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Director: Alex van Warmerdam
ISBN: B000A88ESM
DVD
Actor(s): Teresa Berganza, Johan Leysen, Halina Reijn, Jacob Derwig, Frank Lammers
Audience Rating: Unrated
Condition: Used: Good
Comments: Sold with pride and shipped with confirmation for US addresses. ALL DISKS ARE CHECKED PRIOR TO LISTINGS. EX LIBRARY copy with library markings.
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Customer Reviews
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eeh . . .
Rating  (3)
Date: 2006-02-18
6 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
The first 45 minutes of this film is rapidly engaging and very, very good which makes it worth the three star rating I gave it. Jacob and Marie find themselves in one interesting predicament after another but once they reach Spain and discover their Uncle had passed away the movie totally disengrates into this stupid tale of incestuous jealousy, violence and stupid actions. What a waste of what could have been a promising film.
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Grimm ~ The Title Says It All
Rating  (1)
Date: 2005-12-27
6 out of 7 customers found this reveiw helpful
Note: Dutch and Spanish with English subtitles.
Jacob (Jacob Derwig) and his sister Maria (Halina Reijin) are young adults still living at home with their incredibly poor parents. One day their Father leads them out into the forest to gather wood and abandons them there. He leaves a note behind advising them to travel to Spain to visit their uncle. And so their journey begins.
Left with absolutely nothing they must fend for themselves the best they can. They resort to stealing, robbing, prostitution and even murder in order to survive. They finally arrive at their destination only to discover that their aunt and uncle have died in an accident. Believe it or not, things only get worse from there on.
Grimm indeed. Apparently director Alex van Warmerdam was attempting to create a modern day fairytale ala the Brothers Grimm. I will leave the decision as to whether he failed or succeeded in this task up to those more well versed in the writings of these famous siblings. However as far as rating this film on its entertainment value I have to say he failed miserably. The main characters weren't very likeable and the choices they make along the way make them even more undesirable. A pointless film from beginning to end. Pass on this one.
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I guess I just needed more breadcrumbs to guide me back...
Rating  (4)
Date: 2005-12-11
7 out of 7 customers found this reveiw helpful
As I continue to read more and more dedicated, intelligent graphic novels, I cannot help but think that perhaps director Alex van Warmerdam didn't read a couple prior to creating this film. From the opening sequences until the end of this film, you cannot help but feel a sense of whimsy, the fantastical, and enchantment. From our hopeless characters to the sporadic plot, Warmerdam has created a film in which the symbolic references and fairy tale connections isn't laid out in front of you, but instead deeply rooted within the chaos of Grimm for only those who are truly dedicated can find them. He buries them very deep within his work, but with some patience, a great eye, and a passion for the human genre element, you too will see the strength of Warmerdam's work. Grimm is not a masterpiece by far. In fact, it isn't one of the greatest films that I have seen, but it did burst from the seams with potential.
Warmerdam has quite the ability to build a very surreal world, place unknowing (and sometimes unwilling) characters into the mix, and give us bleak references to pop-children's culture. He shows us this with Grimm. For those of you die hard fairy tale fanatics, you may not like this story. It is not one that the average film viewer will enjoy. Grimm takes some time getting used to. It takes some time developing the characters, and it takes quite a bit of time giving us its story. It is never rushed (though sometimes we wish it were quicker), and eventually completes with a message of family, strength, and sibling love. Warmerdam does a great job of giving us two great navigators through his story with Jacob and Maria. Two completely different characters by nature, but both still have one passion in their eyes, to keep their friendship and family dynamic together. These two are the quintessential "Hansel & Gretel" as they voyage through the world of Spain to discover, not only themselves, but also how cruel the real world can be. While their interweaving stories could/should have been developed deeper with stronger bonds between them and the other characters in this film, Warmerdam has done a superb job of giving us their sole stories and emotions. If you solely watch just Jacob and Maria throughout this film, you will see such a strong human element and the sporadic events that occur to them as they continue their perilous journey. I applaud Warmerdam for his work on these two characters because they lead us through the story. We feel for them, we grow with them, we rally behind them near the end, so in essence, we enjoy these characters. Alas, his lacking story structure is the only hurdle that is tough to cross.
Warmerdam interweaves so many different fairy tale-esque moments throughout the story that you begin to loose focus of the central themes. It reminded me of a third-grade story in which the young child forgot to do his homework and begins his report on "Hansel & Gretel" and inadvertently brings in moments from "Peter Pan", "Little Red Riding Hood", and "Jack & the Beanstalk" unknowingly. As the class laughs, you cannot help but think of how interesting a story like that would be. I think Warmerdam did his homework, brought several different childish stories together, but somehow never quite completed them. He would throw in segments of several different childhood genres that we, the audience, never had the opportunity to enjoy the one we were on. This is where Warmerdam lost me. I wanted to enjoy the different stories. I wanted to see how our not-so-young heroines would react to the different situations, but we never had that opportunity. He would begin a story, but never finish or at least create a strong enough segway to the next moment. Warmerdam had a great concept with this film, but never was able to pull his ideas together. Coupled with a horrible choice of music selection, Warmerdam never quite built the darkness surrounding Grimm. That is what ultimately hurt this picture.
Overall, Warmerdam did a decent job with overall final product of this film. Grimm is not a film for everyone, but for those that enjoy moments of David Lynch coupled with themes of childhood fairy tales. It is a dark story that never quite makes you laugh but instead attempts to use shocking cinematography to bring you this surreal world that we never quite believe exists. Warmerdam has created this mythological world that could be right in your backyard, but spooky enough to believe it came from your imagination. His characters were strong, but his story lacked decent connection. I found myself, like Jacob and Maria, lost during several of the scenes only to reconnect later during the film. I guess I just needed more breadcrumbs to guide me back...
Grade: **** out of *****
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by (Writer: Alejandro Gamboa) (Editor: Óscar Figueroa) (Producer: Eckehardt Von Damm) (Writer: Marina Stavenhagen)
Director: Alejandro Gamboa
ISBN: B000CCD1RK
DVD
Actor(s): Andrés García, Cecilia Gabriela, Mariana Ávila, Elizabeth Valdez, Ricardo Palacio
Audience Rating: Unrated
Condition: Used: Good
Comments: Sold with pride and shipped with confirmation for US addresses. ALL DISKS ARE CHECKED PRIOR TO LISTINGS. EX LIBRARY copy with library markings.
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by (Cinematographer: Yoichi Shiga) (Producer: John O'Donnell) (Producer: Kiyoshi Sugiyama) (Producer: Stephanie Shalofsky) (Producer: Tom Wayland) (Producer: Tomoyuki Imai) (Writer: Barry Banner) (Writer: Sadayuki Murai) (Writer: Taku Mayumura)
Director: Kazuya Konaka
ISBN: B000063JZJ
DVD
Actor(s): Masami Horiuchi, Dai Kanai, Chiharu Niiyama, Ken Nishida, Yasue Satô
Audience Rating: Unrated
Condition: Used: Like New
Comments: Sold with pride. DVD and original case in like new condition. From private collection. ALL DISKS ARE CHECKED PRIOR TO LISTINGS.
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Customer Reviews
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The storyline was interesting but it did not meet my expectations
Rating (1)
Date: 2007-03-12
0 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
This movie had an interesting storyline. So I bought it. But it did not meet my expectations. I did not even stand watching it 'till the end.
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An interesting little movie
Rating (4)
Date: 2006-02-24
7 out of 10 customers found this reveiw helpful
This movie is surprisingly good and a little less confusing than the average Japanese flick. The two main heroines are pleasing to the eye and effects are decent, the only real problem I have is with the transfer...rather subdued colours and lacking a little clarity.The rating would have been higher with a quality transfer..I'm not going to bother going into any plot details, if you like slightly off-kilter Japanese SF you will like it...especially if you have a roving eye for the Asian ladies.
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Sophisticated Sci FI!
Rating (3)
Date: 2003-11-21
14 out of 14 customers found this reveiw helpful
The Dimension Travelers is a decent film which explores the posability of alternate realites.The film centers around a school girl Midori (played by Chiharu Niiyama) who begins to find her life and friends routine and boring, until she meets a new student at her school Mayumi. The girls connect and become fast friends. Eventually Mayumi confesses that she is a dimension traveler, which allows her to enter alternate realites by the sheer force of imagining them with her mind. Mayumi also reveals that Midori is a dimesnsion traveler, and soon Midori is caught up in the ability to switch her realities. As she switches realities, Midori soon discovers that not all are safe. Both to her and the worlds in general. In one reality she is a mental patient in a psychatric hospital. In another the people of the world are being controlled by a mind altering device, and Midori is part of a resistance force. Soon the ability to jump into other realities becomes a problem for both the girls and a third dimension traveler. The worlds begin colliding with one another creating chaos and destruction. The three travelers discover what the problem is in the end and have to make a sacrifice in order to save the realities. I don't want to spoil the film for you, so I'll leave the rest for you to see. The Dimension Travelers is an intelligent story, and was written by the same screenwriter of the anime movie Perfect Blue. The film plays out more like a psychological tease leaving the viewer to decide if Midori is really switching into alternate dimensions, or if she's just plain crazy. The special effects are average, save the reality where Midori is a freedom fighter. The two leads, Midori and Mayumi, do a good job with their roles and help convey the urgency of each reality. Also, the soundtrack fits the film with it's hauntingly Sci FI sound accompanied by a female vocalist. The tech aspects of the DVD include both a Japanese and English dubbed version.(English dub is done well on this one) Movie tralier, a bio on Chiharu Niiyama, character notes and some DVD-ROM features. I did like this film and have watched it more than once. However, I only gave it a three, because the film moves along slowly, and the disc quality could have been better. This edition appears to have been copied form a laser disc where a slight glitch appears, also there are a few spots where the color looks a little too green. This film is not for everyone, but if you like psychological teasers, anime that makes you think, or non-action oriented Sci FI, you might just enjoy this film. It's worth a watch if you fit into any of those three categories. Just don't expect a Matrix type film. It's definately not that.
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by (Composer: Masamichi Amano) (Composer: Fumitaka Anzai)
Director: Kazuo Yamazaki
ISBN: B0000C2IWW
DVD
Actor(s): Ken Ogata, Shigeru Chiba, Toshio Furukawa, Tessho Genda, Fumi Hirano
Audience Rating: Unrated
Condition: Used: Like New
Comments: Sold with pride.. DVD and original case in like new condition. From private collection. ALL DISKS ARE CHECKED PRIOR TO LISTINGS.
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Customer Reviews
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Proof that Urusei Yatsura was in serious decline...
Rating  (2)
Date: 2010-02-17
This movie is proof that Urusei Yatsura was in serious decline around the time of its release, 1983. The creative team that had collaborated so successfully in the first season and partway through the second began to lose their compass, perhaps as a result of labouring under the increasingly erratic direction of Mamoru Oshii. This was a shame, and the movie, with shallow character portrayals, subpar animation (despite the feature film budget), and a laughable storyline (in the sense of 'laugh at') disappoints on many levels. Where the early TV episodes were charming, emotionally involving and disarmingly funny, the movie is cold, uninvolving and strains to generate any comedy.
What makes the animation subpar? Characters are poorly drawn, while key poses are awkward and boring. The animation is indeed rather fluid in certain scenes, but fluidity does not equal quality. Then again, it is choppy elsewhere. Compared with the blissful animation of the majority of the early TV episodes, "Only You" looks terrible. I wish it were otherwise, but I can't escape this conclusion. The backgrounds are either too sparse or too fussy, lacking the clever perspectives and inspired colour palette of those early TV episodes.
There was a sort of swansong at the end of the TV series, with certain episodes standing out as polished examples of the animator's and storyteller's art, but viewed as a whole, the series was declining badly when this movie came along.
If you enjoyed Lum's theatrical debut, good for you, but that's not the way I see it. Pity!
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A must for UY fans
Rating  (5)
Date: 2009-08-17
In 1983, Rumiko Takahashi's Urusei Yatsura had nowhere to go but up. With its stellar production team, excellent writers and simply fantastic voice tallent, the series, then helmed by director Mamoru Oshii(who later went on to be known for his work with Ghost in the Shell among others) needed only a final push to send it rocketing into its respected place in anime history.
That final push was Urusei Yatsura Movie 1: Only You. With its larger budget, it was the first time we saw exactly what the UY team could muster up. An excellent story and then cutting edge animation are only made more impressive by the fact that this film was also created along side the regular series' 3rd season.
The film opens with a sequence, painted only in orange, black, and white, of two children playing shadow tag. As the boy announces to the girl that he has won the game by stepping on her shadow, she in turn informs him that she is an alien and that on her planed stepping on someone's shadow is a marriage proposal. She boards a space craft, and tells her play mate that she will return in 11 years. When the student's of Tomobiki High School suddenly receive wedding invitations to Ataru Moroboshi's wedding, sparks between him and Lum begin flying.
In comparison to Movie 2, Only You requires the viewer to have seen substantial portions of the first two seasons to fully grasp the relations between certain characters. Most notably, this applies to Benten, who undergoes some substantial character development. We see her blossom from a somewhat disposable secondary character to a supporting character who reapers again and again from here on out. If you've seen any of season one and two of Urusei Yatsura, you're more than familiar with the characters who just mysteriously vanish from the series after a thorough introduction.
Speaking of one off characters, Elle is one of the most well done antagonists I've seen in UY thus far. She's a very complicated character. Even by the end of the film, her true intentions on Ataru are still very much a mystery. She inspires sympathy and malice as a diabolical female Ataru on an incomprehensible scale. She can go from a sunny and bright girl whose saccharine sweet demeanor rivals that of Lum, to a literal ice queen, often with in one scene.
The film is also important in the development of the Lum/Ataru relationship. Here, along with the fist episode of season 3 are some of our first glimpses into the nature of Ataru's real feelings towards Lum, with all bravado and machismo stripped away.
Above all, Only You manages to strike a balance of drama and comedy that makes for a serious film that retains the whimsical and absurdist nature of the Manga and TV series. There's not so much dramatic action that the film feels like a Leji Matsumoto Space Opera(Although it is blatantly obvious that Matsumoto's classics had profound influence on the movie), but there is markedly less of the bizarre comedy of the series. This balance is very much like that found in early portions of Takahashi's recently completed Inu Yasha series.
All in all, for the Urusei Yatsura fan, the film is classic UY at its very best. You have here a movie of pure entertainment that incorporates all the hallmarks of UY into a neat little package. It is intensely satisfying, and has some very edge of your seat moments. A warning: New comers to UY need not begin here, however. Since this film draws so heavily on some of the support characters of the TV series, to fully understand the relationships(and appreciate this film), one really needs to see at least episodes 1-18.
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Animated Science-Fantasy Romantic-Comedy Masterpiece of Pure, Unadulterated Joyous Fun
Rating (5)
Date: 2009-07-13
There are some movies (excuse me *films*) that are made as pieces of high art, to startle the senses, to challenge the intellect, and make the viewer question their very perception of reality and their existence... "Urusei Yatsura: Only You" is not one of those films. This movie is pure unadulterated, unpretentious *fun* in the same vein as "Raiders of the Lost Ark" or "The Thief of Bagdad." No big ideas, no philosophizing, no art-for-the-sake-of-art. This doesn't mean that this is a stupid movie, however - this is *smart* fun.
The story? 11 years ago Ataru Moroboshi was accidentally engaged to an alien princess, Elle while playing a playground game of "shadow tag." Now she has shown up to make good on the engagement and take him to her planet to get married. One tiny problem with this however: Ataru doesn't remember his childhood "promise" and - two tiny problems - he is already "engaged" (through *their* game of tag) to another alien princess named Lum who, while babelicious is very possessive (she also tends to deal out massive electric shocks when angry) and - three tiny problems - she is now very angry, not to mention very determined to get married to him first and - *four* tiny problems - Ataru just might, deep, deep, down inside really love Lum back.
What ensues is the most epic romantic comedy of all time, with alien battle fleets, tiger-bulls, UFO vacuums, interstellar biker babes, electric zaps, refrigerated harems, galactic bus rentals and tender moments all conspiring to make you completely forget about any troubles you might have and put a big smile on your face for an hour and forty minutes. "Only You" is also a great parody of all the old movie tropes, like the one where the damsel in distress is forced to marry the villain, and the hero has to save her. Remember the old "Flash Gordon" serial where Flash has to save Dale Arden from marrying Ming the Merciless? Well here it's exactly the same except that the genders are reversed. The animation in this movie is also great, although there are a few hiccups here and there - but this is forgivable as at the time this was made the animators were also working on the TV show, so with the huge workload not everything is spotless. But this is a minor, minor quibble. Watching this film is seeing all of what makes movies fun rolled up into one of the best celluloid presents ever.
Enough praise, what about the DVD itself? Well, the video is great - presented in the movie's original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.33:1, with good colors and few flaws in the image itself. Audio is also good - both the original Japanese and the English dubs are presented in Dolby Digital 2.0, though for all intents and purposes are in Mono... there is no use of actual stereo sound as everything is played equally out of both channels. The Japanese language track sounds good for its age. The English track is technically adequate but the dub itself is awful. The acting is sub-par and the voices just don't stand up to their Japanese counterparts. My advice is to stick with the Japanese - subtitles are your friend. Extras-wise this DVD comes with Animeigo's famous liner notes, located in the case with the disc. These notes will bring anybody not familiar with UY up to speed (so that watching the TV show - while still recommended - is not absolutely necessary) while also shedding light on aspects of Japanese language and culture in the movie that may not be familiar to English-speakers. On the DVD itself extras are in short supply, and limited to a small art gallery, featurettes on the English dub (which are completely nonessential) and more character notes (which are almost redundant). No theatrical trailer, or feature on the movie itself. Oh well, the movie itself is worth the price of admission.
Conclusion: this is one of the greatest romantic comedy movies of all time, rivaled only by "The Princess Bride". Those who like Urusei Yatsura should probably already have this; those who are new to Urusei Yatsura will find this a good starting point, and those just looking for a good, fun, joyous movie will find one in spades.
Quick Summary:
Pluses - Funny, exciting, great story, great characters, great artwork, and lots of fun.
Minuses - Slightly inconsistent animation, gateway drug to the rest of Urusei Yatsura.
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What on (Insert name of planet)?
Rating (4)
Date: 2006-02-09
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
The He-Man Rejects face off against the Flash-Gorden Fan club in a very watchable film.
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The best of the UY movies
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-10-20
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
When everyone in Tomobiki receives invitations for Ataru's wedding, and Lum's not the bride, it doesn't take much to get everyone into an uproar. Things don't get better when it turns out that Ataru's bride-to-be is another alien princess.
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What customers are saying…
Amazon.com Feedback Rating:
4.9 stars over the past 12 months (990 ratings)
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5 out of 5: 2010-03-10
World-class! : )
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2 out of 5: 2010-03-10
Needed the book and CD for a children's storytime at the library. CD was not included with the book. Never would have paid so much for the book if I knew the cd was not included.
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5 out of 5: 2010-03-09
quality as advertised. quick delivery. thanks much.
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5 out of 5: 2010-03-09
excellent packaging and it was brand new 5 stars!!!!
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5 out of 5: 2010-03-09
item was as described.
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