gankutsuou: spelling???

Gankutsuou: the Count of Monte Cristo: anime series

so if you like dumas, and you like space, and you like to have your brain washed by subliminal messages hidden in cartoon clothing patterns, this series is definitely for you.

i really liked it, sort of. i do have possibly unjustifiable reservations. the reservations stem from the fact that, though much of my disposable income goes toward procuring manga, i don't know japanese culture, and i don't speak japanese at all, and so some stuff in it was a little incomprehensible to me, but probably not actually incomprehensible at all. from an outsider's perspective, i didn't always quite get the point of what was going on. but this is all from an outsider's perspective, so just preface every sentence to come with "to my undereducated american eye."

things i liked: there were a lot of really good moments, heart-wrenching stuff and dramatic stuff. a comparison to buffy was even in order when things got darkest--and that is the holy grail of t.v. praise coming from me. i also really liked eugenie. and i think that the turning of dumas's french politics into gankutsuou's imaginary space french politics was pretty damn well done--detailed and nuanced and interesting. also, great titles music.

things i didn't like: it got a little self-involved at times--i think. more interested in showing cool pictures than making a plot happen. again, i think. this is the part where, you know, any knowledge of japanese culture at all would come in handy for me. like it's possible that the parts i thought were kind of self-indulgent might have been metaphors that i didn't understand, etc.

things that i don't know if i thought they were good but i did think they were AWESOME: hmm. giant robot duels--as crow t. robot might say, giant robot duels are the kind of padding i like to see in a film! no matter that it's a space retelling of a classic french novel. throw in giant robots. just throw them in. please. NOW. and all the homosexuality: thank you. thank you for...oh, god, there is no such thing as too much depiction of that relationship between the young men and their older male--what was the term sailor moon used in a similar situation? role models, that's it. role models. also the animation style, with the graphemes that stood still as the clothing they filled in moved: i don't think i was the person who was being subliminally messaged by that clothing, but if i was, i'm sorry for taking down whatever communist government i took down while i thought i was sleeping.

in short, it was a really good retelling of the french novel the count of monte cristo...in japanese...in space...with aliens and giant robots and a vengeful space-mask-spirit instead of a rebellious but holy friar and a vampiric zombie edmond dantes.

Iron Man 2: return of the confusing yet delightful plot sequence

Iron Man 2: movie starring robert downey jr., gwyneth paltrow, and plenty of others, some of whom look amazing in catsuits but i'm not naming any names but oh my god

i've heard that certain message boards on the internet are (or were) at war on the subject of iron man 2: hot or not? my personal opinion: pretty hot.

scarlett johansson was in a catsuit some of the time.

that's neither here nor there. and it's not like i disagree with those who assert that the plot is a big mess. and i like terrence howard better than don cheadle (in the part of rhodey, at least). but, okay, some movies are about big life stuff, seminal events in their characters' histories, and other movies are about watching robert downey jr. act a part that he does really really well. iron man 2, to me, is about one stressful-butt week in the life of tony stark--the threads don't come together, and they could have to make a better movie, but...

at the risk of repeating myself, scarlett johansson was in a catsuit some of the time.

that's neither here nor there. at the risk of repeating myself, sometimes LIFE doesn't come together into neat interconnecting strands until years after the stressful week in question. i realize that these characters aren't real, but the way that iron man 2 imitates life isn't invalid, to my understanding. now, this particular imitation of life might not have been what we in the criticism biz call "on purpose" on the film's creators' part*. iron man 2 threw a lot of material at the viewing audience, and didn't necessarily tell us how to process it.

but, yeah, i liked it. i'd be being a douchebag if i said i didn't like it, if i tried to make myself not like it because i thought it didn't come up to my personal standards of plotmaking qualityness. and the liking of it didn't leave a bad aftertaste in my mouth as my liking kick ass did.

also robert downey jr. is so awesome. all the principals are awesome. i didn't like don cheadle like i liked terrence howard, but he did do a good job.

and scarlett johansson may or may not be in a catsuit for some of the time. i mean, she doesn't look bad in it, you know. whatever, really. oh god.


*yeah, i'm not in the criticism biz and i have no idea what things are called.

How to Train Your Dragon, or, how dreamworks has gots one job but it does it well

How to Train Your Dragon: pixillated movie starring vikings

just as a side note, i begin to despair, i am afraid, of ever marketing this blog with any real success. bah. these capitalist pigdogs who advertise for writers on craigslist are not looking for a snarky yet sensitive movie reviewer with no formal experience. bah bah. will i ever make money at writing anything? in the words of rammstein in their song du hast, "NEIN!"

anyway, how to train your dragon. what can i say? i really really liked it. i don't like it more than shrek II, because shrek II is one of my favorite movies period, but i think i liked it as well as up. because up was wonderful, but also a little corny and random, while how to train your dragon was less touching and more cliched, but the cliches it employed were employed VERY SUCCESSFULLY.

the question, in fact, of how something can be cliched and successful at the same time was brought up at one point in the post-movie discussion. what it boils down to, for me, is that, at the risk of being proved extremely wrong, i feel like there are very few things that can be good without having a solid basis in cliche. i feel like a lot of stuff we're supposed to swallow as good is simply considered good because it's not cliched, and the lack of cliche is its main weakness, because its creators were so busy concentrating on not falling into any cliches that they didn't bother to concentrate on making the production itself worthwhile. it's cliched to say that cliches are cliches because they're true, but that little example of circularity kind of just represents what i'm talking about. cliches might not be true, but they're the most solid representations of whatever they represent available at the cultural moment they exist within. not necessarily the best representations, but, as how to train your dragon proves, when done right, cliches are certainly up there among the best representative tools available.

the strength of the whole dreamworks shrek-vein production aesthetic is that it doesn't just acknowledge its cliched-ness, but frolics about within its cliches more than an elderly woman in a bed of noodles in an intensely irritating robin williams vehicle. i mean, there's nothing in how to train your dragon that we haven't seen before: misunderstood shrimpy kid, by dint of his immense powers of careful observation and mechanical tinkerage, saves his village and his pet from disaster, and wins the heart of the blonde. but it's a superb example of this movie that we all know.

just as an example: we all know, coming into the theater, that if the main character is shrimpy and filled with wisecracks and mishaps, he's eventually going to prove his bravery against impossible odds, odds that have defeated brawnier and less wisecracky men. what he thought were his weaknesses will be proved his strengths. from heidi to mannequin*, this story has been found timeless, and for good reason: we like our losers to come out on top, and never tire of the irony behind the idea that weaknesses may be strengths. how to train your dragon follows this formula faithfully. but usually in this type of movie, the hero suddenly turns into a skinny badass with either/both the donning of some sort of armor or/and a "let's get serious" montage. in how to train your dragon, they're pretty careful to show that hiccup always was kind of a badass, with or without a montage. like, he's genuinely interested in the work of figuring out what dragons do and don't like and how to get along with them--he's not just using dragons to get ahead with his peers; rather, his success in class is a guiltily gratifying side affect of his research, but the research was more than enough for him in the first place. despite similarities in their constructions, this, the love of learning for its own sake, the genuine badassery of being interested in something one is good at and has thought of first, is not the idea that gets produced within the viewer by weird science--it's not the affect of tron--it's really not the affect of any zero to hero movie i can remember seeing as such**--and it's awesome! i mean, seriously! thank you, dreamworks! and this wasn't the only cliche that was subtly torqued in order to be thoughtfully done, to be done well. they were all done well.

as another example (this edit courtesy of the fact that i just saw the movie again last night) of cliches that how to train your dragon did right, the "strong pretty girl" is turning into quite the cliche herself in moviedom. she's a really good idea, don't get me wrong, but when you get someone like athena's daughter-girl in percy jackson and the spiders from mars (whose eyes weren't even that gray, come on!), you realize that the trickle-down theory works about as well in characterization as it does in economics (that was pointed but really really outdated). she walks! she talks! she fights! she drives a car! she has a line or two! and, in something like the words of marc bolan, "she gets cgi on her...she gets cgi...." but there's nothing else going on there. literally. we feel like we have to like the strong pretty girl, because she's proving that girls are able to be strong while being pretty--go girls! but we do, secretly, feel that these female characters are just about as devoid of meaning as they used to be. except that we feel bad making fun of them for it. the jessica biel character in blade III is another good example of this sort of smoking-hotttt-but-idiotic characterization (not jessica biel herself, nor her acting job, but the way she's written in the script)--dare i call it "the wonder woman phenomenon," when i only know periphoral stuff about comic books? eh, i'll do it. that's what the internet is for: random claims about random stuff that one doesn't particularly understand, made with style. i'll be expounding on my several theories about crop circles any entry now (that was a joke).

BUT, in how to train your dragon, strong pretty girl was actually strong and pretty. again, a person can think of a thousand examples in which the pretty girl is wanted both by the musculaturated male and the shrimpy guy--or a person can think of a thousand examples of the pretty girl not wanting the shrimpy guy until he proves himself worthy of her interest--but these examples do not often do justice to the pretty girl (hughes' some kind of wonderful is just leaping to mind as a movie that does not do justice to the pretty girl). the strong pretty girl is even worse, because she despises the shrimpy guy due to his lack of being like her, and often pummels him with vigor. but astrid has REASONS for both pummeling and ignoring hiccup: she takes her fighting seriously, and, more importantly, she takes herself seriously. this is the essence of the strong pretty girl cliche, i think, and i really like it. she doesn't dislike hiccup because she percieves him as weak or not cool or not attractive--she dislikes him because she's interested in fighting dragons for all the right reasons (shouldering her parents' responsibility) and she knows, vaguely, that he's interested in it for all the wrong ones (getting a girlfriend). she's also jealous of him, because, like with his success in dragon training being a guiltily gratifying side-affect of the ramifications of his personality, the acclaim of society for her dragon-fighting talents is more important to her than she realizes before it gets taken away--you could read her as being kind of mad at herself as well as mad at him. anyway. she's INTERESTING, is what it about boils down to. with someone like jasmine from alladin, you mostly think "tiny waist, feisty personality--i don't know about you, but i want to go to there." but astrid's got more going on. anyway.

so, yeah. i really liked it. also i liked the soundtrack. i thought it was real good. and as far as regional orchestration goes, thanks for hitting the fifes a little harder than the bagpipe side of things, soundtrack dudes. also the voice acting was AWESOME. it was really, REALLY quality. jay baruchel baruch-excelled. america ferrara was amerzingly ferrabulous. yeah. every one of them was so damn good. i wish i had the brain capacity to remember more than two names, because they all rocked.

and toothless was freaking adorable. i am almost too ashamed to admit this, but my longing exceeds my shame--i want the plush toy. real bad. i want a giant one to use as a back pillow. i know tiny children are making them for three cents a day.

as rammstein would say, "dort an klavier; lauschte ich ihr." yeah, i have no idea what that means.

*these are really terrible examples--that is, heidi isn't a good example of this phenomenon, and mannequin is far too...unique...to be a good example of much of anything, except of the way that kim cattral looks in a terrycloth bandeau.

**it's also not the effect of i was a teenage werewolf. but this may be somewhat beside the point.

A Nightmare on Elm Street: thank you, michael bay, for all you've done for america. and me personally.

A Nightmare on Elm Street: revamped wes craven conceit with really skinny suburban teens, including beaver from veronica mars season 2 mostly

if writing reviews on this blog is my duty to myself, then i have been failing at my duty lately. i apologize for the radio silence...i saw hot tub time machine and REALLY didn't know what to say. plus there were performances to be in.

but i'm back, for a nightmare on elm street. this probably isn't going to be long.

surprise, this wasn't a good movie. rather vapid teens might have had issues, but then the whole thing becomes prosaically clear due to a hearty dose of child abuse and a metaphor about menstruation...bah. i mean, there's the "the evil was us all along" tradition of horror movie-alia, and then there's the "set 'em up, knock 'em down" theory of horror-making--this definitely fell into the second category. the evil actually was evil, and the teens were all ten pounds underweight, and you didn't really care about any of them, and the mechanics of the horror wasn't explained even a little.

i get the feeling that michael bay has forgotten what it's like to have bad things in his life. it's probable that i'm being an insensitive bastard in saying that--but judging from this movie, it's also possible that michael bay doesn't exist, but is instead a computer-generated logarithm that churns out directorial decisions based on a complex system of adjusted profit margins, and the pictures you see of him standing next to shia leboeuf (sp?) on yahoo omg (heh heh, not that i ever go on omg or look at celebrity photos [i'm lying through my teeth--bring on the olson twins' fashion mishaps! show me jessica alba grocery shopping with her baby! i am a bad person to feed the paparazzi industry so]) are actually of shia leboeuf (sp?) cleverly manipulating a poseable cardboard cutout of a handsome older man. it's possible that michael bay, in learning to cater to the statistical desires of the populace, has completely lost his understanding of the human soul; it's also possible that he just shuts off his soul while working, and manages to retain his wonderful, caring humanity by completely eradicating any trace of it from his movies. i'm going to go with the second one; i like it better.

and, you know, i wouldn't ask him to change. a nightmare on elm street was stupid, not scary, and wide-ranging in its derivativeness (robert duncan and his partner jess sprang to mind in the opening credits [requisite high-brow joke--i'll start pointing these out]; paranormal activity definitely got channeled in the asian dude's video blog). it was a juvenile treatment of a terrifying yet trendy subject, what with the abuse of the children coming to fruition in some really stupid pick-up lines from melty-face, who didn't seem to know how to treat the subject of what he'd done to nancy any more effectively than the screenwriters did--a fact that could have actually been treated really interestingly if, as aforementioned, anyone involved in the movie had known what to do with the abuse backstory (nancy screaming "noooo" at some polaroids for about two seconds? i'd call her whole reaction to the repressed memory thing...i don't know, "underwritten," maybe? especially considering the amount of time the movie spent hacky-sacking teens around. yes. time mismanagement: definitely the main thing that was wrong with this film. [that last, hopefully, read as sarcasm.])

but it was harmless. maybe. i mean, it was entertaining. probably. i mean, i enjoyed it. i probably would have enjoyed it more if i'd seen it at home with my friends, because then we could have made fun of it openly and honestly, as opposed to in the theater, where you don't want to ruin someone else's quality moviegoing experience...

ha ha, sorry. it was really bad.

i did like beaver-from-veronica-mars. i like him in stuff. nancy didn't seem like she had a chance, nor did other guy. i felt like the blonde girl was paying way too much attention to what position her mouth was in. i mean, at a certain point you have to give it up, blonde girl. people's mouths do sometimes relax, no matter how pretty they are. i mean, for the sake of realism...

again, who am i kidding? this movie was bad.

plus, if you didn't wear massive amounts of eyeliner to bed, you wouldn't get raccoon eyes every time the horror showed up. yeah. chew on that, america.

Clash of the Titans: this movie will receive such a BLOGGING as it has never known!!

Clash of the Titans: new release starring avatar dude

who, again, i liked. i really thought that this actor (name, sra, give him a name--sam worthington, that's the name) was pretty much the best thing about avatar. even sigourney weaver at her feistiest couldn't give fill her avatar character with logical personhood, but i thought sam worthington managed his avatar-guy as he managed his perseus: that is, well.

now, admittedly, worthington has somewhere between five and six lines in the entirety of clash of the titans, which, considering that he's playing the main character, is perhaps not a great screenwriting choice. and there are some moments where he just stands and stares at the ground, with his head sideways, like an extra from one flew over the cuckoo's nest (yeah, when are they remaking that? except as an action flick, probably one with jeremy statham as macmurphy, nurse ratchett played by the delectable and incredibly unsuitable-for-the-part kristen bell, and a soundtrack prominently featuring evanescence for the tender moments and andrew w.k. for the surprisingly appropriate accompaniment to the inevitable harbor explosion. i know it's bad, but i so enjoy making fun of stuff). but when worthington gets the chance to actually act, i feel like he does it well.

my friend pointed out that the captain dude, o he of the braided head and INCREDIBLY CONFUSING backstory, seems to be in a different movie. my friend made the point that clash of the titans would be clipping along, and then suddenly that dude would have a line, and the whole story would slow to a gentle glide, torquing itself around the mystery of why the heck he was there in the first place. really, him, and the whole band of soldiers that accompanied perseus--lecherous, erastes, and the older dude (these may not be their actual names)--in fact, all of the argosian soldiers' presence was pretty much a wash, both pacing and plotwise. same goes for the hunters (you know, those completely random brother characters who show up with crabs at the end of the movie?) that came out of, and then went back into, nowhere (my friend thinks that those actors got paid before the movie's creators realized that there was no use for them in the movie, and so they ended up included--my own theory is that those two characters are in fact prominently featured...in the director's cut).

and oh my heavenly creatures, the sheer amount of needless slow mo--it boggles the mind. i know the slow mo parts were supposed to be 3-d, because my friend tells me so, but...sheesh. the thing is that the graphics were really good. the plot, as much as was possible, sucked balls--i mean, it's, literally, a classic plot, and the base material is quite engaging, but what was done to it was super-not-great. making sense was not the movie's strong point. providing opportunities for graphics was its strong point, and, as far as this went, the script was extremely strong. clash of the titans was awesome, graphically. from various previews and billboards, i kind of thought that the visual aesthetic of the film was going to resemble that of battlefield earth, but aside from the men's hairstyles i was proved wrong. the graphics are wonderful. i don't say that that often--in part because i really don't know anything about graphics, but in part because i feel like a lot of cgi work is pretty derivative (see percy jackson entry--and note that i may have picked up feeling entitled to say these things from my oft-aforementioned friend, who is qualified to make said judgments). i mean, it wasn't like the clash of the titans cgi came out of no tradition whatsoever--giant things have taken up a screen to roar at us before the kraken did it--but clash of the titans's cgi was neat. it was cool. a professor of mine points out that coolness is intangible in a thing. it's hard to say what makes this cgi cool and other cgi derivative, but one can feel the difference. so the 3-d stuff really wasn't necessary. it drew attention away from the coolness of the effects and just made them look way overblown.

i also liked the king that hades was able to use as a pawn for reasons that the backstory did much to obscure--acrisius is his name, according to imdb. i liked how the movie took out the golden showers aspect of perseus' conception, and replaced it with this lightening-struck badass, who bites a chunk out of perseus' arm that later gets healed by one of the frosting men in a confusing proof of friendship. i liked the acrisius/hades relationship--it had a very the-emperor-and-anakin vibe, especially the, um, four seconds in heaven (?) scene, in which acrisius gains the power of the underworld by being fired up with hades-breath--or something. i also really liked the scene in which perseus is being taught to fight by the captain guy: it takes on a real step up 2 the streets vibe, especially when the soundtrack starts pointing out that after captain dude has shown what he's got, perseus takes up the beat and makes everyone see that he might be a humble fisherman, but he's got the moves. all that's really missing is opposition from some sort of high school principal; the sexual tension is definitely there.

finally, io is really really really hot.

the end.

Alice in Wonderland: a tim burton movie that i DON'T dislike

Alice In Wonderland 3-D: movie directed by tim burton

well, it's considerably after breakfast, but exposure to this movie has led me to believe six impossible things, at the very least:
1. johnny depp's makeup was more cool than it was annoying. i never thought that that would be the case.
2. mixing the music from coraline together with an averil lavigne single wasn't a great idea for the soundtrack. oh, wait, no, that's not an impossible thing. that's a quite possible thing, one that proved profoundly and omnipresently true.
3. no matter how often alice shrank, grew, snagged herself on things, changed outfits, and beheaded stuff, her hair just kept looking better and better.
4. questions about ravens and writing desks DO make for a bittersweet goodbye.
5. girls can do anything they want to! i mean, my head can hardly believe it, but my heart knew it all along. even in edwardian england, you know, girls can be arrested and scorned and starve themselves for the right to vote...or they can become merchant marine apprentices, and go all the way to china. wearing cute, butch baby blue coats. yeah, alice, as she was portrayed at the end of this movie, definitely went on to make passionate, sapphic love to a series of women, much like that tom-lady in tipping the velvet.
6. i liked it.

i liked the pacing, for one thing--it didn't go too slow, and it wasn't overly irritating. i liked the plot--i feel like it mixed up a few too many things, but at least there was a plot. i liked the acting, mostly, and the cgi animals were really fun. i even liked the parts that they borrowed from lord of the rings, because said borrowings seemed appropriate, and possibly cut down on at least some of the cgi budget. i liked all of it, in fact, except when they were talking at each other, because the serious dialogue was a little bit unendurable. i mean, lewis carroll was a master of nonsense, but even he couldn't have anticipated the way that "serious" dialogue in films such as this--films that don't actually have time for such things as serious dialogue--would go.

and really, tim burton? you're really going to turn the mad hatter into a quasi-heroic love interest? next time just cast johnny depp as the doormouse. or maybe the red queen. either of those characters would have made just as appropriate romantic leads as the mad hatter, plus johnny depp playing either of them would have been impressively quixotic as opposed to overly tim burtonesque: it's time to let edward scissorhands go, man! i mean, when david bowie and jennifer connelly rode that romantical yet oh so creepy fantastically-costumed older man/teen girl wave, that tension was basically the only thing that made labyrinth interesting (aside from the puppets). i'd say the opposite is kind of the case with alice in wonderland. not that both alice and johnny didn't play their parts well, just that, i mean, give them a fighting chance.

ah, it feels good to snark again. speaking of lewis carroll references. go ahead and start hunting it, for i have unleashed the snark. i really did enjoy the movie. if you're going to see stuff that's currently in 3-d, why not not make it ferngully? that is, avatar. sorry. (snark--away!)

i also really liked the fashions, but not as much as i bet hot topic's going to when they start selling alice spin-off dresses.

Paper Heart, or, let the dating start!

Paper Heart: documoviery starring charlyne yi and michael cera and its director

...because when lacking any idea for the blog title, always go for the rhyme.

i liked this. a lot. two thumbs and a couple toes up. i thought maybe the puppets were a little too cute, and the wonder years footage in the middle was maybe a little too emphatic, but i'm pushing myself here to find something bad. i really liked it--and as usual, when i like something, i find it difficult to think of anything to say about it.

what can i say? usually i object to characterizations that don't ring true and plot developments that aren't genre-ically sound; paper heart had neither of these problems. the storyline went all the way through (it kebabed itself...hmm); the characters were captured really nicely. there's a moment when the charlyne character is listening to the story about the dead boyfriend of one of the gay guys and he's making a joke about it and her face is so full of empathy and sadness, it kind of tells the whole story of what makes her resist love in that moment.

it's possible that i watch movies weirdly. i mean, there are things like her going on the biker's motorcycle that, if one were as paranoid as i can sometimes be, one could see as hooks to get the viewer, to make him or her think that he or she is participating in a cute movie with all its alternative trappings. but i don't think that stuff is just for show, i guess. i mean, while she's riding on the motorcycle, we see her, you know? "charlyne" gets revealed to us. it's sensitive of the director to be able to capture her, and the people he's filming, without making it exploitative. he switches valences sometimes, but that's because she's the focus of the film, i think, anyway--and she's got layers. maybe i'm seeing something that's not there, but i don't think so.

note that i'm not focusing over-much on the reality/fiction thing, because that whole argument annoys me. i am trying to be cautious, however (notice the quotes around charlyne above? yeah, i learned that in lit class! it's a technique. i know it, pretty much, yeah).

as might be inferred, i identified pretty strongly with the whole discomfort-with-love thing, which makes me distrust my own judgment. maybe i should just distrust my own judgment with greater frequency--or maybe i should trust it more in this case.

hell, i'll go for option b. see paper heart! it's great!