You know, there are times when I wonder if Edwin adds one extra sentence to his posts to try and get them marked "review" rather than "mini-review" in the index.
AAAAAaaaaaaaaanyway...
The Legend Of Suriyothai (142 Minutes) -
I'm curious to see the Thai cut of this movie, since it is (according to the IMDB) almost 45 minutes longer, and I wonder if some of the things that didn't quite satisfy me in the version I saw Wednesday would be better addressed. Of course, it's very possible the extra running time would make them worse.
For instance, Suriyothai is really not a major character in the film. It opens with a fairly familiar sequence of Princess Suriyothai as a teenager, chafing somewhat at society's rules, attracted to one man but promised to another, and it ends with Queen Suriyothai joining her husband in battle with the Burmese, but in between she's very much a supporting character, and not necessarily the most active one.
The missing footage could have boosted her time... or diluted it. It's a minor complaint, though, because a film's title is somewhat seperate from the film itself.
Suriyothai may have been an ill-chosen title in that it leads to false expectations about the film itself, but that's ultimately something an audience can get over.
There is, however, a very definite stiltedness to the beginning of the movie. The movie spans a time period of about 15 years, and the writer/director seems to feel it is very necessary to show every major event in the Thai royal families during that time. To be fair, it is good background, and much of it pays off. It's somewhat tough slogging, though - the writing reminded me of the first 300 pages of a Tom Clancy novel, where he very precisely sets up the story's setting so that the other 600 can be all hell breaking loose. It's a lot to get through, though, and it's dry.
If the writing recalls Clancy set-up, the direction is Sunday-school recitation. The dialogue is oftentimes very formal, as is the delivery. It's not spoken, it's
recited. I really started to worry, because this is a movie about Thai history, written and directed by a Thai prince, funded by the Queen. It began to feel like a very education, very well-produced, but deadly dull, vanity project.
And then the first person got it in the neck.
The film had needed a villain, and the King of Burma was too distant, but the High Consort of the First King fit the bill nicely. Mai Charoenpura doesn't overact, but she plays the Bad Girl to a tee. She starts out merely ambitious, and then sees a chance to put her house on the throne and is ruthless in achieving it. Suddenly, things start to happen.
And it's gloriously exciting. Those who insist that a gigantic battle scene realized with CGI can't compare to one that was a logistical nightmare, well, enjoy. A cast of thousand battles it out in three gigantic set-pieces, involving boats, guns, arrows, horses, swords, war elephants... It's great stuff, as energetic as the earlier segments were stolid.
When people talk about epics, they talk about the long running times and the huge sequences, often forgetting that the set-up can be laborious.
Suriyothai fits the profile, but it does come out pretty cleanly on the positive side.
May -
Films like
May are tricky - you can show what a mentally disturbed character's rationale is, and what influenced them, but that's not quite getting into their heads. That takes a little more, and
May falls just short.
Don't lay it on Angela Bettis, though - as May Kennedy, she gives a fantastic performance as a girl who has been socially isolated from a very young age, and is just now really starting to interact with others socially, now that she's got contacts to counteract her lazy eye.
But there's parts missing from her story. We see, in a pair of flashbacks that open the movie, how her mother sheltered May as a child, but there's no reason given for her absense in the present. Writer/director Lucky McKee is meticulous in setting certain things up, but leaves others (like her lack of empathy to grusome injury) unexplained. And, during the film's last act, a whole different side to her personality emerges from nowhere, with a heretofore unseen level of self-confidence.
The other characters aren't ciphers, but they aren't interesting enough to share a scene with May, either. That's a problem, because when May snaps and starts doing horrible things, it's not really horrifying because you've got not perspective on the victims as people. You see them they way May does, and it blunts the film's effectiveness as a horror movie.