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Weekend movie maration
I just can't see a movie without giving an opinion.
Serenity
Very much "wild-west in space". You can tell Joss Whedon's been writing screenplays for a long, long time. He knows which narrative conventions to short-circuit and which ones to leave intact. He also tends to define his characters through one-liners, reducing the normal give-and-take of natural dialogue down to something more like thrust-and-parry. It's clever, but it's got limited range. Joss can't write drama with a capital D, but it's okay in this film, because he knows it and doesn't try.
Corpse Bride
Smoother and smaller than "Nightmare Before Christmas", yet ironically not as well paced. Burton has a good time playing in his universe, but it's no longer surprising for me.
Laputa: Castle In The Sky
Now I know where all those early Nintendo RPGs stole their "Flying Fortress" motif from (Crystalis, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, etc). Here's a film that stuck in my head, and I can see why so many people at Pixar love it. The characters are adorable, and the bright comic-book colors are almost old enough today that it becomes a style, instead of a technical restriction. I was amused to discover an animal that was later copied wholesale into a Pokemon character. It was also very disconcerting to hear Anna Paquin's voiceover work, which made the character sound a whole lot like a certain aelf I know. (Her accent also wandered a bit - she did a better job in Steamboy). When she said "Well that was exciting!" 2/3 through the film, I did a double-take because it sounded exactly like that aelf. There's also another character in here who fits the character study I did for valley of the winds. Good ol' Miyazaki actually managed to bring tears to my eyes during one scene, which surprised me. This film is two hours long, and I already want to watch it again. That's a good sign.
House of Flying Daggers
Just a bit too convoluted near the end, but you can still appreciate what Wang, Li, and Zhang were up to. Gorgeous production values of course. The film is worth seeing just for that and the combat.
Serenity
Very much "wild-west in space". You can tell Joss Whedon's been writing screenplays for a long, long time. He knows which narrative conventions to short-circuit and which ones to leave intact. He also tends to define his characters through one-liners, reducing the normal give-and-take of natural dialogue down to something more like thrust-and-parry. It's clever, but it's got limited range. Joss can't write drama with a capital D, but it's okay in this film, because he knows it and doesn't try.
Corpse Bride
Smoother and smaller than "Nightmare Before Christmas", yet ironically not as well paced. Burton has a good time playing in his universe, but it's no longer surprising for me.
Laputa: Castle In The Sky
Now I know where all those early Nintendo RPGs stole their "Flying Fortress" motif from (Crystalis, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, etc). Here's a film that stuck in my head, and I can see why so many people at Pixar love it. The characters are adorable, and the bright comic-book colors are almost old enough today that it becomes a style, instead of a technical restriction. I was amused to discover an animal that was later copied wholesale into a Pokemon character. It was also very disconcerting to hear Anna Paquin's voiceover work, which made the character sound a whole lot like a certain aelf I know. (Her accent also wandered a bit - she did a better job in Steamboy). When she said "Well that was exciting!" 2/3 through the film, I did a double-take because it sounded exactly like that aelf. There's also another character in here who fits the character study I did for valley of the winds. Good ol' Miyazaki actually managed to bring tears to my eyes during one scene, which surprised me. This film is two hours long, and I already want to watch it again. That's a good sign.
House of Flying Daggers
Just a bit too convoluted near the end, but you can still appreciate what Wang, Li, and Zhang were up to. Gorgeous production values of course. The film is worth seeing just for that and the combat.
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Haven't watched it with the overdubs, though. The first time I saw it was on a Japanese video tape with no subtitles, and it was very moving even though I couldn't understand the words! Maybe I'm afraid watching it in English would muddle that memory, or maybe I'm just afraid to do so after trying to watch "Kiki's Delivery Service" in English.
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But that dude from laputa, he's just fuckin' evil. He just wants to be a god on earth for the sheer immoral thrill of it.
I was a little dissapointed by the dub...they added alot of dialogue offscreen where there wasn't any in the original. I really like the quiet spaces miyazaki sets up in his films, and I think its telling that americans are so terrified of them to dredge them like swamps.
I've been really curious about house of flying daggers for some time now. I like zhang yimou's work, but hero was so politically reactionary (but cinematically gorgeous) its made me a litle skeptical about any future martial art's movies under his direction.
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Offscreen dialogue: I don't think it's a problem with all Miyazaki dubs. It definitely wasn't in Mononoke. I enjoyed the added dialogue in Laputa - Ma's villainous sons worked well as chatty motormouths. It was only really obvious that they were shoehorning dialogue when Ma and Sheeta were walking from the bridge to the captain's quarters on the ship - "I'm practicing to talk like a pirate! *ahem* ... Yarrrgh! Shivermetimbers!" "Keep practicin'."
Still, I enjoyed that because it sounded like the cast having fun in their characters.
Frankly, what with how well Miyazaki set up the family dynamic on that ship, I'm surprised the film didn't spawn an animated series to document their further adventures.
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