DVD Collectors Online

Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, a review by Antares

Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011) 60/100 - How does one go into a remake of one of their top ten films? With trepidation, I assure you. I don't think there's ever been a better samurai film than Kobayashi's original Seppuku, and this is coming from a film fan who worships at the altar of Akira Kurosawa. At first I wondered what direction Miike would take. Would he make it more flashy, with a lot more swordplay or would he play it safe and follow the original frame by frame. For the most part, he chose the latter. And though it does reflect some of the feeling of the original, Miike stays with the parts of the screenplay that show case the misery the family endures after their clan has fallen from the grace of the Shogun. By dwelling a bit too long on this aspect, the film feels much lengthier than the 2 hour and 8 minute running time. Kobayashi's film clocked in at 2 hours, 14 minutes, but for me, it breezed by. Finally, a couple of choices made in the last act were misfires. Would I recommend it, lukewarmly if it's a person's first foray into samurai cinema. But if you've seen a few, then I say skip it.

Teal = Masterpiece
Dark Green = Classic or someday will be
Lime Green = A good, entertaining film
Orange = Average
Red = Cinemuck
Brown = The color of crap, which this film is

(From Antares' Short Summations on July 11th, 2020)

Milk, a review by Rich

Title: Milk

Runtime:122
Certificate:15
Year:2008
Genres:Drama

Plot:My Review:
Fascinating biopic of a courageous man, who stood up not only for himself and his beliefs, but for those beliefs and rights of his fellow citizens, and was so tragically murdered with his supportive mayor by an unexpected assassin.
Penn is simply brilliant in this, he is surely one of the best actors of our generation? His sympathetic portrayal of Milk, a flawed, complex workaholic with personal relationship disasters aplenty, is refreshingly open and never tries to portray the civic leader as any kind of saint. Some of the supporting cast do not seem quite so sexually comfortable in their roles as gay activists, but the film, with the backdrop of Harvey narrating his 'just in case' memoirs to a tape recorder, is so smoothly paced and of overall interest that you can excuse the odd poor performance.
A painful journey, and a tearful ending, but a great educational and entertaining movie to inspire hope.


(From DCO third annual November Alphabet Marathon - discussion/review/banter thread on November 23rd, 2009)

Tom's Random Reviews, a review by Tom

Title: Rocket Girls: The Complete Collection
Year: 2007
Rating: NR
Length: 300 Min.
Video: Anamorphic Widescreen 1.78
Audio: Japanese: Dolby Digital Stereo
Subtitles: English

Stars:
Eri Sendai
Hitomi Nabatame
Shizuka Hasegawa
Takayuki Sugo
Takaya Kuroda

Plot:
School is finally out for the summer and Yukari Morita has big plans this season. It's off to the Solomon Islands for her, in search of her long-lost father. Unfortunately, the archipelago stretches over 28,000 square kilometers and boasts a population of about 500,000 people. With odds like that, what's a girl to do? Luckily for Yukari, the local Solomon Space Agency is in desperate need of a new astronaut. With their promise to help find her father, Yukari begins her part-time job as an astronaut! Prepare to blast off into a world of fun, facts and fan-service at 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface!

Extras:
Scene Access
Textless Opening
Textless Ending
Rocket Girls Pilot Episode

How is it, that the Japanese can take a really ridiculous premise and make a real fun series out of it?
A Japanese space agency has had trouble with their past test rocket lauches. All rockets exploded after lift-off. Finally they come to the conclusion, that their rocket design would work, if their austronaut would lose weight to get down to 40kg (essentially being only skin and bones). He decides to take a run for it, because he doesn't want to take part in this. On the run, he encounters a girl, who is currently searching for her long lost father on the same island, as the agency is set. After both are being caught, the director of the agency, having not much time as the sponsors are dropping out because of the past failures, gets the idea, that the girl has just the right built for the mission. A new astronaut is born
What really helped this series is, that they had the real "Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency" as a consultant for the technical stuff.
As a conclusion to the series, they have a mission, where these small girls are helping out American astronauts, who came into trouble on their mission in space. Of course these are not happy it first to have to get help from Japanese girls because of their pride

Rating:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15l28wbbJB8

(From Tom's Random Reviews on November 11th, 2008)