Rurouni Kenshin, movies 2 and 3 (spoilers)

Lots of spoilers. OTOH: I wouldn't recommend these movies to the people who haven't read the manga anyway. The whole trilogy relies very heavily on knowing more than the movies tell you. The movies are great if you have read the manga; not sure how they compare to the anime.

Saw Rurouni Kenshin: Kyoto Inferno and Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends. For some reason I'd assumed that the first of these is the Kyoto arc of the manga, and the second is the revenge arc. This is not the case: they are both the Kyoto arc, and are meant to be watched together. Kyoto Inferno ends in a cliffhanger - one that's not in the manga. Kyoto Inferno is paced quite slowly; The Legend Ends is full of action.

Hmm, does that mean they are gonna do the revenge arc sometime later? I certainly hope so.

The good things: the casting. Everyone is very much in the spirit of the manga, and everyone looks just right. Except, maybe, that Aoshi is way older than he should be. The guy (Yusuke Iseya) is still very much in the spirit of the manga, though, and does his best with whatever the screenwriters have done with his character. The acting is good all over. The whole thing is visually beautiful. And the fighting, wow!

I can't remember any other movie where you have 4 heroes (well, "heroes" is a bit stretching it) fighting the villain and not the other way around. Unlike the movie villains our heroes figure out fairly quickly that it's not a good idea to take turns, and they attack the villain all at once. And they still have a fairly hard time.

The bad things: pretty much everything they did to the plot.

First of all, Aoshi. In the movie Aoshi a) has no logical reason to hate Kenshin at all, b) has been fucked in the head since the beginning of Meiji rule, which is like 10 years, and c) appears to have been insane to begin with. It is quite unclear why he just started to look for Kenshin now, and why Misao likes him (he's been insane since Misao was what, five?).

Second, the government. In order to save its face it does a number of things none of which is likely to result in any face-saving.

Third, "the ball of stupid". In the end, everyone appears to have caught some brain disease causing them to make tactically unsound decisions. It does work out for the good guys, because the bad guys are similarly afflicted.

Still, had a good time and gonna buy the DVD. So there.

Prometheus (major spoilers)

Saw Prometheus yesterday. Oh dear...

It's not that I regret seeing it, or that it was boring. In that way, it was OK. But it was facepalm all the way. I mean the concentration of morons not only outdid all major US and Finnish parties and their conventions, it outdid Suomen Työväenpuolue STP, and they have more candidates than brain cells.

Must admire the spirit of the protagonist though. After finding the aliens who created humans and then decided to kill them all with a horrible biological weapon, losing her colleague and boyfriend (one person) to contamination, being impregnated by the alien and betrayed by her crew, performing a caesarean abortion on  herself with a help of a fancy gadget without even taking her underwear off (was there ever a woman anywhere who had an abortion with her panties on?), and finding out that one of the aliens is still alive, she is still quite in the spirit of scientific discovery. I would probably be more in the spirit of killing the damn alien and nuking the whole installation from the orbit. Of course maybe that's why she is a two-for-one archaeologist and biologist, and I washed out of scientific discovery 15 years ago, and nowadays write Android apps for a living with no chance of ever going to a planet with evil aliens.Notes to self:

- If I go to another star system to meet the aliens who have created us, it might not turn out to be all about hugs and puppies,
- Taking my helmet off on another planet might not be a bright idea, even if the gas concentrations are OK,
- If I am a very old person trying to get a key to immortality from the aliens, telling my robot to bring random stuff to my spaceship and infect random people with it might not be the best survival strategy,
- Little worms crawling out of my eyeballs might indicate a serious health problem. Maybe even a contagious one.
- Waking up a hostile powerful being after all its coworkers died trying to develop weapons to wipe out the humankind? Might not be a good idea.
- In a scary situation running away from my party and getting lost is a bad idea. If I happen to be the person who has mapped the area in first place, and still in direct video contact with the ship that has that map, it also takes a bit of effort.
- If I have to watch my coworkers from the aforementioned ship, I should not abandon my post for the sake of a sexual intercourse. Not even if the guy is really cute, and the coworkers being watched relly aren't.
- If I am a biologist, and even if I am not, I probably shouldn't try to pet an alien creature that looks like a pissed-off cobra.

Movies (spoilers for The Three Musketeers, The Skin I Inhabit and Midnight in Paris)

I've been having a movie week, also known as my-ticket-booklet-is-about-to-expire week.

The Three Musketeers was in fact quite enjoyable, in spite of raping the plot, the history and the laws of physics in spectacular and unspeakable ways. For one thing, it's the first movie I'd ever seen that has a teenage d'Artagnan, like in the book, played by an actual teenage actor.

I've wondered about this before. The book's d'Artagnan is a teenager, and does a lot of stupid things that teenagers do, especially while being out of school, away from adult supervision, and hanging around with deadly weapons. In the movies he tends to be played by men in their thirties, and not in a Luke Skywalker-like boyish-looking-man-playing-a-teenager way, but in a way that implies that the character is an adult, which makes the viewer really wonder about his IQ.

Another delightful thing about the movie was that the royal couple were not in their 50s, as they often are in the movies, but fairly close to their historical age of 24. Explains a lot about their behavior, I guess, although most people have more sense at that age.

Speaking about the book: the plot made me wonder quite a lot about the queen. When I first read it at the age of 8 or 9 it was not clear to me a) why the queen would get into that much trouble for giving some stupid piece of jewelry to that Buckingham guy, and b) considering that she knew that disappearance of said piece of jewelry would cause trouble when discovered, why didn't she give him something less unique, like roses and chocolate. Actually I still haven't figured those out, maybe I ought to reread the book.

In any case - the movie was fun, although in a way that made me wonder about the recreational drugs used by cast and crew.

About The Skin I Inhabit: I always wonder why I like watching Almodovar's movies. I mean, the characters tend to be insane and their motivations incomprehensible. This time, however, Almodovar surprised me by having a character who appeared to be absolutely sane apart from the heavy use of hard drugs.

Midnight in Paris was very enjoyable in "whee, I love Paris" way, because, well, I do. Apart from that, I find it really annoying when the Deep Understanding to which the protagonist comes at the end of the movie is obvious to the viewer from the very beginning. I mean, for fuck's sake, if you were walking around Paris and suddenly found yourself in the year 1920, how long would it take you to figure out that those guys don't have antibiotics and modern dentistry? Not to mention that there is a fairly big war coming up in 19 years? And that the Internet is nice to have?

RIP Claude Chabrol

Claude Chabrol has died today.

The obituaries will probably say that "one of the most important directors of the French New Wave", etc., etc., but I have never really understood what the New Wave was all about, or rather what its different directors had in common. This one, though, I actually like. Quite a lot. He was really good in creating a certain sort of suspense.

Oh well. If there is a heaven, they are gonna have really good suspense thrillers there real soon. Since we aren't there, I really recommend his movies that I am sure Orion will be showing pretty soon to honor his memory.

First Blood (spoilers)

Saw First Blood for the first time ever. I knew what it was about; what surprised me is that almost all the characters had that single-mindedness normally reserved for the Evil Guy's nameless henchmen.

OK, the protagonist has obvious mental problems. OK, the sheriff liked to be mean to helpless drifters (that kind of people usually tend to back off when the victim turns out to be not so helpless, but let's assume this one was dedicated to being mean). OK, some cops probably hit the uncooperative detainees with only like-minded cops for witnesses.

But a police officer trying to shoot and kill a fugitive? In the presence of a disapproving colleague? And then threatening to kill that same colleague for trying to stop him? While the colleague is piloting the helicopter from which the shooter is sticking out with no safety belt, and only his butt inside?

Lust, Caution (mild spoilers)

Saw Lust, Caution yesterday. It was very good if one likes the kind of high-quality melodrama that Ang Lee is good at - and I do.

It starts out almost comically, then gradually moves through darker to very dark.

The translation was not very good (no, I don't understand enough Chinese to know, but I've seen a more detailed translation of this movie). First of all, they omitted all reference to Chunking, where some characters were getting their orders from, making the viewer guess whether our young patriotic heroes were Communist or Kuomintang (not that it has any bearing on the plot, but in spite of sounding like young Communist heroes in the Russian movies they are most likely Kuomintang).

Also: what is it with using the title Tai-Tai in the Finnish texts? I understand using well-known foreign titles like Mr or Mrs or Madame or Frau, but since I really don't think that Tai-Tai is a common knowledge here, why is it not rouva?

The moral of the movie, if any: being a spy is bad for your sex life, and the other way around, too.

Barf (The Bourne Idiocy)

Just saw the Bourne Ultimatum. That's two hours and a movie ticket I am never getting back, and that is the most nauseatingly disgusting piece of camera work I have ever seen.

There ought to be a fucking law against making a whole full-length movie with nauseating jerky camera movements and more often than not blurred picture. Or, failing that, at least a law that would make movie advertisers say "the director was an idiot and the cameraman was very drunk and we really recommend that anyone who might get nauseous avoid watching this movie".

These would be the movies that I would totally boycott, but unfortunately this is the one thing about a movie you never know until you start watching.

The last time I blogged about it people told me that the jerky camera movements are meant to give us a feeling of being there, and of real TV news. Sure thing. That's why the real TV news with jerky movements are a) a few seconds long and b) never watched on a big screen. And what is the blurring supposed to do - give us the feeling of watching one of those stupid ads before the movie?

As it is, the whole thing mostly just gave me the feeling of "give me a plastic bag, now", and I spent half of it with my eyes closed lest I have to use the plastic bag. Didn't go home though, because since I already paid and was there I wanted at least to hear what will happen.

I wish the director of photography had some contact info, so I could write him and tell him that his camera work is most appropriate for the radio.