I drove all over the place looking for the badminton set, which was Berta's original idea, and something that seeming like a good gift. But I wasn't having any luck, and really wanted to get Dad something for him. And so I settled on a DVD of The Brotherhood of the Wolf.
Well, at dinner after we gave him the gifts, I touted the movie as an action movie. But I hadn't seen the movie in quite some time, and didn't know if my portrayal was entirely accurate. So I put my copy of the movie in on Saturday night and watched it again.
The Brotherhood of the Wolf really defies categorization. On one hand, there is a lot of action. The indian dude, Mani, kicks butt early in the film when he arrives with de Fronsac. There are some deliberate stunts with men flying through the air after Mani kicks them in the chest. Pretty cool.
But then it gets very... Dangerous Liasons on you. Not that this is bad, just that it can't really then be called an "action movie".
Another thing that throws the whole thing off kilter for an action film is that it had these art shots spread throughout the movie. In one scene, when a woman is rescuing her lamb from a pit of water in the forest (?), there is this very nice slow-motion sequence in which you can see individual droplets of water hanging in the air. In another scene, de Fronsac is riding through the woods chasing after Marianne, the colors are deliberately altered in a slow-motion scene to make things more vibrant and autumnal. It's truly neat, and reminds me of those crazy Thermasilk commercials.
Things go completely weird toward the end, when the beast actually makes an appearance on screen. Even though I had seen the movie before, I wan't expecting to see a computer generated creature at all, considering the nature of the actual beast. I guess I was just deluding myself there. So there's an obvious high-tech computer rendering aspect to the movie.
And there was the scene when the girl in the ward finally awakes with Mani's help and tells what happened to her and her father. The scene she describes that plays out on screen is quite creepy. In fact, the X-Files-like nature of what follows makes for a whole different kind of suspense movie.
So, is it an action movie or what? As I said, it kind of defies classification.
I recommended that my dad watch The 13th Warrior if he likes Brotherhood of the Wolf at all. It's one of the closer matches, I think. What to you think?
