This is an incredibly lush and detailed anime movie, with tons of action, some truly imaginative imagery, and a unique, densely imagined – if somewhat repulsive – alternate history world. But it’s just too darn long. It just seems to go from climax to bigger climax – and even when it finally reaches the end, it […]
Read more "Shisha no teikoku [The Empire of Corpses] (2015)"This is a strange, strange, strange little film. It is as far from the Disney model of animation as it is possible to get, and it makes Ralph Bakshi’s edgy underground films look remarkably…conventional by comparison. At least as far as his animation style goes. It also borders on being pornographic – let’s call it […]
Read more "Mutant Aliens (2001)"Sometimes you just have to wonder what audience they had in mind when they made a film. Don’t get me wrong, this is a dazzling effort, full of great beauty and technical wizardry. But exactly who did they think was going to go see it? One suspects they may have been inspired by Heavy Metal, which came […]
Read more "Rock & Rule (1983)"Back in 2000, the SciFi Network (yes, they spelled it right back then) had a short-lived short film show called Exposure. It showed a mixture of SF, horror, fantasy and experimental films. It was one of those shows I always taped because of the large amount of padding – and because there really weren’t a lot of good SF […]
Read more "Plug (1998)"If you’d asked me to name the best videogame film adaptation, I probably would have ducked the question by answering Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, which, while an incredible (if silly) film, isn’t actually based on a videogame, just on the whole notion of gaming. On the whole, most of the ones I’ve seen seem to […]
Read more "Ratchet & Clank (2016)"We frequently have movie nights here, with a varying assortment of friends and family. Without question, our most unsuccessful movie night ever was Evangelion 2.22 And I do mean ever. We actually had a fairly large crowd that night, and while most of them hadn’t seen 1.11, some of us had (although, yes, it had […]
Read more "Evangelion: 3.33 You Can (Not) Redo [Evangerion shin gekijôban: Q] (2012)"It’s Oshii-Lite. It could almost be a drinking game, where you take a shot every time you see something that is a copy of Mamoru Oshii, like the shots of spent casings piling up on the floor, or all the semi-mystical talk of things that have to do with the nature of man. It would […]
Read more "009 Re: Cyborg (2012)"