Recent Viewing: Memories and other Experiments
We’ve been watching quite a few movies. Lately we’ve turned to inexpensive sources for movies we knew nothing about on the grounds that if we didn’t like them, we wouldn’t be out much.
The best find has been Memories, a 1995 compilation of three short SF anime features by Kôji Morimoto, Tensai Okamura, and Katsuhiro Ôtomo. Good stories and good animation. My limited experience with anime led me to hope there would be a lot of material of this type. Apart from the films of Hayao Miyazaki, Planetes, Steamboy, and a few others, we haven’t found as much as I’d hoped (a lot of samurai stuff, which I don’t much care for). Memories was a real find, in the $3 bin at Big Lots, and worth every penny.
Patrick Stewart as Captain Nemo sounds like really intriguing casting, doesn’t it? The 2005 TV version of Mysterious Island was a disappointment. A thin adventure film mixing 19th century technology, early 20th century science, 18th century pirates, and giant vegetables. Did they really intend to provoke a laugh when the Pirate King got killed?
I bought the 2004 A Separate Peace without looking closely enough, and thinking it was the 1972. No matter. I thought it was well done, on par with the ’72 version. My only question is why did they do the remake?
John picked out Timeline, which turned out to be a watchable action-adventure movie. Its main attraction to us is that dealt with history and archaeology. It had at least as much archaeology in it as Raiders of the Lost Arc(haeologist).
The Harry Potter series is nearly over. Daniel Radcliffe, what are you going to do with your career? I was hoping for an answer from December Boys, also in the Big Lots $3 bin. The mortality rate of child actors in very high; what a child star does to try to become an adult star is always interesting. Usually it means taking on Terribly Adult roles. Often, graduating child stars take roles as homosexual characters. It worked for Matthew Broderick. It didn’t for Scott Baio (Gemini - a Showtime production not listed in IMDB!). This film is a buddy/coming of age movie. Underwhelming. The plot includes several red herrings (a horse that strives to catch a fish and eat it, and finally succeeds; a kid who catches a legendary local Great Fish only to bury it; the boys’ summer hosts who seem eccentric at first, making you think the kids are spending the summer with the Addams Family - but they turn out to be normal). I got the feeling these red herrings were supposed to mean something, but I wasn’t sure just what. Daniel Radcliffe has a couple other recent movies that sound more substantial. And he also starred in a stage production of Equus, which is definitely Terribly Adult.