ending 2020 the only way that seemed fit
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Today I watched Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Hanagatami (2017). It’s the first of his movies I’ve seen that was made after the 80s, so it’s interesting to see him using the same film techniques he used back then only now translated to HD digital.
I’m not really sure what I thought of it as an actual movie though, although at nearly 3 hours long I was never bored. For comparison, it felt closest in narrative and themes to his 1986 film ‘Bound for the Fields, the Mountains, and the Seacoast’ which to me is probably his second best movie (after Hausu)
I’m also not really sure I understand the choice to use actors visibly pushing 40 to play the high school boys (while their female counterparts looked closer to the correct age). In particular there’s one character who looks to be around 40, acts like an old man and uses a walking cane, and yet is attending high school classes.
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I ended and started the year with FLYING LEATHERNECKS. Which has John Wayne who visibly reads the cue cards in the first scene in the movie after that he doesn’t.
I have to state upon watching a Marion film that he fucking sucks shit. He does mostly good in this role even if the message is muffled and the film kind of ends and then decides to start again 25 minutes before ending.
Thought it was good to see a fighter pilot movie so I can be prepared to judge Rogue Squadron in…three years… bet that will be a bit easier because it won’t be all white guys that I could not tell apart. They certainly keep having guys die and complain about a lack of supplies but I never felt it.
They do use almost entirely archive footage for the plane scenes so hey real deaths on camera. Then they use the kamikaze footage I’ve seen in at least three films at this point and it is always unbelievable. This is the second film with a Japanese ship blowing up and seeing the circle fly out before the explosion shocked me again. There is no pleasure or enjoyment to seeing snuff but each time it comes up it feels important to take in.
I give it 3 out of 5 katanas you take off a dead officer and give to your son that he then draws in his bedroom and you are like what the fuck that is an actual sword I guess that probably happened once or twice.
But also John Wayne can suck an egg. But hey stagecoach is on Tubi.
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The Sisters Brothers was not at all what I expected, Its like halfway between First Cow and Cormac McCarthy Lite, but ultimately just kind of bad despite being very pretty. I heard the book was good?
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I am watching Inland Empire but don’t have English subs for these parts that are in Russian. I thought it was gonna be a thing where English audiences aren’t meant to know what’s being said, but as it goes on and the more scenes there are in Russian I suspect that I’m missing out on… something here…
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I saw Saving Private Ryan…selectbutton…tell me I’m a good man.
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Hey, we sort of talked about that one. Or rather I mentioned it briefly. What did you think about it?
Steven Speilberg (Baby Boomer) can’t get over that he never understood his dad (Greatest Gen). The main character of the film is Matt Damon’s son seen in the background of the beginning and ending.
I am curious what I would have thought of it at the time.
The violence was extremely hyped for me then it didn’t even move the needle for me honestly? Which is maybe just how desensitized I am because VIDEO GAMES? But also the post before this was me talking about how the actual ww2 footage shook me to the core.
Speilberg placed everything so you would feel the one emotion he wanted you to feel right then. And then it is just a sledgehammer of that emotion.
As someone that has seen several contemporary with ww2 films last year (at least 10), no one talked or thought like they do in Saving Private Ryan. It is certainly what Baby Boomers thought their parents talked like.
The context specifically for you BBP is that American WW2 vets (who unlike European vets didn’t have to help with construction of a new Europe and got to go back to normal life) by and large never talked about their war experiences. This was true for both my grandfathers. They went over and “did their job” and came back and dealt with it. Their kids went to Vietnam and came back crybabies and drug addicts. What the fuck was their problem. Sometimes call them The Silent Generation because of this.
So the film being so fucking quipy and contradictory in message is all Baby Boomers trying to deal with not understanding their dads. And it all ends with “tell me I’m a good man.” Quit it Steven. We get it you never understood your father.
I also thought the camera work is scitzophrentic (Hi if this word is offensive now let me know) it would flip between documentary to perfectly framed to BLOOM to no bloom to color saturated to extreme close up to look at this shot of them walking isn’t it pretty PLEASE NOTICE IT IS PRETTY.
Also the sound design is really really constructed (like everything is). I would be shocked to find if anything in the final fight was “live.”
Wow I could write more. I didn’t hate it but do thing it is a terrible movie with terrible platitudes. But I got “am I a good man” which joins “what mean expendable” and “i cant wait to get out of these star wars” as the titular lines of cinema.
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In short Pacific War movies love to use the Real footage of Marines using a flamethrower and that is extremely fucked up.
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Can’t ever fault the opening D-Day sequence for verve and excellent geography but the whole back half combat sequence is junky videogame stuff. Put Sniper Man in Tower. Nazis used Tank on Tower!
Band of Brothers is the superior maudlin Spielbergian Silent Generation jerkoff, ok it’s 10 hours long but if you’ve seen that one you never need to watch the History Channel again.
private ryan, we are here to saving you
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The Borrowers painted the high street of a village near Reading dark green and all the borrowers have red hair. I got a lot of tonal whiplash from red = good, green = bad, but not as much from all the extremely British atmosphere and a box of Eggo in the freezer/US accents on the main human cast/clearly UK shot boxes driving on the right
Baffling, pretty fun
I liked the movie well enough, I liked the book a decent amount more.
i get that the point of jake gyllenhal and riz ahmed was that they are like too naive and innocent for the wild wild west, but it is still ridiculous to me that they wouldn’t start traveling under aliases once they both knew that there were several assassins trying to track them down
they’re actually in Polish. i don’t think you’re missing that much honestly (it’s Inland Empire after all…). but you should be able to find subs somewhere online.
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Woops, sorry to the Polish language!
recent movies watched:
Donnie Darko (2002): ugh. i watched this on a complete whim. it had its moments (Jake Gyllenhaal saying to the motivational speaker guy “i think you’re the fucking antichrist” and also the woman hysterically saying “sometimes i doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion!!” was a great line), but it lost all goodwill i had remaining for the film with its stupid ‘twist’ ending. this is like Evangelion levels of being so specifically about and for ornery teens, but Evangelion still has a lot that’s worth it beyond that whereas this does not. also Heathers is a way better entry in the “using a film to get even at your lame conservative high school” genre.
Fantastic Planet (1974): i don’t tend to have expectations for famous weird animated movies like this beyond “have trippy visuals that keep me engaged” but this ended up being a surprisingly really dark parable about either like slavery or animal rights or like whatever else you want to think of it as (American imperialism/exceptionalism also comes to mind). basically the story pleasantly surprised me. there were also some legitimately really great and weird creatures that appear in the movie that are never really explained in the story either. that sort of worldbuilding/parable element of the movie is kinda what i imagine some alternate universe version of the Star Wars prequels could be like. i can definitely feel like how the movie looks is the sort of texture a lot of indie games nowadays are trying to go for, but with far less guts and less commitment to doing a story that’s this dark (people now are way to puritanical to put nude animated people in their games, let alone any number of other things). you usually only get either cool weird visuals or good story, but not both. anyway - recommended!
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) - the story behind me watching this is that i’ve never seen Gremlins 1 (i haven’t seen most of those “classic 80’s movies” a lot of people watched when they were young) but i saw some Red Letter Media video about this and the setting of a weird state of the art tower that’s part of a Trump-like guy’s media empire and generally how incredibly meta the film was made me think this would appeal to me. it didn’t disappoint. this was a really fun movie! so many weird props and sets, and endless gremlins everywhere. i’m not sure how expensive it was to make but it certainly felt expensive. they also really stretched the whole idea of Gremlins to the absolute limits and made fun of it in every way possible. it feels like a movie made explicitly to mitigate the possibility of future sequels. this is also kind of the best of what i hope blockbuster movies and especially sequels like this to be. so yeah - pretty darn good!
Peeping Tom (1960): i’d been meaning to see this for awhile because i’m a huge fan of The Red Shoes and it regularly gets brought up in discussions of famous cult films. i’m a little torn on it though. the whole concept behind the character, his whole backstory, and the way that he kills (and the final reveal at the end) were really cool and unique and well thought through. there were great scenes - particularly the one with Moira Shearer from the Red Shoes who is easily the most electric screen presence in the film and that particular scene was so well lit and filmed i wish she would have stuck around in the film for longer. but then there were long stretches of boring with characters who lacked any kind of screen presence. the woman who is interested in the main serial killer character was SO irritating. i hated her every second she was on screen, and found her to be a total void of charisma. but i guess that does make her realistically exactly the type of woman who would marry a serial killer. she’s a weird kind of hidden, far more respectable sociopath herself. her mom was at least a much more interesting character. but one scene with the mom especially made me think - are British people just this incredibly nosy and constantly violating of other people’s boundaries? because if so that would certainly explain a lot of things. both that woman and her mom are all up over the main character’s apartment and photo room in a way that feels like a massive invasion of privacy.
anyway i can certainly see how this film caused a stir and was ahead of its time in many ways, though i feel like there are some really clunky parts of the film that made it not land for me as well as it should have.
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you can now access hundreds of stills from studio ghibli works on their website! not sure exactly where to share this but regardless it’s pretty neat
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Yeah, it tried to empty those tear ducts pretty hard by the end of it! Over here we call that “American pathos” and Saving Private Ryan is certainly full of it. I liked the D-Day opening because it seemed like the movie had something to say at that point and then the rest of the movie happened. I remember it did shock me to see guts hanging out in a big mainstream movie, though what was so shocking about the violence was the humanity of the characters, with soldiers screaming, crying and yelling out for their mothers. That’s what was really brutal about it. And yeah, a lot of these men were just boys and even “men” aren’t killing machines without fear or emotions. That’s what the movie made me realize and I was thankful for that. I was a teenager when I saw it, so…
Another thing I remember that was talked about when the movie came out was that the nazis were decidedly not humanized like the allies, they were just straight up cold bad guys, so the movie was kinda dumb in that regard too.
I haven’t seen the movie since it came out in theaters. I think it’s probably still worth it for the opening and as a study of pathos. You’re probably right that it’s bad movie all in all and I do remember the camera work or overall look of it being something that bugged me