by lhb412 » Tue Aug 20, 2019 11:21 pm
^ Love Alita! The action is spectacular and it really gets across the feel, not just the look, of a Sci-Fi action anime.
Attack of the Crab Monsters is supposed to be one of the better Roger Corman sci-fi films of the 50s, and I guess it is. It's got some novelty in that the Giant radioactive mutants absorbed human intelligences and can talk. I still think It Conquered the World is his best b&w film though.
Was happy that a local theater actually showed the indie flick The Farewell. This is based off a true story, and the main character is based off the writer/director of the film who, in the several years it took to actually find someone to finance the film, actually told the story as an episode of the radio show This American Life. I heard that a while back, so I got the rather discombobulating feeling of remembering the story as told by her just as the movie hit those individual story beats. It's about a Chinese American family going back to China to see the grandmother who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, but everyone's decided not to tell her and effectively lie by staging a wedding as a pretense to all see her.
Quatermass II
Wow! This is the only one of the three Quatermass movies that I hadn't seen before, and it's pretty awesome. First of all, it does the whole 'body snatcher' thing only a year after the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie (this story originally appeared as a TV serial, release the year after the Body Snatchers novel and a year before the movie) and the entire story has this gritty, action oriented vibe that just makes the movie feel a couple of decades ahead of its time. Also, some kaiju style shenanigans in the finale.
Millenium Actress
After renting Satoshi Kon's beautiful film Perfect Blue a few months ago I was happy to be predisposed to the latest re-release of one of his films and got to see this one at the Fathom Events theatrical screening this weekend. It's an awesome film, and I feel my knowing nothing about it just enhanced my reaction to it, so I won't say too much about it other than it relates to Japanese film history, specifically starting at wartime films and then the few decades immediately following. I should think that everyone here has some knowledge of that era of Japanese film!