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All in all, a great year. Here's to 2016.
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Reviews
Living in the Age of Airplanes (2015)
Beautiful but lacking detail
This film is quite obviously a labour of love so it's hard to knock it.
Beautifully shot, wonderfully scored (by James Horner who was a pilot) and narrated with great feeling by Harrison Ford (who is a pilot as well), there is no doubting the commitment of everyone involved and it is hard not to get swept away with the stunning photography.
That said, the film has its flaws. Although it serves as a timely reminder of how far humanity has come in the last 100 years and how awesome (in the true sense of the word, not in the cheap way the word is used by millenials nowadays) airplanes are, it is very light on detail.
Suffice to say that the Wright brothers don't even get a mention. Nor are there any interviews with engineers, airplane manufacturers or historians. Too much of the film is spent showing us beautiful destinations you can go to by plane (tourist spots) instead of showing us planes and their engines while telling us minutiae about them.
The second issue is that the film is told through the rosiest of rosy tinted glasses. There is no mention of airplanes' use in warfare (from the First World War to 9/11), for example. Nor is there any mention of the dangers or downsides of airplanes, which is quite ironic seeing how Harrison Ford had to crash-land his private plane earlier this year and James Horner sadly died while piloting a plane a few days ago.
This film is therefore competent and beautiful to look at (especially on the big screen, which I had the pleasure of doing) but it's not sufficiently sophisticated. It serves as a great reflection on the airplane but not so much an education. I personally didn't learn anything that I didn't now about airplanes and I'm not a big airplane enthusiast.
Children will no doubt love it and have their interest in airplanes sparked but anyone looking for a meaty and informative documentary about airplanes will have to look elsewhere.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)
A downgrade from the first film.
A dystopian future run by a magalomaniacal dictator who makes young people fight to the death in gladiatorial like contests.
That's a great idea for a film and it is the reason why I loved The Hunger Games (2012). I went into this one with really high expectations.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire started really well. Darker than the first film and displaying more government oppression as well as the seeds of a revolution, it is certainly an interesting concept. The build-up to the games is done well and the stakes are upped in a simple but brilliant way: past winners are made to fight each other.
Unfortunately, the film starts falling apart when the games start. There are three main problems with the film:
1) Most of the contestants are never properly introduced so it is hard to care for them when they start to die.
2) In a gladiatorial film, the audience wants to see contestants fighting and killing each other. Here, the contestants don't really fight each other, rendering the gladiatorial aspect of the film meaningless. Instead, the contestants spend most of their time battling the weather and other natural calamities.
3) The ending was abrupt, lame and left me feeling cold. It was more of a ruse to get people to the next film than a satisfying ending to this one.
Overall, The Hunger Games series has some really good ideas but in this outing, the film went pear-shaped halfway through.
Special mention goes to Philip Seymour Hoffman who lights up the screen whenever he appears and to Jennifer Lawrence who is still wonderful as Katniss Everdeen but the film doesn't gel and has too many flaws.
I give it a 6/10.
42 Ways to Kill Hitler (2008)
Making failure exciting.
It isn't in the least surprising to find out that there were forty-two attempts to kill Hitler. The only surprise is that there weren't more. As John D. Gresham (a weapons and assault expert) points out, if someone is going to be a professional bad guy all his life, this is expected.
Gresham is only one of the speakers. As expected in this type of documentary, the film is littered with interesting speakers: historians, writers, military experts and so on. All provide interesting viewpoints but what really brings the film to life is the re-creation of the attempts. Even though from the offset you know that all the assassination attempts failed, while watching you tend to keep forgetting that and you say things like "This attempt looks so good. I wonder if it's going to succeed." I think the excitement created by these re-creations is the film's strongest point. You half expect the narrator to suddenly say that one of the attempts succeeded.
The negative is the little time that some of the attempts are given. Before you even know it, you find yourself in attempt 20 and this can make the film feel a bit rushed at times. You wonder if you're missing out on important information. One assumes this happened for a number of reasons. 1) This was originally shown on television so it must have had some time constraints. 2) There are attempts on which there isn't much to say because there isn't much information available or simply because the attempts were not very good or very well planned.
This is a good film. It makes you wonder whether history would have been different if one of those many attempts had succeeded. After watching this you will conclude one thing; that Hitler was a very lucky man. Some of the attempts are truly amazing and extremely well planned by very skilled individuals and it's nothing short of a miracle that Hitler survived all of them.