It’s generally a good policy to design your stories with a planned beginning, middle, and endpoint. Certainly leave yourself room for creative twists and new discoveries along the way, but beginning with a coherent, planned structure is crucial if you want your story to feel like a satisfying, cohesive saga. Of course, not all stories can afford to open with knowledge of their ending – particularly stories in mediums like weekly manga, where concerns like “what new variables can I introduce to keep readers hooked” will often trump more luxurious questions like “how do these new variables further articulate my story’s fundamental point.” Continuing weekly narratives demand novelty, and novelty often ends up evolving into baggage.
Tag Archives: Film
Chihayafuru Part Two: The Movie
I’ll get the bad news out of the way right from the start: the second Chihayafuru film is not that great of an actual film. If I were giving it a formal review, I’d probably spend a fair amount of time talking about how its first act hangs on insubstantial drama, as well as its inability to maintain the manga’s tactical sports intrigue, which generally acts as a needed counterbalance to the story’s melodrama. I’d praise Mayu Matsuoka for absolutely killing it as Shinobu, but reflect that ultimately, in spite of doing its best to reconstitute the manga into a coherent three-film structure, it loses too much of the original’s appeal in the process. I’d conclude by summarizing it as not a great film in its own right, but a very fun lark for fans of the franchise, and a fascinating exercise in the difficulty of translating ongoing manga to discrete films.
Chihayafuru Part One: The Movie
The opening scene of the Chihayafuru film embodies something utterly fundamental to karuta as a sport: the constant, thrilling sense of tense anticipation. Karuta is not a game of continuous action. Its energy and appeal build up over strained moments of anticipation, waiting for the next card to be called. Karuta embodies the thrill of the silence just before a decisive play in any sport; the ball aloft, players’ eyes trained, all voices hushed as victory and defeat hang in the balance. Karuta bottles that thrill, and unleashes it again and again, as its contenders rush for glory on the tatami mat.
Moonlight, A Quiet Film
Moonlight is a quiet film.
I actually had to turn up my speakers just to hear the dialogue, and had to turn them up even more when, after ten minutes, our protagonist resentfully speaks his first words. He doesn’t follow those words up with too many more. Whoever else he is, Little, or Chiron, or Black, is not one for big speeches. His feelings maintain an internal smolder, clear in his downturned eyes and inward-sloping shoulders and perpetual inability to stand in the middle of the frame. Our hero is a man of big feelings afforded minimal release. There is so much there, so much contained in all his unhappy, furtive glances, so much preserved across the astonishingly congruent performances of three brilliant actors.
Annihilation, Which Covets the End
In trying to collect my thoughts on Annihilation, my mind kept returning to that earlier scifi/horror “humans are overrun by a new order” classic Jurassic Park, and that film’s own relative optimism. Putting aside one-liners like “must go faster” and “clever girl,” I feel like that film’s soul was captured in the line “life finds a way.” It’s unsurprising that a heart-on-sleeve director like Spielberg would make a movie about dinosaurs eating people into something life-affirming, and I can’t help but shiver at the contrast between that and Alex Garland’s comparatively soul-destroying Annihilation. Life might find a way in Annihilation, but it’s highly doubtful that we’ll be finding a way along with it.
Rurouni Kenshin Part III: The Legend Ends – Review
Today I conclude my journey through the live-action Kenshin films. This one was unfortunately the worst of the three, reflecting all of the dramatic sagginess you often end up with in trilogies. The film barely has a dramatic arc, and the plans of both its heroes and villains make too little sense to harbor much tension. Still, the fights were fun, and overall this was a pretty charming interpretation of the franchise. I didn’t watch all that much Kenshin as a teenager, but this trilogy definitely sold me on his world.
You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my brief notes below.
Rurouni Kenshin, Part II: Kyoto Inferno – Review
Today I return to the live-action Kenshin films, for a look at the first half of the Shishio saga. This movie was definitely messier than the first film, in ways that felt almost inescapable. The first movie was just barely able to give all of its characters a reason to exist – with the second arc encountering the general character-creep of most long-running manga, this one just had too many stories to pack into one film. But being less gracefully constructed than the first movie certainly didn’t prevent this one from being a really fun time!
You can check out my full review over at ANN or my notes below.
Rurouni Kenshin Part I: Origins – Review
Today I reviewed the first Rurouni Kenshin live action movie, which was a generally wonderful time! I only absorbed bits and pieces of Rurouni Kenshin back in the day, but this certainly seemed to capture the spirit of what I’d seen, along with just being a generally well-composed, exciting, and surprisingly thematically rich film. As I say in the review, Kenshin mines an extremely fertile vein of thematic territory with its dawn-of-Meiji-era setting, and this film takes full advantage of that. I hope you enjoy the piece!
You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below.
Synthetic Love and Her
Her opens with a sequence that appears to be a heartfelt confession, as protagonist Theodore Twombly addresses both an old love and the screen itself. As fond memories are extolled and warm feelings expressed, his words gradually land false – Theodore is neither the assumed writer nor recipient of this letter, and everything he’s recalling applies to a life that isn’t his. And when the screen pulls out, we see Theodore is not alone in his fabrication – in fact, he’s one in a long line of cubicled workers expressing the same thoughts, a factory producing emotional catharsis. Theodore works for Beautiful Handwritten Letters Dot Com, a company that has risen to meet the public’s need for thoughts so poignant and personal we can’t express them ourselves.
The Dramatic Layer Cake of Inside Out
It’s interesting how fan communities often lionize the idea of “thematic depth” in stories, as if fiction with an underlying philosophical message is somehow more worthy than works that are largely concerned with having a good time. It makes sense for a few reasons – we see complexity as an inherent good, we see works that are trying to change the viewers’ minds as more challenging or morally profound, we more deeply connect with the works that taught us something new, etcetera. But it’s also a little funny to me, since there’s no type of art more prone to sermonizing than family entertainment.