Seventh Son: Mildly interesting

Staring: Jeff Bridges, Ben Barnes, Alicia Vikander, Kit Harington, Olivia Williams, Antje Traue, Djimon Hounsou, Julianne Moore
Rated: 5/10
The 17th century English fantasia is almost always captivating with all their dark and rain-drenched landscape and characters more dark than spooky. This one, in which a witch, or should we say a witch scorned, is on the path of revenge, which means all round destruction of humanity. Julianne Moore as the black witch in love with a spook who dared to marry another woman he loved, holds centrestage with all else, except the special effects, falling by the wayside.
Julianne has made a career out of playing witch on Hollywood screen and in the Seventh Son, she flies, fumes and fights with equal vigour. She is the main character of a film which has a hero and his love interest plus a father figure trying to kill the black forces out to annihilate anything and everything that come in the way of their mission to rule the good old world the bad old way.
The sets are done up well and the ambience handled with care in this mildly interesting fantasy film. One can say without doubt that Hollywood has fantasised in a much more engaging way and with much more engaging fare in earlier efforts.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, 1 February, 2015

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nil Battey Sannata: Endearing, real and simple

Cast :  Swara Bhaskar, Ratna Pathak Shah, Pankaj Tripathi Rated :  8/10 Nil Battey Sannata is a confusing title but an endearing, simple, gentle and real film. Besides, the title confuses only till Swara Bhaskar as Chanda explains it to you with endearing simplicity much ahead in the movie. It literally means zero understanding and zero marks — in her and her daughter’s case, in Mathematics. But this one is not just about the mind-boggling numbers that have become the bane of students and parents alike. It is about the maths, algebra and geometry of life itself — an equation that director Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari puts on the blackboard in an engaging, simplified format. Nil Battey Sannata  is a film sitting on a very real firmament, a very you-and-me story about the in-your-face problems that everyone encounters. In here, it is about misrani  (cook) Chanda and her full of life but anti-studies daughter Apeksha Sahay’s daily churn. Thankfully, it is not the drudg...
Read more

Criminal: Arresting memory transplant

Cast : Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones, Ryan Reynolds, Jordi Mollà Rated : 6/10 Big names, big imagination and good execution make this memory transplant thriller a good one to be with, especially with Kevin Costner doing a pretty good job with a character he has never played – that of an emotionless, incarcerated, brutal killer in whose brain a do-good, wife and daughter loving dead CIA’s agent’s (Ryan Reynolds) remembrances are inserted for a trail that is important for the organisation. The underdone role has been handled well by Costner, much like a successful experiment. As he gets acquainted with emotions of love, caring and affection that have been alien to him, he starts turning from a monster to a human being but the director does well to not completely erase his original personality. So, there is a mix and match, there is brutal violence as also gentle gestures, like battering a man to death in a car hijack and saving a hair brush for the little one. The f...
Read more

Aiyyaa: Aiyyo Rani, how could you?

Aiyyaa Starring: Rani Mukherjee, Prithviraj Sukumaran At: PVR & others Rated: 4/10 Romances are often tagged to be illogical affairs of the heart, sometimes unviable and a lot of times unsustainable. Aiyya falls into this category without a care in the world. So, if you go looking to making some sense of this very strangely strung love story, you will be questioning many things, including the sanity of such a venture, especially when it is Rani Mukherjee who is at the helm. Aiyya is not about anything really. It has a very convoluted storyline, the execution of which is equally skewed. Nothing makes sense in this one – neither the over-the-top Maharashtrian family of Rani which has a grandmother whizzing past every camera angle, yelling into the high heavens and baring her shocking teeth in gold, nor the impunity with which Rani’s father smokes four cigarettes in one time, making a mockery of the Censor Board and its stern warning that cigarette smoking is injurious to h...
Read more