AccentedCinema

[Weekly Update] April 12, 2021

Added 2021-04-12 10:36:34 +0000 UTC

Well, that was a month for Kaiju fans. I don't know if all the upcoming movies all look good, or because we were starved of content last year. But damn it, Mortal Kombat is looking good, Ghostbusters is looking good, and The Suicide Squad is looking good.

Oh well, at least it's a safe bet that No Time to Die is gonna suck.

ABOUT THE CHANNEL:

As always, hope you enjoyed our latest video on Godzilla vs. Kong. That video took a bit of contemplation to make. Originally planned as another East vs. West, turns out the Hollywood filmmaking mentality hasn't changed a bit. They did, in fact, make Kong and Godzilla an equal. The fights are (almost) fair. And they went all serious and epic.
So the focus was shifted to my main question after watching this movie: Why people love it but not King of the Monsters. Pretty sure there's a debate going on in the fandom, on which one is better.
When I first finished GvK, my thought was I like KotM better. But as time went on, I realize, with KotM, I'm only interested in skimming through the film, watching only the big set pieces. But with GvK, I'm willing to sit through it again, including the human stuff, and watch Kong explore the Hollow Earth.
So yeah, that's my review on GvK, I guess.
Next week, we have a swearing video, on Earwig and the Witch, Ghibli Studio's first 3D animated feature. I just revisited it today in preparation for our next video, and oh boy, it made me so angry.
Doesn't help that I watched Lupin III right after, and the difference is night and day.
Afterward, we'll have a 3 week break, and we will come back with a video on a side of Hong Kong cinema you may not know. Let's just say it might have a good chance of being demonetized. Thank you for the direct support for making that video possible.

ABOUT MEDIA

On the topic of Earwig and the Witch: Is it me, or do we have a strange relationship with animated films.
Thanks to major studios like Pixar, Disney, and Ghibli, animated films are consistently great, to a point where we often have really high expectations for them, an expectation that isn't shared in the live-action side of things.
Anything short of excellent in animation is often considered bad or unwatchable.
I remember when the trailer for Missing Link (2019) first came out, and it did not look that interesting, I and many people just expect it to suck. Well, it didn't suck. In fact, it was a decent film, competently made. But no one is talking about it, because it isn't excellent. It's not visually excellent, at least.
This reception is also quite noticeable when watching Over the Moon (2020). It's a fair movie, competently made, and visually decent. But it doesn't hold a candle to the Pixar classics, and many people find it hard to enjoy. The messy bit stands out.
We expect great things from the medium. And as a result, there is this major gap between amazing movies that people talk about, and terrible movies that people talk about. These are average animated films that gets forgotten.
Sometimes, these films get their recognition years later: Iron Giant (1999) being one of the classic cases. Overlooked upon released, it is not considered a classic.
But more often than not, movies just go the ways of Kubo (2016), a visually excellent stop motion animation. When it came out, our entire film school animation department was hyped. But no matter how much we yelled into the air for people to see, the general reaction is: Oh, that movie, it looks interesting.
And we all know what that means.
There is Rango (2011), an otherwise entertaining film with... rather unappealing visual design. I won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. How many people are talking about it right now?
That's another thing about animation, it relies very heavily on brand recognition.
Shaun the Sheep: The Movie (2015) was honestly one of the best animated film ever. But since Shaun the Sheep as a brand don't have that much recognition in the US, it rarely gets talked about in the mainstream, or in the film circle for that matter.
Now with live action films being dominated by a single company with a single genre, I really hope this isn't the future for live action cinema. In fact, I hope it's not what animation continues to be, either.