movies

So, two films on Sunday, something of a return to what I was doing in March/April, just wandering down the road (20 minutes or so) to the TNB to catch pretty much whatever was showing.

The first I saw was Wonderful Days, a manga film, but coming out of Korea, which I think is less common. I think that having had a break from animé for a while might have emphasised it, but the film had a beautiful look. The progressive integration of 3D elements into manga films is great, and although they still show at times, the seams between the styles of animation are better and better managed every time (Titan AE was another that mixed styles, if I remember correctly). Also, the end, often a problem for me with Animé films, was pretty good in this case, analogous though it was to so many manga endings (world ending, everything exploding: Akira, bad example, Metropolis, better example).

The second film was "Printemps, été, automne, hiver, ... et printemps", another Asian (also Korean, I think) film, very buddhist in structure and message. In fact, it had only a lightweight plot, and relied much more heavily on its imagery and sound (both effects and music) for effect, an approach that certainly worked for me; I felt very calm walking home. The director, who I think is Korean (Kim Ki-Duk) has another film at Arvor this month, so I might have to check that out, too.

Its worth noting, perhaps, that, since TNB is a proper cinema, both these films were presented in original version (in these cases, Korean) with French subtitles. This was a small problem early in the first film, when they were setting things up, but in truth neither film was really dialogue-driven, so it wasn't much of a drama. My reading is better than when I watched the Romanian film in March, but I still lack for vocabulary.