Weekly Whatever!

[bad_juice]

mine might be longer than a week's worth, since i didn't get around to participating in the last one. we'll see!

nausicaa of the valley of the wind doesn't hold up nearly as well as i thought it would. maybe it's unfair to hold this against it, due to the era it was created in, but a lot of the animation looked pretty cheap and unconvincing.

Comments

[remote]

Nausicaä has pants on underneath the skirt, dude. Miyazaki has always been pretty outspokenly against (pandering to) the male gaze wrt his female protagonists.

I will just add here that I finally watched Noriko's Dinner Table while I was sick this week and yeah, it was great. Now I want to watch Suicide Club again. I'm also going to have to watch more of Sion Sono's films... Though I'm still fairly convinced that Cold Fish was a dud compared to these two, I have high hopes for Love Exposure.

[bad_juice]

if they are pants they are the exact same skin tone as the rest of her body, and do not wrinkle ever. so even if they were intended to be pants, it is pretty much impossible to tell the difference. also lines of her ass are still clearly visible in several shots.

[remote]

They're kind of off-white, actually, but it might be difficult to tell. If you ever see "lines of her ass" I think it's because she's doing something, maybe jumping onto her glider and flying off, and... people have butts? It's not even close to being anything like the typical anime panty-shot. I mean, even if an over-the-shoulder shot of her diving toward the ground on her glider ends up showing her butt as she moves forward it's just... a detail, not something meant to be ogled, and I feel like it's kind of silly to think she's just not wearing anything underneath? (The "skirt" is just the bottom of her coat past her belt, anyway.) I would agree that the coloring could have been less subtle, but I never once thought she was bare-assed or that I was supposed to be trying to stare up her skirt instead of looking at the actual action on screen.

[bad_juice]

i don't know, dude. i just watched this movie yesterday and there are definitely at least a few different shots in which her body takes up a huge chunk of the screen and the shot is looking from behind as she flies on her glider, and it's just a whipping skirt dress thing and pants or whatever. i could not at all figure out how the shots were supposed to be anything besides staring straight up her dress. like, i want to believe you are correct, but it disturbed the fuck out of me for almost all of the movie.

[cut_dead]

At first glance I thought you watched Todd Haynes' Safe.

[bad_juice]

i kinda wish i had!

it is a movie i don't know why i haven't seen yet.

[danschank]

in complete agreement about the avengers, save chris evans being the best part (that would go to ruffalo, imo... this is the first movie that actually makes intelligent use of the hulk's potential as well, at least in the first set-up before he randomly begins "controlling" the beast). i also thought johannson was fine, and had the best action sequences, but i will always prefer hand-to-hand combat to watching a bunch of video game BS bump into each other. as for chris evans, i hate captain america and all the unchecked patriotism surrounding him that i'm unable to take off my embattled-15-year-old goggles long enough to see his performance at all. so maybe you're right?

also, whedon really fumbles the ball on character development. like, are we really supposed to care about the dude with the baseball cards? or about renner and johannson's combat history/potential romance? or about any of that thor/loki hoo hah, which at least was mostly played for laughs?

anyway, the real reason i'm writing is to mention waco: the rules of

[bad_juice]

my problem with johansson is that it was so apparent to me that she was not even close to doing any of the stunts. all of the martial arts work is weird hair flipping everywhere and no distinct shots of her face, exactly as it was in iron man 2. to me scar jo is one of the most boring big name actresses in hollywood, so i can't really abide why they would hire an actor to play a badass martial artist who is both a) a completely boring actress with a character that requires very little emotional range and b) completely incapable of performing any of the martial arts scenes. like, even carrie anne-moss in the matrix, who i am guessing was no martial artist in real life (and is also a totally boring actor), still went through enough training that they could use her face in action sequences. scar jo is like close up of her doing something with her face, cut to weirdly angled wider shot to completely obscure her face for several shots, then back to a close up for half a second. the scenes that require normal acting i was okay with,

[danschank]

eh, i like scarjo... her smoky voice kinda fits whedon's dialogue. and the "stunt double" problem was WAAY worse on buffy (something that could have been corrected with the mega-budget, but whatever). i also think she's a better actor than SMG, which has more to do with SMG being bad than scarjo necessarily being good.

the only thing i can guess about the existence of this movie is that whedon agreed to do it in exchange for being able to do something more personal and less methodically structured for the second one.

i doubt it. this is too major a commitment/paycheck to be some orson welles move where you get to fund a big, unpopular project. plus, if anyone has the built-in-audience/nerdboy cred to basically do as he pleases in the superhero genre, it's whedon. i haven't seen cabin in the woods or read his comics runs (i hear his x-men is good), but i feel like whedon is kinda losing his touch, to be honest. i also think it's damn tough to fit a personal vision into a marketing vehicle with a half-dozen franchises relying on it.

[bad_juice]

ha

[unskilledlabor]

I sort of watched Lonesome (Pal Fejos, 1928) while recording commentary for it, so I didn't get to hear the soundtrack, but it's mostly a silent movie anyway, so it almost counts? Visually it's really interesting; tons of effects and great usage of crowds to create a palpable sense of malaise and disconnection in a teeming city environment. I'm interested in seeing more from Fejos; this is strikingly creative, despite a very mundane story.

Finally got around to seeing Enter The Void, and I certainly have a respect for it, but it didn't really touch me the way Irreversible or I Stand Alone did. All the flyovers begin to feel like a very long riff, and the payoff is nice but not shattering. Brilliant color, of course.

[cabingoat]

are you part of the eastman restoration at all? i love love lonesome.