a lot more for kids than the blurb might lead you to think   on August 4, 2006 - 9:40 AM PDT   of The Big O Vol. 1 (2001) 2 out of 2 members found this review helpful   The Big O seems to have quite a few interesting ideas, and it has its fans who assure me that I'm missing the comedy in it, but based on the first episode I was surprised at how much like a child's adventure big-robot show it was. Not at all what I was expecting or hoping for.

Very well made, likely to go over most people's heads   on July 15, 2006 - 10:49 AM PDT   of Genshiken, Vol. 1: Dojinshi Or Bust (2004) 1 out of 1 members found this review helpful   Based on seeing disk one, Genshiken is a very well made and sharply observed anime about otaku (anime fanatics) in Japan. From what I can tell it's quite realistic, and although it has a fair amount of exaggerated comedy to it, I see Genshiken mainly as a quiet slice-of-life story. The problem so far is that if you are not the sort who likes to frequent anime conventions and draw your own fan art then you may find yourself only mildly amused. To get the most of this anime you have to at least be somewhat familiar with this subculture. In every other way, this series so far is very well done, intelligent and charming. I will rent the next disc soon...but not right away.

No Beating Around the Bush!   on August 26, 2005 - 3:00 PM PDT   of Battle Royale (2001) 8 out of 11 members found this review helpful   Let's get one thing straight from the start: this is not a great film. Surprised? Of course not. You haven't seen it yet, but you already know it's no Citizen Kane. Good, now that's out of the way, you can take all of the glowing comments I am about to make in the right way. Battle Royale is a fine film, made with passion and sincerity by one of Japan's great directors, Kinji Fukasaku. Is this film outlandish, violent, direct and unsubtle? Yes, it is! Is that bad? Not necessarily! Indirection and complexity are not good things in themselves, nor are directness and a refusal to beat around the bush bad things. Battle Royale is no intellectual achievement, but it is sincere, compassionate, and very well made. I had no idea that this film might be anything other than your typical Japanese b horror flick when I first heard of it. At the time I did not know Fukasaku's excellent early work, particularly the yakuza films Battles without Honor and Humanity and Street Mobster. Both of these films are masterful, gritty, hard hitting gang dramas. Looking over the rest of his work it's clear that his staples have largely remained yakuza and samurai pictures. So why would Fukasaku, then in his seventies, decide to make a strange science fiction film like Battle Royale? People who complain about the bloodiness of this movie probably do not understand that Fukasaku is trying to leave something behind for young people, to give them some of his wisdom. Yes, he does it with a good amount of violence, but this violence, as in his earlier films, is not presented simply for titillation, and judging by its popularity in Japan Fukasaku's representation of human brutality and intergenerational conflict must have struck a deep chord with Japan's young people. So is a film so oriented toward teenagers worth watching for adults? Yes, it is. What Fukasaku has to say is not subtle, but it is indeed an uncanny and rather satirical exaggeration of some unfortunate truths about human character and society. It is because these truths only start to become evident to humans at a certain age that it speaks more directly to young people, but this by no means makes it irrelevant to adults.

Clever, But Nothing Special   on July 15, 2005 - 11:19 AM PDT   of Read or Die (2003) 3 out of 4 members found this review helpful   Read Or Die has a few very clever ideas. A mousy, timid librarian superhero whose special ability is control over the properties of paper, and a villain somehow resurrecting (relatively) famous historical figures as supervillains. There is no doubt about the makers' intentions with this one: it's supposed to be good, silly fun. And it is, up to a point. Unfortunately it is marred by somewhat lackluster art and animation, and, as another reviewer has pointed out, it really does not capitalize on its central theme. Why bother making supervillains out of historical figures if you are just going to draw them like any other Saturday morning cartoon villain, with dialogue to match? It doesn't make sense. It is not a bad show, really. It's a bit of fun, even if it starts to get a little old before the movie is over. If it sounds interesting to you, there's no need to avoid it. But in the end it's rather disappointing and you probably have better things to rent.

Stuck with me for days   on July 15, 2005 - 10:57 AM PDT   of The Vanishing (Criterion Collection) (1988) 12 out of 12 members found this review helpful   The Vanishing is a thriller about a serial killer. It is one of the most understated and naturalistic films of its sort I have ever seen. There is not a single moment of melodrama, there is no mythologizing good and evil, and there is certainly no superhuman killer who "just won't die". Your average filmmaker thinks that these things make a movie about a killer more exciting, but in fact such tired genre tropes distance the audience, making everything familiar and reassuring in its way. On the other hand, you have some more intelligent movies which use a very naturalistic style, but err by thinking they need to be unbearably gruesome, appearing to fetishize violence in a disgusting (and supposedly reflexive) way. The Vanishing avoids both of these pitfalls, and largely because of this it is more unsettling in its way than the others could ever be. The character of the killer in particular is brilliant. He is perhaps the most boring person imaginable, but his psychology is fascinating. The film goes along for some time with relatively little action (it is not boring at all, but it is rather understated), and in many ways this film seems like an uncommonly gentle thriller, one which is not interested in cheap thrills, with assaulting you with horror, but with showing something much more believable. But once the movie is over the power of this approach becomes clear, and it is apt to stick with you for days, whether you want it to or not. It is not violent, it is not noisy; it is quiet, realistic and intelligent, and for this reason it is more disturbing than any thriller of its kind that I have seen.

Creates an atmosphere you can't forget   on July 12, 2005 - 4:42 PM PDT   of Boogiepop Phantom Vol. 1 (2000) 4 out of 4 members found this review helpful   Boogiepop Phantom is the most interesting anime series I have ever seen. Through dark, beautiful artwork, an excellent soundtrack which counterpoints the action with unusual precision, and a symbolically rich and mythically resonant sense of the supernatural, this series creates an atmosphere at once dreadful, paranoiac and oddly enticing. I was mesmerized by it from almost the first minute of the series. Atmosphere does not really seem like the right word to describe the effect Boogiepop Phantom can have on you. The comparison to urban legends on one level is very true. The series is extremely successful at evoking that diffuse, paranoid fear of a perverse world upon which urban legends feed. At the same time it employs some very unusual formal devices to great effect; it is extremely masterful visually. There are many characters, and series like these do tend to have thin characters which the viewer doesn't wind up caring about. In spite of what another reviewer said about the series, though, I would argue that most people who give it a shot will find the characters oddly engrossing. Even though the series does not consistently follow any one character, there is a symbolic resonance to their predicaments and their personalities. This, mixed with a penetrating understanding of what I can only tritely call "the human condition", makes the sub-plots interesting, sometimes unexpectedly touching. Everything is ambiguous in this series, especially morally. But unlike many other anime series with philosophical themes, Boogiepop never takes the ambiguity too far, to the point where the sense of mystery breaks down and the show starts to look like a perverse puzzle. It does tell its story in a very disjointed way, but it gives you just enough to entice you, to make you want to know more. To appreciate this series you have to be willing to appreciate ambiguity. There is arguably one major flaw, however: the final two episodes are disappointing. I can't explain the sudden downturn in the series; it's as if they came under pressure to wrap it up and someone got fired. Nevertheless, the rest of the series is so good that its abrupt, non sequitur ending deserves to be forgiven. And even this is not so much a blemish as a failure to live up to the fantastically high standard the rest of the series sets for itself. In fact, if I'm completely honest with myself, there IS something mysteriously appropriate about the rather bland ending, but I frankly admit that I'm not sure what this is. This is a very symbolically rich series, and by symbolic I don't mean it's a cypher to puzzle over, but rather that it means something to your guts without your mind being quite sure what's going on. I wanted to add another glowing review because I feel strongly that this series deserves to be seen by the widest possible audience.

What Is Fiction?   on July 12, 2005 - 4:34 PM PDT   of Voyage in Time (1982) 1 out of 1 members found this review helpful   "I don't believe in fiction," says Andrei Tarkovsky, in answer to a question about his use of science fiction stories in two of his films, Solaris and Stalker. You could see this documentary as an elaboration of Tarkovsky's idea of fiction and truth -- which he usually characterizes as "poetic". It's a documentary that looks and sounds just like a Tarkovsky film, and I think Tarkovsky would probably not have felt that there was any essential difference in truthfulness between this and any of his other films. Whatever his intention in making it, it is fascinating as a meditation on the nature of truth and representation. At first I thought it must have been staged to some degree, but over the course of the film it becomes obvious that it was not. This mixture of an almost cinema verite quality with the look and feel of a Tarkovsky film seems surprisingly natural, and this is what makes this film so interesting. At one point, asked what advice he would give to aspiring filmmakers, Tarkovsky says that filmmakers should not separate their films from their lives. And in Tarkovsky's manner, the way he talks and the gestures he makes, the brooding way he answers questions, propping himself against a window grate as if to shut himself off from the world for a minute, fiddling with a blade of grass, in all of it you can clearly see that everywhere his characters and the style of his films does indeed come authentically from him, from his life as he sees it. And so it is with this documentary, which brings his life and his aesthetic together in such a fascinating way. Although Voyage In Time was obviously shot on a small budget with unimpressive equipment (it's interesting to see Tarkovsky's languid style executed with the jittery camera motions of an inferior tripod), it is another Tarkovsky film through and through, and deserves to be considered among his body of work rather than as an adjunct.

Frightening and Spooky and Smart and Grown-Up   on July 12, 2005 - 4:21 PM PDT   of Don't Look Now (1973) 9 out of 9 members found this review helpful   I can't remember the last time a film affected me the way Don't Look Now did. At one point my skin was actually crawling. The entire film is loaded with a diffuse, paranoid dread: almost everything and everyone is made to seem sinister and oddly threatening. It takes sustained creepiness right to its limit, to the point where anything more and it would either devolve into absurdity or take on an unbearably dark tone. There are a few things you can count on the director, Nick Roeg, for: for one thing, he excels at taking genre stories and making fresh, realistic, adult interpretations out of them; he is a kind of revisionist. He also has a distinctive editing and shooting style that imparts a peculiar sense of motion while at the same time charging his images with an unusual symbolic intensity. Don't Look Now is perhaps the best example of both of these talents that I have seen. The most impressive and exciting thing about this film is how well it manages to take normal behavior and make it strange and unsettling. One example should suffice. Later in the film, the main character knocks on the door of the hotel room where another, ambiguous character is staying. The door immediately whips open on complete blackness, then a split second later you hear the snap of the light switch and the character appears as if from nowhere. It's so sudden and done in such a way that it's startling and quite spooky in context, and yet nothing has really happened. All the person did was open the door and turn the light on. Then again, you wonder a second later, why was she standing right by the door in complete darkness...? The whole film is one sustained note of that kind of fear that comes from uncertainty and ambiguity, a fear that isn't even certain it has anything to be afraid of. This is difficult for any filmmaker to pull off, even for an instant, which is why this is not just a great horror film, but a truly virtuosic movie.

Infamy and Genius   on June 10, 2005 - 10:53 AM PDT   of Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices (1995) 7 out of 7 members found this review helpful   Sometime before 1996, Werner Herzog went to Italy with a small crew to film the old castle of Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa, died 1613. While wandering through the palace, filming cracked walls and collapsed ceilings, the sound of bagpipes rings deafeningly through the ruin. Looking for the source, the crew come upon a man moving from room to room with his pipes, standing in corners as if looking for a particularly interesting acoustic effect. When the stunned crew ask the man what he's doing, he says he's plugging up the cracks in the walls with music so the evil spirit can't escape. So begins Herzog's portrait of Don Carlo Gesualdo, widely considered the best composer of Renaissance madrigals, foreshadower, two centuries before his time, of Wagner, posthumous recipient, as Gesualdo fans like to remind people, of a "pilgrimage" by Stravinsky, murderer and lunatic. The Greencine blurb makes this sound like a parade of lecturing academics. But Death for Five Voices is much more about the lore surrounding Gesualdo than the composer himself, and Herzog seems to deliberately contrast bland interviews with Gesualdo experts with interviews of local chefs, officials, doormen, and so on. Most of the experts have an annoying tendency to read from their notes as if lecturing on camera (something Herzog surely was careful to catch within his frame where most filmmakers would not), while the tales and superstitions still surrounding Gesualdo's castle seem to be more true in some sense than anything the experts have to say. Cinematic portraiture is not new to Herzog, and no one familiar with some of his non-fiction films will be surprised at his ability to home in on the "ecstatic detail" in any situation, presenting whatever he finds seemingly unvarnished and in all its bizarre glory. This is especially impressive when the subject of the film has been dead for centuries. Immune to the clouding effect of superficial relevance, to Herzog anything that happens while touring the Prince's ruined castle or filming a consort in performance might be the way to a truer understanding (or at least a truer representation) of his subject. The world Herzog lives in is one that produces its own symbolism and resonates with meaning. The best of his documentaries (and this is one of them) allows you to see the world as he does for an hour or two. What better reason to watch a film?

The Only Possible Ending   on March 27, 2005 - 2:17 PM PST   of His and Her Circumstances Vol. 5: Alterations and New Perspectives (2003) 2 out of 2 members found this review helpful   JTurner1 has written an excellent synopsis of this final disk, and I agree that the comic book style of the final episode gets in the way. Up till this point, the show's ebulient stylistic invention always served the story, delightfully exaggerating and commenting on the action and characters. The final episode's stylistic experiments unfortunately have the opposite effect; they distance the viewer from the story and render it less effective. However, I do not agree that the story ends badly. I think the perception that the story just stops has to do with a few things. First, we do not see the school play that has provided the framework of the story for the last several episodes. But would it really make sense to end this series on a school play? Leaving the play out was a good decision, in my opinion. The flawed execution of the last two episodes breaks up the narrative line and makes the final scenes with Yukino and Arima less effective, jammed in with other less important elements as they are. But if you look at where the series leaves their relationship, in the midst of growing pains and with the hint of darker times on the horizon, this is the only honest way to end the show apart from having them break up. And for all its humor, what really makes this series wonderful is its honesty. His and Her Circumstances is extemely funny and charming, but we shouldn't overlook the fact that its portrait of young love is penetrating and rather deep at the same time. The final episode is flawed, but in spite of that the story ends perfectly. Finally, I hope no one will avoid this series on account of a few flawed episodes. Regardless of all this, the series overall is wonderful and should not be missed.

Serious, surprising, disturbing   on March 11, 2005 - 11:47 AM PST   of Texhnolyze Vol. 1: Inhumane & Beautiful (2003) 4 out of 4 members found this review helpful   Last year I saw Akira again and decided immediately to explore anime. "There must," I thought, "be more like this somewhere." Many discs later, I've been pleasantly surprised at the diversity of anime. But also dismayed that so much of it is marred (to the mind of someone who is not an anime fan, per se) by various cliches that can be very irritating, and that certainly can turn off someone new to the genre. I only realized how much I'd become accustomed to the conventions of anime when I noticed that they were all conspicuously absent from Texhnolyze. This series is free of virtually every flaw endemic to the genre. It is not aimed at teenagers (in fact it only has one young character in it, and she almost never speaks), it does not have videogame-style action, nor is there anything cloyingly cute about it, to name but a few. Texhnolyze is a complex story of political struggle set within a very convincing future world. Like all great science fiction, while the premise provides the opportunity to explore and isolate certain themes, the characters and the story remain human and all too familiar. This is one of the very few animes I've seen in which the violence is realistic. Street battles are chaotic, bloody and devastating. A character can be alive one minute and lying dead the next. The fragility of human life and the consequences of violence are played out ruthlessly and honestly, and it is not meant to be fun. This, along with the excellent character development and convincing political background, gives this series a truly epic quality. The series takes an abrupt turn into something approaching allegory at the end of the fifth disc. I don't think I've ever seen such a transition handled so well. It is both beautiful and disturbing, capturing and distilling the essence of the series into a compelling symbolic language. All around a truly excellent series (well, the sixth disc isn't out yet, but I feel confident), and one that would make an excellent introduction for anyone unfamiliar with anime and looking for something serious and mature.

Not Promising   on March 11, 2005 - 11:37 AM PST   of Boogiepop and Others (2005) 2 out of 2 members found this review helpful   Mediocre production values, poor special effects, lackluster acting, awful costume design, lazy and unimaginative direction, cinematography and editing. Well, that sums up the first 45 minutes, which is as much as I got through. It's a shame because the material it's based on is so good. Ordinarily I wouldn't post a review after a partial viewing, but I really doubt the movie could have risen above these serious flaws, so take this opinion for what it's worth. I don't think anyone who isn't already a huge fan of the fantastic anime series Boogiepop Phantom would be interested. If you are reading this for some reason and haven't watched that series, I highly recommend that you rent that instead.