This is going to become a standard on this site, Nick praising a movie and then Matt putting it in its place. Blad Runner is an incredible film. CQ, however, while very well done, could have been better. It does great with the Barbarella type atmosphere, but then again, if I want that I tend to watch Barbarella. I loved Jason Schwartzman's character and wish we had seen more of him. The movie suffered from a little too much of that black and white filming myself thing the main character was doing. It didn't really blend well with the 60's pop type atmosphere. Perhaps that was the point, but the film would, at least for me, been more enjoyable had they gone 100% with the 60's pop thing.

Matt's slightly less than enthusiastic review of Ichi the Killer:

Well, obviously the film made somewhat of an impression on Nick, but I have to admit to being somewhat dissapointed with this Takashi Miike outing. Yes, it was a good film. Yes, it was entertaining. Yes, it was better than most of the crap you usually see. However, judging from the trailer I watched online, I was suspecting something along the lines of an intense, bloody roller coaster ride that doesn't let up for a second. There are some extremely graphic and disturbing scenes, but it isn't nonstop and it isn't anything revolutionary. The movie is well done, but there are long bouts of talking heads that will have you impatiently screaming for the next occurence of graphic violence. If I was expecting a standard yakuza tale, I would have been pleasantly surprised and probably would be saying how much I loved the film. Perhaps, however, after hearing all the hype, my expectations were simply too high. It didn't live up to the movie I was playing in my mind. I prefer some of Miike's other work better (Happiness of the Katukuris is bizarre and hillarious, Audition is slow moving but horrific, Visitor Q is strange and wonderful, and Fudoh is the outrageous bloodbath that Ichi didn't quite live up to). A good movie, but not a masterpiece. Maybe I've just been desenitized to violence.
- Side Note : Evil Dead II is good, but also not great. The first film, Evil Dead, does much better with the pacing and building up of suspense. The second one moves so fast that before you know it zombies are just reunning around killing people. There isn't much of a plot or any character development, and for this the film suffers. The highlight of Evil Dead II for me was the use of claymation, which I think is something lacking in today's world of computer graphics. Claymation and stop motion animation may indeed become lost art forms, and it is great to see what can be acheived with such effects.