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[Il Palazzo]

So I rewatched a scene from The Time Traveller's Wife - the sort of high-concept romance film I loved as a young adult, despite (or maybe because) its maudlin saccharine look and feel - where the two characters first meet. Back then I thought the scene was cute and romantic, now I get red lights flashing everywhere, and an alarm siren booming 'stranger danger'.
Picture this: a naked 40-ish year old guy sits in the bushes and talks to an 8-year old girl who's been playing alone. He tells her not to call her mum, but come closer. He knows shit about her (stalker!), says she'll grow up to be so very pretty, and he'll be coming back many times.

[Iduno]

So I rewatched a scene from The Time Traveller's Wife - the sort of high-concept romance film I loved as a young adult, despite (or maybe because) its maudlin saccharine look and feel - where the two characters first meet. Back then I thought the scene was cute and romantic, now I get red lights flashing everywhere, and an alarm siren booming 'stranger danger'.
Picture this: a naked 40-ish year old guy sits in the bushes and talks to an 8-year old girl who's been playing alone. He tells her not to call her mum, but come closer. He knows shit about her (stalker!), says she'll grow up to be so very pretty, and he'll be coming back many times.

Also, he offered her candy, and "time-travels" in a windowless van?

[Il Palazzo]

Peeps, watch One Cut of the Dead. Especially if you're into the whole process of movie making.
It's a very cleverly made film that'll leave you with a feel-good glow. Best not to read anything about it, apart from the basic premise: a film crew is making a zombie flick when real zombies attack.
Also, it's very Japanese.

[Reelya]

"Very Japanese" is confusing, especially in the context of horror movies. Japanese horror is traditionally known for movies such as The Ring, or The Grudge, which are more psychological than slasher.

It's ironically clear you're using "Very Japanese" in this case to mean "nothing like a typical Japanese horror movie". It's probably got legs overseas because it's actually much more western in approach, and then foreign people are noticing the "Japanese-ness" compared to other zombie movies, rather than realizing how western it is compared to normal Japanese horror. Zombies and splatter films are just about the least Japanese form of horror that exists.

[Yoink]

"Very Japanese" means, to me, a lot of sexual humour, body horror, and bizarreness.   

[scriver]

Very japanese to me means a lot of japanese media tropes and that general feeling of japaneseness.

It's like just how you can tell that something is british instead of american based solely on the atmosphere of the show.

[Iduno]

Very japanese to me means a lot of japanese media tropes and that general feeling of japaneseness.

It's like just how you can tell that something is british instead of american based solely on the atmosphere of the show.

And the extra 'u'.

[scriver]

tele shouws

[Kagus]

British humour is fuunny. Coumedy at its fineust.

[Reelya]

"Very Japanese" means, to me, a lot of sexual humour, body horror, and bizarreness.   

A lot of that is because it's what the west *chooses* to import. I used to do a thing in the anime thread comparing the Japanese manga sales charts to the New York Times manga sales charts, both of which they used to publish weekly. The top 10 of nytimes was all boobs and magic battles, the top 50 of Japan was > 50% mostly real-life drama, sports, romance, and the "popular" "big boobs" mangas that get to literally #1 in sales in the USA almost weekly don't even make it into the top 50 weekly sales charts in Japan.

Highschool DxD and Daily life with Monster Girls are actually extremely obscure Japanese comics, yet both regularly hit the #1 weekly sales spot for manga in the USA. I knew a guy back in college who had a big stack of American porn comics (ones like "Horny Biker Slut"). Those were the only comics he collected. Should I assume that's what American comics are all about?

This is where complaining about weebs is justified btw. It's the weebs who are only into shonen battles and pervy stuff, they've lead to a situation where only obscure borderline porn series and action series for little kids get any traction in the US market. The West's attitude to Japanese stuff is largely like if a foreigner only watches American porn and Marvel movies then complains that all live-action films from America are nothing but smut or mindless action.

[Yoink]

Wait wait wait, I wasn't talking about manga or anime... I mean proper Japanese films. Admittedly I haven't seen all that many of them, but the ones that cross my radar tend to be wonderfully bizarre.

The Street Fighter and Karate-Robo Zaborgar are both fantastic.

[Reelya]

The same thing holds, but even more so for live-action than it does for anime. Not that many people in Japan are actually going to *watch* movies like that. You can see box office mojo to get an idea what normal Japanese people go and watch. Here's just the current week:

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/2019W37/?area=JP

Three anime movies got into the top 10 this week, but all of them are slice of life, drama or romantic comedy ones, not action ones. Similarly there are a bunch of Japanese live action movies in the top 10, all equally non-actiony, chick flicks or biographies about authors. One of the top grossing anime movies at the moment really sums up typical Japanese entertainment: "Violet Evergarden: a former soldier returned from war, comes to teach at a women's academy and changes a young girl's life." OK, so it's alt-history sci-fi and there was a big war. So, naturally, we're going to skip ahead to when the war is totally over and the main character is just doing daily-life stuff.

[Il Palazzo]

Y'all missing the point.
The point being that One Cut of the Dead is good and you should watch it now, instead of conjuring armchair insights into the average Japanese person's movie going experience.

[Cthulhu]

I need to see that.  I also want to see Tarkovsky's Stalker but by all accounts I need to set aside an entire day for it and I don't have one yet.

Another good "don't read anything in advance" movie is Pontypool.  It's low budget, very noticeably in some parts (there's a stock sound effect in one scene that's extremely jarring and I'm 90% sure is from Warcraft 3), but starts off weird and quickly becomes absolutely bizarre with a horror premise unlike anything else.  It's based on a novella, Pontypool Changes Everything, and does a good job of taking the very postmodern, abstract concepts there and condensing them into something you can make a movie of.

[Ulfarr]

I need to see that.  I also want to see Tarkovsky's Stalker but by all accounts I need to set aside an entire day for it and I don't have one yet.

More like a free week, just to be sure. As much as I love the stalker universe, if you can call it that with how different each medium (games, book, film) is to one another, the film is just so damn slow. Twice I've tried to watch it and twice I fell asleep.

In the film's defence I was quite tired both times but...