Friday, February 13, 2004
Blueberry Beret
Ok, what can I say? Blueberry, Jan Kounan's film based on Jean Giraud and Jean-Michel Charlier's western comic book series, is candy for mind-expanders, attempting to be in the same class as 2001: Space Odyssey. I have to say that I enjoyed this movie, but perhaps thanks only to our friend Joseph who helped to enhance the experience by thoroughly preparing us for the psychedelic nature of the film before hand…
The movie is a true Western, complete with whores, shoot outs, scalpings, and wide angle sweeping desert landscapes. Music is a lot of rattle snake imitations and much more foreboding than the expansive, heroic melodies of earlier Westerns. The last half hour, in which hero Mike Blueberry downs some of the Chihacua's secret power potion (yeah…the portrayal of indigenous Americans seem to have gone from murderous savages to original stoners), is basically a really fancy way to make people go, "Whoa man, that's crrrrazy!" But the incredibly expensive, Matrix-like graphics are not as beautiful as the landscape shots that mark the beginning of the film and the movie seems to go on a little bit too long. And the gratuitous close-up of a smiling grandmother hitting the pipe was just too much! Stéphane, a bigger comic book nerd than me for sure, was also disappointed by the mish-mashing and altering of the original material. But on a positive note, Eddie Izzard playing Prussian plunderer in search of the secret power, Prosit, made me giggle every time he came on screen. It was his accent! It just got to me! But all-in-all, I do not ever need to see this film again.
A friend of mine once observed that it seems that the cinema was created to take advantage of stoners—stationary visual and audio stimulation and munchies that are super overpriced. I think that the existence of a film like Blueberry proves her point.
The movie is a true Western, complete with whores, shoot outs, scalpings, and wide angle sweeping desert landscapes. Music is a lot of rattle snake imitations and much more foreboding than the expansive, heroic melodies of earlier Westerns. The last half hour, in which hero Mike Blueberry downs some of the Chihacua's secret power potion (yeah…the portrayal of indigenous Americans seem to have gone from murderous savages to original stoners), is basically a really fancy way to make people go, "Whoa man, that's crrrrazy!" But the incredibly expensive, Matrix-like graphics are not as beautiful as the landscape shots that mark the beginning of the film and the movie seems to go on a little bit too long. And the gratuitous close-up of a smiling grandmother hitting the pipe was just too much! Stéphane, a bigger comic book nerd than me for sure, was also disappointed by the mish-mashing and altering of the original material. But on a positive note, Eddie Izzard playing Prussian plunderer in search of the secret power, Prosit, made me giggle every time he came on screen. It was his accent! It just got to me! But all-in-all, I do not ever need to see this film again.
A friend of mine once observed that it seems that the cinema was created to take advantage of stoners—stationary visual and audio stimulation and munchies that are super overpriced. I think that the existence of a film like Blueberry proves her point.
