Recently watched movies!

[MekaGojira3k]

[Tom R VanSlambrouck]

[MekaGojira3k]

[Destroysall]

[jellydonut25]

[MekaGojira3k]

[lhb412]

Panda! Go Panda! and The Rainy Day Circus

This pair of pre-Ghibli animated short films from Miyazaki (script and designs) and Takahata (direction) has the seeds of future productions in it. The pandas are the missing link between Winnie the Pooh and Totoro, and the flood recalls the one in Ponyo about three and a half decades later!

They're totally charming films, the first has a great simplicity to it (recalling Miyazaki's slice-of-life affairs later on) while the second has more fantastic elements and some brilliant visuals.

[MekaGojira3k]

I've never even heard of those, but now I'm intrigued.

[RaymondBurr]

[MekaGojira3k]

[MekaGojira3k]

[jellydonut25]

[MekaGojira3k]

[MekaGojira3k]

[MekaGojira3k]

[Thomas]

The Sci-Fi Boys watched this via Netflix streaming and it was ok. Worth a watch, but no real revelations though if you don't know much about how the special fx guys of the past fifty years got started through Famous Monsters then definitely give it a watch. This was a very very very very reverant movie of the pioneers of sfx in films and loses some of my interest due to the amount of time devoted to that reverance. Also the version on Netflix has all the captions in spanish. Not the closed caption.

[lhb412]

The Secret World of Arrietty

This film is so good. I expect I'll be picking out little details every time I rewatch this movie until the end of my days.

[MekaGojira3k]

[lhb412]

[MekaGojira3k]

Love in the Afternoon (1957) and Prometheus.

Prometheus was pretty amazing. Love in the Afternoon had a pretty strong start but fizzled out. It's biggest weakness is a lack of any real chemistry in the romance. At least there were enough laughs to get the thing going.

[lhb412]

Elephant Boy

Fun British adventure flick from the '40s set in India and starring real-life 13 year-old mahout (elephant rider) SABU! Apparently this flick started out as a kind of docu-drama, but halfway through they decided to make it an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's "Toomai of the Elephants" and they did some reshoots and studio stuff. The result... is a bit like Mighty Joe Young if Joe was a real animal and not stop-motion.

[lhb412]

The Drum


Another Sabu vehicle from his '30s-'40s string of adventure pictures. in this one he's a deposed prince who befriends an English army regiment who help him defeat his usurping uncle. If you can get past the blatantly imperialistic view of the film it's rather entertaining, and the lead white imperialist devil is Roger Livesey, who's a very likeable actor.

[EricDent]

Trollhunter via Netflix DVD service, it's one of those "found footage" films.
This one is Norweigian made (though I watched it dubbed in English).
It was pretty good & the trolls looked rather good.

Though the idea of just one guy going out & hunting trolls was a tad overboard. Their should have been a team instead IMO.

Anyhow since I added some normal movies to the Netflix queue, I will be posting a bit more often in this topic (instead of "what did you just watch" in the anime area).

Will probably see something Thursday in the actual theater.

[MekaGojira3k]

Watched You Only Live Twice (1967). I'm behind on going through these Bond dvds again. I really like this film, even if its marred by the terrible SEAN CONNERY IS NOW JAPANESE, RIGHT? RIGHT? thing. Everything else is enjoyable and there are a couple of really great shots (like Bond's fight at the top of the dock warehouse seen from a helicopter view). It's definitely Lewis Gilbert's best Bond film.

[MouthForWar]

Predators- Its been a couple years, so I decided to give it another whirl. Unfortunately, my thoughts on it really haven't changed. I honestly think I might love this movie if Lawrence Fishburne wasn't a cartoon, Topher Grace's character was eliminated completely, and we got a little more Predator action (would have loved for them to play up the Predator race war aspect). I also love how Adrian Brody really doesn't seem concerned about finding his way back to earth FROM SPACE when he's looking for the ship. Unfortunately, all these things REAAAAALLY drag the movie down for me, especially the Topher Grace character... nothing about this character works. And seriously, for a movie called "Predators," the actual Predators don't do a whole lot. That said, I still hope they do a sequel since this series really deserves more (and better) movies.