April 7, 2005

  • Here's Part 2 of my Sci-Fi Marathon recap:


    Our first feature was Mothra, featuring all the classic cheese you expect from a Japanese monster movie (my B movies of choice). This one was apparently the uncut and restored Japanese version complete with English subtitles-except when a character spoke English; then we would occasionally get very large Japanese subtitles (one time they messed up and gave English subtitles to a person speaking English). There was actually a lot of English for a movie made in Japan, especially when Mothra goes to destroy a nonexistent place called New Kirk City (which spawned a bunch of William Shatner jokes from the audience), located in a nonexistent country that seemed to be populated with bad American actors. I like to make fun of bad movies, but I usually can’t think of anything funny, so I resign myself to enjoying the heckles coming from the rest of the audience. There was a guy about 3 rows behind us (I think his name was “Bob”) who shouted out several gems throughout the entire marathon. Example: A bunch of scientists venture to an island that is supposed to be radioactive. On the back of the radiation suits they each have a bright red tank and a bright yellow tank. Bob shouted, “They brought ketchup & mustard!” Anyways, it’s hard to go wrong with a Japanese monster movie (although it’s possible: 1995’s Godzilla vs. Destroyah and 1996’s Rebirth of Mothra come to mind; they’re so awful you don’t even want to watch them to make fun of them).


     


    The next movie was Primer, which from what I can tell is a recent movie about time travel that is hard to understand, but Chris and I didn’t see it because we went to Barnes & Noble and P.F. Chang’s with Darby. While we were gone, I thought I had missed the short film “Gravity,” which is a Sci-Fi Marathon regular & which I had also missed two years ago, but apparently they never showed it at all (“due to technical problems”).


     


    We got back to the Drexel just after Steamboy started. Chris left to go move his car closer to the theater and to hang out with Darby at Panera Bread (maybe it was just me, but he seemed to have Darby on the brain for the entire weekend), while I watched the movie, even though I didn’t particularly want to. Steamboy is an anime movie made by the same people who did Akira. It takes place in London during the Exhibition of 1851. I’m not much of an anime fan (with the exception of Inuyasha, Ranma, Spirited Away, and a couple other random things), but this movie was at least watchable, even though the dubbing was a bit odd (and that’s a very unusual statement to be coming from me, since I normally prefer the English dubs). Anna Paquin (Rogue in X-Men) was the voice of the main character, who was supposed to be a boy about 12 or 13 years old, and her voice just doesn’t sound like a 12-or-13-year-old boy’s. Alfred Molina and Patrick Stewart also provided voices.