More film fun
Sep. 9th, 2007 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tiggymalvern
Last night was Japanese movie night over at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mamishka's, one live action and one anime.
The first film of the pair was Kamikaze Girls, which went over universally well. Summarised, it's the story of a cynical, manipulative, isolated teenager whose chief joy in life is buying the Lolita-girl outfits she loves from her favourite store, and a girl from a wannabe biker gang; all of which sounds rather yeah, yeah and dull. And it isn't at all. This film is just a joy to watch. It's wicked scripting, with a perfect dose of black humour, it dives off into the surreal world of the girls' life histories and fantasies in animation and mad live action, and it's two really well acted characters with some great comic timing.
There's no great depth to this film, but it's pure entertainment. It's gloriously cute with enough cynical edge to keep the froth away - when you need something light to make you laugh, check it out.
And then we watched the animated film Mind Game, deeply popular with the denizens of imdb judging by the score, but not so popular withmamishka's crowd. This is surreal taken to a whole new level - it starts out rather dark and nasty but with an undercurrent of cute comedy as nerdy Nishi tries to reconnect with his old school crush, and then it goes... well, everywhere.
There are some great set pieces in this, some wonderfully innovative ideas, both in the artwork and the story. Unfortunately, a series of odd and not always successful set pieces is what it remains. The film has no coherency, never forming a complete whole, with ideas seeming to shoot off randomly, making no contribution to the rest. It rambles on in a deeply self-involved manner, feeling a much longer film than it actually is - an interesting experiment, but a failed one. And that wasn't just my opinion, that was all ten of us.
On another note, I'm feeling entirely pleased with myself today, because I've finally finished a scene in my WIP. Which doesn't sound like much, until I point out that this Scene has been hanging round my neck for the last four months or more, wrapped around trips to the UK and Canada and other things in my life. The Scene is a more a whole series of scenes strung together through an afternoon and an evening that segue endlessly into one another, with parts of it that were just killing me, and the finished Scene is currently 19,695 words long. Which brings the entire fic to a little under 37,000 words, and means I've got probably 30,000 still to write, but it feels like a hell of a milestone to have got it done after so long.
And now, having been written in so many bits over so long, it needs one hell of an edit, but I'll give it a couple of read-throughs for fluidity and then move on rather than get bogged down in it. Again. It'll probably need more words to soften the joins.
None of which stops me being exceedingly happy to be done with it :-)
mamishka's, one live action and one anime.The first film of the pair was Kamikaze Girls, which went over universally well. Summarised, it's the story of a cynical, manipulative, isolated teenager whose chief joy in life is buying the Lolita-girl outfits she loves from her favourite store, and a girl from a wannabe biker gang; all of which sounds rather yeah, yeah and dull. And it isn't at all. This film is just a joy to watch. It's wicked scripting, with a perfect dose of black humour, it dives off into the surreal world of the girls' life histories and fantasies in animation and mad live action, and it's two really well acted characters with some great comic timing.
There's no great depth to this film, but it's pure entertainment. It's gloriously cute with enough cynical edge to keep the froth away - when you need something light to make you laugh, check it out.
And then we watched the animated film Mind Game, deeply popular with the denizens of imdb judging by the score, but not so popular with
mamishka's crowd. This is surreal taken to a whole new level - it starts out rather dark and nasty but with an undercurrent of cute comedy as nerdy Nishi tries to reconnect with his old school crush, and then it goes... well, everywhere.There are some great set pieces in this, some wonderfully innovative ideas, both in the artwork and the story. Unfortunately, a series of odd and not always successful set pieces is what it remains. The film has no coherency, never forming a complete whole, with ideas seeming to shoot off randomly, making no contribution to the rest. It rambles on in a deeply self-involved manner, feeling a much longer film than it actually is - an interesting experiment, but a failed one. And that wasn't just my opinion, that was all ten of us.
On another note, I'm feeling entirely pleased with myself today, because I've finally finished a scene in my WIP. Which doesn't sound like much, until I point out that this Scene has been hanging round my neck for the last four months or more, wrapped around trips to the UK and Canada and other things in my life. The Scene is a more a whole series of scenes strung together through an afternoon and an evening that segue endlessly into one another, with parts of it that were just killing me, and the finished Scene is currently 19,695 words long. Which brings the entire fic to a little under 37,000 words, and means I've got probably 30,000 still to write, but it feels like a hell of a milestone to have got it done after so long.
And now, having been written in so many bits over so long, it needs one hell of an edit, but I'll give it a couple of read-throughs for fluidity and then move on rather than get bogged down in it. Again. It'll probably need more words to soften the joins.
None of which stops me being exceedingly happy to be done with it :-)
