Assault Girls
I love Mamoru Oshii. He's made some of my absolute all-time favorite movies. Having said that, he really, really sucks at live-action. It's not something that I can really understand properly, but that's the case. It's almost like animation Oshii and live-action Oshii are two different people. What makes his animated movies so great are completely absent from his live-action efforts. They invariably end up being clunky, inscrutable, visually bland, and dull, all opposites to how his animated movies are. I just don't get it. But Assault Girls...man, I just don't know what's going on here at all. It's really short [70 minutes] so you can't really expect a whole lot, and I didn't, but I was still shocked. There's no plot, the characters are as thin as they possibly can be, and, worst of all, there are only two short action scenes. You would think, going in, that this is probably just one long action scene, which would actually be decent, since the action isn't half-bad. But there's an intro that lasts nearly five minutes and a section in the middle with no dialog and no action [just the four characters wandering aimlessly] for nearly 25 minutes, more than a third of the total runtime!! Add in three Japanese actors speaking horrible-written dialog in English and Rinko Kikushi acting like a mentally-distinguished mentally-challenged mute and you've got a movie. I guess. It feels like a first-time director pulled out an old student film and padded it out a bit. Mamoru Oshii, why do you keep doing live-action?
