Saturday, June 30, 2012

Brave: Such a Disappointment

Pixar, I am disappointed in you. Not mad, just disappointed. Though we all know that the latter is always much worse, especially when spoken by parents to their children. Here is why Brave was such a disappointment:
1) The preview was misleading- it looked like a fun film with strong visual feasts for the eyes and a plot injected with subtle jokes for the adults as seen in Finding Nemo and Shrek. Well, I guess Pixar strayed a bit too far from the Ogre hole (or tavern, or cave- not sure what term he uses for his abode) when they decided to give this cinematic disaster a shot. First of all, at NO point of the preview were bears mentioned, and yet they were the raw material for everything that happened in Brave. May as well have called the film The Jungle Book in Scotland or just Bear, since one word titles or way-too-many-word titles are more popular than the Hunger Games books (which ironically are reasonable with the amount of words in their titles. Maybe the crazy cases just apply to film titles).

2) That's too much, too much!! I wanted to shout that at the screen while gesturing to stop as the writers tried desperately to shove the amount of stories found in an epic novel into a 93 minute movie. I get it, it's Scottish. But this film is a kid's movie, not a history lesson. There a heck of a lot of history to the country to try and shove into a short kid's movie which is supposed to be light hearted. You can't just interject here and toss in another plot line there and expect the audience to be able to follow it. I have seldom felt more confused- I can't imagine how the little kids felt. Maybe they just focused on the pretty scenery (the movie's one redeeming quality).

2 comments:

  1. What?? I'm ADD and I felt like I knew what was happening nearly the entire time. The movie was definitely no Finding Nemo. By Pixar standards it's a lesser film, but I still enjoyed it. What plot-lines were started up that weren't, ahem, "patched up" in the end? Did you stay through the end credits? Even the delivery of all those wooden objects was completed!

    I don't even know that the "history lessons" were particularly history lessons so much as they were an invented backstory created for the movie. I'm sure there are Irish or Scandinavian tribal/kingdom histories similar to what they outline in Brave, but I think the whole point of the stories was just creation of, you know, historical social pressures against which the princess has to struggle.

    Btw, Shrek isn't Pixar (Dreamworks).

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