Saturday, May 02, 2009

Awesome Threesome


Happened to watch three very amazing "kids" movie recently - "Children of Heaven", "Ma vie en rose" and "WALL-E" and strongly recommend all three of them to all "adults".

Of the three, I definitely liked "Children..." the most. Cliche alert: "made me wonder why they dont make such movies anymore". It is a definite must-see for kids these days who can't seem to function without texting and cell phones. 

"Ma vie..." is a more serious film, at least thematically; the film is extermely heartbreaking despite lacking emotional manipulations as in "Taare Zameen Par".  It is hard to believe that it has a "R" rating at the US, especially since most hollywood "PG-13" blockbusters have extreme violence and/or crude humor.

"WALL-E" is a definite third in this list, for despite the animated magic that it was, I felt a bit let down towards the end with a rather gimmicky climax and the happily-ever-after ending. To its credit I didn't feel like I was watching an animation movie, it crossed that bridge successfully; however, it left me feeling like one of those "good-but-not-great" movies (like say "Taare Zameen Par") and THAT, I think is where the movie fell short. 

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Gimmicky climax? Happily-ever-after ending spoken as if it was a bad thing? The ending on WALL-E is the only one that made sense. What did you want, to see him die? That would have defeated the purpose of everything that came before it. Gimmicky? What's gimmicky, the social commentary, the beautiful love story, or the humorous comedy? None of it. WALL-E is #1 and pure excellence all around.

Aravind said...

As I said, I really think the movie was so good for the most part that it failed to live up to its expectations towards the end.

Granted that the "Captain" was an extremely likable character, but to me the last part of the movie - his decision to return, the subsequent fight, all the "bone-shrinked-humans" cheering for WALL-E, their return to Earth, etc was a bit too rushed up (to give the audience THE happy ending instead of A happy ending). And all of it, although nice, was definitely not in the same league as the rest of the movie.

Btw you make it sound as if I HATED the movie which is quite the opposite. I liked the movie a lot (hence the mention as part of the "Awesome Threesome"). I just happen to love the first two-thirds of the movie and just like the rest. I didn't realize that was a blasphemy! ;)

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