Drugs, intrusive technology and, is it paranoia if "they" really are out to "get you?"
Based on a story by Philip K. Dick on of the true visionaries of dystopian futures scenarios. Poor man afraid of things that had little or no basis in reality when he wrote about them as a mid-century (20th) modernist with problems. Now it seems as if he may have known exactly what was coming. How is that possible?
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300 is another movie that has two completely opposed effects on the audience; whether you love it or not it is a film that has to be seen and if its possible, peak at the comicbook before watching the movie. This is due the fact that this adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel is really interesting; every single vignette of the comicbook is captured whithin the film, the compositing work and the way Zack Snyder shot the scenes in order to replicate the visual imagery of the comicbook is honestly outstanding.
Its comprehensible that some moralist would consider this film outrageous. The idea of waging wars as a way of living, the exhaltation of the human sacrifice for an abstract ideal of freedom, the fact that soldiers are going to their certain dead in a strange land to fight not for themselvess, but for their monarchs. Maybe it is because this movie was released when the United States were at the peak of their war-support-effort for the troops in Iraq that its hard to avoid making associations about the parallelism between this group of spartans as an elite army capable of turning the course of a war and the US navy seals.
The level of gore and violence of the film is the same as in the graphic novel. The compositing of the real footage over the CG imagery is outstanding; there’s no single frame of this movie that doesn’t contain CG; the blood splashes and the mutilations occur. If the film is too graphic it is due to the graphic and vivid images of the graphic novel. The color palette is the same as in its printed counterpart;
About the plotline; there’s a lack of dramatism or maybe I’ve found that there’s way too much concern about the visual look of the scenes, way more then in the treatment of the story. There is no narrative, you can appreciate it as a bunch of meatheads on steroids going to a blood feist were they are eager to end their days in a blaze of gore and death. The film really has a lack of emotion in the storyline, there is no sense of tragedy when someone dies.
From the historical point of view it caught my attention how in the film they depict the persian empire as an evil and decadent society whos only purpose is to subjugate other tribes and erase their legacy. That seems far from reality. I really doubt that the failure of that civilization was due to a flamboyant hedonistic leader and its sinfull court; and I think that this is what it bothered me the most in this film. The satanization of a whole culture, the exhaltation of the human sacrifice, and the lack of depth in the drama. From the aesthetic perspective I do believe that this movie is an amazing feit. The CG imagery flawlessly blended with the real actors and together that bucolic look that if its not to the story itself, it confers a lot of visual drama to the shots.
Howl’s Moving Castle is one of the best animated movies I’ve seen in long time. Its not only the welll achieved aesthetic look of the film, but also the story itself is strong. Miyazaki mixes traditional animation techniques with the latest computer technologies to bring us this wonderful story where there’s no point in trying to foresee whats going to happen next because as the story progresses it turns over and over again amusing me as a spectator, but at the same time it makes me feel hopeless in my attempts of guessing whats going to happen next. I love the way all the characterers in the story evolve and mature and how the moral message is never outright stated in the and never do the characters actually tell the messsage, but its presence its undoubtely there in the inner development of every one of the characters in the story.
Who’s the bad guy in this film? This is one of the things that I like the most about this movie, the treatment Miyazaki confers to his characters; they’re neither bad or good, but humans; and as humans we all have both sides and the free of will to choose. So his characters evolve trough the story, they grow and experiment in an interior and personal evolution showing us troughout the film both sides of humanity. The story takes us up and down and side to side in a very chaotic way at the begining of the movie. However, later in the story you realize that all the turns the story and all the little secondary plots fit perfectly in place by the end of the film. Also, the narrative of the story is genius. I love the way Miyazaki propels the script and animation to limits that clearly leave a mark in the minds of his scpectators. The story is amazingly original and keeps us engaged from begining to the end on a constant emotional rollercoaster, unveiling at every turn new characters and new secondary plots that keep adding interest and depth to the story.
The moral message in the story is far more complex and subtle then moral messges in Disney’s movies. In this movie we had to look for it ourselves. There is a moral message in the movie, that's for sure, but it is trough the action of the characters troughout the story that that moral content is stated. The duality of the characters and their changes, sometimes makes us believe that Howl is bad as well of making us believe that the Witch is good, but at the end we can see the result of all that process troughout wich every character in the story experiments by switching between different emotional states and trough their final actions and we finally see how they achieve to find what they were looking for.
This movie is suitable for all audiences, parents would love it as well as kids. Personally what i like most about this movie is the concept art, the impossible buildings and the retro-look of all the machinery not only of the castle but also the vehicles. Also interesing is how depending on the mood of the characters, they shapeshift in the film showing their true colors. Sophie turns young, Howl turns into a crow, etc. And finally, the erratic way of telling the tale keeping the suspense all the way to the very end of the film.
In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the way they tell an age old story of break up and reconcilliation is inventive and refreshing and makes the simple plot seem new and cutting edge. The plot is a guy and a girl summit themselves to a technological process that erases each other from their memories because they broke up. The story really begins to get interesting when Joel is trying to hide his memories of clementine from the men who are looking to destroy those memories. We get to see all the interesting parts of the relationship and break up through joels memories. It sounds pretty straight forward, but the way the narrative of this story is told is through a collage of scenes that belong together to a logically structured fascinating story. This film is really original and with a perfect coherent end.
The shots are tricky because they pretend to be a simple camera shot but they are concealing the special FX, the forced perspective in the scene where the main character is trying to hide the memory of his girlfriend on his chilhood most embarrasing memories is outstanding; However this movie challenges the intelect, is easy to understand that people who are not familliar with the videoclip style would find hard to understand it. Once you can get used to this way of storytelling you can enjoy really the experience of this film.
this is a love story that depicts in a drama-comedy style the process of love between two human beings, how love begins with a mesmerizing discovering of the other, the intoxicating rekon of the other as your soulmate when love is still fresh, and then eventually getting to the unbearable and unavoidable routine that makes you wish sometime to be erased out of the other’s mind.
I really like the way the movie turns somewhat more dark and more funny at the same time when in the middle of the process Jim Carey realizes that he really doesn’t want to forget her and decides to hide his memory in a place where the technicians that are performing the procedure on his brain are not supposed to look; so the struggle between the technician and an unconcious Jim Carrey drives them through a tour of all the labrynths of the human emotional realm. From happy and melancholy memories to almost forgotten really embarrasing childhood memories; the message at the end is clear, what we love is what we choose to see in the other, not how they really are, but the way we perceive them trough our experiences; and that our mind is wall of bricks where every one of those bricks works to give us an overall sense to the way we perceive life.
It is an interesting visual proposal both from the technical point of view as well as the way the narrative is told so originally. What is great is the way the film starts where we see the two main characters meeting for the first time and thats the way we interpret it, but further in the story we realize that the movie begins with the last scene, the second time they meet. We never actually see their relationships, the first or the second, but the love story is told through sometimes humorus, sometimes depressing sketches all in a videoclip style. At the end different meanings can be acquired, but the film seems to say that sometimes human beings are meant to be together, even if it is hard and heartbreaking, they would do it all again if they could. The prevalence of the original love against the reexposed one is presented in the end as well, which is rarely seen in a Hollywood production.
10,000 BC is loaded with action and special FX, but the story is really weak with a lot of blackholes in the plotline. It lacks completely any climax, and the performance of the actors are far from award winning. If tis true that the creators did a lot of anthropological research to try to replicate in a faithfull way the tribes and communities that populated the earth during the last ice age they seem to have failed miserably. The film can't be used for historical references, its just for watching it with amused eyes and be sure not to get to deep into the story so you can try to enjoy this film.
The plot is about a tribe of people liviging in the mountains at the end of the ice age. They have a quite primitive community structured around a matriarch figure of an old woman that is the one who triggers the narrative with a prophecy, a resourse that the writer used over and over to resolve dead ends in the plot. This settlement of primitive people got attack by a horde of arabs (stereotypes are prevelant through all of the movie) and they took with them as slaves some people from the tribe forcing the main character to pursuit them and rescue them. Even a toad could foresee within the first five minutes of the film how its going to end. I think this film would have been far more impressive if there was no dialogues between or from any of the tribes, but instead an incomprehensible dialect because honestly the dialogues used did not support at all the story. Even if the film only had music, I dare say it would be a better product.
As far as CG imagery, the effects were outstanding mainly in the scene of the mammoth hunting. Also, the tiger is really impressive, but what is most incredible about the tiger is its sense of ethics. Not to mention the fact that this tribe from the mountains got all the way from the mountains to the tropical jungle, through the african plains, then finally they came at an end at the building site of the piramyds in Egypt in a couple of days by foot; but its obvious this didn't concern the director. But how else was he going to squeeze this epic odysey into a two hour film?
Another plot element that makes the film even less believable is when there is a collision of two civillization in two clearly different stages of development, the weakest one that by definition its not so well structured and organized as the Egyptians who are now on to the bronze age is brought down by a tribe of hunters from the ice age whom managed during their trip to gather and organize all the tribes that found to rescue the girl. I found it quite hilarious that all of these things happened, from a realistic point of view it would at least be impossible to overcome the technological advantages of the Egyptians not to mention the idiomatic barriers to gather a spontaneous army to seek revenge against an empire.
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