More Fantasia mini-reviews
Jul. 21st, 2005 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaLack of sleep and hormonal fluctuations, or maybe I'm getting soft in my old age, but now I cry at every other sad Asian ghost movie I watch. Last night I was reading Mirage of Blaze in a deserted corner of Starbucks and teared up over my green tea frappuccino when Takaya helped the ghost of that little girl find her mommy. Weird when you think about it, I never cry at the big tragic romance scenes in these books. XD;
I'm getting bored of going to these alone, though. :/ Where is everybody? Bueller?
Corto Maltèse: La Ballade de la mer salée: animated adaptation of a French graphic novel by Hugo Pratt. (here is a paper someone wrote on the character. I am linking it because it is made up of phrases like "Bachelardian pluralism of rationalities".) The story is not at all structured like the Boy's Own Adventure in the Pacific I was expecting; more like a Conrad novel than anything else. I thought the direction was pedestrian, though, the tempo of scenes curiously unvarying, as if the director were unaware that when one reads a comic book one's gaze lingers more on some panels than others. Just an impression, I've never read the original. Some (but not all) of the voice acting was ace: the guy doing Corto had a devil-may-care quality down that was somehow very French. Everyone in the audience laughed at all his repartee lines.
Breaking News: I like Johnny To movies because they go down clean, like an iced shot of vodka. He's one of those filmmakers whose visual style translates in my head as a "prose" style: all understated laconic clarity, normal cops and normal criminals shooting normal guns at each other, gee-whiz James Bond factor turned down real low, self-conscious noir factor likewise. The lack of gloss or fake grit gives an aura of reality to the elaborate set-pieces (camera-equipped SWAT teams hunting three separate pairs of armed killers through a concrete warren of a low-rent high-rise apartment complex) that would be utterly fantastic otherwise. The camera work is jaw-dropping but if you aren't paying attention you'd never notice it. Instead you watch his action sequences and wonder why the hell you bother to sit through movies where people fight and it's all a big muddle where you can't tell where a punch or bullet is landing unless they slow it down and freeze-frame it for you like you were some kind of idiot, because clearly there is a right way to do this kind of thing.
The shots in this movie of the outside of buildings tell me that the person who made it sees the city the way I see the city.
Cromartie High School: as I was about to write this review I came across![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
doctaj, a fflist-er who has an animated gif icon of Mechazawa from the movie. This is a stunning coincidence because the night I saw this I almost posted to lj going ZOMG WTF ANIMATED MECHAZAWA ICON BIYATCHES PLS LOLZ, but was foiled by the late hour. If I were more shameless I'd ask her if I could steal it.
This was an international premiere. A grand total of two people I know will be impressed by this, but then I only went to see it because ofredheadtensai anyway, and I am not sorry. In fact I'm going to see if I can rent the anime from SFA. It is completely retarded and deeply awesome and everyone should download it as soon as it opens in Japan and the bootleggers get hold of it go see it. Unfortunately I cannot give you concrete examples of why you should go see it, as I don't want to spoil the gags, but know that the entire audience had basically peed itself laughing before the scrolling prologue text disappeared at the top of the screen. The only problem I had was the inexplicable subtitling, like "X-kun" would be subbed as "X-san" and "Y-san" would be subbed as "Mr. Y". But that's a minor detail. You should still go see it. Freddie Mercury is in it!
Kamikaze Girls: this is an even stupider title than Karaoke Terror. It's actually "Shimotsuma Monogatari" but of course that's a bit difficult to explain. I'd never realised there was such a thing as a gothic lolita scene in Montreal, but sure enough it exists, because someone on the BBS where all the Montreal gothic lolitas hang out must have posted going, "Hey, you know what would be cool? All of us dressing up and going to see Kamikaze Girls together!" As you can imagine, many fanboys were made very happy that day.
What's interesting is that the gothloli character in the film is presented not as a naive and sweet gamine ideal, but as a narcissistic aesthetic solipsist more sociopathic than Ibaraki's entire population of mohawk-sporting bat-wielding motorcycle-riding girl yankees put together. She learns to make friends, though, so it's all good. All in all a heartwarming film for 90s Japanese pop culture fetishists; the soundtrack has Yoko Kanno, Tommy heavenly6 and Ozaki Yutaka in a shining role.
I'm getting bored of going to these alone, though. :/ Where is everybody? Bueller?
Corto Maltèse: La Ballade de la mer salée: animated adaptation of a French graphic novel by Hugo Pratt. (here is a paper someone wrote on the character. I am linking it because it is made up of phrases like "Bachelardian pluralism of rationalities".) The story is not at all structured like the Boy's Own Adventure in the Pacific I was expecting; more like a Conrad novel than anything else. I thought the direction was pedestrian, though, the tempo of scenes curiously unvarying, as if the director were unaware that when one reads a comic book one's gaze lingers more on some panels than others. Just an impression, I've never read the original. Some (but not all) of the voice acting was ace: the guy doing Corto had a devil-may-care quality down that was somehow very French. Everyone in the audience laughed at all his repartee lines.
Breaking News: I like Johnny To movies because they go down clean, like an iced shot of vodka. He's one of those filmmakers whose visual style translates in my head as a "prose" style: all understated laconic clarity, normal cops and normal criminals shooting normal guns at each other, gee-whiz James Bond factor turned down real low, self-conscious noir factor likewise. The lack of gloss or fake grit gives an aura of reality to the elaborate set-pieces (camera-equipped SWAT teams hunting three separate pairs of armed killers through a concrete warren of a low-rent high-rise apartment complex) that would be utterly fantastic otherwise. The camera work is jaw-dropping but if you aren't paying attention you'd never notice it. Instead you watch his action sequences and wonder why the hell you bother to sit through movies where people fight and it's all a big muddle where you can't tell where a punch or bullet is landing unless they slow it down and freeze-frame it for you like you were some kind of idiot, because clearly there is a right way to do this kind of thing.
The shots in this movie of the outside of buildings tell me that the person who made it sees the city the way I see the city.
Cromartie High School: as I was about to write this review I came across
doctaj, a fflist-er who has an animated gif icon of Mechazawa from the movie. This is a stunning coincidence because the night I saw this I almost posted to lj going ZOMG WTF ANIMATED MECHAZAWA ICON BIYATCHES PLS LOLZ, but was foiled by the late hour. If I were more shameless I'd ask her if I could steal it.This was an international premiere. A grand total of two people I know will be impressed by this, but then I only went to see it because of
redheadtensai anyway, and I am not sorry. In fact I'm going to see if I can rent the anime from SFA. It is completely retarded and deeply awesome and everyone should Kamikaze Girls: this is an even stupider title than Karaoke Terror. It's actually "Shimotsuma Monogatari" but of course that's a bit difficult to explain. I'd never realised there was such a thing as a gothic lolita scene in Montreal, but sure enough it exists, because someone on the BBS where all the Montreal gothic lolitas hang out must have posted going, "Hey, you know what would be cool? All of us dressing up and going to see Kamikaze Girls together!" As you can imagine, many fanboys were made very happy that day.
What's interesting is that the gothloli character in the film is presented not as a naive and sweet gamine ideal, but as a narcissistic aesthetic solipsist more sociopathic than Ibaraki's entire population of mohawk-sporting bat-wielding motorcycle-riding girl yankees put together. She learns to make friends, though, so it's all good. All in all a heartwarming film for 90s Japanese pop culture fetishists; the soundtrack has Yoko Kanno, Tommy heavenly6 and Ozaki Yutaka in a shining role.
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no subject
Date: 2005-07-21 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-21 08:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-21 09:35 pm (UTC)Was that the one that was only available in Asia?
And I'm kinda surprised you went to see Corto Maltese.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-21 10:13 pm (UTC)I'd definitely recommend the series, in anime or manga form. The anime episodes are half-length, and the manga chapters (examples of which you may well have sitting around in issues of Shounen Magazine, if you ever bought it for Get Backers or some such) are short too--nice easy bite-size bits of...er, crack. With, yes, Freddie Mercury. XD;;;
no subject
Date: 2005-07-21 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-22 03:51 am (UTC)lol! They were rigorously promoting this one at Comicon as well. Their advertisement included several pretty horrendous looking gothloli who looked way too old for the very concept of the gothloli types. Though, of course, it made the day for plenty a fanboy and helped the fetish shops with their corset and lace sales.
Weird when you think about it, I never cry at the big tragic romance scenes in these books.
Ditto, though I suspect part of that comes more from the fact that the romantic tragedy is directed more towards painful, wrenching angst and frustration, rather than tear-shedding helplessness and innocent tragedy. I'm pretty dry-eyed when it comes to romantic tragedy, but when it comes to sincerely tragic children, I bawl my eyes out. I used to think Grave of the Fireflies was the ultimate "kid" movie that I'd never want to watch again because of the sniffle factor. Then I watched Dog of Flanders. O_o