Days of Heaven (1978)
I am going through Terrance Malick's films at the pace of his releases. I watched
Badlands a little more than 4 years ago and I hope I get to Thin red line before 20 years
(It seems that as the time between his releases shrunk, so did the quality. But I will make up my own mind about it in due course).
What I loved about this film is the cinematography. You could pick and choose any one of those moments and have a great photograph. There are even scenes of locusts which you'd only expect in Discovery or National Geographic. (Shot almost entirely at "magic hour," the hours between day and night early in the morning and late in the evening - IMDB Trivia). As beautiful as it was, the story was a little thin. I am not sure if it was because Malick threw away the script and asked actors to improvise (which he seems to be doing even now). I was not as taken in with this as Badlands. But, I did like the visuals so much that I'd love to watch it again soon.
Stealing Beauty (1996)
Have you watched his "Stealing Beauty"? That's my absolute favourite Bertolucci movie, and it gets re-watched often enough when I'm in a certain kind of sunday mood.
For the first hour, I was pretty sure that I'd have the opposite opinion. But then, I've learned that sometimes it is better to let the movie take wherever it wants to. But when it ended, I was excited about how a little gem of a movie this was. Overall, I did like it a little more than 'Dreamers'. Of course, I am not flat out recommending it to everybody. Cleanse your palate with another one of Bertolucci's films to know his style before getting into this
Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)
Now that I've mentioned two movies which I liked in varying degrees, it is time to rant.
Kubo is an excellent stop-motion animation from Laika, who seem to have mastered that art. In fact, I thought it was all CGI until they showed the building of the giant skeleton during end credits. I really liked their first animation,
Coraline (I didn't even know they had made two films since then), so my expectations were, if not high, at least not too low. In addition, Kubo was set in Japan which ensured that at least it would be different from the usual hollywood animation. It also had 84% metacritic rating, 8.0 on IMDB, 97% of critics and 87% of audience like it in RT - All the ingredients of what could possibly be my favorite animation made in 2016.
The opening scene was really impressive. Kubo's story with all the magical origami was even more interesting. But, by the tenth minute, I was hearing some really flat dialogues. I thought "They have 90 more minutes. They'll fix this". They certainly didn't. The animation was excellent (but then, it is hard to name a 'bad' animation these days regardless of the technique used). But, the plot was immensely guessable with a lot of cliche' ridden dialogues. It would hold my interest from time to time, but then would become "meh!" soon after. It isn't bad, just not that good. I'd leave the Japanese inspired tales to the Japanese.
<rant>There's a whole section of people saying that "this will suit only children" as if children cannot take any more complexity. I wonder about that. It is not incredibly difficult to do an 'inspired' animation which can satisfy both children and adults alike. Take
Avatar: The Last Airbender series. It is anime like but was made by Nickolodeon. It is clearly targetted towards children, but adults can like it too. It is in fact, one of my favorite animated series. Why? Well built characters and kids being kids.
I also have to rant about that horrible, horrible M(ediocre) Night's adaptation to the big screen, "The Last Airbender". I watched it right after the first season of the series on which it was based. At first, I was thinking "It can't be th..at bad", but it ended up being one of the very few movies that made me wish IMDB could allow zero stars or half star. What has all this got to do with Kubo? ...
</rant>
As of now, I still have two more 2016 animations in my wishlist: The Red Turtle (Ghibli, no dialogs, 80 mins) and Your Name (second highest grossing anime in history. Could this be the first Makato Shinkai anime I really love?)
