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

[greg]

Yeah, it's like Groundhog Day, and he has to win against the badguys/alien invaders or whatever. If it isn't flawlessly executed, he may as well just kill himself to reset the day and start over. So, the title should be more like, "All you need to do is kill yourself." Yikes. Morbid-sounding!

[_D_]

Just bought my tix, Thursday 7PM 3D AVX Guardians of the Galaxy!

Saw Dawn of the Planet of the Apes yesterday. Excellent and better than the earlier film. Just amazing work. Watch through the credits for an extra scene (I missed it as they hustled me out to get the theatre cleaned)...

[llj]

I finally watched Ernest and Celestine. It was pleasant. I'm not sure it was better than The Wind Rises, though; it's pretty safe stuff all around. Very reminiscent of the low key Winnie the Pooh animated features. As far as recent french animation goes, I think I liked The Painting a bit more, even though I had problems with some of the computer use in that one. French animation is in a bit of a renaissance lately. There's been at least one major french animated feature released every year, for the past decade or so. I wouldn't yet say I've seen a recent "masterpiece" on the level of a Fantastic Planet or The King and the Mockingbird, but I liked A Cat in Paris and The Painting as I mentioned earlier. Sylvain Chomet is the best known french animator right now, but so far his stuff has left me a little cold, and he seems to rely on rotoscoping (or something close to it) more than I prefer in animation.

[_D_]

Guardians of the Galaxy was a blast! Sorta like an old space opera like Flash Gordon but much less serious in parts but with some intense action. Lots of "whose who" so I may have to go and see it again. Luckily I have all those free movie passes...

[greg]

Guardians of the Galaxy was a blast! Sorta like an old space opera like Flash Gordon but much less serious in parts but with some intense action. Lots of "whose who" so I may have to go and see it again. Luckily I have all those free movie passes...

Oh man, I can't wait! It won't be released here until sometime in September.

[llj]

Edge of Tomorrow. You guys should definitely check it out if you haven't seen it. In some ways it feels like a deconstruction of video games, done right. Even though it has a Groundhog Day concept, it feels very much like a video game--he dies multiple times because of various obstacles, and then formulates strategies to conquer or avoid them. At times it emulates what it feels like to play a really difficult video game. And when the final battle comes, it even emulates the feeling of being on your last continue and you HAVE to beat the final boss or it's game over for ever. I make it sound terrible, but it wrings a lot of suspense out of this. It's also a funnier movie than you'd expect. If anyone has ever become an expert at a single video game and then wasted a life on a really easy level because they got careless looking ahead, there's a lot of gags in that variety as well.

[greg]

New Rose Hotel. llj, I bet you've seen this one. Johnny Mnemonic and New Rose Hotel are short stories by William Gibson, included in the collection of his short stories called Burning Chrome. Both stories are cyberpunk stories, although Hotel is more about corporate warfare at the top of the food chains, whereas Johnny is about the dirty underbellies of the corporations. The latter involves all sorts of typical cyberpunk stuff like neural implants and such, but the former is rather low-tech. The latter is grittier, while the former is seedier. (Speaking of which, I just read on Wikipedia that the Japanese version of Johnny Mnemonic was a significantly different movie. I thought the movie was cool when it first came out, or at least I loved its premise. The actual movie itself was a bit dumb.)

So New Rose Hotel stars Willem Dafoe and Christopher Walken. Those two can score pretty high on the weirdometer, and having them both together really fits the mood of this movie. Hotel is like something you'd see on the Independent Film Channel. It is very indie in terms of atmosphere, pacing, dialogue, and substance. It's full of sleaze, befitting a typical William Gibson setting. Fox (Walken) and X (Dafoe---the character doesn't really have a name since the short story was written in the 1st person narrative) are agents working for a Japanese biotechnlology zaibatsu, and the company wants to have them "persuade" a scientist named Hiroshi to leave their competitor and work for them. So the two hire a whore named Sandii for a million dollars to seduce Hiroshi, convince him to leave his wife and family, and go to work for their company. X falls in love with Sandii. The plan works, for a while. Then the plan backfires on them. Oops.

The ending is extremely anticlimactic. It puts the pieces together for you to realize how things went wrong, but that's about it. Then again, the short story is the same. Unlike Johnny, the screenplay for this movie was not written by William Gibson himself. The movie has lots of sleaze, rating about a thousand millismuts per second at times. None of it is arousing, but then again, maybe I'm just different than most. It helps set the mood of the story and such, though. Overall, I'm not sure if I'd recommend the movie. For William Gibson fans, I'd say definitely check it out.

So get this. The scientist, Hiroshi, is played by Yoshitaka Amano. Yes, the very same Yoshitaka Amano form Gatchaman, Mospeada, and the Final Fantasy games. Wild, huh? Ryuichi Sakamoto also appears in the film.

[llj]

That looks interesting, Greg. This seems to have escaped my radar, so I will have to look into it.

[greg]

Paul. This movie was pretty hilarious. It's another Nick Frost and Simon Pegg comedy in which the two visit the San Diego Comic Con and go for a road trip to tour all the UFO hotspots, and meet an alien escaping from the US government and trying to get home. It's pretty funny with some LOL moments, and I enjoyed the nerd references like "Boring conversation anyway" and "Get away from her, you BITCH!" The movie could've benefited from more of these gags.

Frozen. We rented this to appease our daughter. After getting so freaking SICK of hearing the "Let It Go" song ALL THE TIME here in Japan (I'm sure it must be the same in the USA, too), I was determined to hate this movie. But I ended up liking this movie. I've thought that the lyrics for "Let It Go" were pretty meaningless without proper context, but now that I've seen the movie, I guess I won't allow the song to irritate me anymore. I like how the movie makes it seem like it'll end with a "kiss from Prince Charming" to resolve all the problems, ignores it, and produces something more profound instead.

[_D_]

Going to see Guardians for a 3rd time tomorrow night. Wish I had someone to go with but everyone who wants to see it already has or else can't get to the theatre.

Frozen was a good film but the Hans Christian Anderson tale has been told how many times in the past 100 years? I dunno. I've seen a ton of tapes from nameless studios both live and animated telling and retelling the story. And of course, kids think its new!