misAdventures of Tintin

Rating: Null/10 (8 November 2011)

List five things you cannot live without read the final question on eharmony. This was so simple, purely instinctive. Movies I typed next to the other necessities. How long did it take me? Less than ten seconds. How long did hitting the submit button take me? More than ten minutes. I can tell it wasn't the internet that was cranky. I was in a phase. I was thinking. Not in the least about how rightly I had slotted something as unsteady as nature or the or the tedious pattern of artwork I had created with my responses. I was thinking about all that I learnt from Tintin. No not Hergé's Tintin, but the screenwriter's Tintin, Spielberg's Tintin, Columbia Pictures' Tintin, Paramount's Tintin. Too many hands and the pencil snaps. But not before creating a tedious pattern of artwork; a maze to trap the first etching. The first etching burned in mind since I was eight was Tintin's coif. At 25, curling my thin gray hair at the cinemas I had expected Tintin to do the same or worse. After a low whimper I resigned to reality. Then I learnt to admire snowy's shining black nose and pristine white fur and look less at "the forever 17's" flaming hair and rosy cheeks and suffer in envy. This was until, envious I realized, the object of my envy suffered as well. At the screenwriter's hands and Spielberg's hands for tossing him into speeding traffic, swelling ocean waves, a glider ( he had learnt to fly by interviewing a pilot!), sand dunes, a mirage; the thick of the plot and the spray of alcoholic vapors in Haddock's breath. You couldn't have expected it to unfold any quicker. Schadenfreude is a sweet feeling! "I don't remember anything about anything," replies Haddock when Tintin pesters him about his past. A few scenes later kids again explode into laughter and applause when they see Tintin riding through a clothesline with only the front tire and handles of a motorcycle and Haddock, the alcoholic brings a sputtering engine to life with his breath. I scratched the three elements it takes to make successful mass movies from my list- pop songwriting, over the top action, deus ex machina. If all this reading has made you dull and hungry then I will offer you the plot thick as soup. Tintin is at a fair where he spots a miniature of a ship called the Unicorn ( which also happens to be the title of the movie). This is no ordinary ship there are legends about it which only Tintin is aware of at the moment. He buys it. The diabolical Sakharine reaches the fair just then to get back the ship from Tintin. Tintin is intrigued. He puts on his detective coat and sets to investigate. He learns that the ship has information about the whereabouts of a treasure hidden by an ancestor of the Haddocks who wishes his treasure to be found only by one in his line of descendants. So how does Sakharine fit into the plot? Well not only is he after the treasure he seeks revenge. Sweet revenge! From whom? It couldn't have been more obvious. In an original piece of writing we see flashes of the past in the present and the future too in the present. What else could Tintin mean when he says there's another 300 kilos of gold buried in the Sea at the end of the movie. But with every bad movie as it is with the good there is always something to learn. Spielberg is an innovator. The characters have been animated so close to reality that you would forget you are watching a "cartoon film." I had actually much prefer to watch animated movies than model turned actors. With pirates of the Caribbean and the pirates there is such an excessive presence of pirates, treasures and monsters why can't a story of the ship and the sea be something different like Life of Pi or twenty thousand leagues under the Sea.