Three Films Make A Displeased Post: Get Loaded

Children of the Sea (2019): I’ve read decent things about Ayumu Watanabe’s anime adaptation of Daisuke Igarashi’s manga, but I can’t say I ever warmed to the film watching it. The storytelling often feels needlessly vague, with character motivations that might actually make a viewer interested in these personality-less ciphers kept even more so, and a plot that never actually seems to want to get anywhere, spouting half-baked philosophy that really needed much stronger visuals to convince. From time to time, the film’s depiction of lights in the sky and underwater worlds is at least rather pretty, but the animation often has surprising problems with the anime standard of using digital technology to still create a movie that has a hand-drawn feel to it, sometimes looking as if it were made ten years ago when anime filmmakers weren’t sure how to do this.

Guns Akimbo (2019): If you’re in the market for a film that wastes Daniel Radcliffe (who was better when playing a highly practical corpse than here) and Samara Weaving on a combination of flat social media satire, only the most obvious and least funny jokes, and action scenes that lack choreography and imagination, do I have the film for you here! If you’re into films with a loud and obnoxious tone, as if made by people trying to hipster up the Neveldine-Taylor formula (if you can imagine that), all the better! If not, well, then take my advice and avoid this thing like the plague. I certainly wish I had.

All the Bright Places (2019): Speaking of films that waste perfectly good actors, Brett Haley’s Netflix teen drama romance thing with Elle Fanning and Justice Smith is the perfect note to end this entry on. On paper, this might be a perfectly good example of the hopeful teen indie movie, but structurally, this is a catastrophe, a film seemingly so badly in love with the idea of emotionally investing its audience in the hopefulness of its tale it forgets to actually portray the grief and pain of these teens properly before the inspirational music starts tweeting and all the postcard pretty pictures start flashing. Turns out that speaking about living after pain is not terribly convincing when you’re not actually acknowledging the pain itself properly and only treat it as something to kitsch away from as fast as possible.


Not helping is terrible dialogue that may or may not have been written by robots who like to quote Virginia Wolfe, pretending this sort of thing signals a teenager as worthy of an audience’s time, instead of writing characters who are.