Warning: May contain callous rants.

Maybe I should read more IMDb movie comments... it seems to make me want to write very much.

Then again, maybe I shouldn't.

I just finished watching the Japanese film "Nobody Knows." (I've been watching a lot of Japanese film this week, after realizing I hadn't seen that many modern Japanese live-action films.) I know this may seem terribly callous, but I wasn't moved by the film. I am often moved by films, and am often moved by foreign films, so, before you go that route, just stop and go spew some comment on a youtube video. Here area couple of the reasons, as they seem to me, I wasn't affected:

1. I'm finding more and more that "gritty" filming is just pretentious carbon copying. I've seen all these angles before, and, unlike one user's comment, it doesn't make me feel like I'm just another kid in the apartment. For one thing, were I another kid, I wouldn't be standing that close to the other kids, and I wouldn't get random strange perspective shots. The cutting rhythm of these "gritty" films just seems off to me, and, most annoying, I'm tired, tired, and very tired, of the same "buzz" used for a quiet outdoor city scene. Every scene in every country that is supposed to be of some park where something terrible is about to happen, has the same semi-natural "buzzzzz-cricket-cricket-buzzzzz" sound effect, and it's as bad a Wilhelm scream without the irony! I'm sorry, "gritty" camera work and buzzing backgrounds, and lots of things shot off of brown-tinted pale walls doesn't make me feel like I'm in real life, it makes me feel like I'm in some movie's version of real life that wasts to emphasize how horrible this life is, and, because they can't do this in subtle, real, or ironic ways, they just decide to tint everything slightly more like... crap (I'm trying to keep this somewhat PG).

2. I didn't find the kids that believable, and reality backed me up. I really, honestly, have little problem with Disney films, because almost everyone knows they're not real, but when a film like this comes in and tries to make something seem "real" it needs to get the facts straight. The kid who died, in reality, didn't die by accident. She was killed by her older brother's friend over a fracking BOWL OF RAMEN. That should give you some idea of the older brother's character, too, and that he may not have been the mature, sad, loving young man portrayed in the movie. Yes, all the performances by the kids were great, but I'm beginning to believe more and more that kids just have an easy time acting, and we always tend to find them more believable than adults. Kids are natural hypnotists, it's how they survive, to make parents believe that it's important to care about them. That's not to say it's not important to care about kids, just that kids know it's important to care about them, and have developed how to make parents care very carefully. Call it evolution or design or whatever you want, either way it makes sense. Kids are natural hypnotists and con men.

So, that's my rant. Strange, disconnected, quite possibly callous. But it's mine, and I'm probably going to stick by it.