Change Your Image
shin_gallon
Reviews
Batman Begins (2005)
The Dark Knight Reborn
Okay, everyone that knows me knows I really love the first two Tim Burton Batman movies. However...Batman Begins is the best Batman movie ever. It explores the character's motivations with remarkable depth, and actually takes it's time letting the plot and characters develop. It's little over an hour into the film before Bruce Wayne ever even puts the cape and cowl on. This Batman is dark, and vengeful...more so than even Burton's Batman films. Christian Bale is wonderful in the role, bringing a truly brooding intensity to the Dark Knight, and Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon is perfect as well. The rest of the cast fits like a glove, as well (my only real complaint is that Ken Watanabe didn't get as much screen time as I expected, but it's just as well). What strikes me most about this movie is how believable it is: there's not a whole lot of moments where you look at the film and go "no way that could really happen". The characters are the heart of the story here, not their gimmicks or even their "wonderful toys". I truly hope this version of Batman continues on: If handled correctly it could knock Spiderman out of the running for best superhero movie series. 10/10
Kaubôi bibappu: Cowboy Bebop (1998)
Amazingly stylish
Incredibly slick, with style to spare, this is a superb series. From the sleek character designs to the jazz driven soundtrack, Cowboy Bebop is one of those anime that you can show to people that don't like anime, and have them loving it. Spike is a total badass, Jet is just plain cool, and Faye...oh, Faye. I could drone for hours about her (the fact that the amazing Megumi Hayashibara does her voice has a lot to do with why I love her, I'll admit). Tight, well written stories and superbly directed action sequences mix with likeable characters and a sense of polish to the series. Highly recommended. One other thing, if you can, watch this series subtitled. The dub voices are okay, but the Japanese cast is spectacular, and really have a lot more emotion to their reading.
Armageddon (1998)
One of the worst movies I've ever seen.
Not only is this movie horribly, horribly bad from a movie making standpoint, it also has flaws in the science big enough to fly a 747 through. Constant, even gravity on the Mir? Yeah, right. Slingshot around the moon in less than a minute? Maybe in the Starship Enterprise. Split the asteroid in half with 1 nuke, only 800 feet below it's surface? That's like trying to split an apple in half with a capgun cap buried half a centimeter under it's skin. And don't get me started on the editing. I don't know what's gotten into filmmakers these days, but I like for movies to at least stay with one shot long enough for me to tell what's going on. The "monkey on crack" editing style of this movie gave me a headache fifteen minutes in.
Other problems include the fact that at the end of the movie, not only did I not care a bit about any of the characters, I couldn't even tell you their names. There was not a single moment of genuine emotion in this entire movie. Every time they wanted a reaction, they'd crank some Aerosmith music to tell you how you should feel in that scene. I honestly felt no emotional attachment to anyone in this movie. Other things just made no sense at all, like the machine guns on the moon rover things they had. What was that about? Were they expecting to find Marvin the Martian on the asteroid and riddle him with bullets?
Bad editing, no emotion, bad script, bad, bad science. It all adds up to bad movie. Avoid at all costs.
Roots Search: Shokushin buttai X (1986)
Make the pain stop...
Painful is the best way to describe watching this. Everything from the bad character designs to the incoherent script to the incompetent directing makes this one of the absolute worst anime I've ever seen. 4 scientists on a space station (the whole station is huge, yet has only 4 staff members? Huh?) find a spacecraft where all but one of the crew members has been killed. They also find an alien on board. Do you think the alien killed them? Thankfully, at least ONE of these 4 is smart enough to realize "Hey, we should get rid of this thing" and they fire it off into space (so it can kill other people later, I guess). Well, guess what? Part of this alien is still on the ship and starts killing them with horrors from their past as some lame excuse. Throw in some ridiculous love thing between the only female character and the survivor from the spacecraft (along with a nice trippy sequence involving them getting naked while the alien is chasing them) and some nonsense about it being a "messenger of God" and a totally pointless, vague ending and you have a bad, bad way to spend 45 minutes of your life (unless you enjoy doing the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" thing yourself, in which case this is ripe for plunder). Oh, did I mention the pointless dialog where she starts going on about "why God created us" for no reason? Get me out of here! The ONLY good thing is that it was subtitled, but even that wasn't much help.