Gulliver's Travels
Not a very good adaption, but it’s not that bad as a standalone film. It’s light comedy, ironically much, MUCH, tamer than the book itself. Maybe I’m just sucker for Emily Blunt.
How come Catherine Tate has a mere couple of lines, why‽
This is just the Lilliput part, with an unexplained Brobdingnag mini-segway that remains unexplored and should have been cut away.
The new framing device is not a travel book, but a lowly mail-room clerk working on a newspaper with a massive crush on an editor, which went unacknowledged for five years. She’s also quite aloof, maybe she was focused on work.
Anyway, after some attempted connection resulted in shop talk, our hero has to write a article sample overnight, which leads to just plagiarism, straight up. He scores a trip to the Bermuda Triangle, which bring him to Lilliput, after a big storm knocks him off-course.
The king and queen don’t mind him, but the army chief is fuming over this new beast that costs him his popularity. Particularly when he takes the side of a lowly tradesman, vying for the princess’ hand.
After pissing on the king to save him from a fire, and the whole kingdom took a long, hard look at his penis, he’s treated with deference, a kind of Lord Protector. He pretends to be the President of the island of Manhattan, but it’s a white lie, they just could not check that!
The army chief is even more angry, so he defects to their rivals, builds a big bot and gives our hero a wedgie in front of everyone, the ultimate humiliation. Lilliput is vanquished, and Gulliver is moved to an exile in Brobdingnag. That ends quickly, he escapes and saves the day by wedging the bot back, in front of her beloved editor.
Yes, she found out about the plagiarism and was captured too. Nothing like life-threatening circumstances to bring about true love.
They both get back to NYC, to a long proper career in the paper. The princess punches the army chief and stays with the lowly tradesman. The end.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.