April 8, 2009

Review: Vinyan (2009)

This movie is my biggest disappointment of the year so far...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1029241/
Cast Members of Note- Emmanuelle Beart, Rufus Sewell, and Julie Dreyfus.

A Tsunami displaces thousands of kids and turns them into face-painted Lord of the Flies cast-members, including the son of our main characters. For the first 4 minutes of this movie were treated to huge,-blocky lettered credits, and some water bubbling. I guess that was the Tsunami that washed away their son?

Meet the crazy and "not worth the trouble" wife.
Anyways, a distraught mother "sees" her believed-to-be-dead son on a video tape of Thai orphans, and makes her husband take them to the jungles of Thailand to find him. They receive the help of a Thai girly-boy, who helps them find an underworld gangster, who promptly takes half a million of their money to find the boy, then does nothing for them. Another wispy Thai gangster kills the first one, and promises to help them instead.

"You like girly-boy?"
The wife proceeds to draw in books, babble incessantly, tries to swim after a boat, randomly freaks out, gives money away behind her husband's back, hits her hubby with a rock, gets rubbed-up by a cadre of small children... and I have nothing else to say.

"Boo, were scary. Or not."
Gorgeous locations and striking visuals are the highpoint of this film. The usually great actors involved were unfortunately given some shit parts, and didn't have much to work with. I had high hopes for this one, and on some levels it delivered, but overall it was the poor actions of the main characters that did the movie in. Once it became ridiculous, I started to notice how slow and uneventful it really was, and by the time anything happened, I didn't care.

It sure looked pretty though.
Am I wrong, or was the last scene in the movie a grade school gang-bang in the making? VERY odd.

Putain!
I can't begin to tell you how annoying and nonsensical the wife was in this movie. She sees the back of a kid on a video tape who she thinks is her lost son, makes her husband go into the jungles of Thailand and pay some Thai criminals half a million dollars to help them find him, proceeds to act bat-shit crazy, then screws hubby over at the end with "You let him go?" I would have divorced her on the spot.

With a gun.
This movie is very light on the gore. Aside from one scene at the end, and a few brief flashes here and there, it was pretty bloodless.

It made our soul bleed though, so that counts.
We do get Emmanuelle Beart naked, but some of it was creepy-style.

Tres magnifique.
"Josh, go home!" That made me laugh out loud.

Always ditch your crazy wife, especially if another hot chick is all over you. Also, once again, kids suck.

You stay here, I'll be back never.
This movie is frustrating on many levels, and rewarding on very few. I think it pissed me off so much because it had a lot of promise, but really just shit the bed. Lots of people might like this, I'm just not ever going to be one of them.

D

Emmanuelle Beart is hot.

7 comments :

  1. Just found out about this flick yesterday, sorry to hear it was that bad! Im going to go ahead and put it on my low priorities list..

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, some people may like it, but the annoying wife and dumb husband just irked me... I know it was a "Grief" thing, or perhaps it was that they all didn't make it out of the tsunami and the movie was their walk through "Hell", but it pissed me off.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Agreed. Just a miserable, pointless film watching experience. Hard to invest much of your emotions in a story when you essentially despise every character in it. I couldn't have cared less whether or not they found their son and, in fact, sort of envied him for being able to escape their stupidity.

    I hate to admit it but near the end of their miserable slog through the jungles there I was ff'ing at 10X to try and get the thing over with and get at least that small amount of my life back.

    I consider the other hour plus completely wasted.

    ReplyDelete
  4. how sad, i was so excited to see this film. i'll still see it, but aimless, nonsenical people bug me too.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I believe that if Rufus Sewell had been in the bad guy role where he belongs, everything would've been alright.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Good review:

    This movie is very beautiful to look at. It captures misery very well. The jungle scenes are well done. The acting is decent for the fairly weak script. The horror comes from the atmosphere and the mood. Both serve to make this film "interesting" but not really "good."

    ReplyDelete
  7. Yeah Information, this movie is gorgeous yet hollow. Tis' a shame.

    ReplyDelete