Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, August 9th 2005 at 11:53am
A six year old girl often sees a giant version of herself staring back at her, the adolescent boy has a train fly out of his head when the girl he had a crush on moved away, the grandfather is old and sings ridiculously weird songs (“YOU ARE A TRIANGLE… WHYYYYYY ARE YOU A TRIANGLE?”), Asano plays a sound recording engineer, there’s an uncle manga artist that wants to record his own single (“Yama yo… O’Yama, yama yo….” [Mountain, oh Mountain, mountain]), the mother is an animator trying to get back into the business and the father … well I have no idea what he does. Of course everything comes together in this decidedly absurd yet fantastic story in rural Japan. The Taste of Tea (“Cha no aji”) is lighthearted and amusing, but also has a lot of depth to it. It’s not just a comedy, or a drama, or a fantasy tale… It’s all three – sort of. It’s a trip through the absurd and the surreal. By far one of the most impressive movies from this year’s Fantasia stock!
Tags: 2005, fantasia, movies | no comments
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, August 9th 2005 at 9:26am
Arahan: Urban Martial Arts Action (or something like that) is a wildly entertaining Korean comedy/kung-fu movie. It’s kind of like Surf Ninjas crossed with My Sassy Girl, only it’s actually a good movie. The story isn’t terribly original: Boy meets girl, girl hits him with Palm Blast, boy turns out to be potential kung-fu genius once his chi is unlocked by a team of 5 ancient kung-fu masters, and boy & girl must defend the world from utter destruction as a corrupt, ancient, evil dark kung fu master attempts to destroy it. Arahan is charming and hilarious, with some excellent action scenes to boot.
Tags: 2005, fantasia, movies | 1 comment
Posted by Skrud at Thursday, August 4th 2005 at 11:05am
How to convert a Japanese movie to American:
- Cut apart the original movie into short clips.
- Add a random satellite/space-station floating in space really badly (you can see the strings)
- Have reporters from the NBC (or something) discuss events in the movie, “live via satellite” (see #2), while observing the movie events on their monitors.
- Add commentary from American “experts” to discuss with the reporters, conduct interviews on the events of the movie.
- Dub over whatever remaining original footage there was in English.
- Mispronounce “Hokkaido”.
- The latest American masterpiece movie!
Despite all that, King Kong vs. Godzilla still retained plenty of hilarious, cheesy, badly-dubbed moments, and is worth watching for the sake of ridicule. There also a bunch of random dancing natives and their King-Kong song. The Japanese movie is 7 minutes longer than the American version, and the American version has all these extra reporter scenes. It makes me wonder what they actually cut out… I hope it’s not the fight scenes. I mean, King Kong and Godzilla really duke it out well!
In the American version, the original Godzilla theme song by Akira Ifukube was cut. I think it’s one of the best theme songs in movie history. I want to see the original Japanese uncut version.
Tags: 2005, fantasia, movies | 1 comment
Posted by Skrud at Thursday, August 4th 2005 at 12:11am
The first (and only) Thai horror movie that I’ve ever heard of was Shutter. It looked pretty interesting, and scary. The first scary horror movie I’ve ever seen was at Fantasia, so maybe I was expecting something a little more impressive, but I wasn’t Shutter all that impressed with Shutter. It did have it’s moments (especially the ending, that was awesome), but most of the movie wasn’t terribly suspenseful or even scary. There were a couple of (albeit really good) cheap scares, though. The story concept itself is pretty clever though, and the way it played itself out (especially towards the end) was also pretty good. In retrospect, it’s a much better movie that I gave it credit for 5 minutes after seeing it, and it’s worth watching.
Tags: 2005, fantasia, movies | no comments
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, August 2nd 2005 at 10:52am
Mind Game was a totally mind-blowing experience. The animation was a brilliant crossover between comic-booky, cartoonier-than-normal anime and live-action (kind of superimposed over the animation) that gave the movie a very unique look. Mind Game was original, inventive, clever and a lot of fun. The movie begins when a total-loser-type (Nishi) meets the girl he’s had a crush on for years (Myon), her new boyfriend, and they go to her family’s restaurant where gangsters come in and shoot Nishi in the ass. After a brief encounter with God (who changes form in every single shot – with hilarious results), Nishi gets a second chance from the moment before he was shot to do things over again. This time he seizes his opportunities and leads everyone on a wicked car chase until… well, it’s a surprise. But it’s awesome.
At its heart, Mind Game is about seizing opportunity when you have the chance and not letting life pass you by. It’s one incredible ride and I think all the awards it received from Fantasia were well deserved.
Tags: 2005, fantasia, japanese, movies | 2 comments
