(no subject)

[gfish]

In search of reduced-mental-capacity entertainment, waiting for the rest of my brain to shut off, I just watched all the action sequences in Equilibrium. Which doesn't actually detract too much from the rest of the movie, but hey, really cool action sequences. The gun katas rock my sad little world. And it reminded me of a post I wanted to make last week after watching Underworld:

Dear Hollywood,

You know that thing where someone gets cut in half with a sword or a laser beam or whatever, and they turn around with an odd expression just in time to have half their face fall off? Yeah, well, it's totally passe now. Please stop doing it.

Love, Fish

P.S. Thank you for at least including obvious bone/brain structure in Underworld. It's particularly silly when the inside of people is undifferentiated strawberry jam.

Comments

Need reduced-mental-capacity entertainment?

[jhitchin.livejournal.com]

Boy, howdy, do I have that!

Just watched the first two episodes of a live-action version of Sailor Moon, fan-subtitled. EGAD! Are these things HORRIBLE! Horrible in a good way, of course.

Re: Need reduced-mental-capacity entertainment?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Oooh, the second one is out subbed now as well? I have the raw copy, neither subbed nor dubbed, but my Japanese was never that good. Of course, it isn't like it detracts from the plot much...

Re: Need reduced-mental-capacity entertainment?

[jhitchin.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's subbed. It has some obnoxious jokes (like their translation of a cram school sign as Bukkake Shower Training Facility) but it helps to show at least there's a thin plot to hold things together outside of the kicking monster tushie bits.

Re: Need reduced-mental-capacity entertainment?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was really disappointed when I saw that in the fan-sub of the first ep. If you can't trust the translation, then suddenly laughing at bizarre Japanese-isms isn't nearly as much fun. I'm hoping they kept it to just the commercials, but the theme song translation seems dubious as well...

[shadowblue.livejournal.com]

I completely agree with your evaluation of the rockingness of the gun katas. As you know.

I also completely agree with the face-falling-off. I really, really hate that. Did you see Resident Evil? Blughghuguhgh.

Another reason to stay far, far away from Underworld, I guess. I'll just make do with a picture of Kate Beckinsale... except, well, I don't actually care that much.

Also: The inside of me is undifferentiated strawberry jam, damn it.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

Greetings. Thanks for friending me. I really like Camera Obscura. I'm sorry you aren't doing any more, but I applaud your wisdom in stopping when you reached the end. That can be a hard thing to do.

Underworld was most definitely a steaming pile of poses, cool shots, pretty people in costumes, and deliberate obscurity without any human warmth or original ideas to make it worth bothering to suspend disbelief. (I knew there was trouble with opening scene. I wondered to myself: OK, she's undead, so a 200+ foot plummet to the street won't actually hurt her--she's supernatural. She still seems to accelerating normally, and she still apparently weights 150 lbs or so, so how come she didn't shatter the pavement when she hit it? Nothing that happened after that was sufficiently interesting to prevent me from returning to that knotty problem.) I kept wondering it Todd McFarlane or Rob Liefeld had been secretly involved in the storyboarding.

However, I would like to offer up the notion that any idea or image, no matter how cliche, can be really nifty if done well. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was a beautiful and moving film, visually captivating and almost flawlessly filmed. Yet, none of the effects or tropes in the film were really new, and even I, who has seen very little Chinese cinema of any sort and hasn't watched a lot of kung fu flicks (unlike most gamers it seems), even I was unsurprised by anything I saw. CTHD's strength wasn't in its novelty, but in its using everything well in the service of the story. If some guy had had his head chopped in two, and hadn't realized it for a moment, it would have been cool in CTHD, because Ang Lee and his crew would have done it RIGHT.