Because I am finally well above a 1.0 ratio on BoxTorrents, I've decided to go on an anime movie splurge, starting this week. Hooray! Most of that won't be seen until next week's post, though, haha.
Marathon Man (1976): It's famous for the dental torture scene where Laurence Olivier drills into Dustin Hoffman's teeth, but other than that, I actually do not like this much. Perhaps I have been spoiled by great thrillers like Die Hard and whatnot, but the action in this comes off as kind of lame and unbelievable. The fight scenes are poorly choreographed, too; I think they are supposed to come off like relatively normal people fighting each other, but they just look silly instead of having any sort of weight behind them. The end, especially, is ridiculous and made me roll my eyes. Blah. The acting and the way the movie is filmed are just fine, but everything else is just eh.
Clannad (2007): The overall story is handled better than I expected. Since it's just a bit more than an hour-and-a-half, the movie focuses mainly on Tomoya, Nagisa and Sunohara, so the roles of many characters are either severely reduced or outright eliminated. Tomoya is also played by Kenji Nojima instead of Yuichi Nakamura, while everyone else retains their original voices, so for me it is like hearing a stranger suddenly pop up among a group of good friends. Nojima does not give a bad performance by any means, but he's just not Tomoya, you know? But I think it is a testament to the strength of Clannad's story that even an abridged version brought tears to my eyes (although that could be leftover emotion from the wonderful finale of ~After Story~ lol). Concepts are used in different ways -- I liked the dual dreams by Tomoya and Nagisa, even if it is sort of cliché -- and the movie surprised me by presenting the events of ~After Story~ in a different order (it begins in media res following Nagisa's death). The ending isn't quite as emotionally fulfilling as ~After Story~ but it's still nice. This is more well handled than I thought it would be.
On the queue for this week: MirrorMask (2005), Air (2005), Millennium Actress (2001) and Tokyo Godfathers (2003)
Total movies: Total Movies: 43 (Gaslight, The Last King of Scotland, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Darjeeling Limited, This Film is Not Yet Rated, Diary of the Dead, Bullets Over Broadway, Interiors, Husbands and Wives, The Professional: Golgo 13, Lars and the Real Girl, Lolita, Quills, Hamlet, Iris, Manhattan Murder Mystery, The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, The Savages, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, The Stranger, Love and Death, Harold and Maude, Spartacus, Scarlet Street, Sabrina, Zelig, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), Stardust Memories, Barry Lyndon, Be Kind Rewind, Radio Days, Deconstructing Harry, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Creating Rem Lazar, Undefeatable, Ninja Terminator, Ninja Dragon, Rumble Fish, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, In Bruges, The Bank Dick, Marathon Man, Clannad)
