My Summer Movie List

[Teto 2609]

One day you'll feel like watching something ironically pheo, and TOME will be there for you.

[Sahaqiel 1232]

It's a webseries by a flash artist named Kirbopher who is big on Newgrounds. He's big enough to recruit to both voice actors from other notable webseries like various Abridged stuff, and even teen Gohan from DBZ.

TOME got really popular because of the artist's notoriety, because otherwise the series doesn't have much quality to speak of past the voice acting and music, done by competent people. Kirb graduated from art school for animation, and I guess he was one of those people who thinks he already knows everything so he didn't actually learn anything, because his character design looks like it's from a how to draw anime book, and his color direction is grimy and dull.

Past the horrible aesthetics, his characters are a collection of anime stereotypes and the plot is an embarrassing, broken mess, which is also constructed from the worst cliches from all the anime aired in America. There is a self insert character who is actually important to the story as well.

Despite this, the series is popular and defended by Kirb's followers. Countless authorities of the scene have written detailed criticisms on why Kirbopher needs to improve and how he should do it, and he's ignored all of them. Even Egoraptor wrote a long post imploring him to stop being so bad, but to no avail.

The episodes eventually started being split into two parts so he'd get more YouTube hits, and thus, more money. Season two got $15,000 on Kickstarter and is currently in the works.

The series' plot is so broken, that Kirb needed to make a bonus video explaining everything, in particular, the villain's motives. He had to explain the villain's motives outside the series. There are so many things I can say about TOME, and nearly none of them are good, if Kirbopher had a direct hand in them. He wrote the original idea when he was thirteen and reimagined and wrote the whole script in two days.

[pheonix561 2080]

I watched Porco Rosso. It was generally the same experience I have with every other miyazaki movie in the end: A plot that just doesn't make sense combined with a jaw droppingly gorgeous setting. I actually shed a tear five minutes in from the sheer beauty of the setting and designs and things, and yet by the end of the movie I was just confused by all of the character's decisions, asking myself how in the world the movie ended up going in that direction. Some of the characters, like Curtis, just weren't consistent, and the ending with kissing fio (who's name I can't get over) and also possibly falling in love with Gina but maybe not, I think it was trying to be deep and just ended up being muddled. Beautiful movie though.

[Teto 2609]

Who did you think Curtis was meant to be? I don't know why people watch characters for the brief screen time they have, and then make conclusions about them like that. I feel like you're confusing inconsistency and three-dimensionality. People are inconsistent. You don't understand a character from a couple encounters they have on a TV show. If you take a series of encounters from my recent life, you'll find a variety of different characteristics, and if you took any single one and told me who that person was, each interpretation would be different, because they're all different parts of me.

 

A character being inconsistent isn't a very strong criticism. Maybe you just have to pay the character better attention to try and understand them through their conflicting characteristics. Miyazaki tries to be a lot more down to earth, so you're not going to have many one-dimensional characters. That's why characters like in Tales from Earthsea or the old lady from Arrietty (neither of them directed by Hayao Miyazaki mind you) stand out in Ghibli movies; because they're so uncharacteristically one-dimensional.

 

Dunno about Fio. Maybe she was confusing sympathy for affection. There's a bit of cultural contrast in the movie with the Adriatic folk; Porco and Gina, and the Americans; Curtis and Fio. While Fio and Gina's relationships with Porco serve as another contrast, for both 'how love works' based on cultural background and age. That's something I imagine being a thematic element, but I haven't thought into it. I thought the enigmatic open-ending of Gina and Porco was just another cultural thing for the setting; privacy in the affairs of romance or somesuch. Might just be a homage to a style of storytelling.

 

I haven't stopped and thought about Ghibli movies much. I've watched them so much for so long that I don't take notice of smaller things, and about the detail that goes into the plot or character. They're so familiar but I realise I don't really know them incredibly well. Porco Rosso makes perfect sense to me, but for the longest time I've never paid attention to it in great detail.

 

Also I'm not sure if the movie was muddled or if you were muddled. I don't know what else to tell you about your thoughts on the matter, but I can encourage a bit more patience. Make sure that, while you're rushing through all these movies, you're not so in a rush to get through the list that you don't take the time to really think about the movies you're watching. It's all good to say "I have seen all these movies", but in the end you can't let it just amount to mass consumption of media, or you won't get anything out of it. If you're not getting much out of it you're just amassing a list that you can show off.

[pheonix561 2080]

I promise you, I'm taking my time with these movies, I usually take a few days between movies to think on what I watched before I move on. Otherwise I'd have covered a lot more ground by now since I started. I didn't make this thread just so I could have a list of movies I've seen that I could show off, I just thought it might be an interesting thread.

 

At the beginning of the movie, curtis kills two people for money, then unsuccessfully tries to kill porco rosso just to say he did. He sneaks into Gina's garden and makes it very clear to her that he won't stop until he's on top of the world and he's totally willing to murder and steal his way there, but at the end of the movie after losing his money, potential bride, and reputation for having killed porco, just goes "haha whatever" and leaves, and never bothers porco, gina, or fio ever again aside from the occasional letter to fio. It didn't make any sense to me. This was the same guy who tracked porco all the way back to his secret hide out to challenge him to life or death duel, and when he ran out of bullets in his plane, pulled out his handgun and started taking shots at him. Why suddenly chill out like that?

The very end didn't make sense to me either. It was like the whole movie was setting up this potential love triangle between fio, gina, and porco. Porco doesn't want to see gina because gina married his deceased war buddy Bernini. Knowing Bernini died immediately after the wedding, porco could never bring himself to be with his widow, even though gina came to want him. So he keeps showing up at gina's restaurant, eating, and leaving. Which makes sense. And then there's Fio, the excited young american engineer who designs porco's great new plane, and despite her grandfather trying to keep fio and porco apart, totally falls for porco. So at the end of the movie porco suddenly learns from curtis that gina wants him, and then fio kisses him, and he's got to choose between one or the other. All of that is sensible. But then in the ending monologue everyone is suddenly best friends. Gina and Fio stay bros, and porco just sort of chooses Gina, and apparently the girl who spends the entire movie falling for porco is just "yeah okay sure" about the whole thing. Why?

It just goes in line with that listful and relaxing attitude all of miyazaki's movies have, which I don't particularly like. I'm not saying they're bad, and I get why it's done and what he's going for, but it just doesn't appeal to me. Like how I can see all the hype surrounding a game like Final Fantasy 7 but never play it because I just can't get into turn based RPG's. Fine if you liked it, but it's not for me.

[Teto 2609]

I get you. It's difficult for me to stop and be critical of these movies at this point because I've watched them so much. It's like someone telling you your friend is an asshole. At first I didn't get it because I thought he was okay, but when I look back on it, he's a bit of a cock and I don't like him anymore. Porco Rosso is a nice movie for me to watch, but I can totally see where you're coming from with that. I just took it as it was for so long and never thought that much about it.

 

I wasn't sure how deeply Fio felt for Porco though beyond a crush though, so that's the only thing I will disagree with you on. Curtis being totally driven to find and challenge Porco and then giving up on it when the police show up makes little sense though, I get you on that. As if he just didn't care about it by the end of the whole thing. Maybe he was dazed and confused after the battle, and burnt out about Gina, that he was more or less in a kind of drunken stupor and didn't feel like fighting people anymore? He probably wasn't at full mental power after all of that and then almost drowning. Sure if he was a stone-face killer then you'd expect him to keep up the fight after he regained consciousness, but he's a dopey showoff so I'm not sure how that kind of person would be under those circumstances.

 

A lot of the inconsistencies you list seem like things that would only make sense with off-screen character development (i.e. cleaning up).

 

I could crow on about how "we just don't get the full picture, so we can't call them bad characters" but in the end it's just bad storytelling that we would have to resort to suspension of disbelief to enjoy a movie. Questioning whether we missed something, or if something wasn't conveyed well enough. Locus of control, I suppose. Speaks a bit to my personality more than anything that I'll constantly put blame on myself for not being able to enjoy or understand something rather than on the thing I don't like. Blaming myself gets me by quite well with understanding people, but I'm not sure how good an attitude that is in the long run. I can waste a lot of time understanding things that don't matter. When people don't like a movie most people blame the movie, whereas I blame my competence as a viewer. Just noticed how strange that sounds.

 

This is a serious moment in my life everyone. In the writing of this post I realised what it means to dislike things, and the fact that I blame myself for everything I dislike. Before right now I would never be able to call anything "bad", because "bad music" or "bad movies" were just things I didn't understand how to like. I don't dislike people or things, but instead I get myself down about my inability to like them. This is real life character development, right here and now. It might not change me, but it's good that I'm suddenly aware that that is how my mind works.

[pheonix561 2080]

I definitely see what you're getting at when you praise the movie for it's inconsistency. And it's not like I don't understand what you're talking about. I think Miyazaki has a really interesting approach to movies like these. Like you said, his characters are inconsistent because people are inconsistent, and in movies like miyazaki's we're actually asked to decide what the characters are like both off screen and on. Characters being like people and changing and evolving and making decisions based on things we don't know about them. Which I think is really interesting and is definitely what lends to his influential style. And I think this movie was a well done example of that. His movies have inconsistent characters on purpose, but it's just the kind of thing that I don't enjoy all that much. I think it might just be because I'm so used to movies in different styles that when I turn around and watch a ghibli movie out of nowhere I get so jarred by the difference in attitudes that I just get turned off from it. I think if I were to get rid of all the other movies on my list right now and only watch miyazaki movies I'd probably end up liking them a lot more than I already do.

It's not like this movie wasn't full of things I loved, there are just some things I forgot to mention. The symbolism you pointed out of the differing love stories between the american hollywood kind and the european kind being represented by curtis/fio falling in love instantly and porco/gina taking their time. Or the fact that porco's curse is a direct metaphor for survivor's guilt. I know that there's a lot of miyazaki movies that fans like to come up with metaphors for what they could actually be about that are sort of a stretch of the imagination to appreciate, but porco couldn't be anything but survivor's guilt.

[Necropolis 763]

Other than lupin I think it might be the least ghibli, ghibli film

Also, I think you might be looking too hard at Fio and Porco's relationship. Or maybe I didn't look hard enoough. I really never saw it as much more than a little crush, so it wasn't all that surprising when he chose Gina for me.

[Teto 2609]

I'm having a mental breakdown so I can't say any more about Porco.

Apart from that it's meant to be what Miyazaki intended to be his most adult movie, and is one of his most rooted in reality.

 

Watch Pom Poko and Only Yesterday. Isao Takahata movies are sufficiently different from Hayao Miyazaki's movies. 

[Fierce Muffin 490]

I actually recently rewatched Porco Rosso since I hadn't seen it in years and I never really saw the characters as inconsistent. They all generally stayed within the kind of character they were presented as, from what I saw. Curtis just seemed like some big shot American as could only be portrayed by Japan, of course, along with Japanese ideals, I guess? From the anime I've seen, characters very often will learn from their mistakes or back down after losing something, you know? Plus, during the second half of their duel, Curtis tells Porco of Gina's love. It's obvious he realizes he can't do anything about it anyway, so why not tell him. Curtis kind of just wanted to be the best at everything and I guess being defeated by Porco made him realize he should move on and thus went to America and began a life of acting.

 

As for Fio, as Necro said, she was young and it was a crush at most. She had only just met him while Porco had known Gina for decades. It seems obvious why he would choose Gina over Fio, especially after what Curtis tells him during the fight.

 

Despite all that though, Fio is probably my favorite Ghibli girl. She just gets stuff done, man, and doesn't waver no matter what.

[Necropolis 763]

The way she cows all of those pirates is amazing.

[pheonix561 2080]

Watched the fifth element today. I don't have much to say about it other than it was a kind of dumb, quirky, fast paced to the point of being exhausting action movie that seemed way longer than it was.

[Teto 2609]

I couldn't stick The Fifth Element all the way through. Maybe one day, but it feels more like something I'd enjoy watching with my older brother, who was into it when he was younger. Feels more like something I'd think was great if it wasn't one of these things people think is great, and I just watched it with some friends not expecting much.

 

By the way The Grand Budapest Hotel is out on DVD, so it might be available for you to watch in some form now. I watched it a second time and enjoyed it again.

[Fierce Muffin 490]

I've never heard of people disliking The Fifth Element. I thought it was a hilarious scifi movie, definitely something to watch with friends. It feels like you guys both went in expecting Blade Runner or something and that's not what it is at all. Especially with something like the MULTIPASS scene. Although, I haven't seen it in years, so my memories of it are possibly dated. I'm still p. sure it's more like a comedic scifi though that isn't very serious and such, but entirely enjoyable because of how silly it is.

 

Not upset with you two, I've just never seen people not love The Fifth Element.

 

Also, watch Perfect Blue, Pheonix.

[Teto 2609]

Nah, I didn't dislike it. It just seems like something I'd enjoy more watching it with other people. I haven't even seen Blade Runner.

I don't know why I didn't get into it the first time. I just wasn't feeling like it I guess. I haven't written it off, and it's there on my list of movies to be revisited, which is often prioritized over movies I have to watch first time.