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!

Stage Door Canteen

Stage Door Canteen. Frank Borzage. 1943.

This is a very bad transfer, but I think I probably got this from a 50 movie box set… which means that the movie is public domain, so whoever made this DVD probably downloaded it off of teh torrentz: It looks like it’s been sourced from a VHS recording.

This movie is basically a bunch of cameos from entertainers famous at the time. It’s not really much of a movie, but it’s amiable enough.