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Space Pirate Captain Harlock

8/26/2014

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Style over substance.

It's common enough in any Japanese anime adventure and director Shinji Aramaki delivers the stylistic goods with space ships that circle each other, defying the laws of physics, firing broadside salvos into each other. I liked the first time that Captain Harlock's ship, the Arcadia, emerged from an endless black smoke that creepily slides off its skull and bones figurehead. All the computer-generated sets were created with painstaking care and attention to detail.

There is a capital city, where the oppressive governing council reigns, that has every bit the white marbled beauty of
Minas Tirith. Although the Arcadia's engine room was only briefly shown, it is a magnificent futuristic coal chamber running on dark matter, dimly lighting a room whose every surface is silted with tarnished blackness after long empty years.

Toei Animation's computer graphics are unrivaled in any animated action film to date.
From time to time, especially in close ups, it's difficult to tell the difference between a real life person and the rendered characters. It's beautiful.

Unfortunately, all that technical brilliance goes to waste on movie that is unforgivably stupid. The characters all come in varying shades of idiocy or they were so uninteresting that I forgot who they were.

The main character switches loyalty depending on who he' talking to. He has an idiotic backstory where he was a slightly younger idiot who paralyzed his idiot brother and now has to make amends by acting in his brother's place as a field operative who answers to an evil council of space idiots.

This council is clearly willing to sacrifice entire planets for the sake of...actually it makes no sense so I won't bother. It's easier to admit that the writers wanted to make them "bad guys" so they were. No one sufficiently explains anyone's motives because motives only exist for the sake of creating annoying artificial conflict.

Sure, all the characters had some backstory, in which they did something inexplicably stupid and now they have to atone, so I guess they had "motives," but it was only to correct completely contrived and nonsensical choices in their pasts that would never have crossed the mind of anyone in control of half their mental faculties. The movie seemed perfectly content following around lobotomized douchbags.

For most of the movie I was rooting for the evil empire because it would have been a valuable public service to euthanize the pirates and remove their mental deficiencies from the gene pool.

There are too many horrible things to point out about this movie. I would like to catalogue all the violations of the laws of physics that no one took the least effort to limit (This was egregious. The dark matter Macguffin alone was unforgivable). I could also rant a while about the pirate crew's determination to use medieval weaponry in space. I want to complain about all the scenes in which everyone is a bad shot. However, those were all sacrifices that the filmmakers made on the alter to style. I point them out because I could only handle so much dumb moronic idiocy in one stupidly stupid movie.

Sure is pretty though.

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Guardians of the Galaxy

8/4/2014

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I tend to nitpick movies. Even movies I like. I notice things in the sound editing that could have been tuned better or pacing that could have been smoother or performances that could have been more intense. With this movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, nitpicking has never seemed so wrong.

I'm tempted to call the movie perfect even though it isn't exactly perfect. I could say that people unfamiliar with the Marvel Universe might be miffed by knowing there is another bad guy behind the main bad guy. Maybe there was a subplot too many. Maybe.

Critiquing the movie based on such things seems petty. It gives us all the entertainment we can handle and more and then keeps piling on. I haven't seen a movie so successfully built around pure entertainment since Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Where some critics might take offense at the simplistic explanation of a planet dooming device, I found the sequence fresh and wondrous and funny. Our heroes stood in a miraculous museum of fascinating characters and devices while the eccentric Collector (Benicio Del Toro) explained the origin of the universe to people who didn't really care.

Every scene gave us a collection of interesting characters, whether they be murderous brutes in a prison or a ship full of scrappy scavengers with arrows commanded by whistling. I haven't seen this level of creative character invention since the original Star Wars

Our story follows a motley collection of criminals with varying levels of recklessness. Starlord (Chris Pratt) becomes their leader in a way that makes sense. Rarely do I see movies that show why each character would follow someone for legitimate reasons that relate to their individual lives. Never once did it crossed my mind that a crew of aliens would follow the human because that's what the audience wants. It evolved naturally. Seamlessly.

Starlord leads four truly extraordinary companions on a mission to stop a zealot alien separatist named Ronan from destroying the galaxy. To stop him, Starlord has banded together a lexicon-challenged tree named Groot (Vin Diesel), a war criminal who has a change of heart named Gamora (Zoe Saldana), a wisecracking, streetwise, genetically-modified racoon named Rocket (Bradley Cooper), and what can only be described as a full-time badass named Drax (Dave Bautista).

First and foremost, against all odds, a talking raccoon who rides a rampaging tree works very well onscreen. Rocket and Groot provide many of the film's best moments. Chris Pratt is not outshined, however. Somehow, in the midst of raccoons firing machine guns, weapons that destroy planets,  space battles, catfights and a whole lot more, Starlord remains grounded front and center. Pratt has the presence of a young Bruce Campbell, who carried Army of Darkness with the same unlikely balance of bravery and cowardice, ineptitude and cunning, charm and despicability. Even though Pratt's performance exists mostly in the midst of choreographed special effects it is hard to imagine a more difficult role to pull off.

So yeah, it's perfect even though it isn't. If you go into this movie listening to people who say it lags, or that there's too much going on, you might end up agreeing with them. You can nitpick and spend time analyzing the film's shameless excesses, or you can actually just enjoy what happens. I was never once confused by the plot, by character introductions, by motivations or editing. I loved every minute of the movie.

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    I work in Kansas City.  I like writing and illustrating things that either make people think or laugh.  If I can make people do both at the same time, I've achieved a continuing lifelong goal.

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