The Latest Movies (Non-Anime) You Are Watching Right Now

[ParaParaJMo]

Yeah, the last few episodes have been feeling more like a pure Joss Whedon show and if you are big into his stuff, I strongly recommend the show.

[llj]

I used to like Whedon on the first...4-5 seasons of Buffy. He had a great handle on plot, character and dialogue in those days. Then everything else after that just annoyed me. There's something about his writing and dialogue today I find intensely irritating, like being forced to listen to someone who loves hearing himself talk.

I wish he'd go back to the guy who was trying to prove to everyone he was hot stuff instead of the guy now who's totally convinced he's hot stuff.

I recently thought it might be fun to try watching more of the Criterion movies they have available on Hulu. I rewatched House (old Japanese "horror" movie) for the first time in ages (still so much fun to watch), but I also watched a few I hadn't seen before, like Cronos and The Vanishing. Both were pretty good!

The Criterion Collection really is fantastic; any of their Werner Herzorg, Wim Wender or Ingmar Bergman titles are a must watch if you are into classic movies. I don't think I could recommend Paris, Texas or Wings of Desire more highly, personally.

Criterion is great; they're an essential stop for anyone trying to learn about film history, but they're also a good place to start branching out and finding out about more obscure DVD/BD distribution companies. Synapse, Vinegar Syndrome, Grindhouse Releasing, Drafthouse Films also release some really great and overlooked stuff as well. I still think Criterion could do better though--they're re-releasing a lot of stuff that people have seen a bunch of times already. Where are the Kiju Yoshida releases? When will I finally get a copy of Eros + Massacre? When we will we get that long awaited release of Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day? It's great that we're constantly getting ever-cleaner prints of The Hidden Fortress to own, but come on, there's stuff out there that's never ever been released on R1 DVD that are pretty important films. I love that they're finally getting around to releasing more of Satyajit Ray's films though.

I also second Paris, Texas as a must watch.

[_D_]

Godzilla this weekend. Lots more stuff like X-Men and Guardians of the Galaxy for later this summer...

[greg]

I used to like Whedon on the first...4-5 seasons of Buffy. He had a great handle on plot, character and dialogue in those days. Then everything else after that just annoyed me. There's something about his writing and dialogue today I find intensely irritating, like being forced to listen to someone who loves hearing himself talk.

I wish he'd go back to the guy who was trying to prove to everyone he was hot stuff instead of the guy now who's totally convinced he's hot stuff.

Did you like the Avengers movie? I thought it was great fun. The Deus Ex Machina ending with taking out the mothership with a bomb and deactivating all the soldiers kind of reeked of Phantom Menace, but aside from that convenient plot point, I thought it was real great.

How about Firefly? Some die-hard fans get offended when I say that it "had the potential of becoming one of the greatest shows ever" instead of coming right out and calling it "one of the greatest shows ever." The first and only season was just still slowly building the characters. The show had so much potential once it could really start to ramp up, but that never happened. It's like watching the first season of Babylon 5 and never getting to see the show after then, and that show really took off with the 2nd season. Firefly was great, but it would have been spectacular if Fox hadn't made the stupid decisions they had that killed the show.

[_D_]

You do know they do a Firefly cast and crew meet every year at San Diego Comic Con. I think last year was the 10th anniversary. The comic which continues the series is still getting new issues but I haven't read them.

[llj]

I thought the Avengers was okay, but I didn't much like Firefly, unfortunately. Again, my problem with Whedon is that over time, his characters inevitably all end up sounding like, well, HIM. This isn't as pronounced in The Avengers where the characters are already clearly defined, but he has a certain way of writing dialogue that has only gotten worse--to my ears, anyway--over time.

[greg]

Yes, Firefly sure has a huge cult following. I haven't been to the SDCC since '07. It's getting a bit too big for its britches, so to speak.

Ilj, I think I know what you're talking about, however I don't know much about Joss Whedon to pick up on the tone of the characters. In fact, Firefly is the only show of his I ever really bothered with. I never bothered with Buffy or Angel or Sabrina the Teenage Witch (okay, so maybe he didn't do that show; I dunno). But I know what you mean about writers becoming so full of themselves. I liked Firefly, although it wasn't as exciting as I thought it would be. Then again, I kept in mind that "this is just the first season that establishes the characters, and the stories would have gotten more exciting if the show had been allowed to survive into a second season and beyond. Then and only then would I have become a rabid Firefly fan. For the fanbase as it is, I can understand the appeal of the show, but not the intensity of the fandom. The whole "cowboys in space" idea, while not the most original, was pretty clever. But a cynical side of me figured that filming people riding around on horses in the desert is much cheaper than space ships and such, so it was just a convenient way to keep the budget low.

I think it was Dark Horse that was putting out Serenity miniseries of about 4 issues each, written by Whedon himself. I had collected a few, but I never got around to reading them. I think I probably took them with me to Japan, with all my Futurama issues. I'll have to find them.

[_D_]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_comics

[llj]

Grand Budapest Hotel. Very entertaining. Probably Wes Anderson's most accessible film for mainstream audiences, but then again I also thought that about Moonrise Kingdom and most of my family hated it (their tastes fit firmly in the mainstream).

[greg]

I love Wes Anderson's movies! I've liked his style since I first saw Rushmore in the theater. I saw it with some friends of mine and I was the only one in the group who truly enjoyed it. My favorite so far is Life Aquatic. I still haven't seen Moonrise Kingdom. I should try the video rental store. I have only met one Japanese guy who knows of Wes Anderson. He saw Life Aquatic and maybe Moonrise Kingdom, but he isn't sure if he likes those movies or not. I think the humor is too subtle for most Japanese people to get. Most humor in Japan is over-the-top. It works great in anime, but for regular stuff on TV, it can be embarrassing. From Imoto to the three onsen ladies, everything is so over-exaggerated. My wife finds it childish and embarrassing. On the other hand, she catches me watching Life Aquatic and always asks, "Is this a comedy?" because I am laughing at parts that don't particularly strike her as funny. I told her that you have to watch Wes Anderson's movies twice. Upon the second viewing, you laugh more.

His films are similar to Napoleon Dynamite. I found it amusing the first time I watched it, but I was laughing out loud the second time I saw it. I keep telling my adult students here that they need to see it (it was renamed as "Bus Otoko" here), but nobody has yet to watch it.