Last Stand At Saber River

Last Stand At Saber River. Dick Lowry. 1997.

I pulled the director of this movie up in imdb-mode, and I got:

“Errr” I thought, but by default (sensibly enough imdb-mode doesn’t show TV productions). But then I hit `x’ (to display all the irrelevant crap), and got:

This is a TV movie! Made by a TV director.

Oops. That explains Tom Selleck starring in this thing. The reason I have this movie is because I got this Westerns box set, which has a lot of great movies.

So perhaps I should give this a chance anyway…

OK, I’m 45 minutes in, and I have no interest in this, so I’m aborting.

人狼

Jin-Roh. Hiroyuki Okiura. 1999.

Oh, it’s animated. This was a DVD I picked up at random in a used DVD shop some time back, and I assumed that it was a… Korean… action movie? For some reason?

But it’s an animated Japanese movie about some anarchists and the cops who hunt them down.

I really like the style of animation here. It’s more French than anything, and some of the characters have this slight insectile vibe to them that’s great.

And it moves slowly and is mostly unscored, so there’s nothing here to dislike, really. But despite all that, the storyline is just so… tentative… that I find it hard to keep concentrating on what’s going on, and instead I’m shopping for springforms on the Interwebs.

The documentary featurette on the DVD is fascinating. The writer (the Ghost in the Shell Guy) talks about how he wasn’t sure that Okiura was the right director for this movie, and that while he likes the results, perhaps he should have directed it himself. The director talks about how he was pretty sure that he didn’t want to do the movie, and set terms for the story that he thought the writer would refuse, so that he wouldn’t have to do the movie.

It’s like the anti-Hollywood documentary. I love it.

Abre los ojos

Open Your Eyes. Alejandro Amenábar. 1997.

This movie is really fun, but they’ve made some strange choices with the protagonist. He’s consistently such douche canoe that the only thing you can possibly be thinking while this is all going on is “yea! torture him some more!”

The cinematography of this movie is what you find if you look in the dictionary under “blah”, but the performances are good and it’s kinda exciting.

Fun!