xanithofdragons | Entries tagged with movies

I've been watching a lot of movies in 2016, at least a lot more than I normally do, although that's not saying a lot. I've already watched three movies in theaters this year. Three whole movies I've watched in theater this year and I might even watch another one in theater? The three I've seen are Concussion, Deadpool, and Star Trek: Beyond. And yeah, that may not seem like a lot, but the last time I had seen a movie in theaters prior to this year was 2013. Yeah, that's how much I typically am not a movie person.

Early-ish in the year, I heard a lot about Star Wars The Force Awakens and decided to watch it and liked it enough that I decided to watch the rest of the Star Wars movies to get the full story. And now I'm slowly starting to get into Marvel Cinematic Universe. And ngl part of why I'm so interested in MCU is the fandom, or more specifically the shipping. Because I am exactly the kind of shipper who gets into something because a ship in it seems interesting. xD

But part of why I say I'm "slowly" getting into it is because I started to watch some stuff and then talked with my brother and sister-in-law and we decided to watch through what we wanted to see together, but we only tend to meet up about once a month. >_< But now I'm really getting excited and really getting into stuff and can barely wait to watch more. T_T

Maybe what I can learn from this year is that it's a lot easier for me to get into movies when it's a series or a franchise. It's hard for me to get really enthusiastic about it otherwise. ^^;

Current Mood: sleepy

I don't like American movie trailers.

I don't watch movies often. There seems to be something about the movie format that doesn't work as well for me. Other media like books or tv series or comics tend to hold my interest better. I can marathon a tv series. I can read a book I'm really into in under a day no matter the length. With most movies, on the other hand, I tend to get bored or tune out easily in the middle. But behind the format of movies themselves, I think there's another thing that makes me uninterested in movies most of the time, and it's the trailers, the commercials, how the movies are marketed.

Most of the time when I see a trailer or commercial for an American movie, at the end of it, I have no idea what the movie's about. The trailer looks like a bunch of disjointed scenes they thought were cool strung together with little to no context. When I'm picking media to watch or read, I select based on plot most of the time. I'm interested in the plot, the story, the characters. When I watch American movie trailers, they don't tell me what I want to know. The may show visual effects or action scenes, which are extras for me. They tell me the actors, but I don't pay attention to American actors. They tell me the director, but I don't pay attention to them either. They may give vague praise from critics, but I don't care.

There are a couple of things that made me think about this. In one of my Japanese classes at Kansai Gaidai, we watched Shall We Dance? (the original Japanese movie), and once we had watched the whole thing, the professor showed us a Japanese trailer for the movie, an American trailer for the Japanese version, and an American trailer for the American remake. Only the Japanese trailer seemed interesting to me. It made the movie look good, and I thought the movie was only so-so and a little awkward to watch at points overall. The Japanese trailer was good enough to improve my opinion of the movie.
Then, recently, I read a review for a movie after seeing commercials for it all summer and thinking it didn't look particularly interesting because the commercials were all disjointed scenes with no context or explanation style ads, and the review actually told the plot. The review made me think the movie was a little interesting, because it told me what I wanted to know about the movie, unlike the commercials which may as well have told me nothing.

Current Mood: pensive

The 4th of July. Another one of those horrible days when mail isn't delivered. And also the day when the nation in which I live was formed or something a couple hundred years ago. There are also fireworks, and those are pretty cool. Sundays are my least favorite day of the week because mail isn't delivered. It's super boring.

This is probably gonna be one of those I waited forever before posting so it ends up really long posts. Fair warning. So I mentioned in my last post from over 2 weeks ago that I had been watching j-dramas and a movie. Well I also read a book. Anyway, sum-up post. I'll try to be brief since there's a lot of ground to cover:

( Whee (Spoilers generally avoided) )

I also got my copy of Arashi's Scene Dome+ dvds and watched it, and it was all amazing! I got the LE, so watching all the extras was fun too. <3

If you want to know more details or more of my thoughts on anything I posted about, just comment and I'll answer. :> You can also comment if you want to mention something to me or ask me about something completely unrelated to this post. I won't mind much. I don't get many comments anyway.　Also, Koda Kumi, just because.

Current Mood: sleepy

http://youtu.be/FRUJH_WxdKU

...

...

...I have no words...

~~Is it bad that I actually want to see this movie?~~

Proper post when I'm feeling less stressed out. Why hello there, end of the semester, when did you get here?

And hi people I met on friending meme! It's been a while since I've done one of those. If it makes you feel any better, the content I have in mind for my next post is probably equally weird.

Current Mood: confused

Meme from

just_bolognese

( Whee )

Between the last time I posted and now, I watched the Ooku movie, once raw and once with subtitles. Loved it. I also showed it to a friend of mine and her friend, and I'm not really sure what they thought of it... Oh well.

Also, Friday night, I wore a collar at a party, and it was pretty fun. :3

Current Mood: amused

Okay, quick(?) updates:

-Contrary to what I was expecting, I went to see GANTZ! It was awesome in spite of a sucky dub. >:< ~~Shipping Katou/Kurono so hard~~.

-I celebrated Sho's birthday. There was cake. There was also a picture of that cake, but it's on my friend's camera since my camera wasn't working (probably dead batteries :/). ~~And there's sorta still cake but I'm prolly gonna throw the rest out 'cause the edges are starting to get hard and there's not much left anyway...~~

-I'm still waiting for my copy of Kimi to Boku no Miteiru Fuukei to arrive...

-I preordered Arashi's Lotus along with an album from a band I happened upon whose music I really liked: Lookie!

-This semester's going pretty good school-wise I think. Classes I'm taking: 3rd Year Japanese, Beginning Greek, Japan for Sale, and Dialogues Ancient and Modern.

-In the past two days, two of my classes were canceled because of BLIZZARD. One of them is a 4 hour long night class. I was really excited about that cancellation even though we only meet once a week.

-I still haven't found my scissors yet... o_o

I figured that I had better post again before everything I could think to post just floated away.

I stayed on campus over Thanksgiving break, just like last year, except this year, I knew about other people staying on campus and spent most of my time with them ~~and not doing schoolwork, lol~~. Highlights:
-More Merlin, resulting in a pillow fight. Trust me; this makes sense.
-Monty Python and the Holy Grail
-Our cafeteria having super delicious Thanksgiving food
-Bad Romance pie
-Getting complimented on my movie drinking game abilities (when I'm told to watch out for something, I notice it! okay)
-Watching Beauty and the Beast while all of us decided which character in the movie we would be. I'm the book store owner.
-Making innuendo about any movie I watch.

And of course, birthday party for Ohno! I baked brownies in a star-shaped tin my friend has. Unfortunately they were undercooked, but still edible ~~and still available to eat, most likely~~. My friend dug out candles for me, and we sang happy birthday for him. Two of the people there actually didn't know anything about Arashi or Ohno, but they were still pretty enthusiastic about it, lol. And the other person there aside from me, I've been working on teaching her about Arashi. :3 I showed her one of Ohno's solos from concert videos and she was very impressed with his dancing. I've also been showing her several of their music videos.

Speaking of Arashi, I am excited about Aiba getting to be a sexy bartender. I am also excited for live action Gantz showing in American theaters. Although for now the exact information about everything seems a bit unclear, I'm still happy about it. I guess I'll be waiting to hear more info for now.

Current Mood: thirsty

^The above is my reaction to watching the first 2 episodes of Merlin Sunday night. That, and plenty more innuendo and suggestive statements. In case you can't tell, I liked what I saw. <3 I look forward to watching more of it with the friend who showed it to me.

The Merlin watching was only a part of more fun had with that friend. We started off going to the science center briefly, where chairs and a sidetable had been sitting in the elevator all day, apparently. After that, we went to youtube where we first watched a series of videos of our Latin professor playing a pimp in a play written in Latin with a story in the style of a Roman comedy. Then I showed her Arashi's Toublemaker and Monster pvs. And then we watched Merlin. ^_^

Annnd, the only other thing I can think to say is that I wish I could be in Japan and see Ohoku in theaters. T_T I look forward to seeing this movie (one way or another) soooo much. I've been showing the trailer to people and telling them about it because I'm just that excited about it. I even got a girl living on the same floor as me who studied abroad in Japan last year to borrow the 1st volume of the manga from me! ^_^ Anyway, I will wait and wish. <3

Current Mood: excited

I'm so excited about Ōoku. There's a new trailer up on the site for it, and pretty much the message I got from that trailer is: this movie will be amazing, watch it. Even though it's bound to be a while before I can watch it, I'm eagerly awaiting the time when I can. ^_^

So tonight, I started watching Saigo no Yakusoku, a drama special starring all the members of Arashi. Lol, I'm only 11 minutes in, but I feel like this is the sort of thing that would be fun to write a scene by scene for. Well, I haven't gotten to any of the real action yet, so I don't know yet. I might go for it some time, in the hopes that someone else would find my thoughts about Saigo no Yakusoku as funny as I do.

Edit: Oh wow, finished it. Only the beginning is kinda silly, the rest was really good.

Current Mood: amused

Recently, I've been enjoying this song and video rather a lot. That may say a lot about me, actually. This too. Such a good angst song. It seems I've been listening to more kpop recently, by which I mean coming across songs I like on youtube and favoriting the videos to watch multiple times.

Today I watched the movie Dororo together with other students of Japanese at this summer program I'm still doing... I'm kind of ready for it to be done, actually. Anyway, ( Fangirling, and not all of it mine this time )

( meme time )

Current Mood: tired

Somehow or another, I've been spending my last few days with some of the most awesome people I know, yo, preparing for Acen next week and everything. Today I went shopping. There was some manga I was so excited to see that I went ahead and bought it. I bought volumes 1 and 2 of Ōoku by Yoshinaga Fumi, since I trust anything by her to be quality work and since I had already heard about it a little on the internet because of the movie they're making for it. I'm really looking forward to seeing the movie, especially after having read it. Nino playing Mizuno. <3 It's so exciting to know who he'll be now. The decision made in the translation to have them speak in such an old form of English kind of jarred me at first, but I got used to it while reading... ^^

I also bought volume 1 of Bokurano by Kito Mohiro. That was especially exciting for me to happen upon, since I hadn't even heard that it had been licensed!

Edit: Apparently I was so tired last night that I completely forgot to mention that I also bought Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey. So yeah.

And now to finish with a meme:

Ask me my fandom-ish Top Five of whatever. Anything. Doesn't matter what, really! Then I'll make a new post with all of the Top 5 asked.

Current Mood: tired

I returned from NJCL convention way back on Saturday, and I decided I was not going to make a post all about it because that would be way too long and because I might miss some awesome stories. However, I will give the short version: it was awesome. Also, I made a friend... a facebook friend... I'm not sure what exactly that counts for though, and I'm not sure I ever will.

Anyway, next year's convention will be in Davis, California, and I'm not really sure I wanna go all the way over there. However, next year will be the year my teacher gets her silver bowl (award for going to 20 conventions), and I wouldn't wanna miss that.

Since convention, I saw The Dark Knight on Sunday with my Dad. I find it enjoyable enough. Also, compared to usually having something to do or at least knowing where to find people to hang out with at njcl convention, being back home has been kinda boring due to lack of video games to play and too much laziness to do things I should be doing. Thus, I started playing the Fire Emblem game I years ago. I don't know which one it is, but I think it's the first one to have come out in the US. I stopped playing it way back then because it was hard (and still is!), but I was bored and Atlus (I signed up for their mailing list) sent me an email about a strategy RPG they're bringing over here. I remembered that I wanted to play more strategy games, and a conversation with

whydeevee reminded me that I had a Fire Emblem game. Since yesterday, I've been playing it obsessively, and I'm through chapter 16, I think.

( thoughts so far )

Also in the last few days, I read a couple scanlated chapters of the manga Byakuya Zaushi, and it was fascinating. I'm sad that there's not any more for me to read right now, but it makes me want to show it to other people. It's creepy, and the art is really pretty.