amp’s movie reviews

This wonderful children’s movie is probably the cutest thing I’ve ever seen. Well… maybe Totoro takes the cake. But Ponyo is close! Ponyo is an anime adaptation of the classic children’s tale ‘the little mermaid’ by Hans Christian Andersen.

I could complain about the plot (how it is poorly exposed, deus-ex-machina-ridden, and some of the details are confusing as hell), but that would be missing the point.
Ponyo is quite literally a magical tale of the friendship between a boy and a cute goldfish-girl. The fact that none of the plot twists make any particular sense doesn’t really matter at all. What matters is that the characters are lovable, the visual style is pretty (though simple), and when the credits roll, you will have a smile on your face. Good times will be had.

Note: I saw a Dutch dub (surprisingly good, and not distracting at all!) of the film in a local cinema.
Especially recommended if you have kids in the ages 5-10 :)

Like watching a Monet painting come alive. With steampunk!

Iblard Jikan is like nothing I’ve seen before. Lacking any form of story or narrative, this is not so much a short film as an animated painting. It paints a breathtaking and strange, yet familiar world. It’s beautiful and lush. It’s charming. Sometimes it is a bit boring. I could recommend this movie to a thousand people and expect none of them to enjoy it. Definitely not for everyone.

Also, I gather that this short film was the inspiration for some of the dream sequences in ‘whisper of the heart‘.
Links: trailer and more information on wikipedia

“When her mother died in childbirth, Naho became not only a sister, but a new mother to her baby brother Jun. While Naho would rather be out with her friends, talking about boys and having a good time, she often is shouldered with the responsibility of looking after Jun instead. A part of Naho would love for Jun to be gone forever; and when the mysterious dreamsphere dealer shows up on her doorstep, she might just get what she has always wished for.”

I’m not sure what to make of ‘Dreamsphere dealer’.

It is a somewhat odd anime in the sense that at 24 minutes it’s too short to be considered a feature animation. But it isn’t part of a series either. It features some ‘grown up’ themes, such as the choice between taking responsibility and chasing after dreams at the cost of others - but it’s presented in a rather simple, almost childish fantasy story. The characters are a mixed bunch at best. The main character is a decidedly bland and typical run-off-the-mill anime girl, but the side characters are genuinely creepy - featuring a merchant who looks like the hand puppet from Saw, and his narcisistic pet elephant who quite literally excretes dreams.

The story isn’t all that much, and the animation isn’t great - but some of the surrealistic landscapes are fun to watch. Unfortunately, they’re too few and far between to make up for this.
All in all, an interesting short, but not a very good one. Kudos to Jeremy for recommending this one.

Considering using twitterfeed.com to push reviews to my twitter feed.
oh, and also planning on actually picking up writing reviews again ;)

Voices of a Distant Star is one of the earlier full scale productions by Makoto Shinkai, who’s work caught my interest after I saw ‘5 centimeters per second‘, a wonderfully visualized exposition on longing and early romances that never find blossom. I loved that film, and when I noticed that the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival was showing a double feature of ‘5cm’ and Voices of a Distant Star, I was obviously compelled to go and see it.

Unfortunately, the festival was showing a very poor American dub version. Apparently I am not the only person to notice this, and since translation is not my area of expertise, I will refer you to the many articles and blog posts out there that cover this aspect .Although I am sure that the translation issues affected my judgement somewhat, I’ll try and review this as though I had watched the original version.
‘Voices’ is a film that is very similar to it’s follower ‘5 centimeters’, both on a thematic level as in terms of animation…..for the most part. Both films follow young (highschool) lovers that find themselves somehow separated. While ‘5 cm’s characters barriers are either emotional ones or distance, ‘Voices’s characters takes a somewhat oddball approach. It’s characters  are separated through time, an interesting concept in itself, but the twist behind it is somewhat unexpected. To cite an imdb synopsis:

“A high school romance is split apart when one member of the couple enlists in the UN space army to fight aliens who attacked our Martian colony. We follow their lives through the text messages they send one another, though the delivery times increase from a a few minutes while she trains in orbit to over a eight years as her crew delves deeper into the universe searching for Earth’s enemies.”

The moment you realize this is also the moment that the animation style begins to divert from the sugar sweet romantical-realistic visual style that I had fallen in love with before going to see ‘Voices’ - and on a level, had considered ‘normal’, I suppose. Voices of a distant star does start off in this warm and recognisable high school spirited feeling and visual style, up untill the point where Mikako enrolls. With little warning, highly stylised VR-like battle robots are introduced as we follow her on a mission deep into space, off to kill some unspecified alien reason for reasons that elude me. She feels very bad about leaving her boyfriend behind though.

This bothers me for two reasons. The first is that I did not like the visual style of the ‘battle’ scenes. The robot’s graphics look like they were mass produced on a very low budget, and regardless of whether this is intentional, it stands in pale comparison to the astonishing amount of detail in some of the hand drawn scenes in the earth based ‘highschool’ setting.

The second reason has to do with the fact that I find this plot twist quite absurd. I can respect the need for such a premise (space travel) as the director . A battle sequence that involves giant mechas is not a very effective way to visualize a whistful mind. The ‘war’ in which this all takes place is not elaborated upon whatsoever, and unlike the familiar highschool setting, lacks authenticity. It lacks it, so strongly that I was not able to suspend disbelief.
Voices of a distant star has a lot of strong points, such as beautiful artwork (wonderful skies and backgrounds) and a great story at it’s core. I’m a hopeless romantic myself, and I found the story material potentially very powerful, strong enough to break the heart of anyone who has ever been in a long distance relationship or similar, but the ridiculous and unneccessarily outrageous plot twist ruined it for me.
Call me closed minded or prejudiced, but my point still stands: the contrast in this film, between a sweet puppy love and the vast coldness of space battle - is so poorly introduced, and executed that it does Voices of a Distant star more harm than good.

It’s almost springtime, and to stay true to the stereotypes and clichés we all know and love, that means it’s time to clean house!
I’m going to be making some changes to this blog, mostly because I’m just in the mood to toy around with web technology in my spare time, but also because I think I can make the user interface a bit better. Everybody likes change, right?

Update…. I’ve made some progress working on the development version of the blog and am planning on updating this place soon:

updated todo list:
• center the title
• change the appearance of the guest ratings
• add links to rss feed in sidebar
• padding between the title of the article and the actual body text
• re-think navigation structure
• re-add dynamic overviews and ratings on all pages
• add a shoutbox
• breadcrum
• background color on the sidebar
• ability to comment on pages
• fancy comments - multiple posts?
• fancy comments - color scheme
• tab navigation
• commenters can hijack registered accounts wtf
• figure out what I want to do with movie categories (removed the listing entirely from the sidebar for now)
• Wordpress 2.5

I have set up a development installation - so for those of you who are interested, though I doubt anyone even reads this blog, you can view the progress here:

http://ampburner.hitmanforum.com/stage/

Oscar woes and competition aside, the academy did call one thing right: If there is one key element to this film that deserves praise, it would have to be it’s lead: Daniel Day-Lewis shines as Daniel Plainview, a flamboyant but brutal oil man and entrepreneur to the very core, who will stop at nothing to to get the things he wants.

Plainview is an oil man, yes, but Lewis proves to be a showman first. Dialogues unfold like you’re watching Glengarry Glenn Ross on crack, and the man’s sheer physique alone is impressive enough to keep you glued to your seat for two and a half hours.
The entrancingly slow pace of the film and the thinly scattered plot developments never pose much of a problem.

This is not just a movie, it is a portrait, and the still backdrops only offer Plainview a more impressive stage to display his maniacal personality. A true feast for anyone who enjoys intense drama and isn’t put off by a bit of exaggeration.

Not a very good date-movie, though. (shakes head)

“Violence and mayhem ensue after a hunter stumbles upon some dead bodies, a stash of heroin and more than $2 million in cash near the Rio Grande”

No Country for Old Men is the latest Oscar winning smash hit movie by Joel & Ethan Coen. It is based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name. The film starts off when our protagonist, Llewelyn Moss played by Josh Brolin stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong. After little consideration, he decides to take the money, thinking to know well what risk he is taking. Brolin does an excellent job at creating a simple but resourceful and most of all, genuinely likable character. The only likable character in the film, for that matter. More on that later.
From this point on, the film unfolds like a straightforward, but extremely well orchestrated all-out chase story, so suspenseful that I would call it reminiscent of the original Terminator. This comparison to the ultimate stalker movie is no thanks to the unimaginative killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) who is sent after Brolin to recover the money.

Though dark, pneumatic nail gun wielding and relentless, Chigurh is equiped with little personality to speak and a set of uninteresting one dimensional morals. At one point the character is described as lacking a sense of humor. Such a clear sign must have been obvious to the brothers Coen when they adapted the novel to a script, but apparently it must have sounded like a good idea at the time. If this were another movie, I would have written this mistake down to someone deciding it would be “cool” or “badass” to have a cold blooded killer who doesn’t exhibit complex emotions, but ‘No Country’ feels far too artsyficial for this to be true. It’s more likely that the character in some metaphoric way is supposed to portray a deeper meaning which frankly eludes me.
What earns this movie a comparison to ‘Terminator’ is the absolutely masterfully crafted air of tension that runs throughout the entire film - from a technical point of view, the directors get everything right. Thanks to great timing, editing, and wonderful camerawork, the deserted plains and seedy motel rooms of Texas breathe an air of suspense, and every sequence of the film is heavy with the storm that you can just feel is coming as the film builds up to a final confrontation between the hunted, Moss, and his hunter, Chigurh….
-spoiler alert-

This brings me to my main complaint about the movie. As I’ve mentioned before, the main character Llewelyn Moss is pretty much, the only character in this film who’s worth a damn. At what feels like halfway into the film, this character is killed off. What’s worse, he is killed off screen by some crew of Mexican gangbangers.

With the main and only character of interest gone, the film proceeds to drag on for another half hour as the remaining side characters talk a lot. It would be like having Sarah Connor die in the first bar fight, followed by an hour of James Cameron zooming the camera up Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ass.
The movie ends with Tommie Lee Jones sitting at his kitchen table, rambling on about the good old days when criminals were more than just bad people or something, and proceeds to whine about a mystical dream that he had about his late father. It’s quite ironic that I’ve only even thought of Jones’ character as I’m reaching the conclusion of this review. Ironic, but not surprising. Jones plays a sheriff who doesn’t do a damn thing throughout the film other than stare into the distance, quite melancholicly, and complain about how he’s getting too old for this shit. That’s not why I go to movie theatres.
If by now, you are thinking that this review seems poorly structured and convoluted, then I have done a good job at capturing the essence of this film.

I’m sure that fans of the book will tell me that I’m missing some grand old point here, and that supposedly, Jones’ character represents the heart and soul of the story. I say to them that film is a visual medium, and films require something worth looking at. It’s not a book. Films simply don’t work that way. Certainly not this one.
After this tremendous letdown I was compelled to leave the theater and drink lots and lots of beer.

I’m going to be lazy and copy paste a review written by my friend dark, with whom I am in complete agreement on this one… almost ;)

“I’m gonna write a review of this of sorts, but in order to discuss why I liked it as much as I did, I have to go into great detail about spoilers. So if you haven’t seen it, I strongly reccomend that you do, and I also strongly reccomend you don’t click the following spoiler tag, because it really will totally ruin it.

Spoilers below
I went into this film without much expectation - I liked the basic premise, but I thought the trailer made it look a bit cheesy, and I’d heard that the thing destroying Manhattan was a giant monster, which sounded totally lame. I was so impressed though - basically, I am very, very bored with the standard model of Hollywood movies, and for me to really like a film it has to do something that I wasn’t expecting.
Every time I saw a cliche approaching in this film, I thought ‘*sigh*, I know exactly what’s going to happen here’, and it rarely did - the building they climbed didn’t fall down the second they escaped, the helicopter with the girl in didn’t explode as soon as it took off, and best of all, Hud died (his name is a referance to a videogame HUD i presume, being that he’s the first person viewpoint throughout this film - awesome).
I usually watch movies with a view to what I’d have done differently if I was directing it (I’m doing Film Studies, so that isn’t too unreasonable a thing to muse), and this film frequently did exactly what I’d do, which pleased me immensely. Main characters being killed off, complete anonymity surrounding the origins of the monster, and best of all the ending - I love stuff like that, totally going against the very tired standard model and not tieing everything up in a neat little bundle. Loved it basically.” - dark

I would only like to add to that that with a more developed set of characters, this film could have been even better. Some of the romantic motivations of the main characters are less than convincing, and at times even feel a bit uninteresting - this probably due to lack of proper exposition - and as such, the film’s ending lacks a little in the emotional payoff department.

That’s not what this film is about though, and as such this flaw is easily forgiven. It is because of a lack of cleverly layed out plot, soundtrack, or witty oneliners that the plain yuppie protagonists do not steal the real star’s thunder - just sit back let cloverfield’s monster take you on a rollercoaster ride.