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I watch some 400 to 500 movies a year. I consume movies, with a strong focus on foreign fares (mostly Asian) and off-beat oddities. I built this site to keep track of my DVD collection, write reviews, maintain a blog where i write weekly about the US Box office numbers and various movie-related news, keep track of every movie i watch, collect DVD covers and set-up virtual shelves and so on. RatingMovies.ComŽ was born and grew from there.
I made all those sophisticated tools available to anybody so you can do all of this too. This is a site for film and DVD enthusiasts (i.e. freaks) where you can build your own communities, with your very own movie and dvd lists, reviews, blogs and RSS feed, mailing lists, a home page like this one, and even keep track of movies your friends borrowed from you.
This is such a wonderful Anime that is suitable for the whole family, while exploring complex ideas about relationships, and the pitfalls of time travel. Combining great writing, beautiful images, great voice acting and a fantastic score, the film is sweet, provocative, and entertaining.
Makoto is your typical highschool student. She is quirky, average at school, and finds waking up in time every morning to be one of her greatest challenges in life. One day, on her way to school her bike brakes malfunction and sure to die as a train hurls towards her, something strange happens and she appears to leap back in time. As those time-leaping events keep happening, she starts realizing what happens to her and decide to use her new found powers to fix her life, like going back in time one crucial day when she woke up late and nearly missed an exam that she then flunked. But quickly, the stakes are raised. One of her best friends asks her out and too shy to admit to it, decides to leap back in time to avoid being asked the question. Then she starts concocting a more elaborate plan to get one of her other friends to go out with a secret admirer. An uncontrollable chain of events ensues that no amount of smarts on her side can seem to prevent. She tries, and she tries, again and again, with each time unpredictable results. That is, until one day she notices a strange tatoo on her arm that seems to countdown to 0 each time she leaps. As she gets to 1, possibly the last time she could ever leap back in time, one of her friends who borrowed her bike faces the same brake malfunction and hurls through his deathly encounter with a moving train. It's at that time that she finds out that she is not alone in her abilities.
This is a compelling piece of Sci-Fi, with interesting time travel issues, all wrapped into a great personal story for that central character. Think of it like Butterfly Effect 1, The (2004), but in much better form, and a much more positive outcome. It's a coming of age story of sorts with all kinds of twists and turns and lessons about human emotions, destiny and the uncomputable variability of life. It's very well written, and seeing how Makoto gains godly confidence in herself after discovering her new powers is fun to watch. It's even more fun to watch her realize the limits of what she can do, coming to terms with those limits, and making hard choices.
The Anime is so well done with great character designs, beautiful animation, colors and backgrounds. And the score is simply fantastic. It's richly layered and melodious and fits perfectly. It was a major success in Japan when it came out in the summer of 2006, surprising everyone, and beating out Tales From Earthsea (2006) which had a much bigger budget and promotional campaign. It has all the elements for a great classic Anime.
Take very decent production value, decent acting, good special effects and throw in an innovative kind of monster, something that you have never seen before, and you get this movie. It's a really well done little horror film that, if you like that genre, will be very entertaining. You kind of forget it's low budget, and keep watching to see how it will all end. This is one of the coolest part of this film. since this is a new kind of monster, we are discovering it at the same time as the characters in the story, learning how it behaves and what makes it tick. This is very cool, and a great differentiator compared to other types of horror films where the monster or bad guy is familiar.
This is perhaps one of the best movies about Time Travel ever made. It's so smart and yet, so silly, it's wonderful.
A bunch of high-schoolers are members of the local Sci-Fi club and goofing around on a hot summer day. After a game of Baseball, they get back to the house where the club is located and they find what looks like a time machine inside the room. Thinking at first that it's a hoax someone is playing on them (they are very geeky, and it's the Sci-Fi Club after all, so they get picked on a lot) , they try it just for fun. A flash of light ensues and the machine and the kid joking around on it suddenly disappear, only to reappear a few moments later. It's a real time machine. Brainstorming about the endless possibilities, the dorks come up with nothing more than traveling back in time to get their hands on the remote control for their air conditioning unit which had broken down the day before. It's such a hot summer day, and they hate not having their air conditioning anymore: the stupid manufacturer didn't even put any switch on the actual unit! Getting that remote from back in time becomes all they can think about. Makes perfect sense!What follows is a succession of mistakes and trying to fix things as the space time continuum is disturbed and time paradoxes start to pop up. Can they fix the very fabric of space time before the entire universe vanishes?
This is such a fun film that has no pretension whatsoever. It's witty as hell, and played by a great ensemble cast in what is foremost a high-school comedy which just happens to feature a twist around time travel. Following the adventures of this goofy, dorky and geeky posse is nothing else but pure delight. It's also very well done with great cinematography and sound. Time travel just feels so fresh, and the editing back and forth between the multiple timelines never feels confusing. You just have to pay attention because there are so many time loops that things happen in the movie chronologically, even though our guys have already started to meddle with their past, which is our present. It's very clever with an airtight story line.
This is based on a play written and performed by those same kids which apparently was very successful in the Japanese equivalent of Off-Broadway. However the film version is so dynamic and rich you'd never think it came from a play.
I watched this movie one evening, and loved the movie so much that i watched it again 2 days later with my kids who thought it was really cool. I had to explain to them the ins and outs of time travel, but the story around those kids and the various gags were plenty enough already to keep them interested. Highly recommended if you can find it. I bet you have never seen a science fiction movie, or a comedy, like that. It's Japanese humor at its light-hearted and authentic best. It reminded me in spirit of Swing Girls (2004).
Christina Lindberg is considered by many as a goddess of 1970's exploitation cinema, and when i saw this double feature that also includes the hard to find Laura Gemser flick Looking Good (1974) (i am a huge fan of Laura), i figured the combo would be a decent value. It was cheap, had 2 films in it, so i figured it would be a good deal.
Don't bother... This "flick" is a rip off with the main star having very little screen time. The movie is also bad. Combine that with the other movie featuring Laura being as useless, nothing more than a TV workout show with Laura having some 5mn of screen time. Skip this altogether.
Laura Gemser is one of the most beautiful women that ever lived, and i have been on a hunt to find all her movies. So when i found this double feature that also includes Secrets Of Sweet Sixteen (1973), a movie with Christina Lindberg (another goddess of 1970's exploitation cinema), i figured i had a hidden gem in my hands. It was cheap, had 2 films in it, so i figured it would be a good deal.
Don't bother... This "flick", is nothing more than a TV workout show with Laura sitting in an "Emmanuelle" chair and narrating some stuff. Even a die hard fan like me see very little value in this at all when the star has some 5mn of screen time, and her 10mn of narration is dubbed. Skip it. The other movie suffers from the same drawbacks as the main attraction, Christina, has very little screen time in that other film, which doesn't have much else to make it any interesting.
The "Quentin Tarantino presents" and "From executive producer Quentin Tarantino" labels have been powerful marketing devices in recent years and introduced several important Asian action and martial arts films to American audiences through the Dragon Dynasty label. This is all good, and more power to him. When i heard about this film and its relationship with Mr. Q, i knew it wasn't an Asian film, but an American film in the tradition of Grindhouse fares. I really liked what Mr. Q did with Grindhouse 2: Death Proof (2007) and so i figured this might be interested. The preview looked cool, promised a great soundtrack, and lots of babes.
Well, let's say that apart from the great soundtrack and the babes, the movie otherwise just misses the mark entirely. The key problem is that the film, and its writer/director seem to take themselves way too seriously. What should be a fun ride ends up being very tiresome. So much so that about two thirds through the film, i started to fast-forward up to the many remaining babe scenes and all the way to the end of the film. So ultimately, that's all i remembered from the film: beautiful naked babes, and some great tracks. Yes, there is some interesting cinematography and art direction, and the film looks good overall, but that's not enough.
What was the story? It's uncreative and immaterial, but here it is. It's about a boy whose mother is killed brutally by a rival bikek gang. The boy grows up, and some 30+ years later, exacts revenge. That's it.
This could have been interesting if only it hasn't taken itself so seriously. In the end, it felt like writer/director, and main actor Larry Bishop, couldn't get a date and decided to make a movie to (1) audition a lot of women, (2) see a lot of naked babes on his set, and (3) have lots of sex scenes with naked babes. So if that's all you are looking for too, then try this movie out. But otherwise, stay clear of it.
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