{"id":12230,"date":"2017-06-30T21:31:16","date_gmt":"2017-06-30T20:31:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=12230"},"modified":"2017-06-30T21:32:15","modified_gmt":"2017-06-30T20:32:15","slug":"film-blogathon-1017-leon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/?p=12230","title":{"rendered":"Film Blogathon 10\/17: Leon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Because we are going to see Despicable Me 3 tomorrow, I felt I needed to step away from the cartoon genre&#8230;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Synopsis: A hit man befriends, and takes in to his life, a 12-year old orphan, and trains her as his apprentice<\/p>\n<p>Leon is, essentially, a French art-house film that successfully muscles in on Hollywood turf.<\/p>\n<p>A couple of the components for this Luc Besson vehicle are, in themselves, quite excellent.<\/p>\n<p>The outstanding Eric Serra score, coupled with very contrasting performances from\u00a0Besson regulars, Gary Oldman and Jean Reno, are just two components that lift this film above the average.<\/p>\n<p>The characterisation is juxtapositional.<\/p>\n<p>Reno, as the plant-obsessed, Gene Kelly-fan hitman is an interesting study.<\/p>\n<p>Gary Oldman chews the scenery up as the drug-taking gangster who has nothing else to give us.<\/p>\n<p>Nothing else to give us, apart from being a pivotal mechanism of wryness in the way the film is fashioned.<\/p>\n<p>The script is a deft construction painted in humour, with a light finish of wit and irony.<\/p>\n<p>Leon has the potential to shun style and go straight for the softer parts of the human audience, and yet it doesn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>The film plays on the burgeoning relationship between Jean Reno and the young Natalie Portman, whilst at the same time surprising the audience, through a couple of deft misdirections.<\/p>\n<p>Leon is a clever film, but because of the genre, and the art-house feel, I wonder if it will ever get the audience it truly deserves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Because we are going to see Despicable Me 3 tomorrow, I felt I needed to step away from the cartoon genre&#8230; Synopsis: A hit man<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}