Buffista Movies 4: Straight to Video
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.
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.
I hit the point, with Akira, that I just started watching it as a sensorial experience, rather than a story, as such. I don't know which translation it was, but, probably, the old one.
I love the older dub. The voices in that, particularly of the Colonel, just crack me up. And since that was the first one I saw, whenever I see one of the other dubs, the voices just sound WRONG to me.
In an unrelated topic, I'm getting annoyed with some of my fellow netflix renters, who apparently decide to use discs as coasters and spill stuff on them before they send them back.
And it always happens after I've spent an hour on the movie already...just, grr.
Brings out the George Costanza in me. "We're in a *society* people."
