I hadn't seen Castle In The Sky for a while. If you don't already know about it, it's a 1985 Japanese animated film by Hayao Miyazaki. Sperhauk and I went somewhere to see it back in 1989. I got that from my collection of Week-At-A-Glance diary's. It was a Monday, the 6th of November but I don't remember where we went to see it. I used to go out to the movies more in those days. It was the only way to see a lot of new stuff and this was something new, at least to me. It's a fun action adventure with airships, pirates, steam trains, lots of gun play, lashings of explosions, magic, high collateral damage, huge body count, and flying robots.
The version we saw back then was distributed by Streamline Pictures. It was an English dubbed version. I got copy of a fan subbed bootleg vhs tape but tossed that when the Disney 2 disc dvd came out in 2003. There's an English version and a Japanese version on the disc. I don't care for the English dub on this one. They changed the music and they add additional dialog. They did the same thing on Kiki's Delivery Service. Weird, huh.
I don't mind watching with the Japanese audio and subtitles on, though occasionally I forget to watch the words and just watch the action. It doesn't matter, there's plenty of story in the visuals. There's always something cool to see as we voyage to the lost flying city of Laputa. It's powerful rulers used to control the world 700 years ago. Pazu, a young orphan, has a secret princess fall from the sky. He gets wrapped up in a race to the floating city and helps save the world from the power hungry hands of the evil Muska. I'm not as fond of Miyazaki's war based movies as I am of movies like My Neighbor Totoro or Kiki's Delivery Service but that's just me. It's still a good movie and worth a view or two.
Since it was the next science fiction film in the box I watched The Cell. I hadn't seen this movie in ages, probably 7-8 years. I watched it a couple of times back when the dvd came out in 2000, which was the same year it was released to the theaters, and haven't watched it since. It's directed by Tarsem Singh and it was his first feature film. He had directed a lot of commercials and music videos. Since then he's directed The Fall in 2006 and this year he's got Immortals coming out. I've seen The Fall but still haven't found one cheap enough to buy. I'm in no hurry, plenty to see in the mean time. Jennifer Lopez is in a few movies that I've liked, especially the delightful Out Of Sight, but I haven't seen her in anything new in several years. She's ok here as a mind travelling psychologist. She has to get into the head of serial killer Vincent D'Onofrio and find out where he's stashed his latest victim. There's a ticking clock, the room the poor gal is sitting in starts filling up with water, in forty hours the room will be full. It gets pretty freaky as we dig deeper into Vincent's dark places. He's pretty repulsive, he's killed several women, the inside of his head is stylistically perverse. He's got quite the imagination, that guy, you almost wouldn't believe it. Vince Vaughn plays an FBI guy on Vincent's trail. He finally finds the guy and busts in his place. The problem. Vincent is catatonic and not expected to recover. Oh, oh. That's where Jennifer comes in. She drops into his mind's world and tries to get the Vincent in his head to tell her were the girl is. It's pretty gorey and sexual and some folks are just not going to want to watch that. Some of the visuals are pretty interesting and disturbing and some don't do much for me. It's worth a look simply for the experience but it's not one I'd want to re-watch a lot. Once you burn off the flashy cover there isn't much left but a serial killer movie and I just don't care for those that much. Who needs to be reminded about the worst of us.
Comments