Xander ,'Lessons'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
The plot isn't much with the sense-making but there's a lot of very pretty ass-kicking going on.
Anime and Japanese video games (and by extension, the FF movies) are never big on the sense making. I think Japanese plots only make sense if you're actually Japanese.
Definitely better than FF:The Spirits Within, (which I realize isn't saying a lot)
Hey! I liked Spirits Within....
Good HP trailer. And it's nice that Snape is a fashion leader in hairstyles for the entire student body.
Anime and Japanese video games (and by extension, the FF movies) are never big on the sense making. I think Japanese plots only make sense if you're actually Japanese.
I think plenty of anime and video games make sense, but the ones that try to be more "high-minded" or "arty" do tend to be lost on the American audience. Even the total mind-fuck Neon Genesis Evangelion makes sense after you watch it about five times and finally realize that all the Christian imagery is because the creators thought it would be cool rather than actually having anything to do with Christianity.
Hey! I liked Spirits Within....
I didn't hate it (didn't love it either) but a lot of people did and it's the flop that killed Squaresoft, so it bears mentioning in a discussion of a movie created by Square's re-animated remains.
I'm invariably the only person in the group who doesn't come out anime films saying "What the fuck was that??" There's some kind of anime wavelength that I'm somehow tapped into that has absolutely nothing to do with plots containing chronologically or causality-linked events.
I liked Spirits Within for that reason -- it was entirely about the exploration of its themes, and therefore entirely lacking in plot. But it was such a beautiful Photoshop ad exploration of themes that I really enjoyed it.
Most of the time, the anime where I end up going "WTF?!" are usually adapted from manga, and are usually a result of the filmmakers trying to shove too much into a limited time span. (e.g. Akira)
I could do without the last 15 minutes of FFTSW, though.
(e.g. Akira)
Of course, in the case of Akira, which I've read in its entirety, is even more of a mind-fuck in print.
Yes, but was it a coherent mindfuck, is, I think, the question?
but was it a coherent mindfuck
Much more so than the movie was.
I had no trouble with Akira. Not that I could explain it to anyone else, but watching it, I wasn't lost of confused. Ditto both Ghost in the Shell movies.
[eta: I will admit freely that I only saw Akira relatively recently, and I have it on good authority that the current DVD release has a much more coherent translation than the original English subtitles.]
I still haven't seen GitS2 yet. I very much want to. The first one rocked my world.