Movie Reviews! The Caller, Audition, The Perfect Host ... Quick Anime Review Notes ... and Some Rambling!

I've been wanting to blog.  But not about any one thing in particular.  And I realize that I tend to not only write long posts, but also ramble on about topics completely unrelated from one another.

So, for starters, So You Think You Can Dance is done.  Chehon and Eliana won.  YAY!  (Even though I'm sad for Cyrus. Boo!)  I found a lot of music through the season and through the "if you like this, you might this" feature on Amazon, so I have a "brand new" 6-hour playlist filled with a range of music from classical, dubsteb, and electronica.  Woot!  I even bought a cd - Gus Gus Arabian Horse.  I < 3 them!  (yes, I just did that.  Check them out...I fell in love first with Believe (not on Arabian Horse) and Over (track 3 on Arabian Horse))

What else is new in the world as I see it?  Well, my cat Neko (occasional substitute blogger whose name is the same as the Japanese word for cat even though we pronounce it with a long ee...see rambling?) - anyway, my cat Neko had to go to the emergency clinic the Thursday night before last and then to our local animal hospital on last Saturday morning, which is where she has resided ever since.  She presented with bloody diarrhea and impacted anal glands.  She was in a lot of pain.  She is doing better, but is on three anti-biotics, subcu-IV fluids, and isn't in any shape to come home yet.  :-(

In addition, Lucien, our alpha male (who is the biggest baby), had a bladder infection and the antibiotics made him sick.  He spent over 6 days/nights in the hospital on two occasions (total) waiting for urine samples because he is such a stubborn little guy.  He finally came home today with the okay to stop treatment and keep an eye on him.  He's been cuddling ever since.

So, speaking of cuddling and health issues, I had to go to the doctor again yesterday and am in the process of setting up a potential surgical consult to follow the procedure I'm having done in a few weeks.  SO, I've spent the day in bed cuddling with Lu and streaming Netflix while Tim and G-man work the Illini game.

Which leads to why I actually decided to write this post.  I watched three movies today and as I write this, I'm starting an anime series (which I will restart to give it a proper watching):  Kaze no Stigma (Stigma of the Wind, I believe).  I recognize many of the voices, so while I'm not paying a lot of attention to it, I'm already intrigued just because of that.

Movie #1:  The Caller - psychological horror/thriller.  A woman going through a divorce moves into an apartment whose phone receives calls from a woman living in 1979.  They strike up a friendship that soon turns sour...with dire consequences in the past and present.  I liked it.  The lighting, camera work, and coloring were all excellent at creating the atmosphere and setting the mood.  I didn't really cringe every time the phone rang, which I imagine is what the director intended, but there was so much going on in the story, that the phone almost fell into the background.  The movie has some heart-wrenching moments and others that make you just stop for a second, but it doesn't allow you much time to mourn or wonder because it keeps moving forward.  The movie seems simple on the surface, but it's multilayered and intriguing.  The mystery behind the caller is never explained.  I like that because anything they came up would seem contrived and ruin the story.  There were a few spots where I questioned why she didn't call the police, but those were easy to brush aside for the sake of the story.  In the end, what needs to be explained has been explained and the story comes together in a near perfect way.  It is tragic and beautiful with all of the layers, and even more so when extra time is taken to think about those layers.  I can't make a call on the Nerdgirl scary scale - I don't think it's scary, especially not in the spooky sense, but there are a few places that could make someone jump (it is more psychological after all).  There aren't any monsters and the only paranormal events are the phone calls.  Everything else involves people (for example:  the main character's abusive ex-husband).  There are a few violent scenes, but they tend to build up and pass quickly, and I don't remember seeing a lot of blood, except in one scene, but even that is brief.

Movie #2:  Audition - Japanese Horror (subtitled).  Okay - so this movie has a cult following for the supposedly gratuitous and graphic torture scenes that (according to Wikipedia, so take that for whatever it's worth) made the movie hard for even Rob Zombie to enjoy.  I've been curious.  The Japanese are known for going over the top and I've seen some crazy torture stuff in anime, so I was more than a little curious about Audition.  I just needed to know if I could stomach it.  I decided to try.  The movie runs about an hour an a half, and most of it focuses on the central story:  a widower, 7-years after his wife's death, is urged by his teenage son to remarry.  Together with a friend in the movie production business, he holds auditions to find the perfect woman.  Of course, as you can probably guess, he doesn't choose wisely.  However, since most of the movie focuses on him, his loneliness, his son, his son's ambitions, and then his excitement at falling in love with the perfect woman, I found myself relating to him and empathizing with him.  Perhaps I would have been drawn in more had I not known anything about the woman.  The parts that have made the movie so popular don't occur until the last 30 or even 20-minutes of the film, and the famous, "graphic" torture sequence is among the last in the film, and most of it is spent showing more of how much she's enjoying it than it is actually showing the torture.  Okay, so here's my take on it - I'm very sensitive to things.  I hate torture in movies, will not watch domestic or sexual violence, hate seeing animals get hurt or killed, etc.  But I was almost laughing during the torture scene.  It just seemed so out of place.  Her character had shifted so drastically and without explanation, that her torture getup and her devices - the whole thing just seemed really out of left field (pardon the lack of a better expression).  (Before anyone says anything about the "love only me" thing, I get that, and I get that she snapped when she saw the picture of his late wife, but even with that, it was a drastic shift.)  And then the torture itself, by today's standards, with the Saw movies and whatnot, was VERY tame.  There was hardly any blood and it really was more about her enjoying his pain and what she was doing than actually showing what she was doing.  In my opinion, this will stay a cult hit, because it is one, but time has done the damage because movies have only gotten more violent.  I've been more disturbed by the violence in the newest Bond films than I was by anything in Audition.  Now, that said, because of that, I was able to enjoy the movie.  I can see where the shock and awe factors were supposed to be, but in the end, I felt horrible for the widower and I felt sorry for her.  But her story wasn't adequately told or something was lost in translation to bring about anything more than surface feelings for her because her end character did not match the character she had been throughout the movie.  Even given that what I say is "tame torture" by today's standards...LATE EDIT:  I've removed the Nerdgirl scary scale comment because I realized that I don't honestly know how she would rate this movie and she has a much stronger stomach than I do.  So I've decided to rate this on my own scale, which makes more sense since I described my own tastes.  This is not a movie that people like me or people sensitive to violence should watch.  It is still sadistic.  It is still torture.  It is sad and tragic.  I was only able to make it through because I researched the movie ahead of time, knew what to expect, had some previous experience with the genre in animated form, and got myself into a frame of mind to see it completely as a work of fiction (much easier to do with an anime, I have to say).  If I had gone in blind and not prepared, I am certain parts of the movie and the end would have bothered me.  However, even with all that, I stand by the my review.

Movie #3 The Perfect Host - dark comedy/thriller.  Starring David Hyde Pierce, The Perfect Host has been on my watch list for a while, but I kept forgetting about it.  A bank robber on the run crashes the wrong dinner party and regrets it...a lot.  Skipping ahead - Nerdgirl - watch this!!  This movie is so  dark and hilarious, and David Hyde Pierce is absolutely perfect in his role.  This movie was made for him.  Just when the robber thinks he has control...um, no sir.  You've just entered the Twilight Zone mind of a violent schizophrenic who likes to party.  Between the drinking and the singing and the conga line and the dancing, and then the pool...there is so much to this "dinner party" as seen through the eyes of the robber and the eyes of Pierce that it's hard not to get swept up and just enjoy the "fun."  Sometimes I wasn't sure how dark it was actually going to go, but that was part of how good it was.  And there was more going on in the background, as well, such as flashbacks regarding the robber's life and why he robbed the bank, and discoveries detectives were making about his case.  The former served to help the viewer feel sorry for the robber, since he appears initially as a cold-hearted jackass, while the latter seems misplaced and forced into the story because it needs to be there until everything is neatly tied together in the end.  The thing about these other two parts is that while I was enjoying the dinner party and not trying to solve the case or look for twists, there were certain things that my mind would grab onto - little tidbits of information that only existed in the story because they were pertinent in some way.  That is, after all, one of the first things we learn as writers - only add what's necessary (unless its a deliberate distraction, but hey, even that's necessary, right?).  So I deliberately ignored those tidbits, just so I could enjoy the movie without solving it.  And I'm glad I did because it was so much better that way.  Excellent movie.  I can't say that enough.

So I'll stop there.  I have a two queries out and am working on a one-page synopsis.  One.  Page.  X_X  Ug.

Until my next ramble.  Goodnight.  Oh - it's a Bleach night!  Yay!  ^_^   Until then, back to Kaze No Stigma.  Oh, and, although been it's on my watch list for awhile, since Adult Swim acquired the rights to show it, I've been watching Samurai 7 - it's starting out slow and one character in particular is rather annoying, but it's enjoyable.  Plus it's based on Akira Kurosawa's film Seven Samurai, which the Bare Naked Ladies sung about in One Week (and Sailor Moon, too!).  I'm not really a big BNL fan, though.  I've also been forcing myself through Casshern Sins and that's starting to pay off.  I think they could have tossed half of the eps and been better off.  I've never seen the original.  Other anime titles that I've watched and enjoyed lately (read: within the last year or so) include Gun X Sword (come on, its like Spike from Cowboy Bebop piloting Big O with a wee bit of Trigun mixed in there somewhere.  How can that not be awesome?), Rin: Daughters of Mnemosyne (adult title) - despite the gratuitous nature of adult titles, this one included, I liked the story and actually cried at the tragic turn, Trigun: Badlands Rumble? (the new movie) - awesome - NEW Trigun based on the Maximum manga series - a must see (and must read) for any Trigun fan or Vash fanatic (like me, even though I'm horrible with titles right now), Claymore - it's been a while, but I liked it - not one that would top my buy list, but I would buy it some day - another sad, tragic tale and I'm drawn to sad, tragic tales - this one reminded me of D's plight in Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, but the two are in no way similar in any other way - Claymores are female warriors and there are no vampires here, Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom - phenomenal - foreign travelers brainwashed into becoming master assassins for a Japanese mafia-type.  The story is deep and layered (I'm into layers) and goes throughout years of their lives and how their "job" affects them.  It centers on the male lead and his desire for freedom, but as we Americans like to say, "Freedom isn't Free" and that's exactly what he learns.  I'd have to say that Phantom reminded me of Darker than Black, although they are a bit different.  I'd have to watch DTB again, but right now I'd say Phantom is the better of the two.  Bleach:  Fade to Black - the 3rd movie in the Bleach series.  Okay - so first, it's Bleach, so it's awesome, and second it focuses on Rukia, so Byakuya's in it, too - double awesome (I clearly have a thing for fake, hot guys).  I've liked all of the Bleach movies, but this is my favorite so far - it let us further into the Kuchiki world than we've gotten and I love that Byakuya came around because of his late wife.  We don't see much humanity or emotion from him, so that scene is one of my favorites.

Oh my gosh.  I've done it again.  Good grief.  See?  I can just go on, and on, and on.  Finally, I bought Halloween socks with a bat on them that kind of resembles the bat symbol.  How cool is that?  Totally what I thought.  Time for me to shut up.