Metropolis (DVD)

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is probably the oldest movie I’ve ever seen (it was made in 1927). Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m not going to use its age either for or against it. It’s just that they don’t make ‘em like this any more, and for good reason. It tells of a future city - Metropolis - which is split in two, Time Machine style, into the wealthy, intelligent people living above ground, and the workers living deep underground. One day, a man from above gets a visit from a mysterious woman, who inspires him to delve underground and see how his brothers live. On encountering their daily toil, labouring to keep vast machines running for the good ...  Read the complete review

Hardly anyone watches silent films anymore, which is a shame. Probably it's the obvious old-fashioned-ness that puts people off. Silent cinema appeals to me at least partly because it's so different to modern cinema, but I also love the sense of scale that you get in some of the films (it seems that building enormous sets that probably cost more than Belgium was not unusual), and also the way you can see film as a narrative medium developing. If silent films are frequently clumsy and unsubtle, later films refined their methods and became what we have today. Besides, I rather like clumsy and unsubtle. And Metropolis, made in 1927, is certainly clumsy and ...  Read the complete review

Japanese Anime is a quite recent phenomenon in Finland that has been practically non-existent before the turn of the millenium. So far the biggest market for manga and anime outside of Japan has really only been the United States, although even there it has really been the pleasure of only a select few. Thankfully things have of late been improving considerably as the artform really is so much more rich than simply Pokemón and Dragonball Z. In my country there has been a steadily growing fascination in anime over tha last couple of years that is getting stronger by the year. There has already been a number of important releases on DVD of the likes of Akira, Ghost in the ...  Read the complete review

"Metropolis is the new milestone in Anime, a spectacular fusion of CG backgrounds with traditional character animation. It has beauty, power, mystery and above all...heart. Images from this film will stay with you forever. My congratulations to Rintaro-san for his masterpiece." It wasn't such a long time ago that I heard Metropolis was being released on DVD to buy, in fact the only reason I knew was because I was looking at all the soon to be released DVDs on play.com. At the time I had no idea what Metropolis was about and all I knew was it was an anime and I was a great anime fan so it was probably going to be great. I put off buying it ...  Read the complete review

This is a review on yet another anime film, as I am doing an anime reviewing season, which is called Metropolis, which is set in the future where the mayor of Metropolis has created robots to do all the work around the city. Director Rintaro, which is not done many famous movies, but has certainly done a good job here. The film starts off with a Private Investigator and his nephew entering Metropolis after the some people talking about how handy the robots are, and the Private Investigator is there mainly because he got a very reliable tip that there was an evil scientist in the mists of Metropolis. Duke Red (this high and powerful person) has hired a ...  Read the complete review