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For the record, I strongly dislike the word "plethora."
However, it seems to best describe this latest batch of movie reviews, which are rather...erm...varied. I suppose it reveals the diversity of crap that Bobby and I are willing to pay outrageous prices to watch on a big screen.
Also, at this point, I've reviewed every movie that we've seen this year! Yay me! Granted, we've only seen six so far, but it's a good start.
Per usual, I will try to be careful with spoilers, but if you want a movie to be an absolute surprise, it is probably best to skip my review of it until after you see the movie for yourself.
Letters from Iwo Jima
Letters from Iwo Jima is the companion movie to Flags of Our Fathers, which was released last year. Told from the Japanese perspective (whereas Flags comes from the American PoV), it details the battle for Iwo Jima during World War II.
I will begin by saying that war movies are not my favorite genre, as a general rule. I often walk out with the feeling that I've watched more a depiction of an ideal than a portrayal of reality that is aimed more at pickup-truck-drivin', church-goin', red-blooded Americans than at an agnostic pacifist like me.
But I really, really liked Letters from Iwo Jima. It primarily follows an individual soldier called Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), an unwilling baker whose primary concern is surviving the war to return to his wife and newborn daughter. As the battle becomes more and more hopeless for the Japanese, Saigo's goal becomes less of a reality, especially given the Japanese value that it is most honorable to die while fighting for one's country, something that officers and soldiers alike are desperate to uphold.
It is always interesting to see a movie from a PoV other than one's own. In other words, I was coaxed into rooting against my own country, an interesting perspective that perhaps shows how truly alike we all are; how easily any of us could fight for the other side, in different circumstances. The movie kept much of the focus off of the Americans--as much as it could, given the fact that they were half of the battle--which was refreshing.
One of the things that did bug me about this movie was that--although it is supposed to portray the Japanese perspective--there was still a strong Western slant on it. The Japanese values are often portrayed as ridiculous and destructive--and while this may have proven to be the case, based on the battle's outcome, these were still values strongly embraced by thousands of soldiers, and I would have liked the movie to make more of an effort in making sense of them to me, as an American.
Consider, for example, that both heroes are the independent-minded sort. Saigo has the rebellious self-interest of an American teenager, his priority not winning the battle or protecting his nation so much as making it home alive. General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) and his modern ideals also go against the grain, and he is despised by his subordinates. Both of these men embrace more Western values than their own, and so seeing them at the center of the story while the others are downplayed or cast as ridiculous (or downright sadistic, in places) still leaves me with no doubt that--although I have watched a movie entirely in Japanese and supposedly told from the Japanese PoV--it is in fact an American movie. The only one to survive the carnage is he who possesses enough independence and self-interest to resist the urge to commit honor suicide or aspire to throw himself beneath the wheels of an American tank, hopefully blowing it up in the process.
Part of the challenge in portraying a foreign culture is capturing that culture in such a way that even values and ideals that we find odd or deplorable, for a moment, make a strange kind of sense, rather like Downfall in its depiction of the Nazis or Paradise Now with Palestinian suicide bombers. Unfortunately, for all of its virtues, I feel like Letters from Iwo Jima missed the mark on this count.
Also, just as I complained about this in Children of Men, it took a nicely crafted, profound scene and took it one step too far to where I felt it was being spelled out on a blackboard: Pay attention, Dawn, this is the moral that you are to take away from this movie. They couldn't be more blatant if they stapled it to my forehead on a 3x5 notecard. At one point, an American prisoner is taken, and he converses with an English-speaking officer who also translates some letters found on the American boy after he dies. Later, Shimizu (Ryo Kase) waxes sentimental about how the American boy's mother wrote the same things that his mother writes to him; how they aren't so different after all. Bring on the stapler.
So a connection that even an idiot could make--and it's not so original a theme, either--was painstakingly explained...why, oh why, do intelligent movies do this? Chances are that the idiots who can't make the connection won't like the movie anyway ("OMG, I have to, like, read the subtitles?") or will be so entertained by the battle scenes ("A guy on fire, kewl!") that it won't make any difference.
But Letters gave a gritty, realistic portrait of war (with no cheesy battle cries a la "Knights in the air!"--yes, I will be bringing that up forever) that didn't lose itself in endless, numbing battle sequences. I truly rooted for these characters, who were often both noble and deplorable at once, and I shared a shiver of fear with Saigo when his company began committing suicide one by one, blowing themselves up with grenades. I don't often like war movies but more like this one could make me develop a liking for the genre.
And so I give Letters from Iwo Jima 3.75 Keebler E.L. Fudge "Elves Exist" cookies out of four and highly recommend this movie to anyone interested in a good historical drama.
Norbit
Next, we will go from the somewhat highbrow to the absolute lowbrow in 604,800 seconds. That is the number of seconds in one week, for the record--the amount of time that passed between viewing Letters and Norbit--but I like to be confusing.
Bobby and I do have the guilty pleasure of enjoying really stupid comedies, and Norbit was this sort of movie for us. At the same time, as someone who takes her movies seriously, I can't quite view these stupid comedies in the same way that I do "normal movies" (which, in perhaps an even greater paradox, somehow manages to include horror movies). Still, since my goal is to review everything that I see on the big screen this year, I will take a blind stab at Norbit.
Firstly, after sitting through more stupid comedies than I care to consider, I've noticed something about them: The central story is usually something that in any other genre would be complete cheese. The stupid comedy, then, dresses up the ridiculous story with some slapstick humor, a few fart jokes, and a motley cast of characters, and we have a blockbuster.
At the same time, this trick annoys me. As much as I did enjoy Night at the Museum, it was absolutely not for the cheesy, feel-good storyline around which the central idea was based. Likewise, Norbit uses the same technique. A drama about a skinny orphan who loses the only friend that he's ever had only to wind up being "protected" by a grotesque and aggressive girlfriend from a crime family...well, I was about to say that that would not work, but the recent state of movies makes me reconsider this a bit. Anyway, the central tenet of Norbit--in case there was any doubt--is as stupid as Eddie Murphy in a fat suit and spandex makes it out to be.
I will admit that I laughed during the movie and quite a bit. It involves the usual crude and off-color humor typical of this genre. There has been a lot of criticism given to this movie for its portrayal (in keeping with the purported cinematic norm) of African American women as grossly overweight. Personally--and keeping in mind that I am a skinny white girl--making humor out of obesity tends to be more distasteful to me than even the racial/gender angle. Of course, Norbit makes it pretty clear that it is poking fun only at fat people who choose to be fat by eating four pizzas by themselves. Of course. We're not poking fun at those folks who for reasons of metabolism or medical conditions or simple unlucky genes simply can't help it.
Of course.
Quickly reviewing the movie's page over at the Felak Favorite, Rotten Tomatoes, many of the reviews seem to center on this very idea: making fun of people for who they are simply Is Not Cool, in this enlightened year of 2007. Still, I can't help but feel that some of these reviewers are going into the movie with a bit too highbrow of an attitude. I will admit that I am a movie snob. Yet I can still get down with a really stupid comedy or horror movie (that often doubles as a comedy, whether it intends to or not) because I recognize that Norbit is never going to compete with Letters or Children of Men. It is a comedy, and comedies have always--for better or for worse--aimed to shock their audiences and toe the line between crude-but-still-funny and downright-offensive.
And so I can't help but to reiterate that my primary complaint about Norbit had nothing to do with its offensiveness but rather its reliance on a cheesy storyline that is not itself funny. Why? Because I went in knowing that Norbit was going to be offensive and that I had to suspend my distaste for jokes based on race, gender, and girth...if I am willing to do this, then how can I turn and criticize the movie for offering precisely what I knew--going in--that it offered?
And so I come back to that storyline...and four days after seeing the movie, it's already faded from my memory. This is a good litmus test for movies, I have found, particularly comedies. Humor is such a personal thing: What I find funny, you may not, and vice versa. But thinking back on the truly memorable comedies, they carry an almost-nostalgic feeling for me, much like looking back on a particularly joyful experience. Last year, only The Matador and Little Miss Sunshine did this for me. Norbit will--not surprisingly--not be joining their ranks.
I give Norbit two E.L. Fudge "Elves Exist" cookies out of four. If you are capable of shutting off your brain for 102 minutes and leaving the moral compass at home, then this might give a handful of hearty guffaws...but in a day, you will likely forget why.
Hannibal Rising
And now we get to the 'gund's bread 'n' butter: the requisite horror movie.
Have you ever noticed that I rush out to see every horror movie and insist on reviewing them all--even some seen on DVD--and yet almost never like them? In fact, I occasionally get so fed up that I make the mental proclamation that This Is It. No More. That I shall accept the facts that horror can be wonderful on paper but is usually absolute trash on the big screen.
Then along comes a Pan's Labyrinth, and I'm roped back into hoping that a new genre standard has been set. It never is.
Pan's Labyrinth shouldn't even be discussed in the same room as Hannibal Rising. Or the same journal entry...my bad there.
While perusing some of the Rotten Tomatoes critical judgments on Hannibal last night, I stumbled on one from Stephen Whitty from The Newark Star-Ledger: "The great thing about monsters is that they glide noiselessly from nightmare straight into myth, fully formed and eternally mysterious. To know what made them is to explain them. And once you explain anything, you begin to lose your fear of it." This just about perfectly sums up my gripe with this endless string of Hannibal movies. (Yet, yes, I know: I keep seeing them. More on that in a moment.) The Silence of the Lambs presented a monster who was inexplicable in his cruelty and all the scarier for it. Peeling away the mystique behind this character is not doing him any favors.
And so often when a movie builds its premise on something related to clinical psychology, I spend much of the movie rolling my eyes and gritting my teeth and thinking, "Even a quick visit to Wikipedia and they could have done better than this!" As someone who has studied clinical psychology, Hannibal was annoying in its waffling. Here is this character who necessarily must be a psychopath, meaning that he must lack in empathy and must have different arousal patterns (not the sexual sort) than normal folks. What gives a thrill to one of us--seeing a scary movie, for example--has no effect on a psychopath, and so they must compensate by committing acts that are arousing to them...and incomprehensible to the rest of us. Or so the theory goes.
Yet Hannibal sets psychopathy side by side with post-traumatic stress disorder as an explanation for the psychopathy...no, this just doesn't work. As a writer, I appreciate the effort to create a "complex" character. As a former student of psychology, I think that they should have done their research a little better. A psychopath is a psychopath. There is no terrible emotional trauma in the past; if anything, there is an organic cause, which makes it all the more frightening, I think. Yet the writer of this stunningly awful prequel obviously missed this point that people are afraid of what they can't know and can't predict and attempts to contrive a pop-psychology explanation worthy of an episode of Dr. Phil.
Clinical psychology aside, the movie was all rather...random. I got the feeling--as I do from many crappy movies--that someone exclaimed, "It would be so cool to *fill in the blank*!" It reminds me of how a young child will create a story with ninjas! And Spiderman! And Dora the Explorer! Whatever is--at the moment--most appealing to them, regardless of whether it makes any sense or belongs with the other aspects of the story.
For example, I don't think that it is a coincidence that the Western world is at the moment obsessed with Asian culture--particularly Japanese--or that Japanese women are regarded as the epitome of female beauty by many...and Hannibal's protective aunt and love interest just happens to be a beautiful Japanese woman. Right, in Europe following World War II...this makes a whole helluva lot of sense. And because the epitome of supercool fighting is, at the moment, related to Asia as well, it makes sense that said female Asian aristocrat would be just the person to teach Asian martial arts to Hannibal, which explains how he came to kill his early victims: That's right, it's not the charisma of a psychopath or any sort of subtlety, it's the ability to carve a man to pieces with a samurai sword.
And of course, because it's supercool to have Asian women in black leather riding about on motorbikes, Hannibal's aunt also has a knack for this. Is the ridiculousness of this movie apparent to anyone but me? And because everyone in this movie has some trauma in their past connected to World War II that serves as a convenient excuse for the atrocities that they commit--or allow others to commit--then Hannibal's aunt lost her entire family when the A-bomb fell on Hiroshima.
Take my advice and don't see this movie. In fact, I have grown so frustrated with my purported "beloved" horror genre that I am placing a ban on seeing anymore Hannibal movies and anymore Saw movies. I am strongly considering extending this ban to horror sequels/prequels in general, but I'm afraid that I need baby steps at the moment. Still, in a year that boasts Hostel 2 and The Hills Have Eyes 2--each appearing roughly a year after the debut of the largely unimpressive originals--and will probably also feature Saw 4 and, with my luck, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Well before the Beginning, drastic measures may be necessary.
I give Hannibal Rising three-quarters of a Keebler E.L. Fudge "Elves Exist" cookie out of four...with the cheeks missing.
However, it seems to best describe this latest batch of movie reviews, which are rather...erm...varied. I suppose it reveals the diversity of crap that Bobby and I are willing to pay outrageous prices to watch on a big screen.
Also, at this point, I've reviewed every movie that we've seen this year! Yay me! Granted, we've only seen six so far, but it's a good start.
Per usual, I will try to be careful with spoilers, but if you want a movie to be an absolute surprise, it is probably best to skip my review of it until after you see the movie for yourself.
Letters from Iwo Jima
Letters from Iwo Jima is the companion movie to Flags of Our Fathers, which was released last year. Told from the Japanese perspective (whereas Flags comes from the American PoV), it details the battle for Iwo Jima during World War II.
I will begin by saying that war movies are not my favorite genre, as a general rule. I often walk out with the feeling that I've watched more a depiction of an ideal than a portrayal of reality that is aimed more at pickup-truck-drivin', church-goin', red-blooded Americans than at an agnostic pacifist like me.
But I really, really liked Letters from Iwo Jima. It primarily follows an individual soldier called Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), an unwilling baker whose primary concern is surviving the war to return to his wife and newborn daughter. As the battle becomes more and more hopeless for the Japanese, Saigo's goal becomes less of a reality, especially given the Japanese value that it is most honorable to die while fighting for one's country, something that officers and soldiers alike are desperate to uphold.
It is always interesting to see a movie from a PoV other than one's own. In other words, I was coaxed into rooting against my own country, an interesting perspective that perhaps shows how truly alike we all are; how easily any of us could fight for the other side, in different circumstances. The movie kept much of the focus off of the Americans--as much as it could, given the fact that they were half of the battle--which was refreshing.
One of the things that did bug me about this movie was that--although it is supposed to portray the Japanese perspective--there was still a strong Western slant on it. The Japanese values are often portrayed as ridiculous and destructive--and while this may have proven to be the case, based on the battle's outcome, these were still values strongly embraced by thousands of soldiers, and I would have liked the movie to make more of an effort in making sense of them to me, as an American.
Consider, for example, that both heroes are the independent-minded sort. Saigo has the rebellious self-interest of an American teenager, his priority not winning the battle or protecting his nation so much as making it home alive. General Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe) and his modern ideals also go against the grain, and he is despised by his subordinates. Both of these men embrace more Western values than their own, and so seeing them at the center of the story while the others are downplayed or cast as ridiculous (or downright sadistic, in places) still leaves me with no doubt that--although I have watched a movie entirely in Japanese and supposedly told from the Japanese PoV--it is in fact an American movie. The only one to survive the carnage is he who possesses enough independence and self-interest to resist the urge to commit honor suicide or aspire to throw himself beneath the wheels of an American tank, hopefully blowing it up in the process.
Part of the challenge in portraying a foreign culture is capturing that culture in such a way that even values and ideals that we find odd or deplorable, for a moment, make a strange kind of sense, rather like Downfall in its depiction of the Nazis or Paradise Now with Palestinian suicide bombers. Unfortunately, for all of its virtues, I feel like Letters from Iwo Jima missed the mark on this count.
Also, just as I complained about this in Children of Men, it took a nicely crafted, profound scene and took it one step too far to where I felt it was being spelled out on a blackboard: Pay attention, Dawn, this is the moral that you are to take away from this movie. They couldn't be more blatant if they stapled it to my forehead on a 3x5 notecard. At one point, an American prisoner is taken, and he converses with an English-speaking officer who also translates some letters found on the American boy after he dies. Later, Shimizu (Ryo Kase) waxes sentimental about how the American boy's mother wrote the same things that his mother writes to him; how they aren't so different after all. Bring on the stapler.
So a connection that even an idiot could make--and it's not so original a theme, either--was painstakingly explained...why, oh why, do intelligent movies do this? Chances are that the idiots who can't make the connection won't like the movie anyway ("OMG, I have to, like, read the subtitles?") or will be so entertained by the battle scenes ("A guy on fire, kewl!") that it won't make any difference.
But Letters gave a gritty, realistic portrait of war (with no cheesy battle cries a la "Knights in the air!"--yes, I will be bringing that up forever) that didn't lose itself in endless, numbing battle sequences. I truly rooted for these characters, who were often both noble and deplorable at once, and I shared a shiver of fear with Saigo when his company began committing suicide one by one, blowing themselves up with grenades. I don't often like war movies but more like this one could make me develop a liking for the genre.
And so I give Letters from Iwo Jima 3.75 Keebler E.L. Fudge "Elves Exist" cookies out of four and highly recommend this movie to anyone interested in a good historical drama.
Norbit
Next, we will go from the somewhat highbrow to the absolute lowbrow in 604,800 seconds. That is the number of seconds in one week, for the record--the amount of time that passed between viewing Letters and Norbit--but I like to be confusing.
Bobby and I do have the guilty pleasure of enjoying really stupid comedies, and Norbit was this sort of movie for us. At the same time, as someone who takes her movies seriously, I can't quite view these stupid comedies in the same way that I do "normal movies" (which, in perhaps an even greater paradox, somehow manages to include horror movies). Still, since my goal is to review everything that I see on the big screen this year, I will take a blind stab at Norbit.
Firstly, after sitting through more stupid comedies than I care to consider, I've noticed something about them: The central story is usually something that in any other genre would be complete cheese. The stupid comedy, then, dresses up the ridiculous story with some slapstick humor, a few fart jokes, and a motley cast of characters, and we have a blockbuster.
At the same time, this trick annoys me. As much as I did enjoy Night at the Museum, it was absolutely not for the cheesy, feel-good storyline around which the central idea was based. Likewise, Norbit uses the same technique. A drama about a skinny orphan who loses the only friend that he's ever had only to wind up being "protected" by a grotesque and aggressive girlfriend from a crime family...well, I was about to say that that would not work, but the recent state of movies makes me reconsider this a bit. Anyway, the central tenet of Norbit--in case there was any doubt--is as stupid as Eddie Murphy in a fat suit and spandex makes it out to be.
I will admit that I laughed during the movie and quite a bit. It involves the usual crude and off-color humor typical of this genre. There has been a lot of criticism given to this movie for its portrayal (in keeping with the purported cinematic norm) of African American women as grossly overweight. Personally--and keeping in mind that I am a skinny white girl--making humor out of obesity tends to be more distasteful to me than even the racial/gender angle. Of course, Norbit makes it pretty clear that it is poking fun only at fat people who choose to be fat by eating four pizzas by themselves. Of course. We're not poking fun at those folks who for reasons of metabolism or medical conditions or simple unlucky genes simply can't help it.
Of course.
Quickly reviewing the movie's page over at the Felak Favorite, Rotten Tomatoes, many of the reviews seem to center on this very idea: making fun of people for who they are simply Is Not Cool, in this enlightened year of 2007. Still, I can't help but feel that some of these reviewers are going into the movie with a bit too highbrow of an attitude. I will admit that I am a movie snob. Yet I can still get down with a really stupid comedy or horror movie (that often doubles as a comedy, whether it intends to or not) because I recognize that Norbit is never going to compete with Letters or Children of Men. It is a comedy, and comedies have always--for better or for worse--aimed to shock their audiences and toe the line between crude-but-still-funny and downright-offensive.
And so I can't help but to reiterate that my primary complaint about Norbit had nothing to do with its offensiveness but rather its reliance on a cheesy storyline that is not itself funny. Why? Because I went in knowing that Norbit was going to be offensive and that I had to suspend my distaste for jokes based on race, gender, and girth...if I am willing to do this, then how can I turn and criticize the movie for offering precisely what I knew--going in--that it offered?
And so I come back to that storyline...and four days after seeing the movie, it's already faded from my memory. This is a good litmus test for movies, I have found, particularly comedies. Humor is such a personal thing: What I find funny, you may not, and vice versa. But thinking back on the truly memorable comedies, they carry an almost-nostalgic feeling for me, much like looking back on a particularly joyful experience. Last year, only The Matador and Little Miss Sunshine did this for me. Norbit will--not surprisingly--not be joining their ranks.
I give Norbit two E.L. Fudge "Elves Exist" cookies out of four. If you are capable of shutting off your brain for 102 minutes and leaving the moral compass at home, then this might give a handful of hearty guffaws...but in a day, you will likely forget why.
Hannibal Rising
And now we get to the 'gund's bread 'n' butter: the requisite horror movie.
Have you ever noticed that I rush out to see every horror movie and insist on reviewing them all--even some seen on DVD--and yet almost never like them? In fact, I occasionally get so fed up that I make the mental proclamation that This Is It. No More. That I shall accept the facts that horror can be wonderful on paper but is usually absolute trash on the big screen.
Then along comes a Pan's Labyrinth, and I'm roped back into hoping that a new genre standard has been set. It never is.
Pan's Labyrinth shouldn't even be discussed in the same room as Hannibal Rising. Or the same journal entry...my bad there.
While perusing some of the Rotten Tomatoes critical judgments on Hannibal last night, I stumbled on one from Stephen Whitty from The Newark Star-Ledger: "The great thing about monsters is that they glide noiselessly from nightmare straight into myth, fully formed and eternally mysterious. To know what made them is to explain them. And once you explain anything, you begin to lose your fear of it." This just about perfectly sums up my gripe with this endless string of Hannibal movies. (Yet, yes, I know: I keep seeing them. More on that in a moment.) The Silence of the Lambs presented a monster who was inexplicable in his cruelty and all the scarier for it. Peeling away the mystique behind this character is not doing him any favors.
And so often when a movie builds its premise on something related to clinical psychology, I spend much of the movie rolling my eyes and gritting my teeth and thinking, "Even a quick visit to Wikipedia and they could have done better than this!" As someone who has studied clinical psychology, Hannibal was annoying in its waffling. Here is this character who necessarily must be a psychopath, meaning that he must lack in empathy and must have different arousal patterns (not the sexual sort) than normal folks. What gives a thrill to one of us--seeing a scary movie, for example--has no effect on a psychopath, and so they must compensate by committing acts that are arousing to them...and incomprehensible to the rest of us. Or so the theory goes.
Yet Hannibal sets psychopathy side by side with post-traumatic stress disorder as an explanation for the psychopathy...no, this just doesn't work. As a writer, I appreciate the effort to create a "complex" character. As a former student of psychology, I think that they should have done their research a little better. A psychopath is a psychopath. There is no terrible emotional trauma in the past; if anything, there is an organic cause, which makes it all the more frightening, I think. Yet the writer of this stunningly awful prequel obviously missed this point that people are afraid of what they can't know and can't predict and attempts to contrive a pop-psychology explanation worthy of an episode of Dr. Phil.
Clinical psychology aside, the movie was all rather...random. I got the feeling--as I do from many crappy movies--that someone exclaimed, "It would be so cool to *fill in the blank*!" It reminds me of how a young child will create a story with ninjas! And Spiderman! And Dora the Explorer! Whatever is--at the moment--most appealing to them, regardless of whether it makes any sense or belongs with the other aspects of the story.
For example, I don't think that it is a coincidence that the Western world is at the moment obsessed with Asian culture--particularly Japanese--or that Japanese women are regarded as the epitome of female beauty by many...and Hannibal's protective aunt and love interest just happens to be a beautiful Japanese woman. Right, in Europe following World War II...this makes a whole helluva lot of sense. And because the epitome of supercool fighting is, at the moment, related to Asia as well, it makes sense that said female Asian aristocrat would be just the person to teach Asian martial arts to Hannibal, which explains how he came to kill his early victims: That's right, it's not the charisma of a psychopath or any sort of subtlety, it's the ability to carve a man to pieces with a samurai sword.
And of course, because it's supercool to have Asian women in black leather riding about on motorbikes, Hannibal's aunt also has a knack for this. Is the ridiculousness of this movie apparent to anyone but me? And because everyone in this movie has some trauma in their past connected to World War II that serves as a convenient excuse for the atrocities that they commit--or allow others to commit--then Hannibal's aunt lost her entire family when the A-bomb fell on Hiroshima.
Take my advice and don't see this movie. In fact, I have grown so frustrated with my purported "beloved" horror genre that I am placing a ban on seeing anymore Hannibal movies and anymore Saw movies. I am strongly considering extending this ban to horror sequels/prequels in general, but I'm afraid that I need baby steps at the moment. Still, in a year that boasts Hostel 2 and The Hills Have Eyes 2--each appearing roughly a year after the debut of the largely unimpressive originals--and will probably also feature Saw 4 and, with my luck, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Well before the Beginning, drastic measures may be necessary.
I give Hannibal Rising three-quarters of a Keebler E.L. Fudge "Elves Exist" cookie out of four...with the cheeks missing.
Tags:
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-16 01:54 am (UTC)Actually, I was writing 9,000+ words of critiques for the Critters workshop...but whenever I took a break, I went to the movies. ;)
That's interesting about the manga (and I had no idea that you read manga...also interesting!). As Letters depicted it, I can see why the Japanese lost so terribly in WWII. "Honor suicide" to die at one's post when there is already a shortage of soldiers did not make much sense; I suppose that I would have liked to have better understood how so many people could have embraced this idea that dying en masse was the ideal way to protect their country.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-16 02:43 am (UTC)I think that the thing with "honor suicide" was precisely that there were more important things to protect than the country. That's the concept that I think many Americans have trouble with, because our form of nationalism isn't quite the same as that of Europe or Asia.