So it pained me greatly when I first went to see the film Daredevil at the cinema, in 2003. Staring Ben Affleck, it was an incoherent mess, a string of bad action sequences without any real story to link them. It was a horrible movie, and what really annoyed me about it was that having made it, no-one else was going to make Daredevil the movie properly.
In addition, at several points the drama cut between acted scenes with Paul Giamatti, and archive footage of the real Harvey on the Letterman show. This sounds like it would be a mess, but it wasn’t – it was extremely well edited, and not confusing at all. What I particularly liked was the attention to detail – when Paul Giamatti is led onstage to be interviewed, he is wearing exactly the same clothes as we then see worn by the real Harvey Pikar when we cut to archive footage on the Green Room TV monitor. Simple, but very effective.
Not suprisingly, most of the films made available each month are relatively old, which is how I came to watch “The Alamo” (2004, with Dennis Quaid and Billy Bob Thornton). The film was actually much better than I expected, in fact, it was bloomin’ good. But I had one minor problem with it.
I didn’t know a lot about the movie, except for the trailer, which showed Leonardo Dicaprio in what seemed to be in some kind of standard horror/shocker. However, I was looking for a film to see, and was surprised when I saw from the poster that it was directed by Martin Scorcese. I thought “this must be more than a simple horror/shocker”, and I was right.
I enjoyed the movie, but mostly because of the 3D, which I admit was very good. I thought the story was pretty thin and predictable, the characters stereotypes and I became irritated by the preachy nature of the script, which I felt was kind of insulting to the viewer – it was hard to miss the environmental message in the story, so I thought it was totally unnecessary to go on about it in the dialog as well.
via Tesco sets up film studio to adapt hit novels | Business | The Observer.
Anyway, I was telling some friends the other day about a DVD Easter Egg, which rearranges the whole film in chronological order, and realised that I had never watched it that way. I had read some criticisms that without the non-linear editing, there isn’t that much to the story.
With one notable exception, there were no changes to the overall plot, and although many of the subplots were missing (how else are you going to make tell the story in two and half hours?), it was more that they were left untold, rather than missing completely. So we still saw the comic-reading boy, and the newspaper seller, we just didn’t get to hear their story.
I don’t want to say too much about it, except GO TO SEE IT, NOW!
The Imax scenes were wonderful, and the transition between Imax and regular scenes were smooth and non-distracting.
