lateen

From the other Kitano films I’ve seen, it seems he really likes to show the mundanity of things, but with this he really went all out. Its not just slow dialogue, its the dead expressions people make while waiting for the other to stop talking. There wasn’t even any music.

While the film is overall much more mundane, Kitano’s character is a lot more active than in other films. He does a great job at making you feel as uncomfortable as possible in every scene he’s in.

For Chan’s directorial debut it was better than I expected, although it really wasn’t that great. Its pretty similar to Drunken Master, but I don’t know if that’s because the movie is falling into tropes of the genre or actually emulating that movie. Every martial arts movie needs to give a reason for why people are fighting. Drunken Master while forced, felt somewhat reasonable. Whereas with this movie it felt a lot more forced, which is probably due to Chan’s inexperience. Some of the fight scenes do go wayyy longer than they really should, too.

In the first couple scenes there was some strange decisions with swapping to a weird fisheye lens, and stretching the frame… which the movie promptly stopped doing. If you’re gonna do some weird stuff, you can’t just give up on it!

actually so terrible. i was forcedf to watch this. i was yelling at the movie the entire time at how bad it was. painful. i ended up recording my reaction to the movie because the intro was so horrendous, which i may or may not make into a video idk

I didn’t really like this as much as I was expecting. It’s a Ghibli movie so obviously its still good, but the third act of the movie kinda lost me. It mostly felt like everyone was running, then stopping to talk/do something, then continuing to run. That’s a fine thing for a movie to do but it was getting a little stale.

I did like how Ghibli took a darker tone with this compared to their previous movies, I felt like it showed that they had range.