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Post by ThirdMan on Sept 25, 2020 16:30:48 GMT -8
Wrong. Kiki would be 9.958. Dammit!
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Sept 25, 2020 19:06:00 GMT -8
So I watched Alita Battle Angel with a bunch of friends expecting to be indifferent.
TURNS OUT THIS MOVIE IS AWESOME!!! It's like a Wachowski movie if the Wachowskis weren't glum navelgazing hacks. The dialogue should be laughably bad but Rosa Salazar and Christoph Waltz are so good that they make it work somehow? The only bad thing about the movie is that there's a tacked-on love interest so wooden he makes Paul Ballard look like an integral part of the Dollhouse cast. Also, not that I watch a ton of big-ass action blockbusters, but the action scenes in this movie are super fun and basically eschew all the standard cliches of a Hollywood action flick circa 2019. So instead of the last act being just twenty straight minutes of explosions you get cool roller derby fights and scenes where characters are literally hacked to bits mid-battle. It's so cool.
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Post by ThirdMan on Sept 26, 2020 16:09:13 GMT -8
^^ Rosa Salazar bias.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Sept 29, 2020 12:22:17 GMT -8
^^ Rosa Salazar bias. Well yes, she is wonderful. Even with the massive eyes. Actually, I thought that would turn me off the movie but it ended up making the film better - I think part of what's so fun about the movie is that Alita is Really! Excited! About! Everything! and the massive eyes help to sell that. I definitely would have loved this movie when I was nine - and actually, I like it as an adult too.
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Post by ThirdMan on Sept 29, 2020 20:23:57 GMT -8
It's nice when people like things.
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Post by Jeremy on Sept 30, 2020 12:52:16 GMT -8
I decided to watch Alita before it disappears from HBO. Didn't quite love it, though it is indeed more fun than the average Wachowski film.
Like much of Robert Rodriguez's work, the film has a sleek production design, and it's complemented by some great action sequences - the roller derby scenes are terrific. And there's a good cast at work here, even if they're somewhat limited by the script. The dialogue is pretty bland (not shocking, as James Cameron cowrote the script) and most of the characters are memorable less for their personalities than the special effects used to bring their cybernetic accoutrements to life.
Speaking of which, the SFX are pretty eye-popping... but they can also be downright disturbing. The constant sight of human faces stretched over metal skeletal frames gets unsettling after a while, and... much as I like Salazar, I found her character's digitally enhanced eyes to be distracting and at times downright creepy. (Maybe I just have a thing against large eyes - I still can't watch that Tim Burton movie.)
Still, it's good to see Rodriguez back in the director's chair, and the positives of his latest film go a long way to compensating for the negatives. I'm even kind of interested in the sequel that will never be made.
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Post by ThirdMan on Sept 30, 2020 14:27:49 GMT -8
I found her character's digitally enhanced eyes to be distracting and at times downright creepy. (Maybe I just have a thing against large eyes - I still can't watch that Tim Burton movie.) I can't speak to how big her eyes are in the movie, but it should be noted that were I to describe the specific "type" of woman I'm generally most attracted to, "doe-eyed brunette" most often springs to mind. Heh.
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Post by Jeremy on Sept 30, 2020 20:26:37 GMT -8
I think the design could be cute in animation - or anime, more specifically, since this is based on a Japanese property. Feels just the right amount of off in live-action, though.
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 7, 2020 14:14:47 GMT -8
Twenty-five years since I first saw it (almost to the day!), the film that made me a cinephile.
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Post by ThirdMan on Oct 7, 2020 16:04:12 GMT -8
I see. That's when you started practicing cinephilia.
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Post by Incandescence 112 on Oct 7, 2020 18:04:32 GMT -8
Twenty-five years since I first saw it (almost to the day!), the film that made me a cinephile. And, presumably, an anime fan too?
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Post by Jeremy on Oct 7, 2020 19:28:09 GMT -8
I would love to see Akira in a theater. Though quite honestly, I would love to see pretty much any film in a theater. What do theaters smell like? I forget.
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 8, 2020 4:27:29 GMT -8
And, presumably, an anime fan too? Absolutely, though it's probably more difficult to pinpoint the advent of my cinephilia than I'm letting on; I already loved a few films like Gremlins and Back to the Future in my youth, Tim Burton was undoubtedly the first director I 'recognised' and I was often glued to Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes so I loved animation from very early on. Akira was special in that it triggered both my interest in 'world' cinema and a desire to basically watch everything in film history. Anime itself was very fringe here in the 90s; I had a schoolfriend (genuinely named Jackie Chan) with whom I'd exchange tapes and I'd often rent things like The Guyver and Golgo 13 out on a weekend as I could pass for eighteen, but it was years before it became mainstream because Manga UK were pretty much the only distributor, and their roster was invariably violent and often unceremoniously dumped around the porn shelves in video shops. The arrival of Pokémon and Ghibli around the turn of the century did a huge amount to shift expectancies away from just decapitations, molestation, the apocalypse and screaming in front of a rushing background.
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Post by ThirdMan on Oct 8, 2020 10:45:37 GMT -8
Nonetheless, Snipe is a huuuuuuge hentai fan.
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Post by guttersnipe on Oct 8, 2020 13:34:44 GMT -8
I think my entire experience with hentai began and ended with Urotsukidoji, which probably tells you everything you need to know about the sub-genre. Although when I was in Japan I naturally visited a multi-storey manga store (the Japanese don't do things by half-measures), and the upper levels were distressingly awash with fleshtone ink. When you consider that their 'real' pornography laws forbid the presentation of genitals, their drawn equivalents make up for it and then some. Yikes.
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