Les Misérables won three Golden Globes last weekend. By all accounts it is a shameless production mired in melancholy. Its efforts have been rewarded with eight Oscar nominations.
Bah, humbug.
I shouldn’t complain about its naked emotion and determinedly pessimistic outlook. After all, I like musicals. I like tragedies. I should like musical tragedies. But slogging through rainy sewers is a tiresome act. I can’t keep my sympathy up during recurring close-ups of actors 100% committed to winning Academy Awards by being as sad and bedraggled as possible. In my opinion, the best tragedy is an unexpected tragedy.
So here’s five movies that surprised me with their wretched emotional scope.
Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011)
The sequel to Kung Fu Panda explores exactly how Po (Jack Black), the eponymous Kung Fu Panda, was adopted by Mr Ping (James Hong), the goose proprietor of a noodle restaurant. After failing to repel a bandit attack on a small village Po suffers crippling flashbacks to his childhood. Po must find what his mentor Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) mysteriously describes as “Inner Peace” and overcome his past to defeat Lord Shen (Gary Oldman), a murderous white peacock.
Kung Fu Panda 2 is, 90% of the time, a joyous affair that speaks to my love of tofu dessert, light-hearted action movies, and specular effects. The other 10% of the time is a series of gorgeous rice-paper textured and extremely tear jerking sequences showing Po’s origins.
The Mist (2007)
A local military research project forgets to convert some units from imperial to metric, causing an inter-dimensional rift to open up in a small town. The residents hole up in a supermarket while a mist settles over the parking lot, and defend themselves against increasingly monstrous beings. Among them is a father (Thomas Jane) who finds that his fellow villagers turn out to be just as dangerous as the Eldritch abominations that issue from the fabric of space and time.
The Mist is definitely a good horror movie, in that the enemy is suitably frightening and that the titular mist does a good job of maintaining an aura of uncertainty over the whole setting.
However, the ending was… frustrating. To the point where I wept at the pointlessness of the movie. Whether you’d bemoan the fate of the protagonist or the time you wasted with this movie has yet to be seen.
Kill Bill Volume 2
The day before her wedding, The Bride’s (Uma Thurman) old assassination squad shot the wedding party and beat her into a coma. In Kill Bill 1, she dispatched two members of her old assassination team. In Kill Bil 2, she continues on her “roaring rampage of revenge”, but it’s not as simple as crossing names off a notepad with a thick black sharpie.
By the time The Bride works her way down to Bill (David Carradine), I expected an epic showdown with a small army of monks, at least two dozen varieties of weaponry and some mounted combat. But that didn’t happen. The final battle is understated and intimate.
And it does take quite a man to smile and tell his killer that he forgives her, before walking to his death.
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) worries about the safety of his new wife, Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman). He has no time to attend counselling because of galactic politics and ongoing war, thus his borderline personality disorder remains untreated. His struggles culminate in a nervous breakdown, the amputation of his remaining limbs, and transformation into Darth Vader. Shouldn’t you know this story by now?
The surprise presented by Episode III stems mainly from surpassing my expectations of the Star Wars franchise after the failure of Episodes I and II to provide adequate entertainment. Yet I gaped in horror when Anakin duelled Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) on the lava flats of Mustafar. And when Anakin screamed “I hate you!” while Obi Wan maintained “You were my brother, Anakin; I loved you!” my inner fangirl wept like a baby.
Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
In World War II era Japan, a brother and sister struggle to stay alive after their hometown is bombed and their mother is killed. They find temporary refuge with their aunt, but her palpable resentment convinces them to leave. They don’t succeed.
Why is this movie on the list? The opening scene, which shows the brother succumbing to starvation in a train station, makes it clear that Grave of the Fireflies is not gonna be a happy movie.
The movie’s unrelenting insistence on putting the children through hell was a difficult endeavour to perform well. If Studio Ghibli had faltered but a little, the whole shebang would have come across as insufferably precious. Come on – the unbearably sweet fruit drop tin motif? Insect funerals presided by a preschooler? Teenage boy defying his elder and starving to death as a result? But I didn’t snicker. For their chosen subject matter… that’s surprising in itself.
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