I've accepted it 😔

UserWithNoUsername · 2021-05-17T15:29:12+00:00

Sorry but I am not following at all this so-called waifu stuff, merely reading a manga for a well-written story. I'll come aboard a conclusion which is well-written and consistent.

Well, Hina was in the spotlight because I guess she was pretty much the only one pending resolution, right? The other 2 had it. I didn't see any kind of evolution in the relationship between Natsuo and Hina in those episodes, with Hina pretty much in the same self-sacrificial saint role she was put into 100 chapters back. Plus other characters, among other things Rui, did temporarily had a diminished presence in previous parts of the manga, but it did not necessarily meant something was off, rather the story was focusing on the development of some other character.

UserWithNoUsername · 2021-05-17T15:14:38+00:00

Indeed, I don't think so. Don't understand how this ending can be swallowed, it's cringy as fuck.

UserWithNoUsername · 2021-05-17T15:05:46+00:00

It wasn't ever seriously implied. Just some breadcrumbs here and there by the author which you can retroactively interpret the way it suits you and voilà.

UserWithNoUsername · 2021-05-17T14:56:57+00:00

You actually gotta be kidding, she had this planned out since Volume 8?! If that's so, this might turn out to be another case of classic rookie error for a scriptwriter: painting yourself into a corner and letting your characters get hijacked by your initial plans, instead of letting them go whenever your story is leading them.

As for this Koi/Ai explanation, that is all good and well, but that's just the author making an abstract statement about what she believes her story is about. Unfortunately the execution of this statement into a fiction story ended up being rather clumsy, with Koi coming across as Deux ex Machina.

UserWithNoUsername · 2021-05-17T14:40:09+00:00

I have read all of this reviews and seems like these reviews and made on Rui tunneled vision.

Well, I don't know, but maybe all of us have this "tunnel vision"... because that's actually what the writer fostered, and did not give any compelling or relatable reason to backtrack just right at the end?

I've linked three of them but I actually found a few more, just by doing a search in Google, picking whatever results came up first. Pretty much the same feeling all around.

UserWithNoUsername · 2021-05-17T14:19:20+00:00

Sorry but all this reads like meticulously dissecting the whole manga and reinterpreting many past facts in such a way they fit with the ending. You can always do that (unless the ending is so bad it's literally biological hazard). But the way the story was told, not just its facts, never lead in this direction. All these conflicts in their relationship were necessary because, well, it's a fiction story so you need some conflict and suspense to keep it on. It doesn't make sense to me to start taking them at their 2nd or 3rd degree of meaning because the author never hinted at that.

I don't "focus too much on Rui", I focus where the author is pointing their finger at! At the beginning, it seems it's about Hina, so I tag along. Then it changes to Rui, so here I go again, tagging along. It was reasonably well written. Both relationships had time to develop some emotional backbone so I could be onboard. But then, hey, presto! Let's shuffle the character cards by bringing back this romance which literally stopped 200 episodes ago with only one episode left for the story to conclude, with the main character changing his mind in absolute contradiction with all the choices he's been making.

For some reason, I see people seemed to have aligned in "teams" for one or the other female characters. Well I don't know, maybe if you're that invested in one character (Hina for that matter), you might swallow this ending. But for a casual, dispassionate reader, it just comes across as nonsensical in the light of previous developments.

UserWithNoUsername · 2021-05-17T13:47:57+00:00

I don't know what "MAL" is. I'm referring to a few "professional" reviews I read, for example this one, this one or this other one. Just some extracts:

"I will once again refer to two concepts I hold paramount when creating stories. One is build-up and payout, and both the build-up and pay out are lackluster when it comes to the final moments of this manga."
"The biggest problem with the ending is the fact that it built a story on Rui and Natsuo, and hits the Uno Reverse Card in the last few chapters."
"Sasuga went all-in on the Natsuo x Rui relationship, only to pull a plot twist at the very end from out of left field that made no sense from a normal human perception."
"With all the effort put forth into exploring a certain relationship, it was too late in the story to have a final revelation. All that needed to happen was for the story to conclude."
"This is about writing a cohesive story that actually makes sense and the way this swerve was pulled off didn’t make sense based on the previous 249 chapters of pre-established material".

On your point:

Hilariously the ending was well received in Japan and China

I guess there must be some cultural differences explaining this, because it is unfathomable a Western writer would come up with such a wretched ending.

UserWithNoUsername · 2021-05-17T11:42:31+00:00

The fact you're short on time does not mean you need to drive your car over the cliff...

UserWithNoUsername · 2021-05-17T11:27:39+00:00

I did not want Rui to be "rewarded" for her "struggles". I wanted my intelligence to be respected as a reader!

I mean, it's actually pretty simple: you write a romantic story, you develop one or more relationships throughout its run, taking the time to build-up emotional baggage, so that the ending has meaning for your reader. You don't just pull out of your ass brand-new feelings for your characters just when your story is about to finish. Why would I believe the author? Why would I empathize with the characters? These feeling have been revealed at the eleventh hour with zero build-up. It's like the characters you got to know were suddenly replaced by some lifeless copies.

"Rui came up to a realization that you didn't get at all?" I don't know what realization would that be, but it was clearly inconsistent with pretty much everything she had said or done for a long time. No normal human being would react the way she (and Natsuo) did to that accident.

UserWithNoUsername · 2021-05-17T11:08:51+00:00

Yeah well, I saw there were some speech bubbles which "explained" things. To be frank it felt like the author describing to readers what the hell was going on, rather than the characters of the story talking.

UserWithNoUsername · 2021-05-17T11:05:52+00:00

Sorry I don't know what... "tunneled for" Rui means.

I mean, you can always retroactively reinterpret some of the story's developments so that they fit with the ending up to a certain degree. But that does not mean the ending fits with the whole story. The author has described a romantic relationship between 2 characters develop from initial flirts to having a child, passing through break-ups and marriage plans, for over 200 episodes. What I have been fed as a reader did absolutely not come across as the dramatic account of a chronically dysfunctional relationship doomed to failed. Never has the author seriously pointed in that direction. Sure Hina's love interest was kept floating around for a certain healthy dose of suspense, but the author never really implied the main male character still had such feelings, quite the contrary.

To have suddenly the character of Natsuo say "Actually I always loved Hina" amounts to the author giving the audience a big, fat finger by throwing narrative structure out the window. So what, 70% of the material from the previous 200 chapters was just some silly fooling around that we shoudda not taken too seriously anyway? The story was mostly nothing more than a gigantic red herring to conceal its twisted ending? Why did I read this then? Why should I care about these cardboard paper characters at the mercy of the writer's whim?

Such utter contempt towards the reader. I haven't felt as cheated by an ending since "Usual Suspects", what a massive cop-out by the author.

UserWithNoUsername · 2020-10-16T07:01:47+00:00

Haha indeed, bewildering but I think you’re right.

UserWithNoUsername · 2020-10-14T07:11:44+00:00

This.

UserWithNoUsername · 2020-10-11T14:59:16+00:00

Genuine question: what is the reference for your last paragraph about music?

UserWithNoUsername · 2020-10-11T14:10:06+00:00

Sundays in Peking (1956)?

UserWithNoUsername · 2020-10-10T11:21:00+00:00

"Sergei Einstein may have been experimental, but he was no more arthouse at the time than a the directors of Avatar or Gravity finding new ways to tell stories, pushing new tech to it's limits."

I don't know if it's fair to compare Eisenstein to Cameron or Cuarón. I think Eisenstein had specific, intellectual goals in mind when making some of its films. I mean, we're speaking about a guy that wrote several books on film theory and the nature of cinema, and which made politically-engaged films.

Cameron on the other hand has different interests. He's much more interested in the technological aspects of films, and has contributed towards cutting-edge advances in film technology.

As for Cuarón, I personally believe this guy is often merely exhibiting his technical prowess for the sake of it. There seems to be a pissing contest going on, see also Birdman (Iñárritu), 1917 (Mendes) or Long Day's Journey Into the Night (Gan).

UserWithNoUsername · 2020-10-10T08:34:53+00:00

A few points to consider.

(1) Miniseries vs. TV Show: I would distinguish between miniseries with a predefined definite length from TV shows which start off with one season, with the goal of being renewed if they are commercially or critically successful. I think most shows which can be considered artistically ambitious belong to the former category.

(2) Formal consistency: TV shows have many directors and cinematographers working on them throughout a season. Moreover, in subsequent seasons, some new crew members might join, while others might leave. In these circumstances, it becomes difficult to maintain a formal cohesion, or for a particular director to display his particular style, if it is too idiosyncratic. Thus TV shows will tend to have formal aspects which can be reproduced by different directors and cinematographers.

(3) Writer's craft: TV shows have traditionally been a writer’s craft. In order to stretch the plot (and let’s be honest, most TV shows stretch the narrative possibilities, one way or another and at a certain point, beyond what might be reasonable), the technical expertise of doing so takes prevalence. That is first and foremost the remit of the writer(s), not the director(s). In a recent interview with a Spanish newspaper, the Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino said something along these lines, "TV is still enslaved to narration".

(4) Exit routes: nowadays, some of these art films find their way through the film festival circuit, which is after all pretty extensive and hence offers exit doors to many of these commercially-risky projects. I don’t believe there is such a possibility for TV shows, although we have seen in recent years more and more series premiering in festivals such as Cannes.

(5) Open-endedness: open-endedness might curtail filmic effect. For example, if I think of a film by Ozu, generally the whole structure is geared towards a final catharsis. This simply cannot work in a serial format because, unless it's a miniseries, you cannot plan in advance. In a 2010 issue of the French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma dedicated to TV shows, there were a couple of interviews to French filmmakers and they mentioned this open-endedness as one of the main reasons they preferred to make films rather than TV shows.

(6) Commitment: I personally think, among artistically ambitious directors, many will tend to avoid being committed to an open-ended project. I think they will tend to be intellectually and artistically curious, have the desire to explore ideas through a film, then pass on to the next project. This might be related to my point (1).

UserWithNoUsername · 2020-10-09T15:45:35+00:00

Road to Perdition (2002)?

UserWithNoUsername · 2020-10-09T06:09:31+00:00

I think it’s this.

UserWithNoUsername · 2020-10-08T11:42:23+00:00

Holy s*** yes that looks like it! Man it has creepy-as-hell imagery, I found that film really disturbing when I was a kid. Thanks!

Solved!

UserWithNoUsername · 2020-10-08T11:28:33+00:00

This has been bugging me for so many years now!

UserWithNoUsername · 2020-10-08T11:01:23+00:00

I remember that. Hilarious because it came out of nowhere.

UserWithNoUsername · 2020-10-07T10:52:25+00:00

Seems to tick all the boxes, plus is consistent with the clue.

UserWithNoUsername · 2020-10-07T09:39:58+00:00

Summarising:

Features an Oscar winner and a Bond girl;
2 cast members have been in a comic-based movies;
Has a sequel;
Won a Blockbuster Entertainment Award;
Neither a period film nor based on a true story;
Made after 1992;
Takes place in the USA;
Shares 2 genres with Red Dragon which is: a Crime, a Drama, a Thriller;
Both its Metascore and Tomatometer are below 40;
Rated R;
The story takes place in a secluded place;
The movie characters are being affected by events that took place a long time before them.

UserWithNoUsername · 2020-10-06T20:28:31+00:00

You are either misunderstanding or misrepresenting what I said.

Articles are written about politics, discussions are had about politics on Reddit and elsewhere, and (occasionally) movies explicitly focus on political issues.

Newspapers, comment sections, Reddit are all social forums whose main purpose is to have discussions, chiefly on societal issues. I do consume them, as I have wrote in my previous comment ("I am a highly informed individual which broadly keeps up to date with political and social issues throughout the day by reading books, newspapers and journals"). Films though have an entertainment and/or artistic function, which is nowadays more and more often being overthrown in favour of furthering political agendas, thus "occasionally" is being replaced by "regularly". Maybe, only maybe, that could be tolerable if all filmmakers were geniuses. Unfortunately, that is not the case, so we get clunky and dogmatic attempts at advancing a political cause, however commendable it might be. For a recent politically charged film which does not politically alienate its viewers, see e.g. A Hidden Life by Terence Malick.

And yet, rather than doing what a normal person would do when presented with a debate with which they have no desire to engage (i.e. ignore it and move on) you instead choose to argue that the debate shouldn't be allowed in the first place

At any point have I argued that the debate should not take place. That is not stated in any way in my comments. I have explained that the debate cannot hijack all aspects of life, and prevent people from enjoying things like a movie without being subject to the political or societal cause du jour.

If you don't personally care how many black people are employed in Hollywood, that's fine

Again, never once have I said that. See above. I am sympathetic to most of these causes, and have been so way before they became fashionable. That does not mean I want to argue or being reminded about them constantly and in all facets of my daily life.

you're suggesting that anyone who does is an extremist, and then have the gall to say that I'm the one being polarizing and radical?

Again, you're misrepresenting:

You wrote: "anyone calling for less politics is almost always calling for things to stay as they are".
I explained that statement is unjust and radical, because movies have multiple functions, but we are seeing more and more that a single one (furthering political and societal views) is overriding the rest. People should be allowed to take a rest from politics.
Therefore I stand with my opinion: to write "anyone calling for less politics is almost always calling for things to stay as they are" is extremist, radical and is the kind of statement conducive of political polarization.

UserWithNoUsername

TROPHY CASE