I want to preface this by saying that I've never seen a Miyazaki movie (or Studio Ghibli movie for that matter), so there's no possible way I could be biased. At all. I try to keep an open mind whenever I watch a movie I haven't seen before. I know that Miyazaki movies are very unique and sometimes pretty weird, but weird's a bit of an understatement here. The story follows Mahito, a boy who lost his mother in a fire and moves to the Japanese countryside with his father following her death. There, they meet Natsuko, Mahito's new mother, and go to her house where they meet the Heron for the first time. Mahito starts exploring almost immediately, and after sent to school for one day, bludgeons himself with a rock to his head to make it seem like he got in a fight in order to get out of going to school again. Mahito's a real one for that. But, due to his injury, he's forbidden from leaving his room and is kept under a watchful eye by Natsuko's maids (?). Despite this, Mahito is able to sneak away from them in time to find his way into an Alice-in-Wonderland-type world that allows him to face his mother's death and finally get over the events that occurred more than 3 years prior. Like last week, I'm going to start actually reviewing by saying what I liked about this movie. And I like this movie a lot. I said earlier in this blog about how this movie's pretty weird, but I'm a huge fan of movies that express themselves in weird and unique ways. It's the most creative way I've seen anyone portray grief and how the protagonist overcomes it. It takes a deep dive into the mind of Mohito as he tries to confront his mother's death and his inability to save her. Of course, you can't talk about a Ghibli movie without talking about how beautiful it looks. Every single frame is drawn and animated with a quality that's second to none, and every single shot looks gorgeous. My favorite part of this animation style is how they animated the fire. Throughout the movie, Mohito antagonizes the fire as the thing that took away his mother. He remembers how the flames nearly engulfed him as he tried to reach her, but was unable. This feeling is recreated with the way that the fire is drawn. It fills the whole screen and is drawn with a very hostile energy that's easy to pick up on and helps the viewer connect more with Mohito. If nothing else, Ghibli completely mastered the art of animation with The Boy and the Heron. Now, let's talk about what I didn't like about this movie. I've mentioned how much I love weird movies, but generally those movies have a pretty rigid structure. The Boy and the Heron, however, does not have a definitive structure. I heard my English & film teacher say that Miyazaki sort of writes these movies as he goes along, and this movie's very telling of that. The main plot can be understood, but it's tied pretty loosely together. At one point in the movie, it's difficult to remember why Mohito even ventured into the other world in the first place, because at that point it seems like he's just trying to escape and not find Natsuke. I like this movie a lot, but I think that if they spent a little bit more time defining and refining the actual story into a more cohesive narrative, it'd just work better in that regard. I've got one last thing I want to bring up that I didn't necessarily like or dislike, and that's how the movie ended (this is usually the part in an AP DBQ that gets you the complexity point.) At the end of the movie, Mohito refuses to follow in his great-grand-uncle's footsteps, and leaves the world to crumble behind him. In doing so, he saves Natsuke from the malice in that world, but destroys lives. But, he's also defining his own future. Rather than do what was laid out for him, and rather than live in a world that could truly be all-good, he takes the more difficult option and lives in a world that finds balance in the chaos of good and evil, and I think that's noble. 8/10
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I want to preface this week's post by saying that I generally hate action movies. They overdo the action, create unrealistic stories, and almost never are able to fully flesh out the plots they're given. Unfortunately, District 9 falls into that "never" category for me. District 9 was an interesting movie, and I don't mean interesting in a great way. I've got a friend that always spoke really highly of this movie, and since we're doing a 200 Days 200 Movies thing, I decided to give it a try. Well, not really "decided", because we all take turns picking movies and this was the one he chose. But I still chose to watch it to honor the rules. So going into this, you can imagine I had pretty high expectations for this movie. And on that note, let's talk about what I liked about the movie. For one, it's a pretty unique and interesting concept. Aliens come to Earth not out of hostility, but out of desperation. When the humans did attempt making contact with the aliens, they seemed deprived of nutrition and desperate for escape from the ship that seemed to have trapped them there. Upon releasing them, the citizens of Johannesburg immediately turn to violence against the "prawns," and a militarized zone is dedicated to the "safety" and study of them. Shocking. Something else of note, that they even brought up in the opening of the movie, is the fact that rather than parking over some major city in the US like New York or Los Angeles, the ship parked over Johanessburg, South Africa. The conflict was also pretty interesting. Wikus, the protagonist, is not only fighting to save himself, but rather save himself from a virus that slowly ended up turning him into one of the prawns. Throughout the movie, he's constantly attempting to get Christopher, a prawn he befriended, back onto the mothership so he can save his own people and get the cure for the virus that Wikus took on. And now, time for something completely different: what I didn't like about District 9. I mentioned this in my review of Gravity last week, and that's that I simply don't care about the characters. The movie's documentary-style of filming made it pretty weird to follow, especially at the beginning. The sheer number of people that the movie opens with talking to the camera for the in-world documentary leaves for a pretty confusing first 20 minutes, where it's hard to figure out who the main character is. This confusing 20 minutes doesn't sound like much, but when most of the rest of the movie is following the same one guy and not much else, it's not exactly an ideal way to watch a movie. Forgetting the first 20 minutes, I kind of liked the first half of the movie. It sets off with a pretty interesting conflict, about a guy fighting a virus, the military, and aliens at the same time. But then it devolves into a generic, guns-blazing, explosive action movie. Like I said at the start, I hate action movies for not being able to flesh out the stories they have. District 9 absolutely could have had the chance to do so, but since the sequel for it got cancelled, it leaves a lot of loose ends by the end. If this movie had gotten a sequel, I genuinely think it could have been a lot better than it turned out to be. But honestly, it isn't. 6/10This was a movie, for sure. Was it a great movie? Not really. Was it a good movie? Yeah, I'd argue that it was. Released in 2013 by Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity is a movie following an astronaut's attempts to get back to Earth after a storm of debris destroyed her space station, along with the help of another astronaut from the same space station. Sometimes. It's hard to talk about this movie without talking about how gorgeous it is. Being a space movie, Gravity is full of beautiful CGI-"enhanced" camerawork and stellar shots of Earth. Another thing I enjoyed about the movie is the setting. I've said it before and I'll say it again, I love movies that confine themselves to one or a few settings. I think it can bring out really creative stories and scenarios, because it's harder to rely on the setting for major plot points. Traditionally, this style of filming can also bring out the best in characters. Unfortunately, for this movie, it did not. The biggest complaint I have about Gravity is the characters. For one, George Clooney's in it and he's the king of being able to play only one character: the smug, sarcastic, charming guy that thinks he knows better than everyone (this works really well for O Brother, Where Art Thou but that's an entirely different movie.) Very little is known about the characters, so it's hard to actually connect with and care about them. Even though there's really only two characters, I found it genuinely difficult to care about either one of them. I enjoyed the movie, its setting, and for the most part the plot, but I honestly don't care about either of the characters or their motives. 6.5/10Going into this, I knew that Tarantino was famous for a lot of violence and just over-the-top performances from everyone in his movies. That being said, no amount of knowledge on his other movies could honestly have prepared me enough for it. The Hateful Eight is probably the single most gruesome movie I've ever seen. At first glance, it seems like it's going ot be a movie where 8 people become trapped in a cabin and bond because they can't leave. I can't stress enough how much it isn't that. They start off getting along, but when suspicion rises about where Minnie and Sweet Dave are, the movie quickly turns into a whodunit shootout, as the men slowly pick off each other in order to either collect a bounty, or to kill the men who killed Minnie and Sweet Dave. The movie is violent, vulgar, and some of the best usage of suspense I've seen so far. It's a masterpiece of tension between the characters, and it's genuinely frightening to see who's going to get killed off next, and I never could have guessed the direction the movie was going to go. One thing I love about this movie is the setting. For a majority of the movie, the characters all spend their time in Minnie's Haberdashery, a lodge on the way to Red Rock. The story, and all of its arcs, take place in this lodge. I love when movies keep the setting the same throughout the movie. It feels like the story is far more unique and in-depth when a movie's setting is consistent. Films like Rope and Vivarium also make use of this technique, and it's these films that easily stand out in a roster because of the way they're performed. I liked Taraninto's The Hateful Eight a lot, and I think it masters the one-setting movie. 9/10 |
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