Flicks ...
Blood ... Japanimations answer to Buffy the Vampire Slayer? At 40 mins long, it feels like it ran out on money. The movie itself never really develops. Peter tells me there's a series now that builds it out. Animation is top notch eye candy. But it's hard to bring myself to watch it over a second time. Qualifies therefore as a flick which in my lingo is a movie worth watching once, as in flicking through ...
White Dragon ... Somewhere in the midst of beautifully shot sets and locations a story could have developed but then we don't watch a chinese kung fu movie for the cinematic heights they will scale do we? To rate the fights I'd have to think back to a time before Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, before Iron Monkey, before even Shogun's Ninja. In other words good but not great. Another flick worth watching once.
The Returner ... Takashi Kaneshiro is always watchable and the dude wears an Armani trench like nobody else, but style alone doth not maketh a movie. Well done sci-fi story not withstanding, the cute anne suzuki's undoubted histrionic abilities not withstanding in the end there was nothing compelling about the movie. But it's definitely worth watching once and it is extremely well directed bar the slow bits here there. To me, movies like this should be Speed ... insane adrenaline rushes that go from high to high like the sky's the limit ... The action scenes, esp. the bullet time cuts are as is usual with Japanese movies executed to the point of perfection but without an original compelling script there's only so much story to fill in the blanks in between ...
Zatoichi ... the movie was good real good, and I'll probably watch it again for some incredibly deft action scenes what makes this a compelling movie is the signature touch of Takeshi nee Beat Kitano's characterizations ... a blind masseur, the nephew, the siblings seeking revenge, the honorable samurai turned bodyguard, the mysterious boss all come to life in an almost Kurosawesque fashion. Given the incredible attention to detail, the choreography of the samurai sequences this is an eminently enjoyable movie, something like a Kill Bill taken to the next level, but it is definitely not a classic. I do like Takeshi's wonderfully understated, dead pan portrayal but I miss Shintanu's self deprecating humor. But what the movie is missing is the originality of the classics before. The story is a rehash, town at the mercy of a gang, who have hired a master samurai ... but neither the battle scenes nor the town life portrayed come across with the authenticity or the understated deftness of say a Mizoguchi or a Kurosawa and I only say this because he has been likened to a modern master. That being said, this movie carries the rehash off with style to burn and it passes my favorite test. Not a minute that is boring or yawn worthy ...
And for the week that's all folks. Next week should be good. Tale of two sisters a modern Korean horror movie, Mirror Mask a Neil Gaiman original should be a feast for the eyes if nothing else, Jin-Roh and a lot else just waiting on the shelves ...
White Dragon ... Somewhere in the midst of beautifully shot sets and locations a story could have developed but then we don't watch a chinese kung fu movie for the cinematic heights they will scale do we? To rate the fights I'd have to think back to a time before Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, before Iron Monkey, before even Shogun's Ninja. In other words good but not great. Another flick worth watching once.
The Returner ... Takashi Kaneshiro is always watchable and the dude wears an Armani trench like nobody else, but style alone doth not maketh a movie. Well done sci-fi story not withstanding, the cute anne suzuki's undoubted histrionic abilities not withstanding in the end there was nothing compelling about the movie. But it's definitely worth watching once and it is extremely well directed bar the slow bits here there. To me, movies like this should be Speed ... insane adrenaline rushes that go from high to high like the sky's the limit ... The action scenes, esp. the bullet time cuts are as is usual with Japanese movies executed to the point of perfection but without an original compelling script there's only so much story to fill in the blanks in between ...
Zatoichi ... the movie was good real good, and I'll probably watch it again for some incredibly deft action scenes what makes this a compelling movie is the signature touch of Takeshi nee Beat Kitano's characterizations ... a blind masseur, the nephew, the siblings seeking revenge, the honorable samurai turned bodyguard, the mysterious boss all come to life in an almost Kurosawesque fashion. Given the incredible attention to detail, the choreography of the samurai sequences this is an eminently enjoyable movie, something like a Kill Bill taken to the next level, but it is definitely not a classic. I do like Takeshi's wonderfully understated, dead pan portrayal but I miss Shintanu's self deprecating humor. But what the movie is missing is the originality of the classics before. The story is a rehash, town at the mercy of a gang, who have hired a master samurai ... but neither the battle scenes nor the town life portrayed come across with the authenticity or the understated deftness of say a Mizoguchi or a Kurosawa and I only say this because he has been likened to a modern master. That being said, this movie carries the rehash off with style to burn and it passes my favorite test. Not a minute that is boring or yawn worthy ...
And for the week that's all folks. Next week should be good. Tale of two sisters a modern Korean horror movie, Mirror Mask a Neil Gaiman original should be a feast for the eyes if nothing else, Jin-Roh and a lot else just waiting on the shelves ...
posted by Subash at 3:08 PM
1 Comments:
Poke!
Post a Comment
<< Home