Recently in Cinema Category

Sin City was an amazing movie…the exaggerated film noir atmosphere…the corny pulp novel style dialogue…the sadistic, almost cartoonish, violence…“Rory Gilmore” as a blue-eyed hooker in studded black leather…and, of course, the powerful visual style, which used minimal color in an otherwise high-contrast black and white palette and looked, at times, just like a moving pen and ink drawing.

I have been a huge fan of Hayao Miyazaki’s films since I was a junior in college. In fact, he is the namesake of my work computer. My Neighbor Totoro was my first exposure to his brilliance; my roommate did a paper on the film. “You only see him when you’re very young…” (…or you’re very drunk). Although Totoro is one of his more charming films, the artwork in his other masterpieces is positively breathtaking. (My favorite is still Mononoke-hime.)

So it is no surprise that I am waiting with baited breath for my pre-order of Porco Rosso, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, and The Cat Returns to ship. The Region 1 release date for all three is tomorrow.

These DVDs have been delayed for so long; I remember when Porco Rosso had a slated release date of April 2004.

Now if Disney would just announce a date for the replacement of that awful Fox Home Video version of Totoro since Fox’s distribution rights have finally expired.

In other cool Miyazaki-related news, it looks like there will be a live-action version of Kiki’s Delivery Service.

Coincidentally, Slashdot linked to UnderGroundOnline’s list of the top 50 movie DVDs of all time the day after I posted a list of my own collection.

I was bored, so I thought I’d see how many titles from UGO’s favorites were in my list. It looks like I only own about half of them (bolded); I guess it’s time to fill up my Amazon.com shopping cart again.

Of course, with Blu-ray and HD-DVD duking it out throughout 2005 for the position of next-generation video format standard, my humble DVD library may soon be reminiscent of my mom’s collection of 8-tracks.

1. The Lord of the Rings
2. Alien Quadrilogy
3. Ultimate Matrix
4. The Evil Dead
5. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
6. Terminator 2 (different edition)
7. Fight Club
8. Men In Black
9. Dawn of the Dead
10. Ghostbusters
11. Star Wars Trilogy
12. Star Trek Movies (only the first three)
13. Escape from New York
14. Akira
15. Clerks X
16. Stargate
17. Se7en
18. The Mummy
19. Indiana Jones
20. The Goonies
21. Tron
22. Pearl Harbor
23. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
24. Back to the Future
25. Almost Famous
26. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
27. Blade II
28. Boogie Nights
29. Rushmore
30. X2: X-Men United
31. Daredevil
32. Memento
33. The Royal Tenenbaums
34. Superman: The Movie
35. The Sixth Sense
36. Gladiator
37. Black Hawk Down
38. THX 1138
39. Hellboy
40. Dark City
41. The Killer
42. 12 Monkeys
43. Jackie Brown
44. Field Of Dreams
45. Saving Private Ryan (different edition)
46. The Fifth Element (different edition)
47. The Shawshank Redemption
48. Beauty and the Beast
49. The Godfather Collection
50. Monsters, Inc.

Whenever I buy a DVD, I catalog it in a handy little app for OS X called DVD Cache. Since I finally hit 150 titles, I thought it would be fun to use the HTML export feature and post them here (with some minor clean-up of the code).

I’m not sure if my DVD library provides any profound revelations about my personality (other than I am an unabashed sci-fi geek, who also likes animation), but it does reveal that I spend way too much money on these silly little plastic discs. Warning: the DVD page is a bit bandwidth intensive (cover art).

There are a few embarrassing selections in there, but…uh…I didn’t buy those ones, they…were a gift.

Hey, if any of you who know me outside the blogosphere want to borrow some discs, feel free to ask me.

Moving on to less controversial topics…

A co-worker lent me a somewhat obscure live-action Japanese movie that he had borrowed from our university’s language lab, and I finally got a chance to watch it Sunday. Battle Royale (2000) by director Kini Fukasaku is an extremely dark, unsettling film with a laughable premise, but a serious, brutally violent tone throughout. I highly recommend it if you can find it (maybe via P2P client).

In a corrupt, imploding dystopian Japan, adults choose to quell student rebellion by making an example of one class of high school students each year. They ship these students off to a deserted island, fit them with electronic explosive dog collars, give each one a duffel bag with random bladed and projectile weapons, then set them loose. Only one student will be allowed off of the island, the required death of all of the rest of their classmates is the only caveat. If more than one student remains after three days, all of the collars explode.

The movie has its flaws (limited characterization, repetitive at times), and the excessively brutal violence is sickening and tragic, but it ends up being a surprisingly moving and provocative tale of desperate survival, friendship, betrayal, cruelty, and resistance.