Rourounin Kenshin is a fun live action version of the manga and anime hit Samurai X that I’ve probably seen more than 4 times. The film was clearly respectful of the original anime and manga series. All the character quirks are identifiably present from the demeanor of Sanosuke, the flirt in Megumi, the boyish naivete of Kaoru, the master and disrespectful disciple dynamics with Yahiko.
Loved this series and loved this film. If I missed something it is the way the characters thoughts were voiced over in the anime. This allowed for geeky explanations of techniques, strengths and weaknesses. And yes I confess that I am in the camp of the Eyes Wide Shut director I am not extremely opposed to voice overs and narration.
If there is a weakness in the film it is probably dependent on the producers plan. Is this a series that will rival the Philippines Shake Rattle and Roll in length or will this be a one shot thing.
Samurai X was about this wanderer trying to escape his past and found a loving place that would serve as the family he never had, one that he protects as they all come to terms with the past and face the present. One film was not enough to get at the core of this story.
Enjoyed watching samurai x with some HS friends, probably biases this review.
rePost::Comparing the 1990s and the 2000s: What Our Movies Say About Us | /Film
I was thinking of my – what was my favorite movie of the decade? It was “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry. And I was trying to think what that film thematically says about the…aughts, and I think that the idea of the tension between reality and fantasy has gotten more pronounced in the last decade, and the ways in which – the movie is sort of like a Philip K. Dick paranoid fever-dream wedded to a screwball romance. And there’s no way it could happened, the technology wouldn’t have allowed it, and the sensibility wouldn’t have allowed it in any other decade.
via Comparing the 1990s and the 2000s: What Our Movies Say About Us | /Film.
read the whole thing its a time sink with links to such excellent lists and articles!!!!
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rePost::James Cameron Is The First Director To Have Two $1 Billion Films: Avatar Passes $1 Billion Worldwide in Just 17 Days | /Film
And what about yearly records? Transformers Revenge of the Fallen took 114 days to hit $402 million, becoming the highest grossing film of 2009 domestically. Avatar will surpass that figure in an estimated 20 days.
via James Cameron Is The First Director To Have Two $1 Billion Films: Avatar Passes $1 Billion Worldwide in Just 17 Days | /Film.
Is it wrong to feel comforted that Cameron beat Michael Bay’s Transformers Revenge of the Fallen?
rePost:Truth Is Usually A Dangerous Concept, But For Tex It Was Natural – Lakernoise
- Cover of A Few Good Men (Special Edition)
Hope you can read the whole thing! I was choking up while reading this!. To be a good man, a dream , probably just a dream!
Truth Is Usually A Dangerous Concept, But For Tex It Was Natural
Jack Nicholson’s character in “A Few Good Men” was right. Most people can’t handle the truth. Most people are so fearful of the truth, they need to get drunk just to slur a few words of it. If they dare speak the truth, they feel they have to get up on the pulpit and preach it. That’s about the only way they can manage to deliver it. They definitely don’t want to look people in the eye and say what they think.
via Truth Is Usually A Dangerous Concept, But For Tex It Was Natural – Lakernoise.
Jason Bourne 4 Now Aiming for Summer 2011 | /Film
Last we heard, Universal was trying to get a fourth film in the Jason Bourne series on track for a Summer 2010 release. Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass were signed on to return, all they needed was a screenplay and a shooting schedule that fit. But the tentatively discussed Summer 2009 shoot doesn’t seem to be on the horizon.
via Jason Bourne 4 Now Aiming for Summer 2011 | /Film.
Some Good news before I post the acid rant.
I love the bourne series, where can you find a series that just gets better as it progresses. Have to say that “The Bourne Ultimatum ” is definitely my favorite of the bourne films. That aside when Matt Damon initially stated that he was to old to make a bourne film this saddened me a little but this was bittersweet because at least they go out in top form. The are doing a fourth film and with the whole team intact can’t help but feel giddy in this must watch movie, at least for a bourne fan (book and movie) like me.
As an aside, personally my I felt that the first book was the best whilst the last book was really weak and was trying to much to find closure that It felt well hurriedly written at times. The three bourne films used the titles of the book but fans can attest to the fact that much like nick and norah‘s infinite play list a screen adaptation really hast to cut out alot of a books best parts to adapt itselt to the limitations of the medium.
Fate is…..
Let’s say that I was really depressed yesterday but It was fortunate that we were going to watch Monsters Vs Aliens at the IMAX theater and we just walked around mall of asia. (We being me chuck vince and marc). We went home at around 9:30 and I was really very sleepy, luckily marc read this on the headrest of the seat a few rows in front of our seat(at the back of the bus). I recognized it instantly, and what follows is what I pictured in my minds eyes as the mystery surrounding this act of vandalism that really cheered me up.
Scene at the back of a jackpherlyn bus:
A girl looks far outside the large bus windows as the bus traverses the Diosdado Macapagal Boulevard. It is already late in the afternoon and the sun is slowly setting and at the moment was directly perched aone of the peaks of the Mall Of Asia structure.
The bus stops frequently because it is a slow day, april 6; The Bataan/ Araw ng Kagitingan Holiday has been moved to monday, and most people were either enjoying thier houses, out of town or are still at the malls.
A lady with really large face hugging shades is slowly humming the song “I believe”, we know nothing about this woman, she has a small frame and wearing the typical summer shorts and bright green top that was either a short very short one piece dress or a retro circa 1980’s top that went well with leggings. Her glasses are all fogged up. She keeps saying to herself as if trying to convince herself that it is true “fate is….”.
A man with round features tinge with a roughness that stems from a sense of organized unkemptness. He is obviously out of it. (probably a girl told him that she’s just not into you at all (sorry him, I was thinking of a friend (ouch), no really (and double ouch))).
He sits down beside her it’s the only seat left in the bus and he of course takes it. Sits down dazed, unconsciously rolling/twidlling a marker/pen. It’s like he is existing in another dimension prallel to this one. It seems he is living in a bubble. His face moves , he has good hearing , then he writes “building bridges of chance for someone you love”.
She stops speaking. she turns her head slowly, as if caught stealing something.
He looks down, seemingly interested in every minute detail of his black chuck taylors. Not really aware that someone is looking at him. He drops the pen. He tries to retrieve it.
She sees him lose the pen, she tries to retrieve it.
Thier hands touch. Thier eyes meet. He says HI!, She says Hello!
Trailer: Taking Woodstuck!
thanks to /film for the pointer here
I got giddy when I watched the trailer(just as I felt when I saw the trailer for Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist), hope It overshoots my expectations! Low Expectations are for losers! hehe!(Although it really is the secret to happiness)
rePost: Liked This :Movie Review: I Love You, Man – Capturing the Modern American Male Condition | /Film
- Image by Andrew Huff via Flickr
Read the whole thing here , I didn’t want to post the whole review.
Nice Movie Review from /film
But what I appreciated most was the way that the film captured the modern American male condition with thought and humor. On the whole, when men get married, study after study has demonstrated that they are more likely to depend more on their spouses for emotional support than they do on others, as opposed to females, who are typically able to maintain a more extensive social network. As a result, widowed men experience higher rates of depression and shorter periods until remarriage. When you couple this with conclusions such as those found in sociologists Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community, you end up with a profound cynicism about the emotional life of the modern American male that’s become fairly pervasive in our culture (see: Fight Club). Putnam paints a pretty bleak picture of American social life, claiming that the ties that have bound us in our communities (e.g. bowling leagues) have withered dramatically to the detriment of civic engagement. In other words, these days, it’s difficult for men to keep quality male friends, and even harder for them to make new ones.
via Movie Review: I Love You, Man – Capturing the Modern American Male Condition | /Film.
rePost:Business and Snake's Oil Men:Linus' blog: SSD followup
I wrote this yesterday about my take on business and snake’s oil sales men and realize that sometimes they are not trying to fool you into a decision. It is sad but sometimes people don’t try to think things through and investigate the stuff they are trying to say. Here Linus Torvalds shows us why a lot of reviews cannot be trusted, and judging from the way he says this I believe he is even referring to some people who are said to be professional reviewers. Things like this used to make me sad, then I realized that when something becomes useless they tend to become irrelevant to people and they tend to be cast off, like a year old fad. The thing is we need to try to live more aware of things and try to always go beyond what is obvious and easy to get. Do not subscribe to labels and pre conceptions, exercise that which we have that makes us more than animals!
Sadly, almost none of the reviews seemed to ever catch on to that, as they were all looking at the (totally irrelevant) throughput numbers that basically don’t matter in any real-life situation. Everybody just quoted the nice big marketing numbers, because finding the numbers that matter more to actual human perception (notably: average and maximum latency) was so much harder, and most disk benchmarks are crap and don’t even give those numbers.
Which is why I was so happy to see this review at AnandTech. Half the numbers quoted are still the worthless ones (I guess you can’t avoid quoting the industry standard benchmarks, even when they are horribly bad), but much of the actual discussion is about how unusable a drive is when it has maximum latencies in the hundreds of milliseconds.
via Linus’ blog: SSD followup.
-rePost-Book/Film Guessing Games-Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Amazon's Kindle and the Recovery of Readerly Naivete; or, Were-Bats–the Big Bug Scourge of the Skies!
- Image by jwordsmith via Flickr
When I was in high school and for most parts of college I kept my watch handy at all times. The MTRCB approval was needed for any film shown commercially and it listed the total run time of the film. The combination of my watch/(and for two years a stopwatch) and the knowledge of the running time of the film has saved me from being naive about a film, if their were any surprise twist left etc. The bad thing about this is that I began to be less emotionally involved with the film I was watching; When I was bringing stopwatches/watches to theaters I was always checking it to see how the pace was going, the action to chatter ratio. The exposition versus the confrontation ratio and other minutae that was although nice to discuss with other film lovers was mainly an exercise in film intellectual stimulation. When I discovered Roger Egbert’s online reviews I was mainly entraced by his love for film, it seemed he had different levels of looking at films. As a film critic, as a film lover, as a lover of stories , and a lover of emotions. I began to see that in trying to one-up other people’s/stranger’s/friend’s observation skills and views I lost that connection to that part of me that just wanted to be escapist and enjoyed a film, whether the lighting/camera work is not as good as it could have been or how smart a film is. I got this back by only being conscious of the time whenever I watch a movie for the second time. I haven’t used a Kindle and I suspect that as long as we (Philippine Consumers) are forced to jump through so many hoops to get a kindle I won’t be using one anytime soon, but I think that it would really improve my naivete !
In a normal book, an author cannot have the antagonist fall with an ensorcelled death-sword in its belly with one-third of the pages left to go and expect the reader to be surprised at what comes next. The thickness of the pages beneath one’s right hand scream: “THAT’S NOT THE ANTAGONIST, SCHMUCK!!!”
Reading it on the Kindle–the sudden appearance of the were-bats has an extra punch that it cannot have in the hard copy…
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Amazon’s Kindle and the Recovery of Readerly Naivete; or, Were-Bats–the Big Bug Scourge of the Skies!.