If you haven’t seen Princess Mononoke and Kiki’s Delivery Service, by the same director, try those. And, by other directors, you may like Wolf Children and Your Name.
Steerpike tells no lies. Studio Ghibli has an Awesome collection. My hard recommendations are: Spirited Away Princess Mononoke Kiki's Delivery Service Castle in the Sky Howl's Moving Castle The Cat Returns (a loose "sequel" to Whispers of the Heart) My Neighbor Totoro is also cute ☺️ and I've heard marvelous things about Ponyo Honestly, Spirited Away and Mononoke seem to be their masterpieces in my opinion
As much as I enjoy Mark Wahlberg and Kevin Hart, Me Time (currently on Netflix) is the worst movie I've seen in some time. What's happened to the film industry? There seems to be one template for comedies: three or four brief laugh-out-loud scenes, and the rest is a chaotic mish-mash of cartoonish GCI violence and Hallmark-movie-style schmaltz.
Trying to watch the Zemeckis remake of Pinocchio but I don’t think I’ll last the distance. It’s my favourite of the traditional Disney films, but this is a completely pointless scene for scene remake and the live action element adds nothing.
Bumped into the 1997 The Shining miniseries and could not get through it. What a dog of a movie. Why King insisted on making this when it only re-emphasizes that Kubrick knew more about horror than King (at least on film) is ... well embarrassing. I couldn't believe how clunky and laughable the ideas were - spooky topiary, a croquet mallet, a firehose with teeth, Tony is really his time-traveling self come back to warn him, and Danny talks like a worn out teenager when he's supposed to be 5? Blech. I'm beginning to think King might've been better off as a thriller writer rather than focusing on supernatural horror. He builds and builds but cannot fathom a ending for his nightmares. Maybe he doesn't really believe in the supernatural and therefore everything kinda pops like a dream. Too much competition, too much need to propagandize, too many yes-men. Plus creativity is dead. You can see it on some of the writing sites every character is an echo of a character. Its like we've become our own avatars. We don't tap into anything deep anymore. It's all very shallow.
That TV Shining series really suffers from the CGI-is-cool attitude of that era. It looks horrible, like something out of Roger Rabbit, but it's like nobody realized it at the time. Kind of like bell bottoms or mullets, now it's a laughing stock. And yeah, even if it looked perfect, Kubrick was so far beyond it in terms of story. You know what movie surprisingly worked though? Dr. Sleep, the sequel to The Shining. It did the impossible. It's not the classic The Shining was, but man, it could not have done better. It was an impossible sequel that somehow stood on its own. A little like Psycho II, when I think about it . . . I'm curious how the book, Dr. Sleep, compares to the movie. From what I understand, the movie had to somehow join Kubrick's movie with King's book. Did King roll Kubrick's Shining into the Dr. Sleep book? (p.s. I like Roger Rabbit lots. Its effects aged well because they were supposed to be cartoons.)
Dr Sleep the novel was very forgettable. It's only real redeeming quality was that it was set in the area of NH where I was living at the time, with easily identifiable landmarks essentially out my backdoor. Other than that, skip it. King also got hit by a car relatively close to my house up there. And my wife's sister lives a few blocks from him in Bangor. And King used to visit some of the restaurants I worked in up there, though I never bumped into him. All of which was moderately cool back in the day, but now feels eminently boring. Kind of like King. Sigh. So many heroes of my youth. So much disappointment as I run nutsack first into middle-age.
It's technically pre-Ghibli but Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is possibly my favorite of the Miyazaki films. In the 80's it got a cut American release called Warriors of the Wind.
Ghibli Studio before they became attached to Miyazaki: The Last Unicorn. Rankin/Bass never looked so good!
Oh, I didn't realize there was a Ghibli connection with Rankin/Bass and the Last Unicorn. I always loved that film. The Rankin/Bass Hobbit and Return of the King were also staples of my childhood.
I was quite surprized to find out too. You can tell the character designs and background designs are still Rankin/Bass, but in the film itself they're executed so much more skilfully and subtly than in Frosty the Snowman or the Rudolph movies.
I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep after I had seen Bladerunner both were good. I much prefer the movie without the voice over (so annoying). Will probably queue up Legend (awesome Tim Curry film) this next week. The lead has almost ruined my favorite film by being himself (ugh). If you are into Asian films, I would suggest War of Arrows. Excellent entertainment value. Good story and great action.
Just saw Day Shift on Netflix. It ain't great art but it was a fun way to pass a couple hours, I recommend it.
I'm guessing that it's a competitor to Netflix and Amazon. But I don't think my television has it. It might be watchable on PC.
Looks very promising. I usually hate these the-male-protagonist-is-suddenly-female switches, because they're always dreadful (hello, Ghostbusters), but in the book the lead Cenobite wasn't very male. He/she seemed to be female, if anything. His body was too scarred to tell. I also hope the writers are not so hung up on that box. There were all kind of ways to open the door to Hell. The coolest story was the one with the crossword puzzle. That would have made a good novel. (Eh . . . not really a protagonist either, but you know what I mean. He's the face of the franchise.) Anyway, it really seems that for once the writers understand the material. We shall see. It better not be a waste of good suffering.
I just went through the Dirty Harry series. It reminds me of the Rambo and (Netflix) Punisher series' in that, in the first installment the protag is an antihero almost on the verge of being antisocial, but then gets softened and made much more acceptable for the rest of the series. For the initial appearance of the Punisher I'm talking about his stint on season 2 of Daredevil, where he was a real hardass, almost a villain, and served as a foil against Daredevil's Do Not Kill stance. With Dirty Harry they went so far in the second movie as having a squad of really bad (murderous) cops to show by contrast what a good guy Harry really is. The first movie is more like those Westerns where when the desperados come to town they need the gunslinging hero to save them, but at the end he has to ride out because he's too dangerous to get along in civilization (Harry threw his badge in a quarry lake at the end of the first movie). At the beginning of Dirty Harry after his famous "Did I fire six times, or only five?" speech to the downed bad guy the crook (Richard Roundtree—aka Shaft) asked him "I gotta know?", in response to which Harry took very deliberate aim at his head and pulled the trigger. And at the end he very deliberately stepped on the wounded leg of the villain as a form of torture to learn where the female victim was located. Those little acts of sadism would never be repeated in the rest of the series (that I can think of).
