"Treating a cyborg assassin like a normal girl will only end in heartbreak."

Watched three very different movies today, with a long nap between. Which means I might start a fourth after I write this up.

First: watched Everything is Illuminated this afternoon with joanofarrgh. I wasn't sure what to make of this film from the trailers and the extremely mixed reviews, but I thought it was really, really good. Elijah Wood stars as a young man who obsessively collects things related to his family, but who only has one item of his grandfather's. On her deathbed, his grandmother gives him two more items that sets him off to the Ukraine to search for his grandfather's home and the woman who saved him from the Nazis. His guides are a young man from Odessa fixated on American culture and his bitter, eccentric grandfather (and their "deranged" seeing-eye dog). The film starts out extremely slow, gets into some wackier-than-probably-necessary territory, but ends with a powerful and moving conclusion. Siri said the film is very faithful to the book, which I now must read.

Second: after my long-ass nap, I finally got around to watching Wizards, loaned to me a few weeks ago by msari. It's an animated film from the 1970s directed by animation legend Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat, American Pop), done with a very small crew and on a very small budget. The story takes place 2 million years after a nuclear war pretty much wiped out all humanity, the few left mostly becoming mutants. After mankind's destruction, their "true ancestors" return to power: elves, fairies, dwarves, ogres, etc. No record exists of ancient man except, apparently, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, which an evil wizard uses to pattern a new war to take over the world. The film is a bizarre, psychedelic mix of traditional animation and obviously rotoscoped scenes from (probably) stock war footage laid over crazy-ass backgrounds. It moves a little slowly, with a bit too much narration early on, but the characters are so weird and the tone is so out there that the film wins a lot of points on its unique charm. The end is also surprisingly cynical given what comes before, coming across as more of a smartass punchline than anything else. Worth watching for animation and fantasy fans, others might find it tough going.

Third: Takashi Shimizu's Marebito, which I won from Twitchfilm a few weeks ago. Shimizu directed Ju-on, and much has been made of the fact that Shimizu shot Marebito in eight days before starting up on The Grudge (the American remake of Ju-on). I can see why-- there's no real hint that the production was rushed in any way, certainly not going by the film's glacial pacing. Shinya Tsukamoto (Japanese cult director of Tetsuo: The Iron Man and co-star of Ichi the Killer) stars as Masuoka, a cameraman obsessed with the footage he captured of a man committing suicide in a subway. Masuoka, determined to see for himself whatever it was that caused the look of abject terror on the dead man's face, returns to the subway and discovers an opening into a vast network of underground tunnels. Eventually, he finds a beautiful young woman, unconscious and chained to a rock wall, whom he takes back to his apartment. Their relationship becomes more disturbing when Masuoka learns how he must take care of her, and his life degenerates into confusion, madness and violence. The film isn't nearly as balls-out scary as Ju-on, but it's more disturbing and not as one-dimensional-- what is going on, what is real and what isn't is never really clear, especially later in the film, and despite a major "wait, what?" revelation the film holds a spellbinding, hallucinatory power.

I'm not really tired at all now, so I might start watching All Souls' Day, the movie I won from Gorezone a while back. If it's good, hooray! If it's not, maybe it'll make me sleepy.