REVIEW: Justice, My Foot (live action movie)

Justice, My Foot is a Hong Kong action-comedy movie.

Review:

Sung Sai Kit is the best lawyer around, willing to take any case (as long as he’s offered plenty of money) and say anything he has to in order to win. His wife, Madam Sung, appreciates all the finery that Sung is able to buy for her, but she also superstitiously believes that Sung’s work is the reason why 12 of their 13 children have died. When their 13th child dies right after Sung’s most recent court win, Madam Sung decides she’s had enough - Sung will retire, even if she has to push him every step of the way. She even goes so far as to curse the child she’s carrying. If Sung breaks his promise and goes back to being a lawyer, then their son will be born without a penis. (They just assume it’ll be a son, since all 13 of their other children were.)

However, it’s Madam Sung herself who eventually convinces Sung to go back to work. She meets a pregnant woman whose husband died under suspicious circumstances, and she argues on the woman’s behalf after the woman gives birth and then tries to kill herself. Sung takes the job on, but the corruption he finds himself up against may be more than even he can handle.

Netflix thought I would love this, probably because I enjoyed Wing Chun, a comedy with a similar feel. Unfortunately, this was one of those times when Netflix was wrong. There were aspects of this movie that I enjoyed, but the humor generally didn’t work for me.

This was primarily a broad comedy with a bit of wire-fu mixed in. There were visual jokes (the portraits of Sung’s parents), gay jokes (two male officials were very clearly a couple, which was played entirely for laughs), fart jokes, and sexual jokes (a racy love letter read aloud in court, a boob joke, accidental drinking of breast milk, etc.). I was a bit stunned at the way the 13th son’s death was handled - lots of drama and fake-looking crying, and yet everyone seemed to be pretty much over it by the time Sung’s retirement ceremony happened. I eventually adjusted to the movie’s tone, which I realized reminded me a lot of stuff like Robin Hood: Men in Tights, but the child’s death happened fairly early on and was extremely jarring.

I didn’t like Sung very much. I wanted him to win because the widowed woman’s situation sucked, but I didn’t get the impression that he was defending her because he cared much about her, or even justice in general. This was the guy who argued that a man whose son was killed should be required to pay the medical bills of a man who hurt his pinky while killing the son.

I did like Sung and his wife as a couple, though. Not only were they openly affectionate, they made a good pair: they were both incredibly clever, and Sung had his education while his wife had her martial arts skills. The only thing I disliked, as far as their relationship went, was when Sung’s wife became extremely jealous of the woman with the murdered husband. Most of the time, though, they were a strong couple that worked well together and had faith in each other’s abilities.

All in all, this had a few good moments but wasn’t really worth watching. I did like Madam Sung, even though she (like everything else in the movie) was ridiculous. She battled people for her husband’s sake while 9 months pregnant (not physically possible, but still kind of fun to watch), refused to let him bow out of promises he made to her, tried to defend the widowed woman in court when her husband wouldn’t, even though she couldn’t really write, and generally let nothing stand in her way.

Oh, one more thing: I was pleasantly surprised at the way the penis curse turned out. I mean, I guessed what would happen the instant the curse was mentioned - it was pretty obvious. The thing that pleased me was Sung's reaction. I may not have liked the guy much, but at least his 14th child made him happy.

REVIEW: He's Just Not That Into You (live action movie)

He's Just Not That Into You is a romantic comedy based on a self-help book by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo.

Review:

This movie is entirely about the character relationships, and I kind of feel like it would best be described with a diagram. Lacking that, I’ll try a list.

• Gigi: A single woman who is desperately waiting for her latest date to call her back, not because she particularly likes him, but rather because she wants to not be single.
• Alex: A bar owner who takes pity on Gigi and gives her advice that mostly boils down to “that guy isn’t interested, so stop throwing yourself at him.”
• Janine: Gigi’s coworker and friend. She’s married to Ben.
• Ben: Years ago, Janine gave him an ultimatum: either he needed to marry her or she’d leave. So he married her. He begins to falter after he meets Anna, a flirtatious singer.
• Anna: Anna’s friend Mary tells her a story about a friend of her sister’s (or something) who met a guy who fell in love with her even though he was already married. The guy left his wife and he lived happily ever after with this new woman. So Anna takes a chance and calls up Ben, even though he already told her that he’s married and doesn’t want to cheat on his wife.
• Conor: Anna’s sorta-boyfriend. “Sorta,” because he sees the two of them as a couple while she sees him as more of a platonic friend she once had sex with. Conor is the guy Gigi went on a date with and who she’d hoped would call (he never had any plans to call).
• Mary: Anna’s friend. She only ever seems to connect with guys online, and then they either refuse to actually talk to her or meet with her in person, or they turn out to be players.
• Beth: Gigi and Janine’s coworker. She’s been with her boyfriend Neil for 7 years. Although they’re living together, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Neil has no plans to ever propose, and Beth has had enough.
• Neil: Beth’s boyfriend and Ben’s friend.

Wow, this movie was unpleasant. I’m pretty sure it was a gift from my sister. A few years ago she asked me what I wanted for Christmas, and I said “movies, romantic comedies.” I’m appalled that, according to Wikipedia and IMDb, this really is supposed to be a romantic comedy. It took a lot of willpower to finish watching it, and even then I had to fast forward through a couple parts because I just couldn’t stand to watch the characters anymore.

I hated most of the cast only 15 or 20 minutes in. Although Ben acted like he wanted to stay faithful to his wife, there were signs right from the start that that wasn’t entirely true. Gigi was painfully and pathetically clingy - I couldn’t understand why Alex didn’t tell her to stop calling him. I hated Mary for encouraging Anna to hook up with a married guy, and I hated Anna for going along with the idea so easily. And if Conor was so caught up in Anna, why bother going on a date with Gigi?

I spent much of the movie hoping that everyone would end up single and afraid that instead everyone would be paired off with different people. Surprisingly, a few people did end up single. Just not as many as I’d have liked. I wasn’t 100% convinced that all the final pairings were a good idea. Pretty much the only couple I was completely on board with was Beth and Neil.

I don’t know that I’d call this a romantic comedy. It wasn’t particularly funny, and much of it was aggressively anti-romantic. I could see that I was supposed to be cheering for Alex and Gigi to end up together - Gigi even pointed out the similarities between the two of them and her favorite romantic movie characters - but it was like watching a trainwreck, and Alex’s change of heart felt forced. The entire situation with Anna, Ben, and Janine was just awful. And while Beth and Neil had the most solid relationship, and I appreciated that he showed up and helped out when she was going through a rough time, I didn’t really feel connected to them. This movie was stuffed too full of characters.

All in all, if I had offloaded this without ever having watched it, I wouldn’t have missed out on much. I will agree, however, with the bit at the beginning: it’s awful to tell little girls that boys who are mean to them are only being mean because they like them. Those boys are actually just jerks, full stop.

Extras:

Several deleted scenes, which I did not bother to watch.

REVIEW: Attack on Titan: The Movie, Part 1 (live action movie)

Attack on Titan: The Movie is a live action adaptation of a post-apocalyptic manga series.

This review includes spoilers.

Review:

If you're on the fence about whether to watch this or not, you can add me to the “not” column. This movie is terrible. I'm no longer even the slightest bit tempted to get Part 2.

I haven't really been able to get into the original Attack on Titan manga, but the franchise as a whole interests me and I loved the anime. One thing fans of this series need to know is that this movie isn't the same as the manga or the show. Humanity is still living inside three concentric walls, a huge titan still knocks a hole into the outer wall, lots of people get eaten, and the whole storyline about plugging the hole in the wall still exists. However, many important details have been changed or completely dropped from the story.

Eren, Mikasa, and Armin are still friends at the start of the movie. Armin enjoys inventing things, even though advanced technologies are forbidden (never mind that several groups of people travel in armored cars later in the movie). Eren and Mikasa appear to like each other, but Eren is too busy dreaming about visiting the world outside the walls and being angry that humanity is trapped to do much more than show off and give Mikasa his scarf. Not one bit of Mikasa's original backstory is evident, and Eren's parents apparently died a while back.

In the original series, it was well-known that scouts had traveled to the outside world and had almost always been wiped out, at least until Erwin Smith got to start trying new tactics. In this movie, no one has seen a titan in years, and the omni-directional maneuvering gear (or whatever it's called) isn't developed until after the outer wall is breached. One thing that had me seeing red: for a while it appeared as though Mikasa was killed during the chaos after the outer wall was breached. Considering that she and Levi were my favorite characters in the original series, this was not a change I welcomed.

Thankfully, she wasn't actually dead. Unfortunately, Levi was dropped from the story and replaced by a Levi-wannabe jerk named Shikishima. Since Mikasa's backstory had also been dropped, she no longer had a bone-deep loyalty to Eren and instead seemed to be Shikishima's favorite playmate. My skin crawled during the scene in which Shikishima essentially taunted Eren with Mikasa, while she passively let him do it. This, by the way, was soon followed by a scene in which two lovebirds in the group tried to quietly have sex in a corner and Hiana offered herself to Eren while he was still trying to get over being snubbed by the almost-girlfriend he'd thought was dead.

I hated the way this movie treated pretty much the entire named female cast. The women were all girlfriends (Lil), potential girlfriends (Mikasa, Hiana), objects to be fought over (Mikasa), or jokes (Hans, Sasha). The women were also always the ones who rushed after crying babies. To be fair, though, the entire cast was pretty terrible. The only ones I even vaguely felt like rooting for were Armin and Sasha, and even they were lackluster.

I thought humanity was doomed in the original series, but in this adaptation it was even worse. The group that went out to repair the wall barely seemed to have had any training, the entire plan hinged on humanity's last supply of explosives, and the plan itself, if it worked, would leave part of the wall significantly shorter than the rest. People already knew that there was at least one titan who could look over the tallest part of the wall, so the wall would for sure never again be able to completely keep the titans out.

Let's see, what else... The special effects weren't very good. The best part was probably shots of the smaller titans during the scene when the wall first fell. Some looked more human than others, and there was something genuinely disturbing about the way they moved and smiled as they grabbed and ate humans. However, the colossal titan looked really fake, and I found that even the smaller titans tended to look more silly than scary later on. The scenes in which characters flew through the air while using their maneuvering gear could also have been better. Also, and I know this sounds weird for something Attack on Titan-related, I thought the blood was overdone.

Overall, this was a bad movie. Yes, it had quite a few new things to offer Attack on Titan fans, but the new stuff wasn't very good. In some cases, the liberties that the writer and director took with the original story actually made the world-building even fuzzier – I'm still wondering how that baby titan could even exist. I definitely won't be buying Part 2.

Extras:

• Just previews for other Funimation products.

REVIEW: Rurouni Kenshin, Part 1: Origins (live action movie)

Rurouni Kenshin, Part 1: Origins is a live action adaptation of the Rurouni Kenshin manga. Although it says "Part 1," rest assured, it doesn't end in a cliffhanger.

Review:

I'll start this review off by answering a question: Do I plan on buying and watching Part 2? The answer is “yes.”

Okay, now for the details. As far as my Rurouni Kenshin background goes, I've read the entire manga, although long enough ago that I've forgotten a lot, I've seen the first season of the original TV series and most of the second season, and I've read one related light novel. I'm definitely a fan of this franchise, but I had concerns about how well it might work as a live action movie. Happily, I thought it worked out pretty well.

The characters and general story were all faithful to the original. Of them all, I most enjoyed Kenshin. Other than a few moments during the last big battle with Jin'e, I felt that Takeru Satoh did a wonderful job portraying him. The box art image of Emi Takei as Kaoru worried me because she was only recognizable as the character by a process of elimination (I knew the woman in the corner was definitely Megumi). However, in the movie itself she was great and really brought the character to life, although I had forgotten how ridiculously and sometimes painfully naive Kaoru could be. Seriously, fighting Jin'e with a wooden sword? Yu Aoi as Megumi, Yosuke Eguchi as Saito, and Munetaka Aoki as Sanosuke were also pretty good, although they didn't fit my mental images of the original characters as well.

Like I said, it's been ages since I last read the manga. I do, however, own an omnibus edition of the first three volumes. Flipping through that, it looks like this movie blended together a couple of the longer storylines from those volumes and cut out lots of Kenshin's original opponents. In the movie, Kaoru's dojo was losing business due to someone murdering people under Kenshin's old assassin name, “Battousai the Killsword,” and claiming that they were using Kaoru's dojo's techniques. The imposter turned out to be Jin'e, a man from Kenshin's bloody past, who was working for a drug lord named Kanryu. I think that might have been two or three separate stories in the original manga.

One of the things I was most concerned about when I started watching this adaptation was how some of Kenshin's more over-the-top opponents would be handled. I remember one character who literally stored a bag of oil in his belly so that he could spew fire at people. This adaptation toned a lot of that down, for the better. The only truly weird bit was Jin'e's eyes, which gave him the ability to paralyze weak-minded opponents. Viewers were repeatedly told that this was not magic but supposedly something called the Way of the Mind. That said, considering how weird his eyes looked and how immediate the effect was, it certainly looked like magic.

The other opponents were more normal, or at least as normal as you can get in a franchise where the main character has a sword-fighting technique that can take out a dozen or more enemies in a single blow (and without actually killing anyone, even though his sword, while not sharp, is still made of metal). I don't think any of them were from the original manga, or at least I didn't remember them. One was a brawler and therefore a good opponent for Sanosuke, and another wore a mask to hide his scars and fought with both guns and knives.

The movie's biggest strength was its fight scenes. I enjoyed almost all of them, even the slightly weird one with Sanosuke and the brawler. I probably liked the one between Kenshin and the guy with the scars the most, although the final one between Kenshin and Jin'e had the most emotion and tension. I also loved the beginning of the movie, which did a wonderful job showing a little of Kenshin's bloody past.

Unfortunately, all those fight scenes did take time away from other things, like proper explanations, better development of some of the more minor prominent characters like Sanosuke and Yahiko, and quieter moments involving Kenshin and Kaoru. I didn't really notice how oddly some of the pieces of the story fit together until later, but I definitely noticed and was bugged by the way Sanosuke was hastily thrown into the story. Also, one of the deleted scenes in the extras stuck with me, because it was exactly the kind of thing I wished the movie had had more of: Kenshin and Kaoru just having a quiet moment together. It was the one deleted scene that I wished had been left in the movie, even though it would have made this nearly 2.5-hour-long monster even longer.

All in all I enjoyed this, even though I though I found myself wishing it had been a bit shorter and more focused. Its faithfulness to the characters and overall story was both its strength and its weakness – I hate to say this, but it might have been better to just drop Sanosuke from the story and introduce him in Part 2 instead. At any rate, I'm looking forward to being able to see Part 2 soon.

Extras:

• Interviews with the actors who played Kenshin, Kaoru, Jin'e, Megumi, Sanosuke, Saito, and Kanryu. The interview with Takeru Satoh (Kenshin) came across as extremely cautious (he was "probably excited" about getting the role?), but the others were better.
• Four deleted scenes. Three of them were fairly forgettable, but I really liked the fourth one and wished it had been kept in the movie. Aside from giving Kenshin and Kaoru a quiet moment together, it would have done a nice job of setting up the final battle with Jin'e and Kaoru breaking out of Jin'e's control.
• Making of. A large part of this was devoted to the work and practice that went into the fight scenes.
• Original trailer.
• News flash. This was technically yet another Kenshin trailer.
• Super news flash. Yet another Kenshin ad spot - it basically just laid out the casting decisions.
• Previews

REVIEW: Mr. Holmes (live action movie)

Mr. Holmes is drama with mystery elements.

Review:

In the movie's present, Sherlock Holmes is 93 and World War II has recently ended. He has just returned from a trip to Japan to acquire jelly made from the prickly ash plant, which he hopes will help his rapidly failing memory. While tending his bees and living a generally quiet life, Holmes strikes up a friendship with Roger, his housekeeper's inquisitive and intelligent young son. It is Roger who helps Holmes remember more details about his last case, the one that prompted him to retire to the countryside.

Viewers get glimpses of Holmes's trip to Japan (his memory so bad that he wrote his host's name on one of his sleeve cuffs so that he wouldn't embarrass himself) and also his final case. In that case, Holmes investigated a woman whose husband was worried she was being used. She'd had two miscarriages, and the only thing that seemed to help her grief was the music lessons her husband encouraged her to take. However, she became obsessed with the music and seemed to think it allowed her to communicate with her dead children. Watson's version of the case indicated that it ended successfully, but Holmes knows that can't possibly be true. If it were, why would he have quit being a detective afterward?

This was a very slow movie, almost too slow for my tastes. It was extremely painful to see Holmes this way, constantly forgetting people's names, things he said he'd do, and more. Even worse, he knew he was forgetting things, and a part of him knew that his efforts to get around his problem weren't quite good enough. The prickly ash was him grasping at straws.

I guessed how Holmes's last case had gone well before it was revealed, so that part didn't really interest me much. In general, this movie wasn't so much a Sherlock Holmes mystery as it was a sentimental drama. I had gone into it hoping for more of a mystery, so this and the general slowness of it all was a bit of a disappointment. I enjoyed Holmes and Roger's budding friendship, but found myself wishing this had been an adaptation of Laurie R. King's The Beekeeper's Apprentice instead.

Near the end of the movie, things became so depressing that I found myself wishing I'd never started watching it at all. Holmes was a lonely old man who'd become estranged from Watson, his best friend, and who had outlived all the people from the original stories (Watson, Mrs. Hudson, and more). He'd gained a new friend in Roger, but Roger's mother was determined to find employment elsewhere, before Holmes either died or deteriorated to the point that she'd have to be his nurse in addition to his housekeeper. Then a thing happened that made me feel like I'd been kicked in the gut, it was so horrible on top of everything else.

The movie does end fairly happily, but for a while there it was deeply depressing. I don't think I could watch it again. It was decent, I suppose, if not exactly enjoyable, but I have a feeling it would be far too sentimental for most Holmes fans.

REVIEW: The Silenced (live action movie)

The Silenced is a Korean historical thriller movie with sci-fi aspects.

This review includes slight spoilers.

Review:

I wasn't aware of the history when I saw this movie, so some of the details of my description are the result of later online reading. Anyway, this movie is set in 1938, during the Japanese occupation of Korea. Ju-ran, assigned the Japanese name “Shizuko,” is sent to a Korean sanatorium because she has tuberculosis. The girls at the sanatorium are repeatedly told that they'll eventually be evaluated, and the two healthiest candidates will be sent to Tokyo and become Japanese citizens. It's something that many of the girls long for.

One of the two girls who seems most likely to be chosen, Yeon-deok (renamed “Kazue”) befriends Ju-ran. Yeon-deok takes her places the girls aren't supposed to go and generally encourages her. Ju-ran is given special medication, and her health begins to improve to the point that she starts to hope that maybe she'll be chosen to go to Tokyo with Yeon-deok. However, the sanatorium is hiding dark secrets. Yeon-deok used to have a friend who was also named Shizuko, but Shizuko disappeared, supposedly taken away by her family overnight. As Ju-ran begins seeing and experiencing strange things, she wonders what really happened to the first Shizuko.

Even though Netflix correctly categorized this as a thriller, I still went into it expecting more of a horror movie, and the first half of the film fit those expectations. I'm a horror wimp, so the various scares and slightly “off” atmosphere worked really well on me. Even so, I felt that the writer could have milked it more. The scares had barely gotten started when the movie's mood suddenly shifted again.

It's tough to say much without spoiling things, but the second half of the movie was very different from the first. Whereas the first half definitely felt like a low-key horror movie, more psychological than gory (with just enough gross stuff that I had to look away a few times), the second half was more sci-fi.  I didn't expect that shift at all. It was like two different movies had been cobbled together.

Another thing I hadn't expected was the way Ju-ran and Yeon-deok's friendship was handled. It felt like a chaste lesbian love story, from Ju-ran's jealous feelings towards Shizuko and one other girl, to the scenes with the candies, to the part where Ju-ran slipped into Yeon-deok's bed to happily show her how healthy her breath had become.

I actually would have been on board with stealth lesbian romance. My biggest worry was that their expectations wouldn't match up. Ju-ran seemed more emotionally invested in Yeon-deok than Yeon-deok was in her, and I wondered whether Yeon-deok really did see Ju-ran as merely a replacement for Shizuko. Unfortunately, then the ending happened. Here's where I'm going to start including some slight spoilers.

Don't get too attached to Yeon-deok. I had hoped she'd somehow manage to survive to the end, happily running away from the sanatorium with Ju-ran by her side, but that didn't happen. Combine that with the lesbian love story feel of some of the earlier scenes, and the result was just depressing. And kind of weird, because the final scene had an almost hopeful feel to it that didn't at all match what had just happened.

This really was a gorgeous movie. It had a lot of potential. Unfortunately, it didn't know quite what it wanted to be, and story's overall balance was off.

REVIEW: Halo: The Fall of Reach (animated movie)

First, some info: I haven't actually played any of the Halo games. I started reading Halo: The Fall of Reach after someone said that the series had some good AI-human interaction moments, but I stalled almost halfway through for various reasons. In an effort to renew my interest in the book, give me a better foundation on the visuals, and maybe clarify some of the more confusing aspects, I decided to watch this. I was sure it would spoil certain aspects of the book for me, but I was okay with that.

Yeah, what I didn't realize was that this movie only adapts a small portion of the book – up to page 154 of my copy, to be exact. I'm currently on page 168, so I suppose I'll have to muddle through the rest on my own.

The movie covers the origin of Master Chief, the protagonist and playable character of the games. Dr. Catherine Halsey first identifies him as a candidate for the SPARTAN-II program when he is only six years old. John and other children are kidnapped from their homes and replaced with short-lived clones. It is then that their military training begins. However, Dr. Halsey has more in mind for the children than just training. There are dangerous augmentations that will turn them into true super soldiers, if they're able to survive the process.

Although the artwork was nice enough - very painterly, with some very beautiful backgrounds - the animation was clearly low budget. This wouldn't have bugged me quite so much if more attention had been paid to facial expressions. Characters' faces looked stiff and wooden. As a result, the voice acting was pretty much the sole way to tell what people were feeling.

I'm not entirely sure whether the children were originally intended to just be weapons against the insurgents, or whether they were created to fight the Covenant right from the start. At any rate, the Covenant stuff only came up during the last third of the movie – most of the movie was devoted to training and to John-117 learning to be both a leader and part of a team. Although I noticed that some scenes had been cut out (much of the battle armor training) and altered (more pre-mission joking), the movie was pretty faithful to the book. Or at least the first 154 pages of it.

One other change I noticed had me shaking my head, because I couldn't really see the point of it. The movie is primarily narrated by three different people: Dr. Halsey, Sam, and Kelly. If I remember correctly, the book primarily presents things from John's POV. Why did the movie take a step back and narrate things from everyone's perspective but John? Wasn't this supposed to be his backstory?

The movie didn't help much with the part I'm at now, and it didn't even get far enough to introduce Cortana (I cheated and flipped through some of the later parts of the book, so I already know she's going to come up at some point), but I at least got a refresher on the stuff I'd already read. That's something, I guess. Also, I finally got some better visuals of the aliens. Eric Nylund's descriptions of them aren't really very good. I also hadn't realized how much variation there was in the MJOLNIR battle armor. Unless that was something done in the film purely to make it easier to tell the Spartans apart?

Anyway, unless you have some interest in the Halo franchise, I probably wouldn't recommend watching this, but that's probably obvious.

Extras:

• Take This Life concept art featurette: This is essentially a slideshow of still from the movie, set to music. I saw maybe two or three images I thought might be concept art. The music was nice, but this wasn't quite what I expected when I saw the word “featurette.”
• Halo: The Fall of Reach animated series launch trailer: A trailer for the Halo: The Fall of Reach movie. Which means that this movie was actually an animated series? My googling tells me it was released as a miniseries, but I don't know anything more than that.
• Halo: The Fall of Reach animated series announcement trailer: Basically a teaser trailer for the movie.

REVIEW: Black Butler (live action movie)

Oh look, it's my first review in over a month. Sorry, I've been in a horrible funk for a while now. Everything is hard: writing reviews, reading, and even watching TV. The only thing I've been doing is working, sleeping, and playing Stardew Valley. Here's hoping that this review is a sign that things are going back to normal, because I'm tired of doing nothing much. And also, I have an ILL book that's due in a week or two.

Anyway, yes, a live action Black Butler movie exists and I have watched and reviewed it. Contrary to what that movie poster might lead you to believe, it actually takes place in a modern day setting.

No watch-alikes, because I figured writing the review itself was hard enough. Also, warning, this review includes major spoilers.

Review:

I watched this out of morbid curiosity. To be honest, I was expecting it to be horrifically bad. I knew that the story and characters had been drastically changed in several areas, and I vaguely remembered reading something about Mizushima Hiro (Sebastian) losing weight for the role, because obviously the most important thing about Sebastian is his thinness.

In the end, this wasn't as bad as I originally expected it to be, but it wasn't great either. It helped a lot that I already knew it wouldn't be a redo of either the anime or manga story, and that the characters wouldn't be quite the same.

So, the story. The movie is set in some kind of alternate history modern day Japan. Genpou Shiori is a girl pretending to be a boy so that she can be the Genpou family heir. Several years ago, her parents were killed and she was kidnapped. She escaped by entering into a contract with Sebastian, a demon. Since then, her goal has been to find and punish those who killed her parents. In the meantime, however, she serves as a secret investigator for the Queen of England (I think?), for reasons that make no sense unless you have some familiarity with the original series and what's been twisted to fit the movie. Anyway, people are being spontaneously mummified, and no one is sure how or why. Shiori is tasked with looking into the murders, and her investigation unexpectedly touches on her past.

Fans of the original series might enjoy that this was a completely new story. As far as I know, nothing quite like it has appeared in either the anime or the manga, and the characters were tweaked just enough to (sorta kinda) cast doubt on the identity of the culprit. In theory, Black Butler newbies could follow along reasonably well, since there was enough new stuff here that the movie was forced to set the stage and introduce the characters.

In practice, though, there were things that wouldn't make sense to viewers unless they had at least a working knowledge of the original series. I'm sure that Rin came as a confusing shock to a lot of Black Butler newbies. Why did Sebastian fight people with butter knives? Because those were often the only “weapons” he had on hand in the original series. Why was Shiori working for the Queen of England? Because in the original series Shiori was actually a Victorian-era English boy named Ciel who secretly worked for the Queen. Why was Shiori a girl pretending to be a boy, and what was with Sebastian at the end of the movie? Well, the original series tends to portray Sebastian's relationship with Ciel as somewhat flirtatious (and the anime even more so). My guess is that someone involved with the movie wanted to keep at least a little of the flirtatious edge but wasn't comfortable with the idea of both of the characters being male.

So yeah, I'd recommend knowing something about Black Butler before going into this. That said, Black Butler fans are both the group mostly likely to enjoy this movie and the group most likely to hate it. There were lots of changes but also, weirdly enough, not enough changes - I wish the writer had committed more to this being an altered story. I understood why the setting had to be changed, but I'd have preferred it to have some connection to the original series – maybe Ciel as Shiori's ancestor or something, with Shiori being a completely new character in her own right. I was able to adjust to Ciel having been changed into Shiori, though. I also didn't mind that the servants had been scaled back to only two, Tanaka and Rin (Meirin). I had more issues with some of the deeper character changes.

This is where I get into spoiler territory. I initially assumed that Shiori's aunt was another change – rather than being a secret enemy, she was Shiori's true ally. The fact that she wasn't constantly dressed in red helped foster that assumption. In the end, I turned out to be wrong, but the aunt's story was tweaked in ways I absolutely did not like. She had previously loved Shiori's dad, just like Ciel's aunt had loved his father, but rather than loving him from afar the way Ciel's aunt had, Shiori's aunt had actually been married to Shiori's father. She miscarried and wasn't able to bear anymore children, so Shiori's father ditched her and married the aunt's sister, Shiori's eventual mother. The aunt responded by arranging for her sister and her former husband to be killed while she took a leisurely bath.

Ciel's aunt's story was tragic and terrible, made more tragic by her realization that she loved Ciel like a son and couldn't go through with killing him. Shiori's aunt's story was just plain horrible and painted everyone involved in a bad light.

Sebastian was also altered. Rather than being a demon who was truly waiting for the day when his contract with Shiori was fulfilled and he could eat her soul, he changed his mind just before her death and helped her survive, for no other reason than that he felt it would be more interesting that way. The movie completely and utterly defanged him, just so that it could work in a cringe-worthy “kiss” and a happy ending in which nothing horrible had to happen and no one had to make hard decisions.

The movie wasn't as bad as I expected, but, considering that my expectations were very low, that's not saying much. I don't regret watching it, because my morbid curiosity is now satisfied. I'd hesitate to recommend it to anyone, though.

REVIEW: Jurassic Park (live action movie), on DVD

I re-watched this a few months ago and should have reviewed it back then. But I kept putting it off because I wanted to include comments about the extras, but then I dragged my feet and eventually ran into problems. So I'm finally just going ahead and reviewing it.

A synopsis feels a little unnecessary, but I'll include a short one anyway: A billionaire invites several people to his not-yet-open theme park (or is forced to invite them – the lawyer is there because a worker's family is suing and there are now questions being asked about how safe the park really is). Amazingly, the park includes real, live dinosaurs. Unfortunately, the park's tech geek decides to make a little extra money by stealing and selling some of the park's dinosaur embryos. Things go wrong, and a bunch of the dinosaurs accidentally get free, putting the lives of everyone on the island in danger.

Listening to the audiobook version of Jurassic Park made me want to re-watch this movie. The overall framework was very similar to the book, but in a lot of ways it was very different. Hammond was portrayed less like a slick salesman and more like a naive idealist – a good deal more likeable than he was in the book. Malcolm and Lex were both less annoying (although still annoying). Grant and Ellie were turned into a couple, and Grant was portrayed as being much less comfortable with kids than he was in the book. The story was streamlined and, after a certain point, completely changed. To my mind, it was all for the better – the movie was much more enjoyable than the book and had aged significantly better.

This even applied to the special effects. For the first time that I could recall, I noticed the slight jerkiness in the larger dinosaurs' movements but, overall, the movie looked really good. There was still that sense of wonder when Grant and Ellie saw their first dinosaurs on the island, and the T. rex and Velociraptors looked great. And I still want to own an animatronic Velociraptor, even though I have no idea where I'd keep it.

The movie was, overall, simpler than the book, but that wasn't a bad thing. I enjoyed re-watching it, and I smiled a little, thinking of how much it scared me when I was younger – it was the first “scary” movie my parents let me watch, primarily because I was a wannabe paleontologist who was fascinated by Spielberg's dinosaurs. It's now over 20 years old, and its dinosaur scenes still make me feel like an excited kid, even knowing that the T. rex's mouth is probably wrong and that at least some of the dinosaurs probably would have had feathers. I'd still recommend it over Jurassic World.

The extras were almost all interesting, but there was so much to watch that my attention wandered. Then my player forgot where I'd last paused, and I just gave up. Even so, it was nice seeing the planning that went into creating the dinosaurs (the animatronics, models, and CGI elements) and making them believable.

Extras:

• "The Making of Jurassic Park"
• Early pre-production meetings
• Location scouting
• Phil Tippett Animatics: Raptors in the kitchen - I watched this before attempting to watch any of the other extras. This made for a bizarre experience, because it included absolutely no context - it looked like some kid's weird low-budget Jurassic Park scene. The thing I found most interesting was that, at this point in the planning stages, the Velociraptors were going to have flickering forked tongues, like snakes.
• And apparently some DVD-ROM features that I had no interest in trying to look at. Anything I have to stick the disc into my computer to see might as well not exist.

REVIEW: Ghostbusters (live action movie) - at the movie theater

I was hesitant about seeing this, for a lot of reasons. I vaguely remembered having seen at least one of the original Ghostbusters movies but didn't have any particular attachment to or love for the franchise. I haven't been wild about the last few hyped movies I've seen, and I was a little worried that this one was getting most of its viewer hype because of the all-female main cast. Also, a lot of the people who were raving about it were also fans of several of Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy's other movies. I loathed Bridesmaids, winced a lot during Spy, and just generally didn't want to see a repeat of the sort of humor I saw in those movies. Thankfully, this turned out to be a lot better than I was expecting.

The story: Erin is a professor who's being considered for tenure. Unfortunately, an embarrassing piece of her past, a book on the paranormal that she co-wrote years ago with her best friend Abby, has come back to haunt her. She's worried that she'll be seen as a crackpot, so she tracks Abby down in order to ask her to please stop selling the book. Abby has since teamed up with Jillian Holtzmann, a nutty and brilliant scientist, and Erin accidentally gets all three of them involved in a paranormal investigation at a museum. The team is later joined by Patty, a transit worker who is an absolute fount of historical facts and knowledge, and their new receptionist, Kevin, who is gorgeous but very stupid. The group finds themselves dealing with more and more ghosts, not realizing that all these recent incidents are due to the machinations of a nobody who feels he isn't getting all the recognition and attention he deserves.

Like I said, this was actually pretty decent. I don't know that I want to own it, but it was worth seeing. Kristen Wiig (Erin), as usual, was involved in a lot of the grosser jokes (mostly involving ectoplasm), but none of it left me with the feeling of horror and pity that many of the “jokes” in Bridesmaids did. I don't recall Melissa McCarthy's weight being a factor in any of the jokes involving her, and Kate McKinnon was positively gleeful as Holtzmann. I was expecting to cringe at Leslie Jones' character (Patty), but she was handled better than I expected. I do wish that the movie had done a better job of establishing her purpose in the team, though. I've seen fan comments stating that Patty's knowledge of odd historical details was due to her love of reading, but I don't think this was ever mentioned in the movie. Maybe she was reading when she first appeared on-screen? I don't know, but her background felt less solidly established than Erin's, Abby's, or even Holtzmann's.

The movie meandered a bit, as the team played around with Holtzmann's various new toys, investigated random ghost sightings (which were all tied in with the movie's Big Bad, although his details weren't revealed until later), and tried to establish themselves. There were things I wasn't entirely clear on, like how the group could afford the rent on even the little place they ended up finding for themselves, why Patty would quit (I assume?) her job as a transit worker for something that I couldn't imagine would pay very well, and how they were managing to pay Kevin. Basically, most of my questions had to do with money. But in the end, if I turned off my brain a bit, it was fun. I enjoyed the various cameos from the original movies, liked the humor more than expected, and laughed at Chris Hemsworth's over-the-top portrayal of stupid, pretty Kevin. The scene with the lens-less glasses just about killed me.

If I could change one thing, it would be Erin's embarrassingly obvious drooling over Kevin. It was painful to watch. I've seen lots of comments to the effect of “well, it's just a gender-flipped version of how women are always treated in movies.” True, but flipping the genders doesn't make me any happier about having to watch it. The group's decision to hire Kevin could have been explained away as the result of there being no other applicants, and, honestly, Erin had better and less cringe-worthy chemistry with Holtzmann.

All in all though, this was fun. If another new Ghostbusters movie gets made with this cast, I plan to go see it.