I thought I’d start a series of short daily blog posts to get myself writing regularly. I’m most likely to write about animation but I’m probably going to talk about film and other stuff as well here.
I’ll start this off with a topic that a YouTube comment got me thinking about- recent sources of non-anime sakuga. I’d like to write a proper blog post about this sometime but for now I’ll just report what I know.
Inside Out is a Pixar movie and that’s really all I have to say about it. It’s basically perfect. I don’t know what I’m going to write about. I suppose there are things that I think could have been done a bit better but I don’t think I’d call those complaints. It was successful because it made me empathize with its characters and become completely invested in it. I think a few scenes in the middle dragged slightly but that’s like saying a house is bad because you saw a fly in it once or something. Pixar is annoyingly good.
I couldn’t wait for Boyhood to end. After I felt like I was an hour in I looked at how long it had left- I hadn’t watched 20 minutes. It’s almost 3 hours long. I’m not sure why it’s so popular. It’s probably because of the way it was made. I think it was cool having the same people play the characters as they grew up but it was unnecessary for a good story and this film doesn’t have one. It feels like a film made about people my age written by someone who clearly isn’t. There are some good things about it but I think it needed to be half as long and actually about something.
Whiplash is a good movie that I think was too cynical. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started watching it. All I knew was that I hated the poster. It was the same problem with Sicario, 90% of it was critic reviews. I watched the first 15 minutes of the movie a while ago but didn’t get into it so I stopped. After watching the whole thing, I have mixed feelings about it. By the end I feel like the movie paid itself off but it stumbled a lot on the way. It has a problem I think exists in recent movies I’ve seen of being too dark for its own good. I like its characters though.
