staticmissile

You might get bored watching this, yes I gave it a 10 but I live in "the future" full of bright pictures and quickly cutting images. This movie is awesome though. I think most people can appreciate the 1920s black and white film look as a unique treatment to our current full-color film stock standards.

Listen, this movie is interesting and a little spooky especially through the lens of 80 years. It's a vision of the future that became typical with movies like "1984" or "Brazil" and a look that inspired 12 Monkeys and a hundred other cool modern day sci-fi films.

It's standard sci-fi...the machines are taking over and making life crappy for everyone. People are their own worst enemy. I love some of the crazy industrial revolution jobs you see our workers performing, like the guy who has to point these giant clock hands at different flashing lights.

If you like sci-fi, you'll probably enjoy this, at the very least you have to appreciate that this creepy art-deco 1920s vision inspired a lot of what you see today.

So, at first I was skeptical. I thought, oh boy another clichéd jab at George W. Bush. There was some of that but the movie went further and came out pretty decent. See, Bush isn't my favorite but I'm not so obsessed to want to watch an entire movie about it.

OK, so this "fictional political candidate" -- basically Chris Cooper doing a good George W. impression -- is a bumbling idiot named Dicky Pillager (oh, my hand...it's so HEAVY!) who is not so much a "bad guy" as the people around him are. The movie is a fun exploration of Dick's diverse family and the frightening political machine of his PR team. It slowly turns into a mystery story, kind of like Chinatown or some private eye story with a high angle of a smoky office shot through a lazy ceiling fan. This movie has no smoky office with a fan though.

It's a decent story. I'm sure there are some "clever" jabs at the current president that we've heard a million times before. "Oh, he's killing the earth!" kind of stuff. It's not as irritating and self-righteous as it sounds. There are some jabs right back at the "crazy hippies" running a scathing anti-Pillager website. It's good to consider that what you think is true about your elected leaders is the product of spin doctoring and grooming.

Good actors, decent story, not bad.

I really like this movie and the way it looks. Sure, there's symbolism and it's foreign and there are all of these "deeper" reasons I'm sure I could give you for liking the movie but listen...the story is fun, weird and twisty. Have you ever played any of Square's video games? OK, maybe not. Anyway, it's like one of those where you don't know who's bad or good, what's going to come out of left field. It's definitely full of real characters. It's not melodramatic good guy vs. bad guys. They're good or bad in so many ways, their motivations for being that way are clear and you can pick who to sympathize with.

I especially like the setting. It's like we're in the future but it's as imagined by early 1900's visionaries. Like a lot of Japanese films, it's tough to tell where this takes place, which gives it a mysterious intangible quality.

Since it's animation, that should be mentioned. It's great, rich and detailed.