Two Movie Reviews (again), A Date (again), and Beyond

[talkingsoup]

Woot stuffs.

Okay, so. On Friday Pat invited me to his room to watch Sin City. Afterwards he introduced me to the Wii. Which is awesome and confusing, but it's pretty easy to get used to the controls. Sorta. Played around on the Wii for awhile, and then we talked for three hours, I think. One of those good, long, get-to-know-you talks which guys are infamous for not doing, which is why Pat is cool. I'm really comfortable just talking to him, which is also cool. Needless to say, it was a lot of fun.

Then Saturday Julie, Kate, Molly and I went down to the Commons to see Pan's Labyrinth. Afterwards Kate and Molly went back to the college, and Julie and I decided to go to Wegman's. We sort of wandered the Commons for awhile, debating whether to just walk there, and then we just said what the hell. We missed the bus back, though, so we called Sophia who is awesome and came to pick us up. The four of us then ate Chinese food and watched a whole lotta Buffy; we've gotten to the point where Angel turns evil and all that good stuff. And Buffy blew up a demon with a bazooka. Woot.

I've also spent the last few days reading all of what's out of D. Gray Man, and I have a few things to say:



KANDA!!!

I'm torn between the depressive, near-certainty that he really is dead, and the vague hope that he isn't. I've learned not to trust anime/manga when they "kill" characters. For the longest time I thought both Chouji and Neji were dead, after all, but nope. If you can't find the body, they're not dead, that's been my mantra on the subject for awhile. And even so, you still have to wait until other people are able to confirm the fact, through their own sorrow or whatever. There's also the fact that Kanda still had things he had to do--way on back in the first or second volume, he said something to the effect of "I can't die until I find that person." The general law in anime/manga is that characters have to resolve their issues, and then they can be killed off.

So...so...

I don't know. It's happening now like it did in Naruto when they were chasing Sasuke--one stays behind to fight one enemy one-on-one. Kanda's gone, Crowley's possibly gone, and there are now only three people left, and Linali can't fight. Which means that Lavi will probably be the next to go. I'm not sure I could handle that one. It would be like L dying all over again. Dammit, they always kill the puppy.

I want to believe that Kanda's alive, but...

*depressed again*



In other anime news, the NARUTO FILLERS END NEXT WEEK. XOMG. Very excited. Almost two years of fillers, and they're finally back on track.

Also, ADV is having a major sale (thanks, kosher_jenny!) and it's the only place I've managed to find The Place Promised in Our Early Days. It is on its way because it is brilliant.

Now for movie reviews.



Sin City

Finally got around to watching this movie, since it came out two or three years ago. Don't let the violence label worry you; it's pretty much on par with Kill Bill.

Sin City is based on a comic of the same name, set in a city of the same name, following various characters lives and the awful shit they go through or get up to. There aren't exactly any good guys, just kinda evil people, evil people, and purely evil people. Everything and everyone has a backstory and a history, motives, desires, all those good things, which despite the fact that everyone is pretty much an asshole, makes them all very human. Except perhaps for the Ferrengi.

And let me first state the obvious by saying that the visuals in this movie are to die for. I saw the comic book itself yesterday in B&N and holy shit did they stick to the art. To be able to take a live action movie and make it look so much like the comic book is a miracle, especially in this world where movies based on comics generally just suck *koff* Daredevil *koff* Fantastic Four *koff* The Hulk *koff*. It's not exactly rotoscoping I don't think, but at the same time it put me in mind of A Scanner Darkly. I guess just in terms of how much effort they put on the visuals, and how the visuals themselves actually contribute to the storyline.

When it's not in black and white, there's only snippets of color, and the use of color is utterly brilliant, both visually and artistically (meaning holistically for the movie overall). It's the same kind of thing as in Schindler's List--color is used to hit you with something, an emotion or a visceral reaction, that kinda thing. Usually it's blood and people's eyes that show any color, which makes for a really beautiful and rather haunting effect. With the Ferrengi, who is yellow the whole goddamn time, the color is used to point out that this guy just pretty much isn't even human anymore. I don't even know if I'm spelling that right.

I don't know if Sin City won an Oscar for its visuals, but it should have.

And it's violent, yes, but not to the point of being, "Okay, did we really have to see the brains right there?" The lack of color helps; if they had shot the whole thing in color, it probably would have been almost gratuitous. Lots of blood, lots of severed limbs, several decapitations or half decapitations, and one or two castrations, plus cannibalism. Yep. But the violence itself almost acts as a character, since violence is the essence of Sin City. This is not a place where you can get by by being nice.

I think possibly my favorite character was Dwight, but my favorite story was Marv's. All the stories are separate, but they connect in small ways. They all live in the same place, after all.

Oh, and you will never look at Elijah Wood the same way again. Although I suppose if you want to avoid ever being typecast, the way to springboard yourself is to make the leap from hobbit to psychopathic cannibal. The kind that puts Hannibal to shame. Yeech.

Overall, it's a very gritty, beautiful, and brilliant movie that everyone should watch.

Score: 9 out of 10



Yay movies.



Pan's Labyrinth

The literal title is actual El Labarinto del Fauno, and I might have misspelled that but oh well. This is a movie from Spain, set in the WWII era. A young girl, Ofelia, who is entranced by fairy tales and such, moves with her pregnant mother to the countryside to meet her "new father," a captain of...um...well the military. On the drive over, Ofelia thinks she meets a fairy, in the form of a large and kind of scary insect. When she arrives at her new home, a mill in the middle of nowhere, she discovers a labyrinth in the woods behind it. The fairy comes back to her one night and leads her through the labyrinth; in the center, she meets a faun who tells her she is a princess and must complete three tasks in order to be allowed back into the Kingdom of the Underworld. Meanwhile, Ofelia's "father" the Captain, is hunting guerilla fighters in the forests, and there is much gunfighting and general war-making.

Now, let me just say that ever since reading House of Leaves, I don't trust labyrinths. At all. There's always one of two things waiting in the center or heart of a labyrinth; a monster, or enlightenment, both in one form or another. It can be a Minotaur or an echoing growl you never see, or death; it can be healing or freedom or an epiphany. There's always something, and more often than not it's bad.

For awhile through this movie, I had to admit that I was a bit leery of the disconnect between one side of this movie--the WWII aspect, which had the freedom fighters and two people at the mill who were helping them, the Doctor and Mercedes, against whom stood the Captain and his men--and the other side, which had Ofelia and the fairies and the faun. You have a fairy tale mixed in with a stark and cruel real world, and it kind of seems disconnected. At the end, though, I realized that actually it worked. The fantasy world makes total sense, because fantasy is an escape from the real world. It's also kind of a representation of how pathetic war and all that is; here you have these people fighting each other, when in the forest around them live creatures as old as the Earth itself who could care less about the war and all that.

Once again, the visuals are utterly brilliant. The fairies look almost-but-not-quite like typical fairies. The faun is awesome, kind of scary and yet awe-inspiring; you get this sense of age and wisdom and also cruelty and untrustworthiness from him. And he ain't a cute little furball like the guy in Narnia. The monsters Ofelia come head to head with are genuinely horrifying. The Pale Man is probably going to give me nightmares.

There's also the war aspect, which can't be ignored. Ofelia's "father," the Captain, is one of the most evil fictional characters I have ever encountered. The writers managed to take every hateful aspect of humanity and combine it into one person. It gets to the point where it doesn't exactly matter who's on what side; I'm pretty sure that the rebels were the ones on the side of the Allies, while the military, representing the fascist government, were the bad guys. But at the same time, it doesn't matter; even if the military sided with the Allies, it wouldn't have mattered because with the Captain and the others, they are simply evil. You want them to be defeated no matter what. At one point the Captain gets stabbed by another character, and I was practically cheering in the movie theater.

There's a bit of a feeling through the movie about whether Ofelia is just dreaming everything up--whether the fantasy world truly is just an escape--or whether it's all real. Which I love, by the way, though for the record I always want a trade-off. I love a movie that's ambiguous through the plot, but has an unambiguous ending. Alternately, a basic movie with an ambiguous ending is also brilliant. Ambiguous movie plus ambiguous ending just doesn't cut it for me--at least something has to be solid. And this movie does have an unambiguous ending, and a satisfying one.

Brilliant movie overall. I'm learning to love Spanish movies, but I need to see more.

And I may not trust labyrinths, but damn do I ever love them.



By the way, I'm writing again. I had a breakthrough in Mot; I figured something out about something that's going to happen later, and it fits unlike a lot of other things I had thought up. It totally connects with everything up till now. Needless to say, I'm happy.

And I think that's enough for one post.

Comments

[ddrussianinja.livejournal.com]

Lol, good to know that we're getting off to the right foot.

No, Sin City was not nominated for any Oscar. That's because of two reasons: 1) Robert Rodriguez is not a member of the Director's Guild of America and 2) He billed Frank Miller as a co-Director, which is against the rules of the DGA (one reason why he isn't a member). So no matter how much Sin City deserved a pile of awards, it didn't win any.

Pan's Labyrinth takes place in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. It doesn't really have much to do with WWII, except that it takes place during 1944. But yeah, the Captain is such a rotten bastard, I love it.

[calliopeeternal.livejournal.com]

When I saw Sin City, half of us were saying "No! Bad Frodo!", as if to a dog.

Brilliant film. One of my all-time favorites, although there are only so many times you can watch it before the novelty wears off.

Marv was badass, but yeah, I definitely feel that Dwight was the most interesting (and likeable) character.