January 24, 2008
The other weekend I saw two films; 27 Dresses and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. I have no particular affinity for Katherine Heigl as I've never been a fan of Grey's Anatomy or of Roswell, her first television series. Though if you wanted to be somewhat amused and disturbed on a couple of different levels, I'd suggest that you rent My Father the Hero, which was one of her first film credits. She plays the teenage daughter of Gerard Depardieu's character whom she tells everyone at their vacation resort is her lover. Or you might want to rent it just to hear Emma Thompson's voice. She has an uncredited role. Or rather her voice does, briefly. Emma Thompson doesn't actually physically appear in the film.
Anyway, I saw 27 Dresses primarily because the trailers and ads for it looked cute. And it was. In "my-everyone's-so-pretty-but-wait-aren't-there-people-in-New-York-City-other-than-these-white-and-oh-so-pretty-people" kind of way. Leah has seen it as well and put in a request that I write something about how the romantic comedies of today do not hold up under comparison with romantic comedies of yesteryear. Which is absolutely true. I agree with her completely. And I might even write about it one of these days. But not today.
27 Dresses was rather innocuous. Looking back, what I most remember about it is its end credits design, which I thought was rather clever. Truth be told I'm not positive if I can't recall the finer points of the film due to its lacking in finer points, the passage of time, or because the film I saw after it wiped them from my memory.
Though I have no real affinity for Katherine Heigl, I do for Jason Statham. It's really only because of him that I saw In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.
In the Name of the King is not a great film. It's not even a good film. It falls into the realm of bad films so bad that they're equal parts painful and awesome. As I've discussed before with Beowulf, this is often a subjective realm and difficult to define.
In the Name of the King has such big names as Matthew Lilliard--he of the crazy eyes that he uses most effectively in this film. And Burt Reynolds--he of the plastic surgery and brilliantly white dentures (I'm pretty sure they're dentures anyway). [As an aside, I find it rather startlingly to watch a film set in the past--from Gladiator to Sweeney Todd: the Demon of Barber Fleet to name just two and see all the actors with such nice teeth. Such nice, white, straight, perfect teeth. I find it rather jarring and do wish that more attention were paid to creating historically accurate teeth.] The film also has Ray Liotta who tries to compete with Matthew Lilliard for best crazy eyes, but has to settle for most inexplicably, and sadly, bloated. It also stars Leelee Sobieski who clearly spent entirely too many hours sitting for both hair and makeup.
The film wavers between being painfully awful to deliciously awful but finally teeters into tediously awful territory due to its running time. It's just over 2 hours. It also is a big mess. It tries too hard to be epic in scope and instead the various competing story lines confuse matters.
There is one scene in particular that seems to crystallize the pain, deliciousness and tedium. It is a scene where Farmer (Statham), the hero is fighting with Gallian (Liotta), crazy-eyed, inexplicably bloated bad wizard/magi guy in the latter's library. Naturally. Gallian manages to gain the upper hand by causing all the books in the library to become a tornado and swirls Farmer around and around until he's finally dropped to the floor. Whereupon four books magically become manacles and capture his wrists and ankles, binding him to the floor. I was torn between being affronted that books were being used in such a way and guffawing over the ridiculousness of it. [As yet another aside, if you want to see a book used much more effectively as a weapon, check out The Bourne Ultimatum. Or, The Bourne Supremacy, in which a magazine is also a deathly weapon. Clearly, Paul Greengrass, the director of both films, is well aware of the power of the written word.] Oh, and if you're interested in seeing some of Jason Statham's better work start with The Transporter and its sequel, cleverly titled Transporter 2. Or Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. Or...actually anything else that he's been in is better.
