Reviews

Please keep in mind that this score is coming from a person who is NOT a fan and that this is still a generally positive review.

For the first time for me, I must credit the Disney front office, and especially Feige, for pulling off one of the most ambitious projects in film history. It has become clear to me that this entire 22 Marvel movie series beginning with Iron Man was taken very seriously by everyone involved, and while I respect the directors' visions for each movie, having the oversight over the entire Marvel project was what really made the franchise an unprecedented success.

Now that being said, onto the movie itself. I'll avoid spoilers, so I'll just say I came out feeling just whelmed for this movie. Unlike Infinity War, Endgame felt more like the typical Marvel movie to me, and that means for negatives it suffered from some pacing issues for the sake of exposition, its music especially during more lowkey scenes felt uninspired, and emotional scenes felt very subdued due to some directorial choices, whereas Infinity War did a lot to cut fat and, perhaps due to its position being 2nd to last chronologically, had some actual impactful scenes.

For Endgame specifically, there was a "thing" about it that also felt very out of place in contrast to what the tone was (if you've seen the movie you'll know what I'm talking about).

But with these negative points in mind, there were some VERY gratifying scenes, both for those Marvel fans (which I didn't care too much about) and for those who understand what kind of expectations this film needed to meet. And because of these scenes and their execution, I didn't feel cheated out of an ending and I can understand why fans would cry.

Congratulations Marvel fans, it's very rare that a fanbase can see their media being remade to still meet their high demands, and I think Marvel has done it for you guys.

Just please keep discussion open though. Just because someone doesn't feel as strongly as you do does not mean they disrespect your opinion; some people enjoy asking the tough questions to get to a deeper truth.

I have the original VHS copy at my parents house and I remember watching this a bunch as a kid (mainly because I was pretty happy just watching the 3 Pokemon movies I had). What stays with me is the pretty mesmerizing visuals and backdrops. Everything in the main meat of the film is very dreamlike and cold. It sort of reminds me of what some of my nightmares were like; cold, empty, and alone with some kind of monster like that giant seal from Pengu.

What stands out more though are the really dark themes about child mourning. It explores a child's need for guardianship for security and comfort, and how much a child grieves not just from the loss of his/her beloved parents, but also the loss of a parental figure. The child in this movie is given free reign to do essentially whatever she wants right after the loss of her parents, and what she wants are her parents back and to essentially shut down the world outside of her, and boy is that relatable. I sure have some times where I wish I could hide under my blanket in my room and have all my anxieties, responsibilities, and pains wash away and get transported back to a time where my biggest worry was whether tomorrow was raining or not.

Everything else about the movie was either average or below par, but I think my enjoyment of this film kind of makes me wish more children entertainment could tackle dark but real topics like these, because it gives those films the "evergreen" quality. Children movies have the unique opportunity to affect a person's entire life; Spongebob does this well because it's topics for each episode are relatively simple and small in scale, which become easily applicable to any aspect of life (on top of really good writing and surreal animation too). And I think shows like Rick and Morty being so popular show that younger people want to learn how to cope with darker realities without being treated like moody teenagers. Give this one a try if you're a fan of the first Pokemon Movie scene where Ash dies.

This is a really sweet film. This anime has one of the most vibrant color palettes I have ever seen on screen and its animation clearly was worked on with a lot of hard work. To top it, the plot is really sappy and kind of melodramatic, but I don't think this necessarily hurts the film. People who love slice-of-life/romantic animes will get a kick out of this film, but I can't promise others that they will appreciate it as much since the third act does drag on and the use of music is a bit excessive creating a feeling of disingenuous drama.

For me, I did tear up a bit. The hand-painted cells are just amazing and I can be a sucker for sappy romance. And the plot does give something to the audience member to engage on. If I was a bigger fan of anime and was more tolerable of the "Anime Music Video" vibes I was getting from this film, I might have rated it higher. I implore everyone to give this film a try and hopefully you'll get more out of this film than I did.

If you went to high school in the US, you probably read pieces from the two author's (other than the original Japanese short story) whom I think inspire this movie the most directly; F Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. What Burning and these two authors have in common is that their themes are often left unanswered and are left to ingrain themselves into your thoughts like an unwanted hermit.

The themes I could pick out from my experience were about class struggle, burden of proof, sexism, lonliness, and jealousy, but I'm sure there is more to find with repeated viewings because after finishing the film, I left feeling so conflicted about who was right or wrong and whether anything I saw could be called true. To avoid spoilers I'll stop here at theming but just prepare to get flooded with persistant questions from characters that are meant to be poignant about society as we know it.

Another stand out factor was the cinematography. Like Secret Sunshine, the film looks and sounds like a HongSang Soo film if HongSang Soo actually invested in camera operators and professional grade cameras (still love him though). The settings are very modest and the people dress and look very plain, but at the same time the lighting is incredibly dynamic and some shots are so intense with color that it might make some people tear up. The cinematography is literally "low key" amazing. 1 shot I want to commend is towards the beginning of the film, the camera is on the bus focused on the main actress who is waiting outside at the bus stop. The camera keeps her in center while the bus turns 270 degrees-ish to line up with the bus stop, and that level of coordination was jaw dropping to me yet the film makes no attempts to highlight this shot from the rest.

I've only seen one other Lee Chang Dong film and that was Secret Sunshine, and I came out feeling the same way about that film as I did Burning, so I think people who enjoyed Secret Sunshine will enjoy this film as well, but at the same time I think people who didn't enjoy Secret Sunshine might struggle through this as well since Lee Chang Dong seemingly wants you to leave his films feeling bitter.

Can't say much that hasn't already been said. I love that while the plot is very simple and keeps it very rooted in basic human elements, the setting and cinematography contrasts this with a ghost-like, spacey, and turbulent aesthetic. This film is cold yet warming (it's hard to describe in words but yiu might get it if you've seen Children of Men).

If you want a challenge, try watching the whole movie next just watching the background. The work put into set design and choreographing the extras are nothing short of masterful and awesome.

If you are willing to dedicate 5 hours of your time to watch Hamaguchi's Happy Hour, what you'll find is a cozy yet mildly depressing film perfect for those lonely, chilly winter nights alone.

The film strives to present themes about marriage, divorce, mid-life, relationships, love, and others in an extremely objective way. The dialogue in the café scene even explicitly states this, also inputting that while you can try to be objective, you are ultimately limited by your own experiences. How do you reach this hyper-realism? For one thing you can practically reduce editing to a minimum. The most stand out result of this is not cutting scenes out to pad out the run time. Even I, a person who loves this trend of extending run time in movies, had to split my viewing into 2-parts. However, this luxury of time gives the pacing a very natural feel; characters evolve very logically while not feeling rushed and long scenes of literally just shots of character's faces lets the audience see character's feelings change (or sometimes lack thereof) while not seeming abrupt at all. Another point is how the characters perform. The very amateurish quality in performance is reminiscent of films like Hong Sangsoo, a Korean director well known worldwide for his amateur style. The delivery of dialogue is very flat and relaxed, with only slight changes in intonation and volume for those extremely "dramatic" scenes. Characters display emotion with only subtle changes in facial expressions, or sometimes if they are sad, the director only presents them in the aftermath with their bloodshot eyes.

On the topic of dialogue, this film does suffer from some expository dialogue, a quality in a lot of French New Wave films that turns me off most of the time. I wish that in the 5-hour run time, Hamaguchi could have found more natural and normal ways of delivering dialogue.

How the film is presented is gorgeous. From watching some Ozu films, shot composition is very Japanese, a lot of intersecting lines into horizons and such. Color selection and camera positioning makes the film seem very disconnected from the characters, again contributing to the omniscient perspective of the film. And Kobe just seems like a pretty place to be. I especially loved the singles where the camera is placed right in front of the camera, like a Deacons/Cohen Brothers film making us intimate with the character while their cold expressions still leave a veil between us.

Overall, I think those who are willing to be active watchers for the 5-hour run time can get something out of watching this film, whether if it's about your marriage or if you happen to agree with these other reviews and find that women are evil (?). I personally thought that the main characters felt trapped by the societal pressures of mid-life (marriage, children, love) and that their actions to break out of those chains were out of their intolerance to be stuck in their societal roles as housewives. But the director's purposeful strategy of "present-how-it-is" kind of gives everyone the right to form and support their own ideals based on this film.

TL;DR This film is well versed in how the internet works and makes very smart commentary on how the internet works while having a pretty exciting plot. I would highly recommend this film despite its minor flaws that mainly come from how new this kind of filmmaking is.

Whereas most other films tackle technology with the cynicism of a cranky, old man, Searching feels like a film that was made by someone who actually uses the internet and can make very intelligent commentary about the culture around it. While the premise of filming an entire movie on a desktop sounds incredibly cliche, and the general plot has been abused by the Hollywood formula one too many times, the creative decisions on how the mechanics drive the plot gives this film an incredibly fresh feeling.

I love how the websites and software used in the film were real instead of made up. This choice kept the film grounded in reality and gave legitimacy to the arguments made by the filmmakers. One of my favorite points made by the film was on internet commenters. Yes, there are people on the internet who are ready to comment jokes "so-edgy-that-it-could-cut-an-atom-in-half", but there are also people who try to sympathize with those "crazy people" on YouTube, and Searching understands this mixture so well whereas some other films (Unfriended) believe that the internet is just 4Chan and Liveleak.

This film also touches on topics such as internet fame, media, disconnect between people, and generational gaps with small comments. There arealso small gestures that give the character so much life, like how John Cho's character constantly types "gmail.com", it shows that he is kind of amateur to the internet, but not so much that he can't navigate around it which is in contrast to his daughter who appears to be a typical, tech-savvy teenager, and this dynamic plays into some of the major plot themes. This is small, but there are enough of these where the film becomes incredibly realistic and relatable.

Aside from the filmmaking, John Cho's performance was great along with Debra Messing. I thought the camera movements really helped with the visual storytelling. Music was okay, it wasn't special to me but it did enhance tension and emotion in scenes where it was added.

Other criticisms I have is that the plot is pretty generic. Don't get me wrong, the premise of the film kept it exciting and plenty of the twists were unexpected in my first viewing, but I am waiting for a film to create a plot around the premise rather than vice versa. Also, the use of real websites I feel could be a double edged sword in that it could date the film (remember pagers in The Wire?). The mouse movements were also really robotic and some scenes felt like they were hand feeding connections that the majority of the audience members would have already gotten already.

In conclusion, this is a pioneer film in Desktop Filming or whatever this will be called. This film gives legitimacy to the technique and I am excited to see how it will expanded in the future. But in the meanwhile, give this film a watch.

TL;DR While this film is visually and aurally appealing in Pixar standards, this film drops a lot of the aspects that made the original Incredibles unique in favor of a more box office friendly approach.

As a preface, I adored the first Incredibles growing up, and after re-watching it in preparation for this film, I still adore it. So, this review will carry some bias, because I think the Incredibles 2 is a perfectly OK film by itself.

What this film has going is its updated visuals, interesting and engaging action scenes, and music; or in general its aesthetic. Originally Director Brad Bird wanted the visuals of the Incredibles to mimic that of those Golden Age-Superhero posters back in the 50s/60s, and while the first film did a great job in context to what technology was available, this sequel nails it. The skyscrapers were massive and follow the simple geometry of modernist architecture, the trains, cars, and other vehicles were all futuristic in a modernist sense (again), the music while not so different from the original film was still magnificent and brassy, and the action was very impressive and flashy whereas the original film didn't have too many opportunities to show off this sort of choreography. And while the plot, characters, and script were meh, without the context of the original this film is a perfectly OK 5/10 and a perfect rental if you want to appreciate the high quality artistic direction that Pixar produces.

Now that being said, this film loses almost all the magic the original had. To keep this readable, I'll just mention two of the most annoying aspects of the film but be sure I had other qualms with this film and you can find most of them in other reviews.

The first aspect is line delivery. In re-watching the original, I noticed how snappy, quick, and sticky the dialogue was. Most people I know have at least memorized 2 scenes from the original and I can almost guarantee YOU the reader know the super suit scene by heart. Now how many lines from the Incredibles 2 can you recite? Maybe the "Math is Math" line but that might be it. One part of why this is because the voice actors who weren't in the original did not follow the cadence and speed that original voice actors, the most blatant violator being the voice actor for Void. Instead of sounding like someone who is a part of this 50s/60s-quick talking world, her nervous west coast girl delivery sounds sorely out of place like the picture of the time-travelling hipster. The closest voice actor to get to the delivery was Bob Odenkirk, but even he would sound out of place if he was casted in the original film and kept the same delivery. This aspect is hard to explain in words and this is more of guttural reaction to the dialogue, but hopefully if you re-watch the original you can tell too. The other aspect was how much this film just felt so standard. It has X number of action scenes, it has Y number of funny scenes, it needed to have 5 Jack Jack scenes, etc etc. The magic of the first film was how reserved the animation was to let the character designs, subtle facial animation, and dialogue shine. It is amazing how re-watchable the First Act is being it was primarily in a gray office building. There are so many scenes in the original Incredibles that were shot-reverse shot. A true sign of a director following an inspired vision to the end. What about the Incredibles 2? It relies heavily on a compilation of scenes that halt the progress of the plot to produce oohs, aahs, and laughter (talking to you Jack Jack, raccoon, and Edna) instead of quality scenes that can do the same (albeit less flashy) and give us insight into characters and conflicts.

Overall, I cannot discredit the Incredibles 2 too much for these aspects because these aspects are what I got from the original, me alone. If you want to watch a 3D animated movie with your family, go ahead and pop this on your living room screen, but if you want to watch a movie like the Incredibles, you will probably be disappointed.