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jediknightcub
Reviews
American Splendor (2003)
HATED this piece of...
I hated hated HATED this movie. I would have sooner spent my two hours finding interesting ways to destroy the DVD. I hate "hipster" movies like this. Okay okay. I realize there might be some Harvey Pekar fans out there, but what was so great about him? He couldn't draw comics, and all he did was relay his boring life in stick figures for others to illustrate. And his observations were about as funny to me as Bizarro (i.e. not at all). This was painful. Painful to watch. Painful to listen to. Painful to experience.
And it got worse.
*****SPOILER WARNING (ALTHOUGH YOU'LL BE SPARING YOURSELF THE TORTURE IF YOU JUST GO AHEAD AND READ THIS SPOILER)*****
He got ball cancer.
And the movie turns into a standard sentimentalized ball cancer story - the exact thing Mr. Pekar has been railing against since the beginning of the movie! ARGH! Unfortunately for me, the character doesn't die. He survives ball cancer, and he and his wife make a graphic novel out of it called, Our Cancer Year. Granted this is obviously where Tom Green got the idea to do his MTV special about his ball removal, but Tom Green was married to Drew Barrymore and did outrageous stuff on his TV show (especially to his parents) that actually made me laugh. This Harvey Pekar guy was basically a sad sack loser who got a movie made about him that a bunch of hipsters lauded with critical praise and now I'm forced to suffer through it because of their misconception of what a good movie is.
Oh and I hate R. Crumb too, so I won't be seeing that documentary about him either. I think the straw hat is what makes me hate him most. No one wears straw hats unless they're in a revival of The Music Man. You're only wearing it to draw attention to yourself.
Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001)
The word "masterpiece" is over-used
The word masterpiece is being thrown around a little bit too much on this one.
While I found myself stunned by the visuals in Spirited Away (particularly a magnificently realized train ride across the sea), its lackluster story - little more than a rip-off of (or homage to) Alice In Wonderland - keeps this film from being a classic masterpiece.
Some of the ideas were extraordinarily imaginative (the spirit bathhouse, Haku's transformation into a dragon, Yubaba's transformation into a bird, the boiler-room operator), others were just downright ridiculous (No-Face's regurgitation, the bouncing disembodied heads, the baby, an evil twin sister - what is this Days Of Our Lives?).
This is not to say that I was expecting literal-minded filmmaking. I was thoroughly impressed by the director's previous film, Princess Mononoke, but I felt its story was integral to its success (i.e. a hero's journey; the forces of human industrialization vs. nature and the need to co-exist peacefully). The "story" in Spirited Away is much more simplistic (girl overcomes her fears) and, as a result, leaves little in the way of narrative thrust or suspense (especially for a 2 hour movie). Princess Mononoke's story was epic and its running time and pace justified. Spirited Away is merely serviceable in every way except its visual palette.