More thumbnail movie reviews
Jul. 28th, 2004 09:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaLast night was Romasanta, loosely based on a werewolf incident in 19th-century Galicia. ...I've really got to stop rating Fantasia horror films based on how much they'd depress Subaru (three and a half disembodied eyeballs out of five?), but sometimes it's too easy. Without giving away the plot altogether, suffice it to say that the titulary character is less a man in the shape of a wolf than a wolf in the shape of a man, that people enter the forest and don't come out the other side, and that after her family gets eaten, Red Riding Hood goes after her wolf - and he is hers, in the sense of her lover or her nemesis or how a parable about the dangers of Talking To Strange Men belongs to the young listener - with a very large and very non-metaphorical silver knife. That right there is two eyeballs. XD The third is due to occasionally breathtaking cinematography (the harvest field scene, the werewolf transformation in the rain). The extra half-eyeball is for the neat portrayal of the blurred line between science and superstition of the period. Occam's Razor would dictate to the modern viewer that Romasanta is a sane serial killer who lied to both his victims and the court of law, and Antonio a schizophrenic; but at the time lycanthropy could just as well be the learned man's stance. Said learned man is a brilliant forensic pathologist - once again in modern terms - but also a phrenologist given to determining genetic disposition toward criminality by tapping suspects on the noggin. And what if he defines lycanthropy as whatever it is that causes an outwardly normal human to behave like a ravening wolf - fur or no fur? The practical response, as Golitzinsky put it, is that a silver bullet in the heart'd kill a regular criminal just as dead. So why take the chance? XD
(That's the highest rating it gets, though. Mostly because I can't shake the niggling impression that it could have been better-written; while the script was never awful, it never rose beyond serviceable either. Just enough prose to tell you what's happening, and no more.)
***
I also promised someone to talk about Blue Spring, I think, so I will. Uhh... it's hard not to compare it with 9 Souls, first of all, with which it shares a director, half the cast and a certain similarity of vision - and 9 Souls is a better movie on every count. ^^; Acting's better, direction's better (less of that "dramatic" slo-mo), script's better, soundtrack's better. Of course 9 Souls is more recent, so what we're seeing is improvement, which is good. It doesn't mean Blue Spring isn't worth seeing either, but you'd have to have a high tolerance for brutal teen violence, and it's not the sort of film that's intended to be "enjoyed" in any sense. (It also doesn't help that several of the characters looked vaguely like Prince of Tennis boys, and thus it was traumatizing to see them take metal bats and kitchen knives to each other, but that's my personal problem and no fault of the movie.)
What gets me is the script, I guess. Everything else would have done, but the script never quite made you grok the characters' motivations (with one exception I'll deal with in the next paragraph, and that more intertextual than anything else). Why did Yukio go off the deep end like that? Did he think he was dishing out justice like Ultraman or was he just annoyed by all the career counselling? Couldn't tell. With Aoki and Kujo I see what the story was trying to get at, but the way it was set up made me wonder if these kids had never had a meaningless spat with a friend that led to a couple of days of not-talking to each other, saints forbid. ^^; Aoki would've had to have had simmering resentment from internalising his inferior position in the hierarchy, and one never got a sense of that from their relationship previous to the split. I mean, it was pretty obvious to Kujo at least that Aoki'd make a better leader; the fact that it may not have been obvious to all the other assholes/idiots never seemed like an issue, until all of a sudden it was. And why is Aoki's sense of self-worth built around Kujo's esteem anyway? Isn't Kujo supposed to be the socially inept one who has no friends? ^^;
And so on and so forth. One thing, though, started to make sense as I thought about it, and it was this: Kimura in this movie and Kazuma in 9 Souls are the same person. That is, they're not - different names, hi - but they may as well be. (Same actor, I should mention.) Kazuma is one of Kimura's possible futures, and the likeliest one at that. That's a heartbreaker you don't often find in sports manga: three years living the Nationals, breathing the Nationals, staking it all on the Nationals - and then the team doesn't make it. "No regrets for my youth," the captain says, and promptly joins the yakuza. When Toyoda picks his life up in the next movie he's in the slammer for multiple murder. In retrospect Kazuma was the only one out of the bunch who knew there wasn't the slightest hope of accomplishing anything, other than make reparation with whatever's left of his life; all he wanted in the end was to play a last game of baseball.
(If you google Toyoda you find a story about how he was a child shogi prodigy, until he hit a wall in his teens and realised he could never go pro.)
EDIT -- Forgot to note the (sadly typical) fact that Golitzinsky & Co. apparently tried to play the Clapping Game after the movie. Hanging off a deck over the lake, mind you, with only a dunking and the psychology of tumbling backward into space at risk, because all the same they hold their lives more dear than to do it off the top of a building. FWIW he says that seven claps really is about the limit; past that is balls of steel and plain insanity, because you feel yourself falling.
While in the process of googling I found the official site of that movie I mentioned the other day - the Miike one about the time-travelling hitokiri. Matsuda Ryuhei's innit too. He plays the emperor of the interdimensional realm. XD;; There are Shinsengumi, mind you, but I guess they didn't want to repeat themselves. (And yakuza and... um... something about buddhist demons I didn't catch. Basically, CRACK.)
(That's the highest rating it gets, though. Mostly because I can't shake the niggling impression that it could have been better-written; while the script was never awful, it never rose beyond serviceable either. Just enough prose to tell you what's happening, and no more.)
***
I also promised someone to talk about Blue Spring, I think, so I will. Uhh... it's hard not to compare it with 9 Souls, first of all, with which it shares a director, half the cast and a certain similarity of vision - and 9 Souls is a better movie on every count. ^^; Acting's better, direction's better (less of that "dramatic" slo-mo), script's better, soundtrack's better. Of course 9 Souls is more recent, so what we're seeing is improvement, which is good. It doesn't mean Blue Spring isn't worth seeing either, but you'd have to have a high tolerance for brutal teen violence, and it's not the sort of film that's intended to be "enjoyed" in any sense. (It also doesn't help that several of the characters looked vaguely like Prince of Tennis boys, and thus it was traumatizing to see them take metal bats and kitchen knives to each other, but that's my personal problem and no fault of the movie.)
What gets me is the script, I guess. Everything else would have done, but the script never quite made you grok the characters' motivations (with one exception I'll deal with in the next paragraph, and that more intertextual than anything else). Why did Yukio go off the deep end like that? Did he think he was dishing out justice like Ultraman or was he just annoyed by all the career counselling? Couldn't tell. With Aoki and Kujo I see what the story was trying to get at, but the way it was set up made me wonder if these kids had never had a meaningless spat with a friend that led to a couple of days of not-talking to each other, saints forbid. ^^; Aoki would've had to have had simmering resentment from internalising his inferior position in the hierarchy, and one never got a sense of that from their relationship previous to the split. I mean, it was pretty obvious to Kujo at least that Aoki'd make a better leader; the fact that it may not have been obvious to all the other assholes/idiots never seemed like an issue, until all of a sudden it was. And why is Aoki's sense of self-worth built around Kujo's esteem anyway? Isn't Kujo supposed to be the socially inept one who has no friends? ^^;
And so on and so forth. One thing, though, started to make sense as I thought about it, and it was this: Kimura in this movie and Kazuma in 9 Souls are the same person. That is, they're not - different names, hi - but they may as well be. (Same actor, I should mention.) Kazuma is one of Kimura's possible futures, and the likeliest one at that. That's a heartbreaker you don't often find in sports manga: three years living the Nationals, breathing the Nationals, staking it all on the Nationals - and then the team doesn't make it. "No regrets for my youth," the captain says, and promptly joins the yakuza. When Toyoda picks his life up in the next movie he's in the slammer for multiple murder. In retrospect Kazuma was the only one out of the bunch who knew there wasn't the slightest hope of accomplishing anything, other than make reparation with whatever's left of his life; all he wanted in the end was to play a last game of baseball.
(If you google Toyoda you find a story about how he was a child shogi prodigy, until he hit a wall in his teens and realised he could never go pro.)
EDIT -- Forgot to note the (sadly typical) fact that Golitzinsky & Co. apparently tried to play the Clapping Game after the movie. Hanging off a deck over the lake, mind you, with only a dunking and the psychology of tumbling backward into space at risk, because all the same they hold their lives more dear than to do it off the top of a building. FWIW he says that seven claps really is about the limit; past that is balls of steel and plain insanity, because you feel yourself falling.
While in the process of googling I found the official site of that movie I mentioned the other day - the Miike one about the time-travelling hitokiri. Matsuda Ryuhei's innit too. He plays the emperor of the interdimensional realm. XD;; There are Shinsengumi, mind you, but I guess they didn't want to repeat themselves. (And yakuza and... um... something about buddhist demons I didn't catch. Basically, CRACK.)
