Have you seen Grave of the Fireflies? It's the most powerful movie I've ever seen. I wondered if that was among the movies you've seen in your exploration of Japanese animation. BTW, it must be watched in Japanese w/ subs or it doesn't count.
oh yes I actually own the dvd for the. Totally forgot I had it. But yes, that was probably one of the most depressing movies I've seen in a while next to bridge to terabithia. When his sister thought the dirt was rice or something (been so long I forgot) since she was hitting extreme starvation... that really hit me.
The story was semi-autobiographical. The author of the source material lived through that experience, and his sister died. The book was intended to be an apology to his sister. The guilt he carried seems pretty obvious given the fate he assigned to Seita in the book/movie.
12 Angry Men A doubtful juror tries to convince eleven other biased jurors who are ready to railroad a guy that they might be wrong about the case. It all seemed pretty unbelievable, and much of the acting was stilted, preachy, and just awful. I have no idea how this is rated so highly on IMDB. Having sat on a Jury, the most realistic character was the guy who didn't give a shit and wanted to get it over with so he could go to a baseball game. Your average American jury consists of 12 of those guys. Someone like Henry Fonda would have been eliminated during voir dire.
Next week I shall see 3 movies in the theater. Which shall they be? Avengers, Hunger Games, and what...
I thought 12 Angry Men was overrated, and that's definitely not the first movie I'd recommend from the 50s. You should be looking at Japan or Sweden for the great movies of that era. Try Ikiru from Akira Kurosawa for example.
My cable was down last night but my internet was still working (there have been trucks working on the lines in my neighborhood the last few days), so I started down the IMDB top 250, and that was the first film on the list I hadn't seen. It was massively overrated. I felt like I was watching a cheesy made for TV movie about the importance of jury duty. The entire thing is set in one room, so it's completely reliant on the acting, but the acting is mostly bad. Some of it is laughably bad. It's #6 on the list, up there with The Godfather, Pulp Fiction, Empire Strikes Back, and Shawshank Redemption. It's definitely not in the same league as those films. It wasn't even particularly good.
I just saw a trailer for this upcoming Snow White and the Huntsman movie, which I hadn't heard anything about. It sounded pretty questionable in name alone, but I decided to at least watch the preview. Kristen Stewart? Are you kidding me? I'm convinced that if you took an x-ray of her head you'd see a silhouette of a hamster running around in wheel. Dumb as a fucking brick. She said "It's really been awesome to play a young girl that's so human." Wow. I may have to print that out and frame it on my wall. Usually I tend to give the vast majority of the credit of a movie being good or bad to the director and writer(s), but in this case simply having Kristen Stewart playing a key character almost certainly guarantees that this is going to be terrible. Charlize Theron actually looked intriguing as the evil queen, and she's a very decent actress who happens to also be stunningly beautiful. The trailer had me interested for a few moments. Then the Twilight blockhead appeared, and my tentative optimism vanished forever. BTW, did the studio pay licensing fees to Studio Ghibli? The imagery of the forest looks like they quite obviously copied Princess Mononoke. Anyone who has seen Princess Mononoke would instantly recognize the similarities in style and design.
@AKS Kristen Stewart is a complete bimbo who seems stoned most of the time. She has no charisma or screen presence, her line delivery is totally flat, and I really have no idea how or why she's a movie star. It's like they picked some random dumbass stoner chick off the street and made her an actress. Man on a Ledge Really far fetched airport thriller novel type stuff that could never happen on this planet. It was a seriously stupid movie. Rebel Without a Cause Cheesy, overacted, and boring. Another overrated dud from the 1950s. It had one sort of decent car racing scene involving a cliff that's not worth wading through the rest of the movie to see. The mentally ill gay friend character was more embarrassing than anything. Maybe a movie about angsty, rebellious teens was a novel concept in the 50s, but today it's a cliche. I also don't understand the hype about James Dean. He didn't seem like that great of an actor.
The first half was good, the second half was a turd. "Ooh check me out, I am but a humble baker boy, stabbed in the leg and left to live for some reason, possibly plot related, and I have left this helpful trail of blood for people to follow yet I will also use my level 85 camouflage skill to make myself look like a rock. I know how to do this because I used to decorate cakes! Never mind the fact that this probably took the makeup department 4 hours to apply, I can do it in minutes in a life or death situation whilst bleeding my own blood and being hunted by people that want me dead!" "Hi! I'm a little girl! Not only can I survive and hide from a band of hunters for several days, I can also do it whilst dragging around a hallucinating tub of lard that I quite clearly couldn't carry, whilst she is being hunted by evil peoples!" "Hi! I'm everyone in the Hunger games. I may be being hunted in a small forest but I shall continue conversing at full volume with no regards for my surroundings except when the plot calls for it!" "Hi! I'm Katniss's sister, she gave me this brooch and said I would be safe but I got picked for the hunger games on my first go. FML. I gave it back, obviously."
Battle Royale was equally nonsensical, and it was basically a remake of that. It was still entertaining.
The difference is that in one movie, they're a class drugged on a school trip and dumped on an island whereas in the other they've been doing survival training and stuffs and don't know the others from Adam..
Take a college level film appreciation course in your spare time and you'll have a better understanding of why older films like Rebel Without a Cause and 12 Angry Men are considered classics.
I already have taken a course, and while I understand why they're considered classics, it doesn't mean that they've aged well or hold up to modern viewing. There are films from that era like Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and High Noon that still hold up very well today. I expected High Noon to be a cheesefest, and on the contrary, it's one of the best westerns I've ever seen. 12 Angry Men and Rebel Without a Cause are dated and cheesy by modern standards. They don't hold up. You can view them as a product of an era sure, but what fun is that?
Why the fuck would someone need to take a course to enjoy a film. If you enjoy a film then you enjoy it, if you don't you don't, simples. If someone wants to call a film shit because they didn't like it then that is their choice!