You might think there’s nothing worse than being betrayed by someone you love but you’d be wrong. There is. It’s called being both betrayed by someone you love - by which I mean those two adorable will-they-won’t-they-or-have-they-already film reviewers David and Margaret – and having to sit through two hours plus of slushy pretentious wank as a result.Reviewing Into the Wild, the story of Chris McCandless (otherwise known as “Alexander Supertramp”) who flags off the lure of Harvard law, donates his college fund to Oxfam and takes off on a road trip that eventually leads him to Alaska, Margaret said the following:
“He’s written a beautiful screenplay and taken risks with the direction, which all pay off, and he’s elicited magnificent performances, especially from Emile Hirsch. It is so close to being a masterpiece…”Well thanks, Margs, but I’ve been burnt before. No offence but around about the time you slammed Pulp Fiction and gave The Fast and the Furious four stars I started to tready warily around you, keeping my distance as I would from a well-intentioned but senile aunt trying to feed me buttons and telling me they’re boiled lollies.
Let the casting vote be Davids, sweet David, who likes complete cheese as much as he enjoys obscure Norwegian crap even David Lynch would dismiss as ‘weird’. This is what David said:
“(Sean Penn’s) a good director and this is a very good film. I was completely captured by this story, by this epic adventure…”
Well. Well, well, well. Welly, welly, welly… The thing is it is an epic adventure and it is a great story. It’s just an awful shame the movie sucks balls. Only Sean Penn, who takes himself about as seriously as the Holocaust, could distil a potentially beautiful story into a pile of clichés that beat the viewer over the head from the start and doesn’t let up until you’re lying on the floor among stale popcorn by the end, whimpering softly.
Granted Emile Hirsch, playing Chris, does a great job and looks sometimes quite breathtakingly hot while he does it and Hal Holbrook, playing a 90-year-old tearjerker, is indeed tearjerkingly efficient but a stubbled hottie and a red-eyed octogenarian does not a masterpiece make.
David and Margaret can expect their letters returned unopened and the photo collage David made of the three of us to be consigned to the bin. The dream is over.
4 comments:
are you sledging the film because it wasn't a 'masterpiece'? it had a few silly cliche's in it? for such a long post, your point is very vague.
i've seen it and loved it, even if i didn't agree with every moment in the film. perhaps you expect too much. perhaps your taste in movies just sucks.
Gee, Anonymous is getting kind nasty of late. Amazing how that happens more often when a person doesn't have to leave their name.
My mum liked it. If that counts for anything.
Yeah whatever anonymous, thanks for your thoughts. The post was actually as much about feeling let down by Margaret and David as it was about the movie but it’s probably hard to get the gist of these things if you’re confined to reading only the monosyllabic words so I won’t hold that against you.
I probably did expect too much and doubtless would have enjoyed it more with lower expectations but my point was that listening to it being talked up so much before I saw it contributed to my finding it so disappointing.
I genuinely do appreciate comments and fiery debate, though, so feel free to say my comments suck too, if you like.
And keep on being anonymous while you're at it...
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