skygiants | (no subject)

So I saw some movies over break!

The usual family-holiday-movie-compromises resulted in:

War Horse: It's a heartwarming animal story about World War I. This . . . really says all that needs to be said, I think.

Oh, also, for fandom's reference, Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch are both in it, and I was like 'hey, it surprises me that I haven't seen some parts of my flist talking about that!' and then they die and disappear from the film after like ten minutes. I LAUGHED SO HARD.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows: My deepest thought about the feature film Sherlock Holmes franchise is that somehow, although Jude Law always looks annoying and smarmy to me, put him in a lulzy Victorian moustache and suddenly he's totally endearing! I don't know what mysterious law of physics causes this to occur.

No, but basically, this was more of the same: lulzy hijinks, enjoyable set pieces, plot that doesn't really make any sense when you squint at it too hard, Mary Morstan being awesome for the ten seconds she's on screen. Would I rather watch 'Mary Morstan and Stephen Fry As Mycroft Holmes Break Ciphers'? Yes, probably, but oh well. As for Irene's death, man, she's Irene Adler and she died offscreen, in a flashback, by an unreliable narrator. Basically she is one of the least for-real-dead I have ever seen and the only reason they possibly could have for not featuring her in a later film is that Rachel McAdams cost too much money. Fanwank away, fandom, fanwank away.

X-Men: First Class: The funniest part is that when we were trying to settle on a Christmas Eve-ish movie, my mom tried to sell us on Sarah's Key and my brother nixed it: "no Nazis on Christmas Eve!"

Then, of course, we fire up X-Men: First Class and get ten straight minutes of Nazis.

. . . then when that was over, we turned off the movie and landed on Bedknobs and Broomsticks just in time to watch Angela Lansbury fight some Nazis. So, uh, yes. (But it did make me wish that X-Men: First Class had been "Angela Lansbury leads some teenaged X-Babies in fighting Nazis." Look, there's a lot of awesome movies in my head, all right?)

Hugo: This was not actually a family compromise, I saw it before break with

obopolsk, and it was seriously gorgeous. The cinematography was beautiful, the kids were adorable, it was about OLD FILM PRESERVATION and so I got tiny dorky frissons of glee throughout the whole thing -- it wasn't actually fabulist or fantastical, but it was very much in the style of those just-on-the-verge-of-fantastical films like Amelie, where there's no magic per se but it makes you see the world as magical. Like that. It would have been the best movie I saw over the past few months, hands down, except then

rushin_doll and

jothra and I went down to the Studio Ghibli festival to go see . . .

Whisper of the Heart: OH MY GOD, GUYS. I fell in love with this movie so hard! It is now rivaling Spirited Away for my favorite Studio Ghibli film, and I don't say that lightly.

Whisper of the Heart is a coming-of-age movie about a girl who reads. She gets a crush on the boy whose name she sees on the library cards above her own, because he's checked out all the same books she has; she negotiates friendships that are suddenly becoming more complicated; and she tries to see if she has what it takes to write stories, if she has the passion and the work ethic to create something instead of just taking it in, to figure out who and what she wants to be.

So basically Studio Ghibli made a movie for me, and it's just - ahh! Guys! Jo and I both staggered out of the theater clutching our hearts going "FEELINGS." I am still kind of clutching my heart and going "FEELINGS" a week later.

Also I can't stop listening to the movie's theme song on repeat, which is Our Heroine's arduous and adorable translation of John Denver's "Country Roads" into Japanese. IT'S A PROBLEM.