Tag / billy crudup

by Jaime Rebanal

‘Princess Mononoke’ Review: Hayao Miyazaki’s Bloodiest is Among His Most Breathtaking and Humanistic

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Princess Mononoke is arguably Hayao Miyazaki’s largest film by scale since 1984’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and it is also his second greatest achievement as a director. There aren’t many animators who bring so much life to their worlds quite like how Hayao Miyazaki does it, but for every bit as imaginative as these movies can get, the impressiveness of how immersive these films are is reflected beautifully through their real-world parallels. In Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki finds himself taking upon a very complex moral standing through a war being waged between nature and humanity – and every moment of it is as beautiful as one could ever hope for it to be.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Alien: Covenant – Review

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For as many films as the Alien franchise has managed to spawn, only Ridley Scott’s original film has maintained where it was at its very best. That’s not to say James Cameron’s Aliens isn’t fantastic in its own right, but it sets up what’s brought the franchise down as more films had come along: the whole universe ended up becoming far too big for its own good and thus it began to progress far too much like a video game. Now with Ridley Scott’s prequels coming along, we have Prometheus only being as broad as ever and adding to this problem even with my own enjoyment of it, so that’s where my skepticism for Alien: Covenant had rose higher. But I wasn’t merely disappointed with Alien: Covenant, I was so frustrated with what it wanted to be, even to that point it managed to leave a rather bitter taste in my own mouth by the time it was over, because of what it wanted to be all at once, and overall, how little I ended up caring for the final product.

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by Jaime Rebanal

20th Century Women – Review

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In my good friend Cole Klima’s review of the film, he cites understanding as a concept that drives us as human beings and a fundamental to which Mike Mills explores in 20th Century Women. The concept of understanding is ultimately what connects us as people, but in a 21st century it seems to be a faded concept. We live in a world where people seem more accepting of one another regarding where they have come from but there’s an evident divide that we can bring ourselves to. We never know it on the spot but it’s felt: our beliefs and our generations and our grasps on reality divide us in some way or another and that concept feels captured too perfectly in 20th Century Women.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Jackie – Review

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Pablo Larraín’s latest film, a biopic about Jacqueline Kennedy from the days after JFK’s death, is one of the year’s most frustrating films, one in the sense it feels far too much like an obscured portrait of its own subject. On one hand there’s a technically impressive feat that’s allowing itself to shine all the way through but somehow it seems that Pablo Larraín’s handling of the subject is just so alienating where it should be intriguing. My assumption was that if it were the point to get a grasp on what Jacqueline Kennedy was like after JFK’s death, it was one among many factors to why Jackie never finds itself working as well as it should. Rather instead, it just feels so empty and never moves out of the single spot it remains within.

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by Jaime Rebanal

Mission: Impossible III – Review

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Many people cite Mission: Impossible II as the worst film in the series yet I’ve always had a specific dislike in regards to Mission: Impossible III. Where I admire Mission: Impossible II to an extent for John Woo’s own self-awareness to the silliness which he presents on the screen, I stand by a specific belief that Mission: Impossible III is the worst of the bunch as I find that when compared to the previous two, it’s so much more of a lazy effort. Mission: Impossible III just starts off promisingly but soon after that, everything that follows turns extremely frustrating and by that point, I simply don’t care anymore for the direction it goes.

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