I thought Spirited Away (made in 2001) was awful, so much so that I didn't watch anything Miyazaki made after that for years.
I tried The Wind Rises (made in 2013), also found it terrible.
However, before those two films, I had seen several Studio Ghibli's earlier movies and found them pretty good. I thought Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (pre-Ghibli but the same group of people, with director Miyazaki) was absolutely amazing. So my impression is that their earlier films are much better than their newer works.
I'm convinced that a large part of this kind of thing is related to personality.
People's ability to get "in the zone" depends on if the level of presentation fits them. I remember in AP Chemistry, some kids just thrived on the rote memorization nature of the whole course. They did great. Some of us found it nonsensical that we had to memorize so much without explanation but we still managed to push through and get good grades. The people who did better weren't "smarter," they just never cared to ask any bigger questions about the material. I'm sure that lack of curiosity helped them to succeed in standard careers.
A person who was "smart enough" to do cutting edge theoretical research might get lucky and have a personality that fits with having a more standard life. Someone who isn't "smart enough" might be very interested in certain problems and push through to finding the answers. Someone who is "smart enough" to do that and doesn't like bureaucracy might drop out of grad school, or even undergrad.
It's just testing and rewarding people who studied for the stupid test, that's all. It also rewards conformist personalities.
It reminds me of undergrad calculus, where you had to memorize how to do dozens of types of integrals. You're not supposed to ask "what does dx mean?" Asking those types of questions will give you a worse grade.
I remember back when I was supposed to "study" for this thing. I asked "if it's an aptitude test, how does it make sense to study for it?" No one could give me a good answer so I decided it was stupid and never studied for it. I thought it was disgusting that so many people were paying for services, books, etc. to specifically prepare for the test even though the whole pretense of the thing is that you're not supposed to be able to do that.
On the other hand, I loved a lot of the AP stuff (chemistry, physics, calculus) since you were rewarded based on understanding the actual content of a subject, a system that made sense. But it's a good thing I didn't think to ask what "dx" meant back then, otherwise I would have probably gotten a worse score.
The Final Cut of the movie ruins the original look of the film. I'm amazed more people haven't commented on this. For example, compare the shot of the outside of Chew's lab:
Thanks for posting that, it was hilarious. I'll definitely re-watch the part where they're quoting him directly again when I need a good laugh.
I wouldn't say he misunderstood his creation, I would rather say that he didn't care about the source material and made something different, with themes that weren't really thought through too well. I agree that the sum of the visions amalgamated is better than the vision of the director in this case.
I saw 2049 when it came out. I didn't like the original film much but of course was still curious about the sequel since I liked the original novel.
One problem I have with both these movies is that the whole "memories" thing doesn't have anything to do with the point the original novel was making. The main point of the original novel is that the replicants are fake human beings which are not only deplorable due to their lack of empathy but are also rather dangerous, and that real human beings will likely become dehumanized ourselves in our eventual efforts to eradicate them. I'm paraphrasing Dick in that last sentence but you can hear the more full version in this interview: https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=3d7XMnmPgUk
Anyway, I agree that 2049 has more of a plot than the original, but I lost most of my interest in the movie as soon as I realized that the main character was a replicant (which unfortunately happened pretty early on). Great cinematography though.
Authentic replicants like the book wouldn't work on screen, I feel.
The movie tells you K is a replicants within the first few minutes, it's not ambiguous like deckard (eh), the point of K is that he has meaning handed to him on a plate - he might be human.
Thanks for bringing this up. Arthur C. Clarke was devastated at how the movie removed most of the explanations of what was going on, and walked out of the movie during the intermission:
"Without consulting or confronting his co-creator, Kubrick cut a huge amount of Arthur’s voice-over explanation during the final edit... As it turned out, Arthur did not get to see the completed film until the US private premiere. He was shocked by the transformation. Almost every element of explanation had been removed. Reams of voice-over narration had been cut. Far from being a pseudo-documentary, the film was now elusive, ambiguous and thoroughly unclear. Close to tears, he left at the intermission..."
I'm honestly glad Kubrick didn't go with Clarke's narration. Kubrick was a filmmaker and Clarke was a writer. While abstract and nearly impossible to understand without the book, the movie and book work amazingly well together as a unit. With concrete first order explanation at the end the sense of profundity wouldn't have been there. The aliens and their machines are vastly beyond human comprehension, and the arc of man's evolution was absolutely poetic. It would have been dated and corny with direct visual and vocal explication. The movie drew me to book, not the other way around.
Thanks for sharing your opinion. Probably you could tell from the tone of my comment, but I don't like the movie the way it is. I agree with you that the movie and the book work well together but I wish the movie worked as a standalone piece of art.
I think Kubrick and Clarke could have perhaps found a compromise. For example, I remember liking the ending part of the movie "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" by Spielberg which had a similar situation to the last sequence in 2001. I don't recall if that movie had any explicit explanation of what the beings at the end were but it was pretty clear who they were and what they were doing from the way the movie handled things.
Yeah I'm not hard headed about it and get that it's not for everyone. I'd be open to other possibilities for how the ending was handled. I definitely don't think direct narration would have worked though. The voiceovers in the theatrical cut of Blade Runner are almost universally disliked. Some less subtle hints like you say could have worked.
I thought Spielberg ruined AI btw. But that's a different topic. I thought the final scene was the only good one in the movie. The imagery and implications stuck with me for decades.
I agree with everything in your comment, including about AI. The last 30 minutes of that movie amazed me but I didn't like much of what came before that.
I tried The Wind Rises (made in 2013), also found it terrible.
However, before those two films, I had seen several Studio Ghibli's earlier movies and found them pretty good. I thought Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (pre-Ghibli but the same group of people, with director Miyazaki) was absolutely amazing. So my impression is that their earlier films are much better than their newer works.