I suppose what is meant by this category is favourite non-English film. The one that comes to mind immediately is John Woo masterpiece The Killer, starring Chow Yuen-Fat and Danny Lee. It’s a story about an assassin who, while on a job, blinds an innocent girl. He decides to use his earnings to try and restore her vision while at the same time trying to get even with a crime boss that double crossed him. All the while, a driven police detective is hot on his trail, chasing him with a skill and zeal that matches his own. It’s a beautiful, late 80s film that shows John Woo’s true artistry. Set in a pre-handover Hong Kong which is atmospheric and enigmatic. I should really see this film again.
Author: Dennis
30 Day Movie Challenge – Day 9: Favourite Musical
I can be short and sweet on this topic; I don’t like musicals. There are some notable exceptions, but they usually border on not being a musical, but more a film with music. In light of that, my favourite “musical” has to be The Blues Brothers. In the words of Crazy Elf; this post is over.
30 Day Movie Challenge – Day 8: Favourite Thriller
For every article and category in the 30 Day Movie Challenge, I’ve been helping myself by reading the best/worst lists that iMDB compiles on each genre. Just to get a feel for which films fall into that category and to make sure I haven’t overlooked any really good films. (I’ve seen quite a few and my memory isn’t so great.) Based on the list for Thrillers, I should be picking The Godfather, but I don’t consider that a thriller, so I won’t. Pulp Fiction? Nah. Inception? Very, very good so possibly. The Dark Knight wasn’t much of a thriller. Neither was Fight Club or Goodfellas. Most of these films resist being pigeonholed into one genre and the first real thriller on that list is Psycho, which I haven’t taken the time to watch yet.
The film on that list that I’ve seen that comes closest to being a thriller is Black Swan, which I thought was absolutely amazing. There’s a good chance I might be overlooking a few top notch, classical thrillers out there at the moment, but this is the most recent film that I’ve seen that a) I consider an actual thriller and b) I was amazed by to the point where it remained on my mind for a long time afterwards. The subject matter is just so disturbing, especially when you start seeing the mother/daughter sexual abuse theme. It was incredibly well played — to the point that I got genuinely annoyed at Natalie Portman’s character — and visually incredibly solid. The suspence was properly built up and the foreshadowing was subtle yet impactful. All in all I thought this was a truly amazing film.
What Was Your First Internet Experience? Here’s Mine!
Eva sent me an article from The Atlantic in which they talk about a project by On the Network, a podcast about the Internet. They asked anyone who’d be interested to call in to a special telephone number and leave a message with their first Internet experience. Not just casually, but the first moment it hit you and you went “whoa!” She (Eva), asked me what my answer would be. I thought about it for a while and here’s my answer.
I think the first moment I really realised what an impact the Internet would have on our society was when I had just moved to college. It was 1995 and I was 17 years old. I had been online several times at that point, mostly just to browse around, look for information and such, but it didn’t really hit me until I started researching Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, for a class. I forget which network I logged onto — probably Undernet or some such huge network — and I was absolutely blown away by the amount of people I found there. While at first I treated the Internet as “just a big network” or a glorified version of Microsoft Encarta, it suddenly got launched as a social network, where you could talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime. The world suddenly became so small. It just became so much more interesting. Like many people, I got hooked to IRC. Like many people, the Internet is a social tool first, everything else second.
(I admit that in that epiphany, the world didn’t just become a lot smaller, but also a lot less mysterious and compelling. Where once a trip you booked was exotic, exciting and slightly scary because you had absolutely no idea what you’d encounter, simply going on what others have told you and snippets you may have caught on television, now you book a trip and you know exactly what you’re going to see, when you’re going to see it, you can see photos and videos on it, taking away much if not all of the mystery and adventure.)
My idea about the Internet being a social tool become reinforced when the following year I started playing Diablo. Playing the single player game was very entertaining and compelling, but once I was done with that I started to play on Battle.net, the online branch of Blizzard’s games (Blizzard being the developer of Diablo, a.o.). It was very simple, you could play with up to four people in an instance of the game, if I remember correctly, but those four people could be anywhere in the world. Anywhere. After that, I spent some time playing a Korean game called Lineage, one of the very first MMO’s. It was in its beta stage and was free to play. Suddenly, I was playing with a bunch of Koreans. At that point I had only ever met two Koreans in my entire life.
So yeah, IRC was the first moment that I went “whoa!”
30 Day Movie Challenge – Day 7: Favourite Animated Feature
This is one of the few categories I didn’t have to think too long or too hard about. Ghost in the Shell is an amazing anime that features a great, sophisticated storyline, an atmospheric and immersive visual style and good voice acting. It deals with existential and mature subjects and isn’t afflicted too much by the obsession that a lot of Japanese anime artists seem to have for juxtaposing the cute with the hyper-violent. Both Kusanagi and Batou, arguably the story’s main characters are rich, three dimensional and well thought out, and the antagonist is not your run of the mill opponent either, both the Laughing Man and The Puppet Master. GitS was the second anime I really loved, after Akira, which was the only other anime that could come close to getting the title Favourite Animated Feature. It also spawned several spin-offs, all of which had a high level of quality, though none had the impact on me that GitS had, probably because it changed something inside of me forever.
Since GitS and Akira there have been a few others of note, but none as good as either of these, nor as fundamental and impactful to animated films.
I remember when I first watched Akira with my cousin. It must have been 1990 or so and we had rented it from the local video store back when renting was still the thing to do. I ended up not being able to watch it for whatever reason, but my cousin did and informed me that I really had to make some time for it. I picked it up and watched it three times that very weekend before returning it to my cousin so he could return it to the video store. It was so amazing, so special and so not like the Disney crap I had expected to watch simply because it was an animated film. Sure, I’d watched Robotech and whatnot, but all feature animations were always that honey-sweet Disney shit. So I was pretty much hooked and I started watching all kinds of anime, mostly Manga. Most of it was pretty bad, but I liked the edge and grit it seemed to have over western cartoons. And then when I just thought I was done with anime, just when I thought that Akira was lightning in a bottle, Ghost in the Shell hit and sent me into the stratosphere. I’m still waiting for another to come along and do that again. :)