blitzkrieg1701

Let's get one thing out of the way right up front: Infra-Man is NOT a good movie, in fact, it's downright awful. Let's get another thing out of the way: it's a blast to watch anyway.

Basically, Infra-Man is every Ultraman/Power Rangers cliché ever imagined rolled into a single movie. A heroic young fellow who's part of a barely explained government agency (that's clearly hi-tech, since everyone wears clothes made out of tin foil) volunteers to be turned into an overgrown action figure named Infra-Man to stop the evil Princess Dragon Mom and her band of mutants from destroying mankind. That's pretty much all the story thee is, and it all happens in the first ten minutes.

Technically, Infra-Man is a spectacular mess. The pacing is terrible, with periods of incomprehensibly frantic speed sandwiched between stretches of mind-numbing boredom. None of the characters have any personality at all (they're more like props that talk) which is problematic, since none of them get more than half a second of introduction for us to get to know them. The acting is awful on it's own, and the pathetic dubbing only makes things worse. The `monsters' wouldn't even make it onto a Fox Kids show; The Banana Splits were scarier (and they had better special effects, too). Lapses in logic abound (Why does Princess Dragon Mom call us `Earthlings' when she's a `prehistoric super human'? How does every one know to shout `Infra-Man!' when the hero first appears when he's only been around for about thirty seconds? Why does our hero suddenly jump from being powered by a nuclear battery to solar power? Why is he even called `Infra-Man' when he has nothing to do with anything infrared? Why does She-Devil always look so bored?) but the film is clearly a lost cause at this point.

Yet, Infra-Man is an absolute blast. Why? Simple: it's one of those few movies that's so deliriously bad that you can't help but laugh. All that bright and colorful spandex jumping around, the absurdly over done sound effects, the almost seizure-like bad acting, the almost nonexistent special effects, and the complete absence of plot are thrown at the viewer at a speed and volume that is mesmerizing simply because we can't believe anyone would actually do this sort of thing. It's all so grossly bad that you can't help but be entertained by it, sort of like a fart but with spandex and monsters.

Every other reviewer so far has apparently been so swept up in watching this cinematic train wreck that they actually call it good, but don't be fooled. No one is laughing WITH Infra-Man, we're all laughing AT it; and in that sense, it's a blast.

`Self-Indulgence' is usually a very bad thing is see describing anything, conjuring images fat, long, bloated, dull epics that no one but the director would ever find interesting. In the case of FLCL, however, shameless, extravagant self-indulgence is a very good thing.

One thing has to be understood about FLCL right off the bat: this is not a deep piece of film making. FLCL is not a significant epic carefully thought out by a brotherhood of deep and wise sages on the nature of reality or what it is to be human or anything like that. FLCL is the collected weirdness and quirks of a gaggle of awkward geeks and sci-fi buffs exploded onto a screen and divided into six 30 minute portions, all done with absolutely no guiding principal other that `Hey, wouldn't it be cool if.' And, in this case, that couldn't be a better thing.

99% of all projects born of such self-indulgence would be unwatchable dross, but FLCL has the good fortune of being the indulgence of the brilliant minds at Gainax, who happen to really like a lot of very good things like back story and characterization and restless originality. These guys could make a film about themselves taking out the garbage and it'd be worth watching.

Not to say that FLCL is perfect by any means. While the story is interesting in concept, it's virtually lost in the flurry of flashy animation techniques and rampant in-jokes. Most of the characters spend the bulk of their screen time as mere cannon fodder for one absurd scenario after another, with precious little time to show the dept and personality they actually posses. One can't help but think that Gainax did themselves a disservice by forcing themselves to cram everything into 6 episodes. Still, the sheer beauty and madcap originality of said episodes succeed in making it a heck of a lot of fun, and that's really all FLCL is supposed to be.

The Ninth Gate ought to be a good movie. It boasts a famed director, some very accomplished actors, truly elegant locations, and a story overflowing with possibilities. Yet, for some reason, the film simply refuses to take these ingredients and make something interesting out of them. Quite frankly, this film is DULL. Not in a `there-not-enough-fighting-and-guts' way, but a `why-am-I-supposed-to-even-remotely-care-about-these-people?' way. For one the cast's performances are uniformly dull. In fact, whether they are supposed to be excited, angry, frightened, or dieing, everyone seems downright BORED. Things aren't helped much by the clichéd, unnatural dialogue either. Truly artless direction, surprisingly enough, is the final nail in the coffin. Somehow, poor Mr. Polanski has found a way to suck what little energy might have been generated out of the film through a plain, painfully unimaginative, job that occasionally borders on amateur (the Peter Pan-like wire work during the obviously over-rehearsed `fight' scene is especially embarrassing). Ultimately, The Ninth Gate recalls the campy B-movie relics of the fifties (the ones we keep around to make fun of, not the ones that actually stand the test of time) in a very bad way. There are simply too many obvious and inexcusable flaws to take it as anything other than an example of how even promising ingredients can fail to survive the trip from the page to the screen.