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Reviews
Yasuke (2021)
Disappointing in every sense
Yasuke was a real historical figure, an African who served Nobunaga Oda. Very little is known about him, but the idea of a black African serving as a samurai in feudal Japan has always been intriguing. Exploring the true story of this mysterious figure would already have been compelling, so it was incredibly disappointing to see the story jump the shark into a land of Samurai mecha, aliens with supernatural powers and battles in feudal Japan involving lasers.
I'm sorry if I technically gave spoilers here, but these are things they revealed in the trailer anyway. Why even bother to base this on a historical figure if you're going to go the full-on fantasy and sci-fi route?
If the show had other redeeming qualities, I could forgive this bizarre directorial direction and just go with it, but the voice acting is terrible - delivered in a stiff, wooden monotone by most actors - and the character development is seriously lacking, replaced by bored old tropes rehashed. The animation isn't terrible but neither is it very good, maybe something along the lines of Legend of Korra quality, but you can tell the production quality doesn't rival a true Japanese studio.
I had high hopes for a show that promised to delve into a back alley of history and tell an interesting tale but what I got was corny and poorly produced.
Pacific Rim (2021)
Very mediocre typically-American cartoon for teens
I love Pacific Rim, with all its flaws. So, I was particularly excited to hear that they were turning it into a Netflix Original Anime, especially given the great job that Netflix did with Castlevania, Ultraman and other anime.
I grew up on American cartoons, and I do love them, but I absolutely fell in love with Japanese anime in my tweens because I felt that the Japanese never saw anime as strictly a medium for children. They weren't afraid of telling stories for older audiences and tackling mature topics and emotions.
Evangelion is possibly the best example of this, being a tale of robots and aliens on the surface but ultimately a much more sophisticated story about depression, isolation and the human struggle - on an intensely personal scale.
Well, Pacific Rim: The Black is exactly like Evangelion... if you took out every single ounce of sophistication and dumbed it down for 14-15 year old kids. Its lineage descends much more from the US after-school cartoon programming like Transformers and GI Joe than Japanese anime like Evangelion or even the surprisingly sophisticated yet still action-oriented Gundam series.
The thing about "dumbing down" programming for teens is that... you don't actually ned to dumb it down at all. Teenagers are far more worldly than most people give them credit for and yet it's the American philosophy that you have to simplify things for them to make it easier to appeal to them. The crazy thing about Evangelion, is that it's also actually targeted at teens. And yet it sees no need to dumb down a single thing.
I wanted to make this a spoiler-free review so I can't actually cite specific examples, but PR: Black abounds with trite storylines and details that constantly elicit face palms. While the acting is perfectly fine, the characters are shallow and predictable. Only in the very last episode did they give a faint hint of something more interesting to come, but I don't know if it's enough to make me come back for season 2.
Snowpiercer (2013)
A film which pushes suspension of disbelief past reason
This review contains *mild* spoilers.
As a fan of sci-fi films, I am no stranger to the concept of suspension of disbelief. The sci-fi genre requires it by its nature. And yet, a movie can viewers to suspend their disbelief to an unreasonable extent. Without a doubt, this movie has surpassed that threshold more than any other movie I have ever watched.
First, the premise of the movie is absurd. In the future, a chemical to reverse global warming has backfired and brought on an ice age. The only survivors are the passengers of a super-train which is a completely self-contained ecosystem and which has been running non-stop for 18 years.
OK, let's just stop right there. Why anyone would or could build a train which is a self-contained ecosystem is just silly. The idea that it could run for 18 years with no refueling is even sillier.
Second, the tail section of the train is filled with the poor who are oppressed by the rich elite of the train. In a closed system with limited resources, it makes no sense to keep the poor people around at all. The end of the movie makes an argument for why they keep the poor people, but the argument itself is even more ludicrous and unbelievable.
Third, a handful of rebels fight their way towards the front of the train. A train is one giant tunnel. It is quite possibly the easiest terrain in the world to defend. You simply place a few defenders at a choke point such as the door between train cars, and they can defend against a much larger force. This is the lesson we learned in 300 :) And yet somehow, this ragtag group of malnourished rebels manages to fight their way through heavily armed defenders.
Beyond that, there are a myriad of specific details which make no sense. One train car is a giant aquarium with a glass tunnel through it complete with sharks and manta rays. In a ~10ft wide train car. In another scene, the train turns a corner and two characters have a gunfight across opposing train cars. The two cars remain stationary relative to each other for the entire 5 minute gunfight. In one of the final scenes, an angry mob chases down two of the main characters and corners them, then just stands around waving their arms at these two unarmed people for about 10 minutes.
I really wanted to like this movie but I never had more than a few minutes to watch the movie before another ridiculous plot point came up.
The Dead (2010)
Snoozefest
The zombie movie genre is a polarizing one. For the most part, people either hate all zombies, or love all zombie movies. I have always found myself fascinated by zombies and therefore in the latter category. So it was with some surprise that I found myself completely and utterly bored by this movie.
Most of what people say about this movie is correct. It's a wonderful setting, well shot and with good acting. There's just one problem... absolutely nothing happens the whole movie. The viewer is subjected to two hours of watching the main characters wander through the African desert. Most of the "action" happens during the daytime, where the lethargic appearance of zombies never evokes so much as a mild fright. Speaking of lethargic, these are not the frightening, sprinting zombies of 28 Days Later. Instead, they are the slowest, laziest zombies you have ever seen. I'm not sure if the main characters ever bothered to actually run away from them. Usually, a brisk walking pace was enough and sometimes I thought they might even break into a speed walk.
We never come to know the characters or care for them in any way, although I have to admit, I fell asleep several times throughout the movie so maybe I missed some crucial character development but I highly doubt it.
Jack Falls (2011)
A Trite Exercise in Clichéd Tackiness
Normally, I wait until a film has at least a thousand reviews on IMDb before I watch it, but the first hundred reviews promised me such an amazing movie, I decided to ignore my better judgment. Too bad I didn't realize that the first hundred reviews were probably all the director's friends, family & cronies.
The biggest problem with Jack Falls is that it has no vision at all. Instead, the director sought to replace true creativity by blindly copying fads and gimmicks from other movies. The "film noir" style is copied from Sin City (a laughably bad imitation at best), the "black and white with touch of color" is copied from Schindler's List, and the characters are all copied from a Guy Ritchie movie. The thing is, as derivative as it was, that formula may actually have resulted in an enjoyable movie if it weren't for the acting which was at times cringe- worthy but mostly just mediocre.
If you're any sort of movie aficionado, stay far away from this movie - unless you're in the mood for a night of groans and face-palms.
Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles (2006)
I, too, am speechless
However, my lack of speech is more out of respect for the original series than anything else. As a long-time fan who grew up on Robotech every day after school, it is extremely hard for me to speak about the series with harsh words. And yet, that's what I feel I must do.
This movie is a prime example of why Americans (or maybe just Harmony Gold) should NEVER, EVER, EVER be allowed to do Japanese-style anime. To begin with, the plot is predictable, the dialog is terrible and the voice acting even worse. Seriously, the voice acting is worse than a bad dubbing job. However, even if all of that were true, at least there should be some great eye candy for Robotech fans, right? Really cool robots flying around, new aliens to gawk at, cameos from old characters, cool new armor, etc. Wrong, you get NONE of that.
The mecha in this movie is so utterly disappointing. On the Earth side, you get Alpha and Beta Fighters with a short scene with Cyclones. Not a single new mecha. Not only that, but the mecha are rendered in the worse CGI I have seen in decades. Simplistic models with no texture mapping at all (AT ALL!!), no cell-shading or any other advance techniques to maintain an anime-style feel. Just pathetic. On the Invid side, all you ever see are the standard Invid Troopers (they may even be Scouts, I didn't get a good enough look). For the "Children of the Shadow", you only get to see their mecha for about 5 minutes towards the end, and the mecha design is really primitive compared to Japanese designs.
Overall, it's hard to believe that this movie was made twenty years after the original series. If you watch the many sequels for series such as Macross, each one brings to the table advancements in animation, character and mecha design. The Shadow Chronicles is a step backwards in each of these areas. If you are super die-hard fan as I am, you will probably ignore this review and see the movie anyway, because you need to see for yourself. However, just be prepared to have your childhood memories ripped to shreds.
The Forbidden Kingdom (2008)
Crouching Tiger Meets Saturday Morning Cartoons
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you took martial arts epics in the vein of Crouching Tiger and let Hollywood spin its magic? Well, I personally would never dream of it but some Hollywood movie execs apparently thought it was a great idea. The result is the Saturday Morning Cartoon version of Crouching Tiger, complete with corny dialog, comic book plot, teen hero and cheesy unfulfilled romance.
Director Rob Minkoff - best known for Disney blockbusters The Lion King, Stuart Little and The Haunted Mansion - is true to form and manages to Disney-ify the sacred genre of martial arts flicks. To be fair, people looking for the Disney experience will probably come out of the theatre vastly satisfied. The male under 18 demographic did give the movie its best ratings, after all. Those looking for a more sophisticated movie should not get their hopes up.
While the corny Hollywood dialog is bad enough ("I would rather die a mortal, who has cared about someone, than a man free from his own death." "*sob* I don't want to lose you"), the problem is exacerbated by Jet Li and Jackie Chan's bad English accents. To be blunt, I couldn't understand what they were saying half the time. A rather unfortunate side-effect of this is that it focuses your attention on Michael Angarano ("Jason Tripitikas") as he is the person in the movie whose lines can be most easily understood.
Anganaro is easily one of the most annoying and hateable heroes ever to take the stage. Beyond the mere fact that he plays a white teenage boy - a fact surely to make die-hard kung-fu fans cringe - he is a pathetic loser throughout the movie. Not the Ralph Macchio type of "average guy" that teen viewers can relate to and root for, but someone that you actually would want to bully and push around yourself if you met him in real life. During his showdown battle with the White Witch, I found myself cheering every time he got slapped around.
When you are done being disappointed with the acting and dialog, at least you have the fight scenes, right? Unfortunately, the martial arts choreography is dull and uninspired. This is made all the more disappointing since none other than kung fu choreography legend Yuen Woo-ping is at the helm. I can only rationalize that Yuen must have been under some very bad direction from Rob Minkoff. As a lifelong fan of Jet Li and Jackie Chan, it was so infuriating to see their talents wasted on such truly boring fight sequences. On top of that, the fights depend far too much on wires. Wire work is a reality in kung fu movies and can't be avoided, but a masterful choreographer should use them sparingly and their effect should be as transparent as possible. Instead, their heavy use is emphasized by unnatural, slow-motion shots.
The final straw that broke the camel's back are the costumes and general art direction. Jet Li's Hero showed us that a movie with minimal plot and depth can be made epic with the right costumes and art direction. Forbidden Kingdom is to Hero what Narnia was to Lord of the Rings. Colorful but not sublime, elaborate but not authentic. The main villains - the Jade Army - look like transvestites with their heavy makeup and their (suspiciously Thai-styled) costumes look like cheap rubber.
While Forbidden Kingdom can be very entertaining for the 10-15 year old boy demographic, it was a grave disappointment for fans of Jet Li and Jackie Chan who were eagerly looking forward to their first collaboration.
Elephant (2003)
A good sell, but I didn't quite buy it
Gus van Sant's drama on a day in the life of a normal high-school which turns bloody, is often engaging and entertaining, but in the end fails to sell the user on the drama of the moment.
On a film-making level, Elephant has a lot to offer. The movie is filmed almost entirely in long, continuous, hand-held shots which are not only enjoyable on a technical level, but establish almost a stream-of-consciousness effect which adds to the sense of realism of the movie. This realism is underscored by a complete lack of soundtrack and has prompted many to say that the movie is filmed in a documentary style but actually it isn't at all. And yet, it is a convincing portrayal of high-school life. The movie is also non-linear, with different characters and sub-plots weaving through each other, adding depth to the characters as we see how each thread relates to the others.
Unfortunately, where the movie fails miserably is in creating any sort of tension or visceral reactions to moving situations. The movie is about a horrible heinous act based on the Columbine tragedy, and yet, there is never any sense that the antagonists had any reason to do what they did. They're both reasonably good-looking kids who don't look like they would be picked on much in school. And in fact, the only scene we see of their turmoil is when one of them gets something thrown at him in class. Nor do they show any sort of inner turmoil, but rather hang out at home playing video games, watching TV and otherwise looking like happy kids.
The culmination of the movie, the school shooting, is by far the least convincing part of the movie. The antagonists waltz through school looking almost bored. A few scattered students run through the hallway, but there is no sense of mass chaos. The released high-school camera footage of Columbine was much more visceral in comparison. In one scene, a student peeks out into the hallway only to get shot. The other students calmly drag him into the room, notice that he is dead, and calmly crawl out the window. Where is the screaming? Where is the panic? Where is the terror? I really wanted to like this movie, and on some levels I did, but ultimately Gus van Sant paints a two-dimensional picture that lacks emotion.