A while back I wrote about Ralph Bakshi’s animated adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. I seem to be one of the brave few who actually did enjoy the movie, but mostly because of the few things it got right. Overall, the best I can say about it is that it’s not as bad as people say, but when that’s the best defense of a film one can offer, well, it’s probably not a good movie.
Last weekend I wrote up a recommended reading list as a permanent page, and as I came to the end I briefly considered adding a section for comics, but decided against it because my goal was to direct people to higher art; pop culture already has enough promotion.
While thinking about some of the graphic novels I may have added, I noticed that most of them were works that I’d only really recommend to someone specifically interested in the medium. I took a look at the general fiction section and considered whether I’d encourage anyone to read them before even the relatively lighter works, like The Things They Carried or The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and the answer was no, I wouldn’t.
A few years ago, I wrote a post called “What’s Up with Anime Fans?” In short, I considered why anime and its fandom make some people, including some of its own fans, uncomfortable, and concluded that the problem isn’t anime in itself so much as the culture surrounding it, and that the fandom’s awkwardness is a self-reinforcing phenomenon. I still agree with most of that post, but it raises a couple broader questions that may be worth considering. First, can we judge a medium by its fans? Second, can we judge a person’s character by the media he consumes?
Though I’ve been reading Watamote for a few years now, first via scanlations, then by importing the Japanese graphic novels, I’ve yet to write about it directly. I did talk about the anime adaptation shortly after it aired about a year and a half ago, and my thoughts on that still reflect my opinion of the first few volumes of the source material. As much as I love the early part of the comics, it is a formula that runs a high risk of growing stale - Tomoko comes up with a scheme to get popular quickly, or to impress someone else, this plan blows up in humiliating fashion, Tomoko learns little or nothing, repeat. Luckily, author Tanigawa Nico (actually a two-person writer/artist team) inserts some variety by giving Tomoko other people to interact with, early on her brother Tomoki, her cousin Kii, and middle-school friend Yuu. These volumes add another interesting dynamic by introducing Komiyama, a mutual friend of Yuu, and who has a crush on Tomoki. While we still see Tomoko making a fool of herself on her own like the early chapters, the most interesting parts tend to be those involving the trio of Tomoko, Yuu, and Komiyama. The added interactions also make Tomoko more easily relatable for those who, while uncomfortable in social situations, aren’t quite helpless as she appeared to be early on.
Watching films from the 1930’s and earlier takes some patience from modern viewers. Even studio productions can feel amateurish, as performers tended to overact, the camera was generally static, and early sound films often lacked background music. That said, there was some interesting experimentation going on in a still relatively new medium, so viewers willing to do without some modern polish can find some genuinely interesting material.
Which leads me to 1934’s Maniac, directed by Dwain Esper, which was produced outside the studio system and was thus free to include things like extra violence and bare breasts. Before getting too excited, though, keep in mind this was still 1934, so there’s not really anything a modern audience would find remotely shocking.
This post was written with my bear cap on.
I got my first job in late October 2004; it was only as a temporary hire for a one-week special event, but for me that first pay cheque was an absolute fortune. I don’t remember what all I got with it, but do remember the one thing that mattered - a copy of serial experiments lain, which I count as my first anime.
<- Uncle Walt-a-thon: Sword in the Stone
It gives me a little sense of pride that mine must be one of the few blogs that can post a review of The Jungle Book right after a post on Doctor Zhivago, and it’s not even out-of-place.
Anyway, I already wrote up a closer for this series, but I did want to include The Jungle Book since it was the last film Disney worked on (though he passed away while it was still in production). Also, it was likely my favourite film as a child. I couldn’t even guess how many times I watched this movie before I turned ten, but it was enough that, even though I haven’t seen it in a solid decade-and-a-half, I could still remember every scene, almost every line, even. Only Robin Hood and Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day are even in the same ballpark for my favourite and most-watched childhood films.
You know a movie’s going to be good when it opens with an overture. I’ve actually not seen any other films that have one (though a few people on twitter have informed me that it used to be fairly common for old film epics), but I knew it was a promising start to this latest film about Soviet-induced misery, Doctor Zhivago.
Unlike the last two installments, which were either obscure (The Chekist) or at least not very well-known in the United States (Katyn), Zhivago is one of the better-known Hollywood epics, and “epic” is just the right word for it - with a wide-ranging plot and a run-time of three hours and twenty minutes, it’s a project just to watch. Fortunately, though, it doesn’t feel that long; the pacing if fairly quick, and it never dwells on a particular scene for very long. It’s also a visually interesting film, with a variety of settings and some unusual camerawork (e.g., following a character by looking in through outside windows). A bit distractingly, one can also play a game of “place the accent;” it has a mix of American and British actors, a couple French minor characters, and a couple guys who do a Russian accent, which is rather confusing.
Since the last film I saw about Commie democide was such good times, how could I resist more? Unfortunately, it’s slim pickings in the murderous Marxism genre; I had to go to Russia for The Chekist, and this time I had to look to Poland, for 2007’s Katyn. (As an aside, shouldn’t there be more movies like this? We Americans fought a decades-long Cold War against Communist states, and while there are several films featuring them as villains, there’s not really a Western film that I’m aware of that’s like a Soviet Schindler’s List. Instead, there are only these relatively recent Polish and Russian films.)
The shortest way to describe The Chekist, which covers the 1920’s mass executions carried out by the Cheka, the early Soviet Union’s secret police, would be to call it a Holocaust movie, but instead of National Socialists we have International Socialists. That does give the film, directed by Aleksandr Rogozhkin, some novelty value since, though I can think of several films off the top of my head that deal with Nazism, if not the Holocaust specifically, the only movie I can think of to cover Communist massacres is the Polish film Katyn. If nothing else, for those who have a visceral reaction to the word “Nazi” but not “Communist,” this film should help fix that.