Anya ,'Same Time, Same Place'
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.
My Miyazaki list:
1. Spirited Away (so gorgeous and imaginative it made me cry - this may be in my top 10 of all time)
2. Princess Mononoke
3. My Neighbor Totoro
4. Howl's Moving Castle
5. Kiki's Delivery Service
6. Nausicaa
7. Castle In the Sky
Mononoke was my first. I saw it in a theater in Boston when I was there for a summer during high school, one of my first exposures to indieish cinema (my hometown being barely large enough to support a "normal" movie theater.) A slightly odd, occasionally creepy, very dorky Asian guy convinced me to go with him.
I loved it.
The only other one I've seen is Spirited Away, which I also bought on DVD the day it came out. I should definitely put the others on my netflix queue.
I watched The Testament of Dr. Mabuse this weekend.
I watched the first fifteen minutes of this on TCM about a month ago, but it was starting at 2:00 am, and I just couldn't stay awake for it. I've always loved Metropolis quite a bit, so I was excited to see it, but the sandman had different ideas. What I saw only strengthened my opinion that Lang is one of the all-time top-tier geniuses of the medium.
It's currently in our Netflix queue. what comes next is always getting tweaked a bit, but it's hovering near the top, and will hopefully be selected soon.
I've always loved Metropolis quite a bit, so I was excited to see it, but the sandman had different ideas. What I saw only strengthened my opinion that Lang is one of the all-time top-tier geniuses of the medium.
I've never seen Metropolis. M was good stuff, though.
I think M is a great combination of sound and silent film--there is that incredible speech by Lorre at the end, but there are also so many great extended scenes of just views of sets with no sound at all, including background noises or music.
there is that incredible speech by Lorre at the end, but there are also so many great extended scenes of just views of sets with no sound at all, including background noises or music.
I wrote a five-page paper on the Elsie montage.
M is also in our Netflix queue. Actually, so is Metropolis, as S has never seen it.
I saw Stranger Than Fiction last night and urge Buffistas to go. I didn't love the film, although I definitely enjoyed it, but it's worth it for Emma Thompson's performance alone. Her character is smart and dark and funny and a has a real inner life and is beautifully played. It's such a rare treat to see a female role that's a complex character dealing with all kinds of issues, none of them having to do with relationships to men or to family and I want to support that at the box office.
At my wife's bidding, we watched X3 last night, which was a predictably embarrassing piece of garbage. I liked the first two movies pretty well, but this one had a bullshit script (for instance, everyone always says exactly what's on their mind), an uninspired director, and a cast that seemed to be pushing death scenes into their contracts just to get away from this shit (except Halle Berry, who was suddenly the co-star of the movie, and she couldn't act her way out of a wet paper bag). Bad bad bad.
this one had a bullshit script
There is only a certain amount of "Isn't that cute! Completely pulling geography and physics out of your butt!" and then it stops being cute.
Also, I think I am over the time in American culture when it was okay for PMS to be the villain of the piece.