Late Movie Reviews
A pile of old movies I’ve seen but have been too lazy to write about until now. More to follow soon.
Ghost in the Shell 2 - Innocence
I think this is a film you have to watch a few times before it really sinks in. The first time, you’ll probably just sit around gawping at the scenery; it’s really extraordinarily pretty. I was on the brink of running up to the projection booth to ask them to just loop the Carnival sequence over and over. The music is excellent too. The whole story is just an excuse for two detectives to ramble on about what it means to be human, and parts of it are pretty slow, but it picks up towards the end. Plenty of things go boom! I think I like it even more than the first one.
I’d actually seen it before, months ago in Edinburgh, but I was kind of drunk at the time, so it didn’t really sink in. The main thing that I took away from that viewing was courtesy of Ian: Now, any time I read a cod-philosophical quote, I “hear” it in the voice of Ramirez from Highlander. So, uh, yeah, thanks for that.
A History of Violence
Weirdly, I think this is the first David Cronenberg film I’ve actually been able to sit all the way through. (For reference, 15 minutes of eXistenZ was all I could manage before bailing out of the cinema due to mind-crushing boredom.)
But this is actually ok. It’s kind of slow and reflective, and if you’ve watched the trailer then you can probably fill in the rest of the plot, but it’s an interesting enough way to spend a couple of hours.
It took a while, but I finally got to see this, and it was worth the wait. The premise is really, really dark, and it’s usually not until the second film in a trilogy before the story gets this bleak. There are loads of nice touches (the subtitle effects are really neat,) and it doesn’t feel too overproduced like a lot of similar movies tend to be.
I’ll probably lose my nerd status badge for admitting this, but I’ve only just seen this film. Common consensus seems to be that it’s better than the first one, but I really don’t understand why. It just felt kind of half hearted. Still watchable, but it just didn’t seem to fit into the setting as well as the first one. I’ll admit I haven’t read the comics for years, but wasn’t the whole point that everyone in New York didn’t know his real identity?
(Furthering my suspicions that I’ve watched too many zombie movies, I think the most memorable bits in the film were all of the Evil Dead riffs. Which either says bad things about the film or about me. Or possibly both.)
Amazingly, it was a really hard sell to get anyone else to go along to see this. It’s a standard music documentary format thing about the Minutemen (I know it doesn’t ring any bells, but you’ve heard at least one of their songs: ‘Corona’ is the Jackass theme music.
The production is pretty rough and amateurish, but that’s what makes it great. It perfectly suits the music and the band. Basically, I loved it, but the whole thing was hugely painful to watch while knowing the inevitable ending.
Easiest. Review. Ever!
If you liked The Nightmare Before Christmas, then you’ll like this too.