I've seen 4 films this month (so far):
-
Charisma, by Kiyoshi Kurosawa:
I'd wanted to see this film for years, and finally managed to get a copy of it. It's a 1999 film and somewhat slow, definitely not for everybody, but I really liked it.
If you're familiar with Kiyoshi's works, you might want to try and give it a shot some day. But if you do, be sure to watch
Cure before
Charisma, it's somewhat important that you do.
Also the movie stars Koji Yakusho who's one of my favorite Japanese actors. He's really great, and he's also the main protagonist of
Cure, so yeah. Those two films would make for a nice double-bill night, but again they're not for everyone.
-
Like Me was the one I saw afterwards. Just watch this teaser:
This is another one that I've wanted to watch since I first saw the teaser a year ago.
From the looks of it, you can clearly tell that it's one of those films that can either be really good and interesting, or a complete waste of time.
Me, I wanted to watch it because it looked visually interesting. I wanted to give it a shot, then again the movie was just 80mins long so yeah.
It was pretty much a forgettable film, even though it DID have its moments. I'm still happy I got to see it, but yeah there just wasn't much substance to it, but it was interesting to see it unravel.
-
Manifesto was next, which I saw two days ago:
It's a film where Cate Blanchett plays a series of characters, each one monologuing their own manifesto.
That's pretty much the film. Some bits were interesting, while others would've benefited from a slightly longer exposition.
The film felt like it was over pretty quickly because of the whole back-and-forth between characters, so yeah. Different kind of film experience, but it wasn't hard to sit through in any way.
- and then there's
Ready Player One, which I finally got to see yesterday.
Once again, I got pretty much what I was expecting.
I think I enjoyed the first part of the film a lot more than the second half, but the film felt very rushed and had a lot of problems.
Character development was pretty much non-existent, the whole "rebellion" part was shoved in extremely hard and out of nowhere, and the ending was kinda... I dunno, I expected something else.
I don't usually watch this type of blockbusters, but yeah. Going into it I already knew that this was - somewhat - a kid's film and that there just weren't THAT many routes that the film could take.
So yeah, pretty much what I expected, I think.
This is the kind of story that I wouldn't have minded if they made a trilogy out of it, or even a Netflix series or something.
You would've had more time to develop the characters and whatnot. As for the "references"? They're either blink it and you'll miss it, or they're extremely on the nose when mentioned by the characters and just don't sound genuine at all, so yeah.
The movie had its moments, but overall it's just trying to look cool: there's no depth or development at all to it. Even the romantic angle doesn't make any sense and had no business in being in it, but that's how these films go.
So far I've seen 30 movies this year, which is pretty much the amount of films I would usually see per year (2017 and 2016 I saw less than 40 movies each I think). Trying to change all that and I'm succeeding :P
