BP Movie Journal 8/31/17

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7 Responses

  1. Jackson H. says:

    David, if Conan the Barbarian isn’t your thing, you should check out the sequel, Conan the Destroyer. It’s much shorter, for one, but it also isn’t much like its predecessor. It’s goofy and campy and wildly entertaining. Totally worth it.

  2. Jackson H. says:

    Also, to shoot a hole in your millennial argument, I was born in January 1983 and I relate way more to Tyler on this.

  3. Jackson H. says:

    Taking over the comments because I can: David, have you ever seen Hard Core Logo? I bring it up because you mentioned Callum Keith Rennie. Anyway, great Canadian film about punk rock. Thought you might enjoy it.

  4. Harry Lime says:

    As another gross guy hiding behind his “feminism” I’m sure David has an intimate window into Joss Whedon’s psyche.

  5. Dan Roy says:

    No conversation about dead stuntmen would be complete without a mention of Gone Fishin’.

    And per Milius, for all the legends about him my favorite Milius bit comes from his appearance on a Japanese documentary about Steven Spielberg from the early 80s, where he appears to be Speilberg’s best friend and spends much of the doc hanging out with him in his office, divying up sushi orders. He says, and I think this is verbatim: “Most people in Hollywood like doing drugs, we like food”. I’ll post a link if I can find it.

  6. Tyler’s is the first review of the new Death Note picture I’ve heard that was mostly positive. I understand that in most of its forms, Death Note exists as a series – in comic form and an animated series, but there was also a film in 2006 that I wish was better known here. That was my blind introduction to the story, and it was (and remains) terrific. It did not feel like it should have been a series, and I was surprised to discover that it had been serialized first. The movie felt tight, but not rushed, advancing in ways whose quickness gave the audience credit for following and thinking. Right when I thought, “Huh, I wonder if he’ll ever cross his own moral line about only executing the guilty who’ve gotten away with it…” the movie advanced in that way, and did it intelligently. It earns everything. The morality and ethics are really put to their tests here. It did not hit upon the social media response issue Tyler described in the new one, but had the public response factor in as constant background, part of the reality building.

    More important is how watchable it is. The lead is great. The character of ‘L’ was fascinating. I don’t think he’s easy to get right. The version of him in the new one seems to be letting people down, and in the American dub of the 2006 movie, his voice was played as gay stereotype. It’s like people have to give him some kind of nameable backstory definition, where in the film, he’s just nuanced.

    I don’t know how it would play after seeing the new one, because much of what is so engaging is the story itself, its ideas, as Tyler said. But for those interested at all, at least for those not steeped in any serialized version of the tale, I can say that this movie, the 2006 Japanese film, is a real corker, and a smart one too. With one caveat. The Death Demon who loves apples is not a great special effect. It’s not even a good one. It’s a great character, which helps, but I had to mentally write in, “Okay, this kid likes video games, so it’s showing up as a video game animation” because that’s about the quality of it. Again, the character is so interesting that it works in spite of that limitation, and its unreality even makes sense in the story.

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