2 reviews from KM 1663862

Soylent Green
This is one of those movies that I always felt I 'should' watch. I put it in my queue quite some time ago. After the recent passing of Charlton Heston, it caught my eye as I was scanning through my queue trying to decide what I wanted sent to me next. After watching it, I was somewhat disappointed. I don't know how well this movie was received at the time it came out, but certainly the fact that 'soylent green is people' is at least as common knowledge as the true identity of Rosebud, tells me that there must've been something to it. I just didn't see it. Perhaps the obvious reason for this is that I knew from the beginning pretty much what was going to happen. Perhaps I'm too used to modern special effects and camera techniques, that I can't appreciate how revolutionary it was at the time. Whatever the answer, the one positive of the whole watching experience, for me, was that I thought they did a good job of portraying a future (not so far removed from us today) that seemed hopeless. But where they succeeded in depicting a world that was in its last days, I don't feel that it adequately showed how they got there. All the usual suspects were implicated (apathetic society, general overpopulation, environmental pollution, corporate greed, government corruption...) but none of them were, satisfyingly explored for my tastes. Perhaps this is out of design. The way it played out, it never pointed a finger at any particular cause. So, as in real life, the problems seems all the more nebulous, and therefore harder to fix. This is a bold direction to take a movie in, because the audience has a tendency to want to believe that there's some specific evil behind this horror. However bold it may have been, I feel that because there was no particular antagonist in all of this, it makes the act itself somewhat less horiffic... at least to my 21st century, desensitized tastes.

Cardcaptor Sakura
I am a fan of X and Chobits, so I thought I might give this series a try. I rented the first disk, and while I didn't find anything wrong with it per se, it just didn't interest me enough to keep the other 19 disks in my queue, along with the two feature length movies. I don't have a problem with anime that's directed mainly at younger audiences; this one just didn't grab my interest enough to want to stick with it.