Recently watched movies!

[Tom R VanSlambrouck]

[jellydonut25]

[howze01]

[Destroysall]

Robocop

Loved this movie, was glad I could see it again, thanks to Epix.

[MekaGojira3k]

[MekaGojira3k]

Just watched All About Eve (1950). Damn. This was a great movie.

[lhb412]

The Mark of Zorro (1940)

Tyrone Power (who starred in The Black Swan) plays Don Diego Vega, a soldier making quite a name for himself (and enjoying it) in Spain. His father calls him back to California where he finds a corrupt governor and a sword fighting strongman (Basil Rathbone) in charge of the place. Diego immediately begins cultivating an image of being a fashion-obsessed, wimpy jerk in order to distract anyone from connecting his arrival with the sudden appearance of the masked vigilante Zorro!

It's a great film, and it has the best swordfight ever in it (between Power and Rathbone, who were both skilled fencers), but don't expect a whole lot of Zorro in costume - Diego drops the alter ego by film's end and defeats the bad guys in his civvies (Spoiler? It's a Zorro film; you know what's going to happen!).

[MekaGojira3k]

Saw the King's Speech. It was amazingly good! I feel like this deserves Best Picture above the rest this year.

[Tom R VanSlambrouck]

[Reaper G]

Meatball Machine and Samurai Princess

The first one was too serious and Tetsuo-esque for me to really enjoy. The second was a wackier kind of gore which I love, but the lack of subtitles hurt.

[Bluejira]

Just watched Robin Hood with Russel Crowe. Not that big a fan of this movie.
It's a prequel to all the legends we know.

[Tom R VanSlambrouck]

[Dagarah72]

This weekend I watched the new Gregg Araki movie Kaboom! It was a return to the more colorful, offbeat style of his earlier films like The Doom Generation and Nowhere. In other words, great music, an attractive cast, lost of sex, silly dialogue, creatively shot scenes with lots of color, plot turns that come out of left field and a funny but abrupt ending. The story involves a college student who, when he's not busy hooking up with people left and right, comes across strange goings-on that involve cults, the supernatural and a conspiracy. It was a lot of fun!


Ricky

[MekaGojira3k]

[canofhumdingers]

Six-String Samurai - what do you get when you cross Mad Max with cheap martial arts movies and throw in a heavy dose of 50's rock & roll? This movie! It's a (very) low budget post apocalyptic movie where the main character, Buddy (who, incidentally, looks just like Buddy Holly) on a quest to reach "Lost Vegas", the last city on earth, to be crowned the new king b/c Elvis just died. On his journey he has to fight his way through an evil bowling club, a commie army, and even face Death himself. It's ridiculously silly and terribly low-budget, but it was lots of fun! Check out the trailer on youtube.

[Tom R VanSlambrouck]

[jellydonut25]

[Bluejira]

[Tom R VanSlambrouck]

[MekaGojira3k]

[lhb412]

Pom Poko

As much as I've sung the praises of Miyazaki I'm afraid that I've skimped on seeking out more of Studio Ghibli's work and as such am just now seeing this masterpiece of an animated film.

During Japan's economic boom a group of mythical raccoon-dogs find their home woods being bulldozed for developement. They resolve to re-learn their ancient art of shapeshifting to scare the humans out, leading to various episodes of them taking the form of traditional Japanese ghosts and monsters to scare the modern humans away... but amid these sometimes comic scenes you never forget the sad inevitability of the situation. It leads to an ending that isn't all-out tragic, but is definately bittersweet.

[lhb412]

More anime!

In a fit of nostalgia for my middle school-era Toonami memories I recently rewatched Tenchi Universe. For those who don't know, the Tenchi franchise is about a seemingly ordinary Japanese teen who ends up with a bunch of girls from outer space living at his house (ah, that old plot). Tenchi was originally a direct-to-video series with high production values, great innuendo-filled humor, and was generally excellent all around... um, if you can forgive lots of gratuitous shots to ogle at the pretty animated girls. Universe is a sort of blander, less sexy remake of the series for TV. Usually I'd be against something like that, but hey; I fell in love with it when I was 12! How can you argue with that? But when Tenchi Universe ended it was continued into two movies, so....


Tenchi Muyo in Love!

The higher production values and time really raises the game of basically the same staff as the TV show. I really comes close to capturing the feel of the video series. Tenchi and company are sent back in time by Washu (the best character in the orginal series but relegated to a plot device in this TV continuity), to prevent an evil and wonderfully animated villian called Kain from killing Tenchi's mother and changing history.

Bizzare thing about this movie: the music was done by Christopher Franke of Tangerine Dream, and the awesome/cheesy prog rock ballad he wrote for the end credits is sung by Nina Hagen!

[MekaGojira3k]

[lhb412]

^I forgot to mention that Tenchi Muyo in Love is one of my favorite physical DVDs in my collection: it's from the early era of the format (1997!) and comes in a jewel case like a CD! You take the cover out and unfold it and it has a reproduction of a poster of all the characters with both the Japanese and English voice actors' signatures. The menus are early-intenet era design clunky. When I bought it (used) it had a cardboard sleeve in the shape of a standard DVD case, but it was pretty smashed because half it was just an empty sleeve with no support.

[lhb412]

Tenchi Muyo in Love 2

This is such a suprising movie. The first Tenchi film was a much bigger spectacle, but still embraced the fun tone of the TV series. This one goes in a different direction: it's mature and sophisticated, there are no battles (at least physical ones), and the science fiction concepts are just there to serve the human drama. In the movie Tenchi dissappears and Ryoko and Ayeka get jobs in the city while looking for him. They keep catching glimpses of him, but can't interact with him because he's in a slightly different reality then they are, one where he's a few years older and lives with his lover, Haruna, but he is begining to suspect somethings amiss in his reality...

Why this change in tone for the Tenchi franchise? Well, I suppose the target audience of the show when it aired in 1995 were, let's say, 13 year olds. When this film came out those kids were 17. I suppose that makes sense. But what really matters is that it's a very lovely film.