Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Evangelion 3.0: あすかばあちゃん かわいいです~~~ (2012)

Is Evangelion 3.0 the new Citizen Kane (1941)? Perhaps. While I won’t go into the details of Kane’s connection with Japanese leather philosophy, it is clear that badass robot pilot Shinji Ikari, who has to be 60+ years old in this installment but looks 14 thanks to magic pink slime, is the embodiment of post-apocalyptic robot power fantasy.

I am a big believer in blind devotion to popular anime brands. This isn’t a bad movie, because it’s a Neon Genesis Evangelion movie. Don’t stop the series now! Give me more!

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Thursday, November 28, 2019

ThanksKilling 3 (2013)

ThanksKilling 3 is the sequel to ThanksKilling (2008) and the ill-fated ThanksKilling 2. T3 is about one man’s quest to build the year-round seasonal theme park Thanksgivingland, in spite of the inter-dimensional monsters and Muppet-like characters that try to stop him. Like Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), the film pays tongue-in-cheek homage to its roots while consistently delivering scares, laughs, tears, and family-unfriendly fun.

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Monday, September 2, 2019

Zardoz (1974)

Fresh from directing Deliverance (1972), John Boorman wrote, directed, and produced a sci-fi classic that is without a doubt his most unconventional film.

The movie takes place so far in the future that the location could only be described as specifically as that it’s in a temperate zone. There seem to be parallel realities, and a giant flying head travels between dimensions and orders around Sean Connery until Connery hitches a ride across the dimensional divide and ends up in a high-tech hippie commune. If that sounds like your thing, you may have a few screws loose.

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Saturday, July 27, 2019

The End of Evangelion (1997)

I am in love with Japanese cinema, and that goes doubly for anime. Anno Hideaki’s Neon Genesis Evangelion is some of the most enjoyable anime I have seen, and The End of Evangelion is the best cinematic adaptation of the franchise. Deeply philosophical yet chemically engaging, the film left a profound effect on me when I first saw it and continues to do so to this day.

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