We’re taking advantage of the end of the year to review Studio Ghibli’s cartoons. My favorite is “Totoro”. What I really didn’t like was the one made entirely on a computer. In addition to being ugly, the story is very bad.
Let’s skip Grave Of the Fireflies.
Princess Mononoke is the masterpiece
Earwig and the Witch was a disappointment. They were returning to the Diana Wynne Jones well for that one. The sad thing is that this was an improvement on the book.
Indeed. It took the main idea of Nausicaa and made an even better film.
CARAMBA!
We can skip Grave of the Fireflies as long as we acknowledge the gut-wrenching power and importance of that movie!
I agree with you. The message of this cartoon is still necessary, even more so today. But we are not in the mood for so much suffering.
I also watched “Rebel Moon”. If we don’t think about who the director is, we’ll think it’s a remake of “Battle Beyond Stars” made with CGI and not practical effects and miniatures.
I was surprised to see Doona Bae wearing a traditional Korean hat and two fire sabers in a fight as exciting as the cleaning I do at home on Saturdays.
That being said, this isn’t a bad film, nor is it a good film. It’s like those cheap movies that used to be broadcasted on Saturday nights on open TV.
Catching up on comedy specials to end this year with some laughs:
I found a great Youtube channel that uploads upscaled UK comedy shows, some real gems in there like “Nathan Barley”, “Monkey Dust” and “The New Statesmen”.
Another one I liked was Watch Taylor Tomlinson: Look At You | Netflix Official Site
This was an oddly divisive one. My boomer parents didn’t like it at all, but my Gen Z cousins were totally into it.
For the first month of the year 2024, we present UNICO IN THE ISLAND OF MAGIC! This theatrical feature animation, released as the second film of UNICO, was produced based on the original script authored by Osamu Tezuka himself. - Story - Unico is left alone on a certain small island, taken by the West Wind, where Toby, a disciple of Kuruku the Witch, turns forest animals and villagers there into living dolls. To return them back to the original forms, Unico, together with Torby’s sister, Cheri, goes to the Island where Kuruku lives.
https://tezukaosamu.net/en/anime/15.html
Just saw Godzilla Minus One tonight. Very much a spiritual return to the source material of the original 1954 film, when the monster was the embodiment of atomic horror at a time when Japan was still very much dealing with the devastating aftermath of a war it started and the struggle to redefine itself and its values moving into the latter half of the 20th Century.
This version of Big G doesn’t mess around. The way they depict his atomic fire breath was an interesting twist that really hammers home the idea that he’s a walking A-bomb.
Also possibly the first Godzilla film I’ve seen that actually made me care about the human characters, most of the time those stories are just a way to pad out the running time until the next monster attack scene.
I felt genuine affection for those characters, their story really mattered. But it also doesn’t scrimp on the Big G action, Gojira is a genuinely frightening force of nature in this and, like you allude to, it is a love letter to the original. The polish they put on the original score is superb as well, when they head in to the final battle it really got my blood pumping.
This is the second time that my bosses at SFGATE have forced me to watch a Zach Snyder film against my will. The first time they did so, with Snyder’s hallowed cut of DC’s “Justice League,” I found myself irritated but ultimately forgiving. But this time, I was sentenced to watch all of Snyder’s new space opera “Rebel Moon, Part One: A Child Of Fire,” which dropped on Netflix over Christmas, like a raw potato weighing down everyone’s stocking. This assignment, to me, felt like the bigger imposition.
I had no idea how correct I’d be.
…
Because “Rebel Moon” is, without question, one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It’s not coherent enough for me to hate it. It’s just a profound waste of time, and at age 47 I don’t like having my time wasted. This movie doesn’t even have kitsch value, the way other awful films might. It’s just an incoherent, deadening mess. It’s a movie that shouldn’t be watched so much as it should be biopsied. The fact that it ends with the title card “END PART ONE” feels like a hostile threat more than anything exciting. If my bosses force me to watch Part Two, I will leave this job.
I watched it over Christmas and have only the vaguest memories about what happened. Literally forgettable.
Yeah, I watched it around Christmas too and did not remember the majority of the plot points covered in the review.
I may have mentioned Colossal before. A very different take on the kaiju movie.
And @NukeML - at least if it’s a bad film, it doesn’t seem to stick around in your head for long after watching it… 
i didn’t hate it, but it was not good. and, like you guys are saying, i don’t remeber much of it, either. could be that my pregame warm up smoke hazed the memory a bit, or that was how i sat through the picture without hating on it, even if it was derivative drivel.
… watching “Solo”
I always thought the planet was called Korell
