Archive for the ‘cinema’ tag
My Own Anime Filmfest (Part 1): On Makoto Shinkai
For someone who prefers reading and writing short stories, I prefer movies to consume-in-bursts TV series. I could come up with several reasons as to this choice, but movies just tend to be a less compromised creative output, if you ask me.
That, I believe, is another thing that differentiates me from the typical otaku, but I’m referring to the stereotype though: he, or she, who follows the popular, and the latest and greatest in, say, anime. On my end, I put on my wannabe-critic cap, and do some online research first, consult with Noel Vera if he has written about it already, and screen movies based on directors. Anime or NOT anime, that’s usually how I am before deciding to watch a film.
5 Centimeters Per Second
Makoto Shinkai has been touted as the next Miyazaki, and the movies I’ve seen so far does prove that Shinkai’s output is more than impressive to the eye, his storyline a few notches up versus the typical mecha-context love story, but this is not in the vein of Miyazaki’s timeless works. The imagination seems to be limited to the what-if’s of middle-school friendships and crushes, and growing up and being involved in modern Japan’s space alien battles (Voices of a Distant Star), and post cold-war scenarios (The Place Promised in Our Early Days). I’m not dismissing what he’s done so far, but I find the Miyazaki comparison a long shot.
Landed
From the photo archives: Remedios Circle Kids
Spending the first restday after a month and a half of not being at work, which means I went to work for two days, to download all my emails, and reset my computer to a new image sanctioned for the new network. Catch-up re work matters would be next. I am back, not much has changed, but there are apparent new and unfamiliar things.
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The building in front of mine is now completely demolished. There’re new places to eat: a pizza place for those with a bigger lunch budget, and a carinderia-style eatery housed inside a lesser mall. I haven’t ventured further off, since the realization that sometimes its better to not discover things alone comes to mind more often that I want it to.
And on that sully note, let me share an image that proves how geek-materialism does somehow an otherwise empty and unwanted soul here.
REVIEW: Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler
Keep this in mind first: the former passion of movie-watching, and giving out an opinion about each experience, comes rarely to me now. The UP Film Center was my second home back in college (it also happens to be just across the street from my dorm), I surprised my film professor that I wasn’t a film major after taking two subjects already from him, and the first topics I blogged about early 2000 were movie reviews.
Having stumbled upon the new Darren Aronofsky release, The Wrestler, a few weeks back, I knew, instantly, this will be a treat. I’ve seen all this director’s previous films: Pi (its now a blur to me now, though), the frantic and just-alright Requiem for a Dream, and a critically-panned flop, The Fountain, which I actually liked.
Let it be said that there is nothing new, plot-wise, with The Wrestler. In sum, we really just see an aging professional wrestler struggling with real world facts: that he’s old and damaged, that he’s past his career prime, that his neglected daughter hates him, and that the stripper he gets lap-dances from is ultimately hesitant in starting a relationship with him. He wants to correct each mistake, make everything as happy and content, like his beloved hair-metal songs, the soundtrack of his life, his once-celebrated career.
A look of wonder will creep into your face when you see a tanned, bodybuilder-heavy Mickey Rourke in tights, with his behind to the audience, in what looks like a nursery school room. We only get to see his face minutes after, in the wrestling ring. A few minutes more, after a coordinated victory, we see what its like behind the show, the faces behind the characters of any larger-than-life persona you can think of: mayhem, hate, and of course, the contrasting all-American hero. Mickey Rourke plays Ram Robinson, and yes, he is that hero.
SHORT REVIEW: On The Dark Knight
Chris Nolan (Memento, Batman Begins, The Prestige) made a good movie with The Dark Knight, but I found it flawed, out-of-balance. As typical of films of this type, I cannot remember chair-grabbing moments, since I was too busy processing information, and wasn’t provided enough space and time for that. Sure there were impressive ka-boom scenes, motor vehicles thrown inventively whirring along Gotham’s streets and tunnels, and all that unpredictable psycho-play with the Joker as architect, but who the hell was the audience rooting for to save the day? Sure it wasn’t The Dark Knight: his character development in the story was slim, shoddy, forced-to-impress, and he was too busy being bitter over Rachel Dawes, who in this offering, was only a story-peg to lead to a point. Jim Gordon? The story twist involving him was expected, and everything else comic fodder. Maybe it was Harvey Dent, because it was established well that he was indeed the White Knight of Hope Gotham needed via the caped, oddly hoarse-voiced vigilante.
But I was rooting for the Joker, the scene-stealer, to save my time and moviepass money. I wanted him to be the force that skews the storytelling, the contraption to bend the pounded nail (nail = Batman and his now-tired drama). The viewer is provided with an overplayed and menacing comic villain, gloriously underplayed and easily scary. This was no page off of Tim Burton’s gothic reference manual: this was an amazing movie-persona we are sadly now grieving over because Heath Ledger is dead.
Slowly finding my way back to the movies
I was shooed away from a Cine Europa 2007 film fest screening because I was thirty minutes late to the scheduled distribution of the free tickets, which was slated at two hours before the movie screening.
Alright, I wasn’t really sent off scampering the Shangri-la mall floors, but this was the only film I really wanted to see among the festival offerings, and I schemed days ahead on how to work this around work and my daily commute. The movie was La Môme, the Edith Piaf biopic.
La Môme movie trailer