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.

UNITARY

To be honest, I feel like this was a movie made for me. It goes from a serious drama to silly comedy in the most campy, but genuine way. This movie also contributes to a trend I see in a lot of East Asian stuff where you see characters change drastically after skipping ahead in time. The subtitles can sometimes be nonsensical, but I feel like that’s more to do with it being too culturally specific and thus basically impossible to translate. They used the orchestra hit in a song which was cool to notice :) rot13 encoded spoilers: gur glcr bs fuvg v guvax bs jura v gnxr gbb ybat bs n fubjre

THE ANGEL’S SPECTACLES: LATEEN’S FIRST DOUBLE FEATURE

When deciding on what movie to watch this Friday, I narrowed down my picks to 1 option, The Red Spectacles. However, when I watch anything from a particular director I prefer to do it in release order, and Angel’s Egg happened to come before it. I didn’t feel like watching an animated movie, so I ended up in mental angui-hey wait a minute, Angel’s Egg is only 70 mins long! I could watch BOTH movies back to back. Besides, I feel like watching an animated movie now anyway. I could even write reviews for movienight with a thing comparing the 2 films and put it in BOTH reviews! Anyway, enough talking to myself.

To put it simply, Angel’s Egg is a serious mom-youre-too-loud-talking-to-your-new-boyfriend anime, while The Red Spectacles is more of a weird having-an-awkward-intervention-with-your-moms-new-boyfriend-about-that-strange-movie-youre-watching kind of movie.

Visually the films have a lot of similarities. They’re both high contrast and use color sparingly, although the way they use color is different. AE has color all the time using bright tones for emphasis, while TRS opts to be shot in black & white and switches to color film when needed. They’re both slow but AE is quiet about its presentation. TRS is loud and doesn’t hold back about its style. You WILL see a dozen shots of a guy looking forward in sunglasses and you WILL enjoy it.

Trust is something that filmmakers have to establish, otherwise the audience will disregard what the filmmakers are trying to say. When I was watching AE there was one shot in particular that I thought was going on for too long, I wasn’t trusting the filmmaker. After waiting for it to pay off though, I realized that choice made sense in the context of the scene. After that realization I trusted the filmmaker fully. AE is entirely sincere when its trying to get you to trust it. TRS, however, completely breaks the audiences trust as much as possible. This makes sense as TRS IS a goofy comedy, but it actually ends up serving the story its trying to tell. TRS transcending trust in this way somehow makes it genuine to me.

Something interesting is that I feel both these films may have inspired MADGOD. Combine the premise of AE, a person carrying something into an unfolding world, with the sick-ass armor + suitcase of TRS, and you basically have MADGOD. Obviously I have no proof of this other than those vague similarities, but Phil Tippett is an animator so I think its plausible.

META

A little after first submitting these reviews I realized that I actually really enjoyed this whole ordeal. I feel like I got more out of both these movies simply by watching them back to back. I was definitely able to write way more. Maybe I’ll do it again in the future? STAY TUNED FOR MORE

UNITARY

While the movie is quite slow its actually very compact. Everything shown on screen matters to the story being told, there isn’t any extra fluff. This does makes sense since by nature, animated movies have to be this way, but its cool to see it in something with such a slow pace. I can’t think of much else to write, its simply a well made animated movie with interesting characters, setting, and ideas.

THE ANGEL’S SPECTACLES: LATEEN’S FIRST DOUBLE FEATURE

When deciding on what movie to watch this Friday, I narrowed down my picks to 1 option, The Red Spectacles. However, when I watch anything from a particular director I prefer to do it in release order, and Angel’s Egg happened to come before it. I didn’t feel like watching an animated movie, so I ended up in mental angui-hey wait a minute, Angel’s Egg is only 70 mins long! I could watch BOTH movies back to back. Besides, I feel like watching an animated movie now anyway. I could even write reviews for movienight with a thing comparing the 2 films and put it in BOTH reviews! Anyway, enough talking to myself.

To put it simply, Angel’s Egg is a serious mom-youre-too-loud-talking-to-your-new-boyfriend anime, while The Red Spectacles is more of a weird having-an-awkward-intervention-with-your-moms-new-boyfriend-about-that-strange-movie-youre-watching kind of movie.

Visually the films have a lot of similarities. They’re both high contrast and use color sparingly, although the way they use color is different. AE has color all the time using bright tones for emphasis, while TRS opts to be shot in black & white and switches to color film when needed. They’re both slow but AE is quiet about its presentation. TRS is loud and doesn’t hold back about its style. You WILL see a dozen shots of a guy looking forward in sunglasses and you WILL enjoy it.

Trust is something that filmmakers have to establish, otherwise the audience will disregard what the filmmakers are trying to say. When I was watching AE there was one shot in particular that I thought was going on for too long, I wasn’t trusting the filmmaker. After waiting for it to pay off though, I realized that choice made sense in the context of the scene. After that realization I trusted the filmmaker fully. AE is entirely sincere when its trying to get you to trust it. TRS, however, completely breaks the audiences trust as much as possible. This makes sense as TRS IS a goofy comedy, but it actually ends up serving the story its trying to tell. TRS transcending trust in this way somehow makes it genuine to me.

Something interesting is that I feel both these films may have inspired MADGOD. Combine the premise of AE, a person carrying something into an unfolding world, with the sick-ass armor + suitcase of TRS, and you basically have MADGOD. Obviously I have no proof of this other than those vague similarities, but Phil Tippett is an animator so I think its plausible.

META

A little after first submitting these reviews I realized that I actually really enjoyed this whole ordeal. I feel like I got more out of both these movies simply by watching them back to back. I was definitely able to write way more. Maybe I’ll do it again in the future? STAY TUNED FOR MORE

Great thriller with a great performance from both the leads. It wasn’t as heavy on the more open ended storytelling as Kurosawa’s previous movie Cure was, but it was definitely still there.

Something really interesting was how little significance was given to when people were hurt or died. When someone gets shot, they don’t scream, the sound effects are minimal, and they just… slowly fall over. It was a really neat touch that added to the uneasiness.

I feel like this is a movie about responsibility, with the 3 story lines showing different parts of it. The photographer avoiding it, but later coming across it. The teenager running away from it. And a married man desperately clinging on to it.

I think Edward Yang really likes having characters that do things that may not make sense even to themselves. He had a little bit of this in That Day on the Beach, a lot more in Taipei Story, and even more in Terrorizers. Because of that, it took me a while to figure out what I’d like to say about this movie, which is nice. It means I think about the movie for a bit longer.

REALLY interesting movie. It gives off some David Lynch vibes with… well.. a lot of things. The pacing, the black comedy, the set design, and a lot more that I can’t really put a finger on.

A lot of foreign movies I watch I feel have comedy that isn’t too culturally specific, but with Monday there was a couple times were I felt I would’ve gotten the joke better if I knew more Japanese.

The movie has one of those endings where, if you were to watch it with friends, I feel you could discuss it endlessly about what happens and what you think certain things meant. I always really like those kinds of movies.

When I originally logged this I left it blank, which I feel kind of implied that it I didn’t think it wasn’t noteworthy. But that’s not what I think it all, this movie is just a remake of the first 6 episodes of Evangelion and it does it quite well. There isn’t too much you can say about this movie that can’t also be said about those 6 episodes.

I’m writing this review mostly to say that my goal on this glorious website is to write something for every movie, even if I only have a sentence or two of thoughts about it.

An above average 80s crime movie. Nothing too crazy to be honest, other than getting to watch Chow Yun-Fat be the literal coolest person alive.

It very obviously inspired Reservoir Dogs, so that’s cool I guess

Really great slow movie about people’s different responses to living in their pasts.

I think it perfectly encapsulates the feeling in adulthood where people you know sort of unceremoniously coming back in your life, briefly catching up, realizing you’re both different people after spending time together, then leaving the same way they came.

This movie also continues the trend of stories about people being homesick for their adolescence. I can’t offhandedly think of a Western movie like that, but I feel like I can list so many East Asian movies like it, which I think is interesting.

Mostly a standard romance, but Maggie Cheung carries it way further

uggggggghhhhhhhhh

Suffers from the same issue that I talked about in my log for The Night Comes for Us, where the movie is more interested in the spectacle of action rather than the action itself. This movie sort of gets a pass since its not as egregious but also since its more about the drama and history (which happens to not be very interesting). Ip Man doesn’t lose a single fight and isn’t worried about losing at all, so its hard to be invested

The animation of when they turned on the engine in the shack blew my mind. In combination with the sound design it felt like I was there

Easily one of the best martial arts movie I’ve seen. There’s so many fight scenes and every single one of them does something new so it never gets old. The story isn’t really special, but for 1978 its very passable.

Pretty much a B-movie from the at times incoherent plot to the over used sound effects. But I don’t care because Tony Jaa demonstrates literally every possible combination for kicking and breaking a persons limbs.

I feel like the movie’s only purpose is to conclude a characters story, which is fine, but I think it forgot to be a movie in the process

the action is on par with the first movie (really great) but there’s like at least 20 minutes worth of plot that doesn’t matter and slows things down