Short Circuit 2, for all its inherent '80s cheese, is a genuinely touching film. Through very well-worn staples of robots-with-emotions stories, it explores the nature of personality and what it really means to be alive. However, it avoids total redundancy by pairing Johnny Five, a brainy, kindly robot with retro pop culture references just popping out of his head, with Benjamin, a nerdy, overzealous soon-to-be citizen played with equal silliness and empathy by Fisher Stevens. Two scenes in particular truly stand out: one, when Johnny Five has been arrested, he sits chained to a wall contemplatively reading Pinocchio and Frankenstein. In another, after Five has been mercilessly beaten (as an adult, it still makes me cry), he meets up with Fred, played by Michael McKean. Too injured to speak and running on a stolen car battery, Johnny Five desperately (yet painfully slowly) scrawls his pleas for help on an alley wall with a rock. This film has many flaws from both technical and aesthetic viewpoints, but I still just can't divorce myself from how moving it is to watch a robot genuinely struggle to be alive in both a physical and metaphysical sense.
Reviews
5 Reviews
The Fearless Freaks
(2005)
Grainy, old-school documentary... I dig it
6 August 2007
Warning: Spoilers
The interesting thing about "The Fearless Freaks" is the difference between the style of Brad Beesley's film-making and the production process of the Lips' albums. Wayne Coyne's music is weird, yes-- even chaotic, but it is carefully put together and endlessly tweaked, elevating the raw elements of songwriting (guitar chords, sung melody) into a mesmerizing digital orchestra of sorts. Beesley's documentary, however, is satisfied with gritty, hand-held 16mm footage of (usually) Coyne pontificating. It's odd that such futuristic, unconventional music-making would make such good source material for old-school, back-to-basics film-making. The most interesting part of this documentary, rather than the heroin scene with Steven Drozd, is Wayne revisiting his old Long John Silver's and enlisting two young children to reenact a robbery which launches him into a spiel about the rather un-poetic reality of death. It, like the rest of the film, is an incredible snapshot of some true oddballs in the American music scene.
Amateur at best
6 August 2007
Warning: Spoilers
In the special features for "Final Fantasy: Advent Children," the film's producers admit that they have had no experience making feature film. It definitely shows in this unnecessary ode to Final Fantasy VII, the video game that can probably claim to have first popularized emo hair among American teens. Advent Children continues the tradition of Square's earlier effort, The Spirits Within, of creating astoundingly realistic CG models. However, throughout the entire movie, the viewer does not get to enjoy the aesthetic beauty of the film, because the incompetent, over-stylized direction never brings the camera wide enough to see what is going on. Quick jump cuts and silly slow-motion insertions further add to the poor pacing of the incomprehensible, irrelevant plot involving the resurrection of Sephiroth, the game's famed villain. Like many anime series, Advent Children starts with an absurd premise and ends with abject confusion. Along the way, there are a few moments of enjoyable visuals, but ultimately it's a pointless and frustrating affair.
Yu tou dai lao ben tu di
(1978)
Watch it if you can deal with an awful DVD
6 August 2007
Warning: Spoilers
This is a true example of the ultimate in '70s kung fu cheese. Some truly distinct, Road House-esquire sequences occur, including a fight with a cross-dresser, a scene with a fighter whose style involves trying to kiss his opponents, and a poetry competition for the heart of a woman. The action is cheesy but sometimes (but only SOMETIMES) inspired; however the video quality of the DVD is absolutely awful. Obviously, no one involved in this film thought that the low-budget feature would ever be needed in the future, so the video has degraded very much over time. If you can look past the horrible DVD quality, this one's good for a Friday night laugh-a-thon with friends.
Pan's Labyrinth
(2006)
Fascism bad! No, the movie is.
12 June 2007
Warning: Spoilers
EXTREME SPOILERS: Pan's Labyrinth in a nutshell: a little girl dies because fascists are bad. Her stepfather does every evil thing imaginable; torture, misogyny, and intense shaving constitute his daily routine. Short of eating babies (that's reserved for floppy-skinned monsters that put their own eyes on plates), there's nothing he won't do to ensure that the noble revolutionaries hiding in the woods die without any dignity or unswollen eyes. He's portrayed with zero subtlety or sympathy; he can't even die when stabbed in the heart, he's so evil.
I kept wondering, why is this man portrayed the same way as a Disney villain? The answer: Guillermo del Toro set out, with this movie, to warn the world's masses that anyone who is anti-Communist is exactly like this man.
Why am I giving so much attention to the historical fiction facet of the film rather than the fantasy elements? Because the movie gives just as much time to them, maybe twenty percent of the entire 112-minute running time. The few scenes in the fairy-tale subplot are visually imaginative but irrelevant to the larger point of the movie: fascism is bad.
At the end of the film, the audience is led to believe that this girl's imagination has provided some sort of redemption from her brutal surroundings.
Wow. The profundity is overwhelming. People imagine that they end up as royalty and not middle-class corpses? I'd have never thought of that without you, Guillermo! Pan's Labyrinth is just another cog in the wheel of the artsy crowd's anti-right wing obsession. Like an exterminator wielding a 300-pound sledgehammer to smash a long-dead housefly, wannabe avant-garde directors keep using big-budget films to preach to the world that, yes indeed, fascism during World War II was bad. I, personally, would love to see a new generation of filmmakers with the cojones to speak out against the fascists of the world today, including the Communists of Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, et al. However, if del Toro would face up to the fact that more than one side of the political spectrum rules oppressively, then he would drown in his tears realizing how pointless and obsolete Pan's Labyrinth is.
I kept wondering, why is this man portrayed the same way as a Disney villain? The answer: Guillermo del Toro set out, with this movie, to warn the world's masses that anyone who is anti-Communist is exactly like this man.
Why am I giving so much attention to the historical fiction facet of the film rather than the fantasy elements? Because the movie gives just as much time to them, maybe twenty percent of the entire 112-minute running time. The few scenes in the fairy-tale subplot are visually imaginative but irrelevant to the larger point of the movie: fascism is bad.
At the end of the film, the audience is led to believe that this girl's imagination has provided some sort of redemption from her brutal surroundings.
Wow. The profundity is overwhelming. People imagine that they end up as royalty and not middle-class corpses? I'd have never thought of that without you, Guillermo! Pan's Labyrinth is just another cog in the wheel of the artsy crowd's anti-right wing obsession. Like an exterminator wielding a 300-pound sledgehammer to smash a long-dead housefly, wannabe avant-garde directors keep using big-budget films to preach to the world that, yes indeed, fascism during World War II was bad. I, personally, would love to see a new generation of filmmakers with the cojones to speak out against the fascists of the world today, including the Communists of Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, et al. However, if del Toro would face up to the fact that more than one side of the political spectrum rules oppressively, then he would drown in his tears realizing how pointless and obsolete Pan's Labyrinth is.
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