Change Your Image
femmesimonbelmont
Reviews
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Brilliant performances, stellar visuals and sound design
The night of the Hunter is a film not to be missed for the true film buff. A movie that keeps you on pins and needles for the whole ride is a rare sight indeed. There's nothing I can say about the cinematography that hasn't already been said. Beautiful, shocking, brilliant, rife with symbolism and expressionism. This entire movie, aside from the ending, feels like a child's nightmare, with that same feeling of inexorable dread with no end in sight, until abruptly, it's over. The performances are all wonderful, creating a world full of quirky characters that borders on surrealism. If you're a fan of Orson Welles and David Lynch, you'll almost certainly like this movie. The prints are pristine, and it's a feast for the senses and the mind. The Night of the Hunter is easily one of the greatest suspense films ever made. The only complaint I have is that it turns into a Christmas movie at the end, and the tonal shift is enough to give you whiplash.
Ben (1972)
Has no right to be as moving as it is
This is the story of a lonely boy and his rat. I cried like a baby at the end when the Micheal Jackson version of this song started playing. Part of that could be due to the weird resonance having a young M.J. singing the song lends to this film. He was also a greatly misunderstood soul.
This really is an odd little story, Ben is not painted as evil, just needing to find a place for his humongous family. There are many humorous scenes in this, such as women in towels running out of a health spa from rats (why? the rats don't care that you're in a state of undress)! Seeing a young Meredith Baxter stumbling along and losing her glasses in a filthy sewer is fun too.
There is much inadvertent hilarity to be gained from watching this too, such as six foot tall grown men apparently succumbing to maybe six rats climbing on them and dying for no apparent reason.
Let's not forget the scene with the detective commenting on the whacked out truck driver "I've seen people like this before, up in (somewhere in the U.S. mid-west) after pulling dead bodies out of a mine". WTF! Not to mention a rat being able to both read and understand the word "pesticide" written on a cheery yellow box! There's also rats unscrewing air-vents and riding on toy trains!
"Ben" has some serious pacing issues. The mini-recap at the beginning of Ben over-seeing Willard's death, was OK, but it's nearly a half hour into the film when Ben and Danny become friends, and the time in-between is interminably long. Danny and Ben seem to have been friends for about two days when the former writes "Ben's song". Quite rushed! Most of the middle is fairly good, even though things like the puppet show and Danny composing Ben's song drag a bit. Then at the end it just seems to go on forever. The last twenty minutes of this film, which felt like an eternity, is a horrible affair of flame throwers and the squeals of countless rats! The rats are so cute, especially Ben, that is is truly a gut-wrenching thing to watch.
There are very nice portraits of relationships here, especially Danny and his family, and Danny and Ben, which made the characters seem real enough to get me emotionally invested. The story of their friendship is truly beautiful.
In closing, this is not a go-to horror movie. It's not exactly a horror movie, though it mostly is in tone, and it's not exactly a drama either. This is a good movie for when you don't feel like you have a true friend in the world. Even Ben got a friend who loved him enough to risk his life, though he was a monster to everyone else.
Uchû no kishi Tekkaman Blade II (1994)
Pretty, but empty.
Good animation, OK music, horrible everything else. This series is a waste of time. I've heard for a long time that this series was awful, and I didn't want to believe it. I mean, it has Takaya/Tekkaman Blade right? How awful could it be?
Well I'll tell you how awful. The first two episodes of this six episode oav series are wasted on developing a character that basically disappears for the rest of the series. Between the first episode and the second episode is particularly bad. One character has a huge fight with another character, and then the next episode, it's never mentioned again. Then suddenly one of the characters is trying to be nice to the other one with no basis established for her doing so. The middle episodes were out and out boring, too. I saw them yesterday... yesterday! I can't tell you what happened in them!
There are plot threads dropped not only from the original Tekkaman Blade, but within the oav series as well! Character A states she's going to stop at nothing to make character B her boyfriend, but nothing ever comes of it. Seriously. And this is built up for like two or three episodes. Why did we have to waste so much time with them?
D-Boy is totally wasted here; Aki gets some screen time, but I'm not sure I liked it. Honda's around, which is cool, but where the hell is Levin?! Noal and Milly's fates are never really disclosed either, despite it being only ten years later.
Things finally get interesting in the last two episodes... but it has NOTHING to do with the premise it set up for Tekkaman Blade II, and NOTHING AT ALL to do with Tekkaman Blade! The whole plot line of the Radam continuing to assault earth, not addressed, not tied up at all. This was not a space opera, this was a soap opera largely set on earth. There is very little action.
I loved Tekkaman Blade because first and foremost, it was about the struggle of a single burning soul in the darkness to do the right thing, no matter how many times and how many, many ways he got screwed over. Something very rare in this romance obsessed era we're now living in. But Tekkaman Blade II... well we have a couple of characters with the potential for their stories to be about more than crappy love triangles, yet this is all we get!
This show was a slap in the face to fans of Tekkaman Blade. Don't bother wasting your time with this. I've heard so many negative things about Tekkaman Blade II over the years, I'm shocked the other reviews on this site are freaking glowing!
Sukûru deizu (2007)
School days = sleeping days
OK, the characterization is good. The animation is pretty to look at. The music is even nice. But, don't listen to all these other assholes. Seriously. The grand finale that everyone warns you about is sickening, but, not worth the wait. This isn't Escapism. What happens is... stupid. And kind of boring. Everyone says this show is so shocking, and "nice boat" but ... after all that build up, it's not worth it. I'm a big "When the Cicadas Cry" and "When the seacats cry" fan, so take this with a grain of salt if you must, but honestly Higurashi leaves this show so far in the dust it's ridiculous. Even with its poor animation. Just play a hentai game or something. I felt sorry for some of these characters, but couldn't sympathize with the protagonist in the slightest. Bleh. Jerry Springer is more entertaining than this. Stay away from this snoozefest. So not worth all the buildup it's getting.