Tag: review

The Charles is winning me over because they show a lot of anime. One that I was looking forward to was Miss Hokusai. This one is about the painter of that famous Japanese painting about the tidal wave and Mt. Fuji and also about his daughter. She is also a painter and contributes most of the story to the film. What little it was.

The problem with this film is that it is a slice of life anime. Now I love me a slice of life anime, but as a movie, I’m not too sure. It sort of rambled on from one vignette to another in their lives. There wasn’t a story to tell. It started on a bridge, and it ended on a bridge. In between, there wasn’t much story.

Perhaps, I had to go into the Japanese mode of looking at the emptiness. In the empty space, I found some things to like. There was a sequence in a brothel which was interesting. There was the passage of time marked by the growth of a puppy. There was the comedic side kick who wasn’t the best artist. There was the sempai who the daughter had a crush on. Pieces of life that made some sense in the movie.

Hopefully, the next anime at The Charles is a good one, too.

3 of 5 stars.

The Girl On the Train is similar to Gone Girl. It has crazy women bent on killing people. The men? They’re despicable, too. No one is good. Everyone is no good. And there are bodies.

The movie itself was okay. As a thriller, it did keep me guessing. Then when it ended I knew, I’d been had, because this one writes itself.

Now watch it. It seems we have a girl problem.

3 of 5 stars.

The Magnificent Seven ain’t no Seven Samurai. It ain’t no Magnificent Seven of Yul Brenner fame. It’s its own movie, a western born in the 21st century. With a diverse cast and its own agenda.

It doesn’t make the wild bunch do it for honor. They do it for the money. And for personal reasons. This last fact changes the movie into revenge. No one wins. Even the farmers lose. You the view do as well.

It’s a decent action movie, but again, no Seven Samurai.

3 of 5 stars.

Suicide Squad cleared the low bar I had set for it. I liked it better than Batman V Superman. But that doesn’t mean it was a bad film and a terrible waste of time. What I do for my readers! I watch the films that you don’t so that you don’t have to ever.

The major problem is that you don’t know any of these characters at all. Maybe you’ve seen them, but you don’t know them. And you won’t care either. Sort of like one of the squad members introduced in the middle of the film only to be used as cannon fodder.

The best was the flame guy, but he’s not gonna make it to the sequel. If there is one. God help us.

2 of 5 stars.

I was a victim of a bad mom. She took me to see Bad Moms. Not that it was a bad movie. It just wasn’t good.

First, who can believe that Mila Kunis can have 2 grade school aged children? That is unreal right there.

Second, she wasn’t bad at all. Just her attitude was bad. I’ve seen movies where the mother has left behind the kids to fend for themselves and eventually die. Mila Kunis did not leave her kids alone. She just got drunk and partied hard. Plus, she fought the PTA. Everyone fights the PTA!

Third, even the PTA was sympathetic. They were all high strung, but just a little bit of partying would help them. And it did.

Last, this was a better movie when LL was in it — Mean Girls.

3 of 5 stars.

Being a Japanophile, finding out that Our Little Sister was playing at The Charles, I wasn’t going to miss out on it. I read about it probably late this past winter. If it was about an imouto, then I am there. It is and it isn’t. It is very Japanese. I wanted to be enchanted by it, but it was fine.

Our Little Sister is about 3 sisters who upon attending their estranged father’s funeral invite their younger half-sister to live with them in their maternal grandmother’s home. Their offer is generous and heart warming as it comes off the cuff as they boarded a train. The younger sister accepts. She doesn’t have a father anymore and she doesn’t want to impede on her father’s third wife. No family ties, so she wants to make them with her older sisters.

The film goes flitting about stories and moments for the sisters in the house. It is a true slice-of-life movie as there isn’t much of a plot or much of drama to propel the story. There is no one story arc, but that of showing the sisters being a family. The mother comes back to bring some drama, but she is too flighty of a person to stir up the home.

It may be titled (in the English) for the little sister, but the main protagonist was the eldest. She was an Ozu female – burdened with being true to the family and to liking the matriarch position. The second was the wild one always drinking. I would love to drink with her. The third, the original imouto, was pleasingly young, an imouto if there isn’t one.

I dug the film because it reminds me of Ozu. His explorations of the family dynamics, tradition keeping, and old versus young in Japan fascinates me to no end.

A side note: I’ve seen one movie from the director, Hirokazu Koreeda, already: Nobody Knows. That one was a harrowing tale of a mother abandoning her children and letting the eldest, 13 year old, attempt to keep his siblings alive. It had a Grave of the Fireflies kind of thing as the ending made you sad…

3 of 5 stars.

Hollywood is bereft of ideas. Jason Bourne, a sequel that no one asked for, is a prime example of the death of creativity in movie land.

It’s a movie that is unnecessary. Bourne’s story was done. He should’ve stayed hid. Yet, like Al Pacino in Godfather III, they kept pulling him back in.

It starts with Julia Stiles showing back up. She’s been gone from Hollywood movies so it was a surprise to see her back. She too should’ve stayed hid because any girl linked with Bourne ends up in a sniper’s sights. She pulls Bourne in with the most hoary of cliches – it was Bourne’s father who started Treadstone and that Bourne was recruited because the government had to lock him as the country’s most steely assassin-spy.

And that was it. A back story which was dumb. He was a better character because of the mystery.

This will be a terrible summer for movies.

1 of 5 stars.

Star Trek Beyond is the best movie I’ve seen this summer. Thoroughly enjoyable. Currently, I think that it is the best film of the summer. I’ll admit, though, that this summer has been pretty bleak in terms of movies. They have all been mediocre at best.

Anyhow, Star Trek Beyond wants to bring the franchise to the status quo as a television series. It is ready now to boldly go where no one has gone before now that all movie baddies have been defeated.

4 of 5 stars.

I read a review of Lights Out that said the movies sub-text became actual text. Horror films seem to deal with things we can’t really handle in an imaginary way. For this one, the fright was all about depression. That’s all that needs to be said because you can imagine what that the ghost/haunting was about depression. Depression made all too real and literal.

But the word part, the movie did not scare me. I went home, went to bed, closed out the lights in my house. I wanted to be scared of the dark. I wasn’t. I put the lights out on this one.

2 of 5 stars.