I saw two films at the Seattle Cinerama in 70mm this week and I also tried to watch a screener of Jackie Chan’s 1911, which I will tell you right now I only managed to watch 37 minutes of it. It was truly awful as it attempted to serve as a history lesson detailing the revolutionaries that brought about the fall of China’s Qing Dynasty. Too bad it was about as dull as a film can get with a lot of onscreen explanation in-between each scene, attempting to establish what you are about to watch before it went into tedious, generic and overly melodramatic action sequences I felt entirely removed from.
The sound effects sounded like they were straight out of “Call of Duty” with guns being cocked every two seconds; there were jarring edits, even in the middle of someone speaking; they put almost every character’s name on screen for about one second before flashing it off, fortunately it didn’t matter who any of them were; and the acting was was so bad there were a few American actors involved, speaking as if English was their second language. Once some guy named Homer appeared for the second time I was checking out. Just dreadful.
All of that said, let’s take a look at a film I did enjoy and then get to what you watched.
Cleopatra (1963)
So now I leave it to you, what did you watch this week?
