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Reviews
Toki o kakeru shôjo (2006)
Why are the Japanese so into stories of High School Romance
Before I watched this movie I had watched a marathon of Anime at Glasgow Film Theater which included Wolf Children, From Up On Poppy Hill and 5 Centimeters Later. There's quite a few things I saw recurring in each of them. High School Romances that stem from awkward interactions, either between two separated friends or a girl who can't tell her feelings to a boy, which lead to lots of tears over their incapability to proclaim their love and stress over hesitant confessions leading to no confession at all.
I don't mind Romances in stories, in fact I'm writing my own story where two childhood friends get together, but there are way too many simplistic tear fests in animes, in fact all across animation love stories are developing too quickly. These animes also have a tendency to make the romantic side of the story seem like a death scene from the Grudge. The girl is totally petrified of the guy's feelings towards her in those cases but in others their feelings are immediately mutual. If getting a girlfriend was this easy I would've moved to Japan years ago
I began to really like this movie. Great animation, a strong and independent female character, who for the whole time fought against her strengths with short skirts and hanging around men. Although the idea of a time travelling device being disguised as a walnut was pretty stupid it was funny and enthralling up until the last 20 minutes where it turned into another high school romance story with a lot of unexplored plot points like one guy's reason for going back in time, why time travel was invented (other than allowing silk haired hunks to get girlfriends). And what kind of ending was that. The main character goes back in time, altering everything she had altered on her own for that boy only to be told he was going back . Why? What about the crappy timeline he lives in, which he went to the past to avoid, is so great that after spending years in the past he wants to go back there?
Life of Pi (2012)
Into the wild was better
"A young man who survives a disaster at sea is hurtled into an epic journey of adventure and discovery" - IMDb short synopsis
Apart from glowing fish and an island of pacifist Meerkats what exactly made this movie epic? And what did he discover other than poking a tiger with a stick and yelling at it makes it not want to eat you.
I was hoping for a lot out of this film but I didn't really see anything special about it. This film I felt lacked stability. It wasn't one type of movie or any. And I didn't feel emotionally attached to anything.
I read somewhere that the alternate story he told in the end to the Japanese reporters was what really happened, but the way in which this was introduced was far too random.
I guess though it has helped me make sense of a couple of things but I still think this was bland.
One thing that bugged me right from the beginning, and I've never read the book so I'm not sure how to criticize the way the film has been written, I don't think Pi narrating his story of survival really worked.
Because I knew he would be alright in the end I didn't feel very much towards what he was going through. I felt it would've been more powerful if you saw his story progress from childhood through to his late teens without any narration.
Then there was his childhood, this drawn out sequence of his early life which didn't seem to have a massive effect on the main plot point. Once he is out at sea it's like nothing that came before really mattered.
It wasn't really the eyecandy i predicted either. Things moved too fast for you to get a good look and there was just lots of stuff that glowed in the dark.
I'm too tired to go on. I hope this has been coherent