My criteria for a movie, animated or not, is the same. I have a raging hard-on for animation due to my opinion that animation is a far superior medium for storytelling than live-action. That is a whole other discussion, tho.

In my opinion, the most important element of a story are the characters. Characters are what makes the rest of the story happen if you've written your story correctly. The motivations of the characters and the clashing of the characters makes everything else in a movie happen. The movies I mention have, in my opinion, superior characters and relationships. Princess Mononoke is a really good film, I will admit, and deserves to be listed as one of the absolute best of the ghibli films and therefore as one of the best animated films of all time. Miyazaki's other movies are a bit more fluffy and loose with their characters and their motivations and actually lie to you about the motivations to a certain degree. You go through most of Spirited Away with a very negative portrayal of the villainess, but at the end of the movie I had a completely different opinion of her and she felt much less of a threat to me. I'm still not sure what her motivation was throughout the film, aside from just "I'm the bad guy, I have to make things hard for this girl". The girl was actually doing her huge favors for most of the movie, but the villain continued to harass her, neutered as she was by the end.

Mononoke is a great film, tho. I won't even try to argue. There's only one part that I think isn't utterly brilliant, and it's a stupid little trivial thing that no one in their right mind should care about.

The three films I mentioned are all extremely character-oriented stories, and I find that those films that emphasize character over plot end up with the most engrossing stories. Ghibli has always emphasized character more than most other studios - live action or animated - but I think Kondo and Takahata were/are better at it than Miyazaki. Not to say that Miyazaki isn't damn good at it - he is - but I would say those three films I mentioned are better than any of Miyazaki's films.

Just my opinion, tho.

Sorry for length, I'm a little drunk at the moment and it's making me possibly ramble more than usual - which is significant for a guy who tends to ramble even when he's not drunk.

Akira, for instance. They'd probably make a lot more money by just putting a couple million dollars into marketing a theatrical release of the animated film, rather than blow $60 Million on making some crap americanized live-action flick. Akira is going to be a disaster in live-action. They will lose money, even if they shot it at half that much money. It will be another Dragonball.

The animated film, tho...  I'd cut off my pinky finger Yakuza-style to see the animated film in a theater. I would probably see it multiple times.

I think the trailer only really shows the first parts of the movie. They don't go into any supernatural aspects in the trailer, aside from the little blue lights in the woods. I have a feeling there's more to the movie than the Disney Princess™ plotline they're showing us. I'd be willing to bet that that's mostly a misdirection.

The trailer does suck, tho.

I wish they hadn't bailed on Newt. That movie looked promising.

That titanic vid is amazing. I'll have to look into that project to see what they have planned for it. Hopefully the goal is more than just recreating the ship. I think it would be cool to recreate the voyage as accurately as possible, from beginning to end. Kind of an interactive history lesson. It would be cool to be able to walk around, check out all the notable people who were on board and why they were on board, whether they lived or died, if they lived, what they did afterward, how long the ship took to sink, how it broke apart, etc. Something like that would be an awesome teaching tool, me thinks.

I mean, that's what I'd do. I imagine most people would rather shoot laser guns at each other in the dining hall or something.

hilarious.

In somewhat related news, Arrested Development is going to get a new season on FOX as a way to lead into the movie which is currently being hammered out, and most recently Netflix has signed a deal to start producing new episodes in 2013. I'm not sure if that includes the season that's supposed to lead up to the movie, or if the deal will be for additional shows.

Netflix had previously stated that they were going to look into producing shows and possibly movies for their service. It would be interesting to see how well they do, or if they plan on creating new series or just set up deals to produce some of these cult-popular shows from other networks.

I would think that the web would be an ideal format for series. You wouldn't have to worry about pacing for commercial breaks, you could go as short or long as you wanted, etc. I remember when I first heard about Channel 101 and I thought it was an awesome idea and would be 'the future' of internet media distribution. Turns out it was mostly teenagers shooting bad comedy shows in their backyards. It would appear that their latest shows are a bit better produced, tho it still looks like it's mostly comedy oriented. Such a waste of an idea.

The community looks really really popular if you're only paying attention to the internet. If the opinions of people on the internet were the norm, we'd be somewhere in the fifth or sixth season of Firefly right now, Minecraft would be the highest selling game of all time and sites like The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks would be revered and not demonized in the media.

Besides, The Community isn't exactly an unpopular show. It's the #3 show in it's time slot. It's only slightly less popular than "Let's Misrepresent Nerd Culture For Mass Consumption" and "Stupid Human Tricks". How is that bad?

If anyone is upset about The Community getting canceled, you can blame the same people who gave Transformers 2 a billion dollars and decided that Rebecca Black deserved a million bucks for effort. IE: the 99% of the US population who will cock their head like a confused puppy if you try to explain to them how the internets work. The 99% of the population who just don't give a shit and only want to watch something that will amuse them for an hour in between eating and sleeping and pooping and working and screwing. The 99% who have no idea in the slightest that "the 99%" is a thing on the internet.

You know, if Peter had just left after talking to the Sandman at the end and not gone to talk to Harry, Harry would have never died. He only died because Peter showed up. He was waiting for Peter.

They should have made aunt may venom.

They put Gwen Stacey in this movie and then didn't kill her. What the hell?

I wanted Mary Jane to die, and every scene in this movie with Mary Jane I was waiting for something to kill her. I don't really know why.

Why did they put her astronaut boyfriend in the previous film and then not follow that up by having him get the symbiote? Was that not the reason they put him into the second film?

The thing about these movies is that they dangle these cool things at you and then don't do those cool things. "Hey, here's Venom! Look at Venom guys! OOOOh what are we gonna do with Venom!?" And then they gave Venom about five minutes of screen time and no real motivation at all. Sandman's character starts out with an interesting motivation and goal, and then they totally ignore all that crap so they can have him hit stuff a lot. They take the - granted, very flimsy and stupid - tension between Harry and Peter and throw it out the window for most of the movie due to amnesia. All the character stuff they could have done there was just thrown out because they literally made him forget his motivation and goals for half the movie.

The movie as a whole was a huge mess of setting up potentially cool stuff and then saying "nope, we need to totally ignore all that stuff we just set up, so let's change all of this and establish a new scenario". It's not even like it's 2nd act "upping the ante" type changing. It's full on changing the goals of all the characters and then moving into the second act. Except Sandman, whose goal they just ignore, really. Venom doesn't even show up until well into the second act, just before they go into the third act / climax. I guess that's upping the ante, eh? Just throwing in a new villain at the end? Hrmm...

<EDIT>
It's like they started off the script and said "OK, we've got these two or three good ideas for what we want to do with this story, let's do it like this", and then they got thirty pages in and thought "no, this is dumb, let's just add a scene or two to undo all that crap and set up these new ideas instead" and then they spent about 80 pages doing that and thought "no no no, this isn't working...  let's just go back to the first ideas we had...  just add a scene or two to undo the changes we already made before...  and... good..."

But then someone said "hey, wait...  people will probably get pissed off that we just wasted like 90 minutes of screen time with plot stuff that we just threw out..." so someone else said "I know! Let's just add this other character to the end and we can pretend like it was all building up to this the whole time!"

And then they all had a congratulatory party where they all got drunk as hell before they sat down to finish writing the last bit of the movie.
</EDIT>

Something to add to the money-making discussion at the end: the thing that gets these films to make a buttload of money is the fact that it's something that a family can go see, and kids - older kids - will want to go see these movies. A lot of the audience for these movies is the 8-14 year old kids that have families that all go to the movies together. That's why they keep trying to make every movie PG 13 now, cause parents won't take their 8 year old to go see Watchmen cause it's R-Rated. Why do you think Watchmen bombed? Wasn't cause it was bad. It was cause there was naked blue guys and dirty sex and people getting brained and stuff like that in there. While the 10 year old kids out there might see a preview for that and say "wow, I wanna go see that movie!" their parents are gonna say "That's R-rated, so it's probably violent and full of boobies" so they won't take their kids to see it.

I KNOW there are a lot of people who will drag their 5 year old kids into a theater to see se7en, but those are the truly retarded people of the world. The people who give Monies to Spiderman 3 and Transformers 2 aren't really stupid, they're just trying to give their kids a good time, or they are themselves teenagers and thus just kinda dumb in general.

The book "Maus" has some interesting insight into Nazi Germany and the holocaust as well. I highly recommend it. I've wanted someone to make an animated film or series out of it for some time, but the author seems to be 100% against such a thing. I can understand why, but at the same time I think it would bring the story to a much wider audience than it has now. Most people won't read a comic book, even if it is the only one to have ever won a pulitzer prize (and it will remain the only comic to ever win one, as they changed the rules shortly after Maus won because some 'serious' authors got all butt-hurt when a lowly comic book won).

OK, I'm gonna talk about a few movies here. I used to watch a lot of bad movies as a hobby. Recently it's gotten hard to do this, as the rental store I used to buy them at has gone belly up, so I've been trying to find them online. These are the straight to DVD movies that are actually trying to be decent movies, or at least trying to be fun to watch. Some of them are up there with The Asylum in terms of "so bad it's good", while others are just painful to watch. I will, of course, include trailers and such in this post.

1) US Seals 2
I already posted this in the netflix thread. If you've not already seen it, it's on netflix instant right now. Stop reading this and watch it. It's one of my favorite B movies of all time.

2) Megasnake
This is Asylum fodder, though it was made by the now defunked First Look Studios for the Sci-Fi Channel. For those who don't know them, they're about on the same level of the Asylum, except they actually tried to make decent flicks and occasionally succeeded. They picked up "Transsiberian", "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" and "Paris, Je t'aime" among others that were pretty well recieved. They also released "Mega Snake", "Retrograde" and a bunch of other low budget flicks. Or maybe they just had the distribution rights for Sci-Fi channel films. I dunno.

Megasnake is about a snake that gets really big. See, this family used to go to one of those snake wrangling churches where they'd dare the poisonous snakes to bite them and trust god to prevent that from happening. The father of this family died of a snake bite, and the two sons of this guy grow up. One of them is terrified of snakes, the other is obsessed with them. The obsessive one buys this rare poisonous snake from some dude. The terrified one is upset about this.

Then the snake gets really big and eats people.

The acting and special effects aren't good, but there are a few things that make the movie watchable and interesting. First, the dialogue can be decidedly odd and poorly delivered. The snake itself actually looks really good in some of the early shots, but once it's bigger it looks hilarious. The final awesome thing is the climax which takes place at an amusement park and has one of the most hilarious tilt-a-whirl scenes I've ever seen.

3) The Shepard: Border Patrol
Directed by the same guy who directed US Seals 2, and set in the same town and sets as the town in Mega Snake, this film is actually pretty watchable. There are some decent fight scenes, there are some funny line deliveries, there are some weird twists that come out of nowhere. It's actually not all that bad if a little slow in some scenes.

In fact, Florentine, the director, would probably be a decent action director if he could manage to tighten up his movies to prevent them from lagging in parts. US Seals 2 has this problem with some of the earlier scenes while this film and "Ninja", his most recent film, get slow around the middle. All of his movies have some pretty nice fight sequences, which goes without saying when you realize that this guy's previous job was fight choreography and being a stunt man.

So yeah, check this one out. It's pretty good.

4) Invasion.
This is probably one of the worst films ever made. Show this movie to someone who thinks Gigli is a bad movie and it will blow their minds. Hell, show it to someone who thinks your average Asylum film is bad and it will blow their minds. And it's not really the sort of bad you can make fun of, either. Oh, it's got it's moments to be sure, but it's a hard sit. It's not like The Room or Birdemic. I dare you to watch this movie.

Made by one Albert Pyun, famous for the earlier Captain America film, as well as Bloodsport 2. His most successful movie? Time Cop. This guy made fucking Time Cop. If you wanna see what he's been up to lately, watch Invasion. It's also sometimes called "Infection", which cause some problems for me as there's another B-movie called "Infection" that I now own as a result of my first attempt to get my hands on this film. That movie isn't any good, either.

The one notable thing about the movie is that the main section of the film (the dash cam footage) appears to all be done in one take. I dunno if they maybe used some clever cuts here or there that would let them do a cut, but it appears to be one solid take. Which doesn't make it good, but makes it at least interesting. There's some subtle stuff that you probably won't notice going on in the background as well. I only noticed it while I was rewatching the movie for the third or fourth time back when I was planning on doing a video on bad movies.

But if you wanna see some truly terrible modern B-Movies, look at the B western genre. My god, so many bad movies. It's hard to give a suitable example, but I'll post the first one I ever watched.
5) Bounty:
This film can be hysterical, but only if you're drunk. There are so many problems with this movie it has to have broken some kind of record. The plot goes all to hell, the sets are cheap as hell, the 'jail' has bars that don't go up to the ceiling. The buildings don't look like buildings. Each interior looks like someone took the same 10x20 foot shed and stuck some furniture in there to make it kinda look like a bar or a jail or whatever.

And then there are things like power lines in the background of this period western. Stuff like that. I don't even know if this should be considered a recommendation. More like a "Hey guys, this movie exists!", and this isn't even the worst of them. Or the most entertaining. Check out "Shoot First And Pray You Live" if you wanna see what it looks like when you're a director obsessed with Quentin Tarantino and you make a bad western. Or check out "All Hell Broke Loose" to see what kind of movie you can shoot if you own some horses, have a DV camcorder and have access to an actor like David Carradine.

Bounty is a terrible / funny movie.

The only reason I post this is because that you can occasionally find some really amazing movies by dredging the bottom of the barrel. Some movies seem to just get buried down there for no reason. Examples:
1) Dolan's Cadillac.
Supposedly based on a Stephen King story, it's about a guy out for revenge after Dolan, this vegas mob guy, has his wife killed. I just randomly picked it up one day for a few bucks and was surprised by how good it is. There's definitely some weaker shit in the movie, but overall it's pretty good. This trailer does it no favors. There are some pretty clever bits in this movie. It is kinda cheesy at parts, but it's overall fairly decent. There's definitely a good movie in here, it's just a little unpolished.

2) The Horseman.
Fucking great movie. Another revenge movie. This one has a lot more depth going for it, due to the nature of the inciting incident that causes the main character to want to seek revenge. It's not just a black and white movie, and it ends up turning into something else by the end anyway. Great fight sequences that are mostly short and brutal and feel like real fights and not overly choreographed movie fights. Main actor pulls out a really good performance. Definitely watch it.

3) Interview.
Steve Buscemi co-wrote, directs and stars in this movie about a political reporter who, having stepped on someone's toes apparently, is forced to do what he considers to be a fluff piece interview with some ditzy third-rate actress. It goes to some pretty interesting places pretty quickly. The ending is kinda 'meh' but it's a pretty interesting movie overall, and Buscemi is as good as ever.

There are others, tho. Linewatch isn't half bad. Puerto Vallarta Squeeze is pretty good.

Yeah, that movie looks pretty fun, and the few lines she did have were delivered well enough. Kinda surprised I haven't seen the trailer on the sites I go to. I must go to the wrong sites.