Guaporense's live action thread

I decided to make a thread about the live action stuff I watched since I can only talk about animation in the animation thread.

Avalon (2001)

Reason for watching: Its a Mamoru Oshii film, its on Zotis top 100 and I also saw it in a top 10 modern Japanese films list.



Each Mamuro Oshii film that I watch I find myself more and more impressed. Considering that he is perhaps one of the greatest film makers , given his aesthetic innovations in the field of animation, and the fact that most of his work is science fiction is leading me essentially to conclude that Oshii might be the greatest Sci Fi filmmaker of all time.

One of the reasons for that is this excellent little know gem. It is directed and written by a Japanese using Polish actors and staff. Like Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala its hard to say wheter it is a Japanese film or not. The film in itself is an arthouse film incorporating science fiction elements in the form of a multiplayer virtual reality game.



Visually this film is pretty amazing. Specially considering it was made in 2001 with a shoe string budget. I found the CGI pretty good overall although still inferior to the Hollywood stuff made at the same time (Lord of the Rings).



I like that highly ambiguous atmosphere created by the film, and despite being a slow and highly experimental film it never is boring. Also, unlike most of Oshii's films, the dialogue is not filled with thick explicit philosophical content, which might be a bonus for some. I now feel the need to watch more of his live action stuff. Apparently there is a lot of good stuff he has done besides his animation.



So, think of Tarkovsky's version of The Matrix bit faster and with more stylized visuals and you get an idea of how this film would be like.

Revenant (2015)

Reason for watching: Famous movie that everybody is talking about, won several prizes recently.



This movie was a bit disappointing. Well, not quite because I don't have very high expectations regarding American movies these days, Hollywood is getting very uncreative and repetitive. Or maybe I am getting too old. I just find the tropes and clichés that characterize blockbuster movies to be rather dull and boring these days after watching so many of them. Still I loved Star Wars 7 so I am maybe being inconsistent here.

The movie had good elements: the cinematography and the acting were very good. I liked the visuals more than anything else by a huge margin. However, despite these intense visuals pushing the expressive limits of live action cinematography, the plot and characterization were severely lacking.

Since the movie was tremendously long at 2:40 hours, the lack of plot started to take a severe toll on my enjoyment of the movie and the atmosphere of the film's wasn't dense enough to carry it through its long duration (its not a Tarkovsky movie whose passion manages to make even its super long takes very interesting). Still while not a great movie its an attempt at making a great movie and that has to be praised.

Kamikaze Girls (2004)



Reason for watching: Saw it on the Kinema Junpo top 200 Japanese movies list. Ranked around 75th place, its supposed to be one of the finest Japanese films of the 21st century.



Now that was a memorable movie. And a film I strongly identified with, more so than most "macho" movies. This movie essentially represents what live action trying to mimick the aesthetics of girl's manga can accomplish, essentially being a a "live action anime" film.



I like visually rich movies. I always liked stuff like that because I guess I like colors and images, although my obsession with manga and the fact that many of my favorite movies are black and white, shows that I am perhaps not the color lover I might imagine to be. Visually this is a very creative film more creative than its plot which is a fairly standard story of friendship.



The direction of the film is also very impressive. It uses a very aggressive style to mimick the visual aggression found in manga. Overall proving that manga influenced film can be art and be great, disproving Miyazaki claims to the contrary (he blames manga to the decline of Japanese cinema).

I felt very much the same way that you did about The Revenant and then I re-watched it and found myself really enjoying it. I think most people don't realize the symbolism and fore shadowing that the shots in the film represent. I would say you learn more about Leo's character through the filmmaking more than you do the actual script and to me that's just an incredible feat.

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Well I guess these very slow movies are not in general my type of movie. I also didn't care for Beautiful.

Queued this up since you've been talking about it. One of three movies at the tip top of my watchlist.

It's kinda arthouse though. I don't know if you would like that type of movie since it's a very unconventional film.

We'll see. If it's anything like Assault Girls, you're probably right.

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I know Japan does make films which don't look like videogames or manga. Why don't you watch them instead?

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Japan makes movies that don't look like manga? Not really. Japan used to make movies that didn't look like manga, in the 1950's. Now, according to Miyazaki, the whole Japanese culture was infused with manga to the point where people's minds think like manga and the direction of films is such that the camera moves as if it was an eye looking at manga panels.

Miyazaki's work in fact is among the least manga looking movies Japan produced over the past 40 years. Because Miyazaki consciously choose to abandon the aesthetics of manga and instead incorporate more influence of stuff like Kurosawa and Italian neorealism, into his films. Most other animation is much more manga influenced.

Miyazaki blames the decline of Japanese live action cinema and also the low quality of most Japanese animation on the influence of manga. I would disagree with him because I find no problem with modern Japan's live action or animation. Copying the aesthetics of Hollywood and Kurosawa is also bad and lacking in creativity, at least manga influenced cinema is less predictable and appears creative to a foreigner unused to manga.

Where do we draw the line at a what constitutes a "manga aesthetic" when it comes to live-action anyway?

Miyazaki says that Japanese cinema nowadays is influenced by the way the brain reads manga, in other words, the manga mentality is applied to the way movies are directed.

That's different from copying down some common elements of manga (the style of jokes, etc) into movies.

Although it's also true that the way panels are drawn in manga tends to be much more cinematic than Western comics. Thank to Tezuka's influence, who since 1947 was drawing cinematic style manga. So the direction of influence goes both ways.

Examples?

Kamikaze Girls is the most obvious example I can think of. Another example is Love Exposure as well. Very much like manga in the way they are directed, as if the camera moved like manga panels, in the very aggressive way it does, very unlike older Japanese films.

Both these movies are among the top 10 best Japanese films of the decade according Kinema Junpo.

Kamikaze Girls has been on my watch list for a long time.

Guap, you should watch Noriko's Dinner Table.

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)



Reason for watching: Was nominated for the WW2 HoF and is a well regarded classic from Hollywood.

Review: Its true that as a person who has no identification with American culture from the 1950's and 1960's (being a Brazilian who grew up in the 90s and 2000s), its easy for me to be bored by most of Hollywood movies from the period (something I learned in the 50s HoF, although in that case ). However, some of these movies transcend their cultural specificity and are of universal appeal. One of those exceptional movies is Jugment at Nuremberg.

Hollywood movies made today have broader cultural appeal than old Hollywood movies as well. The reason being that modern Hollywood targets the global audience and not just the local clients (at least for the big budget blockbusters), and so appeal to persons who are not from the specific American cultural background.

This movie in particular is very intellectual because it's main interest for me was in terms of the ideas it presents. According to the philosopher Schopenhauer, the objective of art is the stylized presentation of already existing ideas (while science and philosophy is the discovery of ideas), and in this respect this movie is greatly successful. The point of the movie is the morality behind judging a person from acting under the law after the law changed: that means, it there exists such a thing as a law above all national laws, that is, if justice is absolute.

Another philosophical question is: is the responsibility for the murder of the people in the concentration camps of the person who operated the train going there? Is the person who pushed the button for dropping the atomic bombs responsible? Those cases are obvious, however, in the movie they were judging judges who sentenced people into being sterilized according to the Nazi laws.

They were acting according to the law but they were doing something that can be regarded as morally wrong, and also, they were fully conscious that what they were doing wasn't considered morally correct at the time because they lived under a democracy before Hitler came into power. However, I would think I would be in a hard situation if I lived in Germany in the 30's because it's not like I could easily move to another country to not be subject to the Nazi laws and I wouldn't think it's fair for people to be judged for things they did not have freedom under the law to not do. So I would disagree with the movie's conclusion.

Essay - Is TV cinema?



Yes. TV is a method of distribution of film, another method is through movie theaters. Essentially there is no difference between the two: both consist of watching a screen with sounds. They are the same medium.

The movie theater holds a nostalgic quality because for several decades it was the only method for the distribution of film. After the TV was invented most film production was and still is allocated for distribution through the TV, these were the so called "TV series". Movie theaters became second rate venue for watching a screen, since it's so much easier to watch it at home. Hence, movie theaters became the places where the more special films were released, to make the act of actually getting out of home to watch a screen become "special". From this came the distinction between "TV shows" and "movies".

Old movies involved much less attention and effort in their production: John Ford made about 100 movies Mizoguchi made about 70, Chris Nolan and James Cameron made 7-8 movies, respectively. As movies ceased to be the main form of screen entertainment and became a rare and more special occasion there was a divergence in the way film for movie theaters is produced, now they are special "events" involving a lot of effort in their production. Which explains why in the old days it took a couple of months for Ford to make a movie but now James Cameron is taking several years to make his Avatar 2.

TV shows, in the other hand, became the mass production method of choice for the mass produced film. Hence, on average, TV shows involve a lower degree of attention given to their production than film and are more like the movies of old directors like Ford's and Mizoguchi's. Thinking about it, Ozu's slice of life films can be understood as a "Japanese daily life" TV show of 2 hour long episodes that came out once a year. And modern soup operas such as the Brazilian telenovelas are produced at the rate of 150 hours of content a year, so fast that there is virtually no time spend consciously on the direction and acting. Still some telenovelas have pretty good writing.

So it's true that on average TV shows involve far less visual quality and less emphasis on visuals/images/composition than movies do. But that's on average: Madoka, for example, is a TV show that displays a level of focus on visuals and a level of visual creativity that far surpasses the typical movie and is comparable to classics like Kubrick's 2001 or Citizen Kane. TV can achieve indeed artistic greatness.

One shouldn't be prejudiced against TV shows and instead should be able to appreciate film released through any type of distribution method and understand and appreciate the differences as well.

...yeah alright, but comparing an animated fantasy series to something like Citizen Kane...