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For a thriller movie its good to make sure the viewer doesn’t exactly know where you’re gonna go next. This movie does that fine, but I felt like it kind of left behind the opening premise of the movie in the process. Did the first half of the movie really matter plot wise? It matters for the characters of course, but it feels like an afterthought. This could be intentional, with the movie using it to say that the character doesn’t care about what happened anymore, but like… that’s too wasteful.

Its a Park Chan-wook movie so of course its got good editing, cinematography, the whole 27 feet.

Absurdly violent with real animal cruelty. Its no wonder this got banned and had to be recut. But after stomaching that, the movie will go from the quality you’d expect from a Hong Kong New Wave film, to bordering on b-movie level plot intermittently. It was pretty succinct with its messaging, but then it did a “ok we’re going to repeat that just to make sure you understand what we’re saying” kind of ending, which was a little annoying.

I usually get some ice cream at the half-way point in a movie, but after the first 10 minutes I decided not to. I’m glad I did.

Pretty drawn out and slow. There were lots of scenes that really dragged. The fight scenes were just OK for 1970, but the last one was good.

For a wuxia movie you’ve gotta have people jumping really high. This movie solves that problem by cutting to a performer doing flips off the ground. But it was done in a very drastic way that didn’t feel like it had much lead-up.

I remember seeing reviews for this movie that described it as ‘dreamy’. Which, like… huh? To me something being dreamy is when characters in a story just go along with whatever is happening to them, regardless if it makes sense. Which doesn’t happen at all. Aesthetically this also didn’t feel very ‘dreamy’ either. It doesn’t help that this is a /very/ common descriptor for movies, to the point of being overused. Maybe other peoples dreams are just really boring.

I might’ve liked the movie more if I learned more about Buddhism, which this movie clearly has lots of themes of.

Each film feels pretty disconnected from one a other. This maybe makes sense considering how it would’ve been been when it released. Like maybe it was meant to be a shotgun blast of different animation for eager theater goers, with as much range as possible.

Labyrinth was easily the best, presenting all of its interesting ideas very plainly and clearly

Running Man felt like an excuse to have cool car exploding stuff

Cancellation order had a very “you’re ending it there?” kind of ending

I ended up procrastinating on writing the log for this movie which I think is telling. Usually after I watch a movie that I like I keep thinking about it the whole weekend, but with this I mostly forgot about it. Sure it was neat compositionally at times, but mostly? Eh. I feel like the other characters didn’t react strongly enough to the fact this dude literally has an atomic bomb. With some of the characters that makes sense, since they’re intended to be nonchalant about it. But the police REALLY did not seem as worried as they should be. The bomb guy also fucking with police during the 2nd Act was also dragging a bit.

I’m sure it says interesting things about Japan and its relationship with atomic bombs, but again. They way the movie went about it left me going. Eh.

It did start playing some Masayoshi Takanaka at one point so that’s cool.

This movie is very neat and tight visually. Looking back Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s other movies are also this way, but I haven’t really fully processed that until now. A lot of times directors will shift their visual styles, either slowly over time or instantly to fit the movie. But Kurosawa hasn’t so far with what I’ve seen. Everything is meticulously intentional.

The premise is laid out very early, and I was worried that the movie would take the usual approach with a story like this, but it didn’t. I guess I shouldn’t question the GOAT of all time.

rot13 spoilers: trahvaryl urnegoernxvat raqvat, vgf abg whfg gung fbzrguvat urnegoernxvat unccrarq, ohg gur ohvyq hc gb jung pbhyq or, gura gur hggre qrfgehpgvba bs vg

On the surface its a coming of age story, but its more than that. Its looking back on your young self and old times with not only a bit of nostalgia, but also stating it as a fact of your past.

The cinematography is great, I love the warm yellow glow cast on everything

The movie is also very communist, which is cool to watch from a red-blooded-bald-eagle-screeching-gun-toting-dictatorship american perspective.

A Spring Fling https://tilde.town/~lateen/spring-fling.html

The fly sitting on my monitor really added to the viewing experience.

Just great. What else could you expect from Leone. I especially really like the introduction of Cheyenne. It’s a slow build up then he takes a swig from a bottle, lifting his hands up to reveal he’s in handcuffs… like 3 minutes after we were introduced to him. I think that one moment explains the intentionality with details that older filmmakers were really keen on.

UNITARY

The dialogue in this is fantastic, you can tell the writer really cared about these characters.

While the movie is quite modern (it even does a phone camera overlay), it reminds me a little of Wong Kar-wai. I don’t know if that’s due to cultural similarities, or if it really was inspired by his work.

Its in black and white, which is always great. I think this movie benefits from it greatly. I really wish other movies were in black and white more often, not everything needs color.

THE CONNECTED EMPTY

I’m not gonna put another wall of text so here’s a link with it: https://tilde.town/~lateen/2026-03-06.html

UNITARY

Very similar to Serpent’s Path (they were made as diptych after all). I really like the green landscapes shown, it was present a little in Sperent’s Path but its more present here. I don’t really think I’ve seen parts of Japan that look like this, which is odd considering how obsessed people are with Japan online. The cinematography is great, especially the camera movements. Its quite noticeable when the camera moves, the movie wants you to know its moving, but it still feels very restrained.

The almost-random horror sequence was also great.

Some of the soundtrack is like actually just vaporwave. I’m not just saying that because it uses synths, it like actually sounds like vaporwave. Which is very cool considering this movie released in 1998.

THE CONNECTED EMPTY

I’m not gonna put another wall of text so here’s a link with it: https://tilde.town/~lateen/2026-03-06.html

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

When I initially watched this movie, it made me fall in love with China—at least this movie version of rural China shown. I love the landscapes, the architecture, how slow and deliberate people are, the way the poetry is narrated.

Normally I try to be sort of subjectively-objective with my logging of movies. I enjoy talking about what makes a movie work or doesn’t work, as much as I enjoy talking about my personal experience with it. With Kaili Blues, I don’t think I can be as objective as I’d want. When I think about this movie I don’t really think about the smooth editing between the long take and the rest of the movie. I don’t even think about the story of a man discovering things about himself and other people, and accepting it as it is. I just think about the love it makes me feel.

A Spring Fling https://tilde.town/~lateen/spring-fling.html

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.

This marks my first time watching a movie that I fully own. Before I’d been ~acquiring~ my movies, but with Mishima I was gifted the Criterion Blu-ray (which I ripped of course, I’m not buying a shitty disc player). Its very special to me to watch it in the best digital quality possible.

I’ve never really liked how often people describe movies as masterpieces. Sure there’s lots of movies so there’s bound to be quite a few, but it still feels /too/ frequent to me. When I first watched this movie I knew that I could probably consider it a masterpiece, but wanted to make sure that I rewatched it before claiming that. A masterpiece is sacred in my eyes, and by naming movies too often as such only devalues them.

After rewatching this movie, I can say without a doubt that this really is a masterpiece. I could go on about every aspect of the movie, and I would never be able to describe how great it is. It has so much to say about living with art and beauty. If you’re reading this and haven’t seen it, Watch It.

A Spring Fling https://tilde.town/~lateen/spring-fling.html

Even though this was a rewatch, and I went in knowing that the lens was absurdly wide, I still was not prepared for how wide the lens is.

I mean its just great, man. People coping with loneliness makes for some great stories.

I remember reading this one street photography book and the artist talked about how he rotates his camera in order to keep composition, which is abnormal, which this movie does frequently. You’d think that with such a wide lens, there wouldn’t be much problem to get interesting compositions. But I think because they wanted to keep the camera close to the characters, they ended up having to rotate the camera anyway.

This was the first Wong Kar-wai movie I watched so I didn’t know that the movie was referencing Chungking Express, which it does pretty often. Makes me wonder if Kar-wai’s other movies reference each other and I just haven’t been noticing it.

A Spring Fling https://tilde.town/~lateen/spring-fling.html