Tuesday, September 25, 2007

A Mighty Flop: A Mighty Heart's Failure

Angelina Jolie's new movie A Mighty Heart was, by financial standards, a colossal failure. A lot of people (including this guy at blogcritics who clearly has an axe to grind against her and this guy at the Huffington Post who makes a more balanced argument) are blaming the movie's failure on Angelina Jolie's off-screen antics. I think that's certainly a fair guess. I think the subject matter is also a factor. I agree with a reviewer at AlterNet who described the problem as one of plot: the movie's not about Daniel Pearl or Mariane Pearl as people. The decision to dramatize the agonizing two weeks of her struggling to save her husband and ultimately failing was a bad idea. A movie about Daniel Pearl himself or even their marriage leading up to his kidnapping would have been a much better subject. I know I personally am not really interested in experiencing two hours of a wife desperately trying to save her husband, only to find him beheaded at the end of the movie. As far as Jolie in "blackface," that is pretty offensive. She should have just played it as herself. Without the makeup.

In a related story, I haven't seen so many bad puns in movie reviews since Catwoman.

Related:
The Average Catwoman Review
It's Not Brad's Baby

2 comments:

Maurice Mitchell said...

What I find fascinating is that I had absolutely no interest in the movie. Not just in the movie, but in the history of the movie. Not even the history of the movie, but the story of the actress. Not even the history of the actress, but even the title seemed too much work to think about. In the end, scenes of Angelina Jolie looking plaintively into the distance made me yawn. Didn't realize I was missing anything.

Maurice Mitchell said...

Dear Sir,
There's nothing more insensitive than a white actor pretending to be another ethnicity.
Signed,
Ted Dansen, Al Pacino, Andy Garcia and Al Jolsen.