Lately, I've really been well kept in visual entertainment. On Tuesday, we hit Best Buy to score a copy of Constantine on DVD, but as always, I left with more than the item for which I came. I also grabbed a film called, Requiem for a Dream. My brother said, "dude, you'd probably like this movie, it's really fucked up". Well, with a review like that, I decided to give Requiem a whirl at the low price of $10. I'm often leery of my brother's picks, as he absolutely loves films like Anchorman and even the extraordinarily unfortunate Hook, but Requiem is flat out one of the best movies I've ever seen. It's one of those movies that's sickeningly depressing, but in a good way. It's a film about addiction and how far people will sink to get their fix. The film was quite well acted, particularly Ellen Burstyn and Jennifer Connelly. Honestly, anybody who's ever even considered shooting up or pushing off should have to watch Requiem for a Dream first, it'd totally change their mind.
Then, after watching one of the most depressing movies I've ever seen, I finished watching the last volume of Texhnolyze, which as it turns out, is one of the absolute most depressing works of anime I've ever seen. When I first started watching the show, I had no idea that it would end in the way that it did. I'm going to write something more detailed on Texhnolyze, but I want to watch the entire series straight through just to have a clearer handle on things.
Today. I went to see George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, one of the greatest zombie movies I've ever seen. Some would lynch me for what I'm about to write, but I'm not a fan of Romero's most revered film, Dawn of the Dead. Visually, it doesn't stand the test of time, it's not frightening at all and I find its social commentary to be heavy handed and ridiculously absurd. However, Land of the Dead does everything right. It's scarey, it's well filmed, it's wonderfully edgy and the social commentary is funny, but not over the top. It has everything that's great about zombie movies.
That's it for now...
Posted by Mike at July 21, 2005 07:31 PM