April 12, 2017
Movies I've Recently Watched: Logan and Ghost in the Shell
I've seen some pretty excellent movies recently ...
Logan
Logan is without doubt the best film in the X-Men series. It stands alone as a beautiful film that can be enjoyed by fans of the franchise, and non-fans alike. It's just a really great story. You get the best performance yet from Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart. The premise is simple (spoilers ahead): an aging Wolverine, somehow dying as his healing abilities are fleeting, is caring for an elderly Professor X who is suffering from dementia. It certainly helps if you know the backgrounds of these characters, but you never need to have read a comic or seen a previous film to appreciate the humanity depicted here. In this alternate time-line mutants are more or less wiped out of existence, living on the fringe, which is where Wolverine takes care of Charles. While this is going on, a new person enters their lives and provides purpose again for the old heroes.
Logan is R-rated for extreme violence. Wolverine finally lets his claws out in the way that he has in the comics. It's almost like this film makes up for the lack of blood in previous films in the series. This is the real Wolverine we've waited for a long time to see. A perfect ending for Jackman and Stewart in the series.
Ghost in the Shell
First I'll say that I'm a big anime fan in general, and in particular of the original Ghost in the Shell, although I hadn't seen any of the sequels or supporting series. Back in the early 2000s I became interested in anime. And after reading that a lot of the Matrix, and in particular the character of Trinity, was inspired by GitS, I had to check it out. It's maybe one of the most original and mind tripping cyberpunk sci-fi films I'd ever seen. I loved it, but it took me years to fully appreciate it.
As for the new live action Ghost in the Shell: in some ways I think it's amazing, in others just about average.
Before watching the new Ghost in the Shell I re-watched the original. The new GitS got a lot of flack for the “whitewashing” of the main protagonist from Japanese to Caucasian. The character of Major is a treasure of Japanese culture. To make her character white is egregious. And this comes on the heels of the controversy of the whitewashing of the character of the Ancient One in Dr Strange. It does feature prominent Japanese actor Beat Takeshi (who stared in, wrote and directed one of the weirdest and most interesting movies I've ever seen: Kikujiro no Natsu) as a fantastic chief of Section 9, but that could never make up for the changes to Major. That said, I think Scarlet Johanson pulled off her version of the character just fine. The cast is all around pretty great. The best part of the new GitS is how it visually brings the original to life. The world of GitS is gorgeous in live action. It takes a lot of care to recreate scenes from the original in beautiful detail. That alone is worth seeing it in the theater. Where it breaks down, apart from the changes to Major, is the dumbed-down dialogue. All the interesting aspects of the world of GitS have to be explained by the characters as we progress through the story, as if these characters weren’t fully aware of what a 'Ghost' or a 'Shell' were. This assumes the audience is too lazy to think critically during the movie about the ideas being addressed. (I think about the movie Dune which I didn't have the fortune of seeing in the theater but have read that it came with a glossary of terms for moviegoers – David Lynch expected his audience to do a little research, not force a script on them that explained every little detail). That's my biggest complaint. I think you could edit out 5 to 10 minutes of that explanatory dialogue and have a much tighter and more interesting movie. This new GitS really makes me cherish the subtly of the original.
Labels: Anime, Ghost in the Shell, Logan, science fiction, X-Men
