{"id":2633,"date":"2010-07-21T21:44:34","date_gmt":"2010-07-21T11:44:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=2633"},"modified":"2011-03-20T18:45:47","modified_gmt":"2011-03-20T08:45:47","slug":"three-awesome-looking-but-slightly-average-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=2633","title":{"rendered":"Three awesome looking but slightly average films"},"content":{"rendered":"

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There are a lot of ingredients that have to come together for a film to be truly great.\u00a0 Sometimes a film will come along that blows you away with spectacular visual effects or striking costumes and imagery only to be let down by shoddy characterisation, poor pacing or a clunky script.\u00a0 For every great ‘effects’ movie that comes along, such as Pans Labyrinth, Children of Men<\/em> or Amelie<\/em>, where they deliver substance to go with the style, there are others that have a similarly lofty ambitions but don’t quite get there for one reason or another.<\/p>\n

I recently went through my DVD collection and rewatched a selection of scenes from the following films.\u00a0 They’re far from being favourites but I think there’s no harm in watching them at least once for their highly polished or unique visual charms.\u00a0 By a strange coincidence, all three films I picked were released in the same year.<\/p>\n

The Curse of the Golden Flower (2006)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

This film is about an emperor who returns to his kingdom and his wife who he suspects of having an affair with some guy.\u00a0 Meanwhile Other Guy is interested in a princess and Gong Li is all like ‘oh no you di-n’t’.\u00a0 At some point ninjas get involved.<\/p>\n

While the story didn’t hold my interest, just look<\/em> at the range of colour that permeates every single frame of this movie.\u00a0 Each still looks like its been through Photoshop with the contrast cranked up to full.\u00a0 Everyone in this movie chills out in ornate solid gold suits of armour or expensive silk robes like the kind Ric Flair used to wear in the Eighties.\u00a0 It looks amazing.<\/p>\n

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The Fall (2006)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The cool thing about The Fall<\/em>, a film in which a bed-ridden man narrates a tale to a little girl who sits at his bedside is that all of these fantastic looking scenes were done without the aid of computer effects.\u00a0 Each image is artfully composed and full of patterns and symmetry which are pleasing to the eye.\u00a0 The story isn’t actually too bad here either.\u00a0 I like how the visual representation of the story told by the man is occasionally misinterpreted by the little girl.\u00a0 At one stage, there is confusion when the girl thinks an ‘Indian’ that the man is referring to is a Native American when he actually means someone from the sub-continent region.\u00a0 Once she realises this, the Indian in the story changes to reflect this.<\/p>\n

While its not a badly told tale but its not all that memorable either.\u00a0 It doesn’t have the lasting appeal of something like The Never Ending Story<\/em> and it isn’t up to the level of a Pan’s Labyrinth <\/em>either.\u00a0 It just looks really nice.<\/p>\n

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Renaissance (2006)<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Renaissance<\/em> is an animated French feature that came out a year after Sin City<\/em>.\u00a0 This is close to being a literal black and white film.\u00a0 There is only a small amount of grey used to pick up some of the detail.<\/p>\n

The story is set in the future and is a generic film noir tale about a missing girl.\u00a0 The English dubbed version is of decent quality and obviously had a bit of money behind it (Daniel Craig and Iain Holm are involved) so don’t feel you need to track down the original French copy with English subs.\u00a0 However, as with The Fall<\/em> and The Curse of the Golden Flower<\/em>, you won’t remember the story at all in a few months, just the nifty black and white visuals.<\/p>\n

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There are a lot of ingredients that have to come together for a film to be truly great.\u00a0 Sometimes a film will come along that blows you away with spectacular visual effects or striking costumes and imagery only to be let down by shoddy characterisation, poor pacing or a clunky script.\u00a0 For every great ‘effects’ …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,5],"tags":[591,589,590,841],"class_list":["post-2633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-films","tag-renaissance","tag-the-curse-of-the-golden-flower","tag-the-fall","tag-visually-interesting-obscure-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2633"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2673,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2633\/revisions\/2673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}