Impressions

This post was written with my bear cap on.

<- Uncle Walt-a-thon: Sword in the Stone

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.

Yep, going back to subtitles for this monthly - hey, remember when Bibliophile’s Journal was going to be a monthly series? Well, we just skipped a month or ten. No big deal.

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.

I went to see Miyazaki Hayao’s newest film, The Wind Rises, yesterday at the Dallas Angelika where I could see the subtitled version. The crowd was fairly small, about a dozen people, but I suppose that’s not too bad for a subtitled film that’s been out for a couple weeks already on a Wednesday evening. Part of me felt obliged to see it, because I’d failed for no good reason to see Howl’s Moving Castle or Ponyo, so I haven’t seen a Ghibli film in theatre since Spirited Away. Also, I’d like to support any 2D animated films that come out, but haven’t seen many chances to do so. Apparently, the Angelika is showing a Tiger and Bunny film; based on the synopsis it’s an original film and I haven’t seen the TV series, so I’ll have to skip that one, but I’ll have to check out the Anglika occasionally to see if they show anything else. They did have A Certain Magical Index showing in their café, but the sound was muted.

I’ll give Uzumaki this: I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Author Ito Junji’s concept sounds like one hell of a creative writing challenge: the town of Kurouzu-cho is cursed by spirals. Every chapter repeats the “spiral” motif somehow, and though some episodes succeed more than others, I have to tip my hat to Ito just because he could write a three-volume comic using such an odd hook.

I went to see Evangelion 3.0 at the Plano Angelika theatre yesterday, and though it was less fun than it could’ve been since the person I’d planned to see it with had to be out-of-state, I still enjoyed the experience and thought I’d share a few brief thoughts about it.

Once in a while, I come across a work of fiction that should be better than it is, and unfortunately Bram Stoker’s Dracula fits firmly into that category. The premise carries the novel through, and the story does have some strong points, but Stoker does a couple of things that undermine the whole work.