I guess I've been on a bit of a movie binge.

Yesterday and today, I watched Avatar Aang (the movie) and In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai movie).

I'll start with Avatar: it was disappointing. I thought the backgrounds and the environment were beautiful, basically every time. The scenery was gorgeous, and everything that wasn't people was really great, including the spirits and animals. The voice acting wasn't great, but it was fine, with some highlights, namely Taika as the great spirit, but mostly being mediocre and unremarkable. I feel the same about the score, which was really just unremarkable throughout, though not intrusively boring or anything. The character animation, though, and really the general character design was definitely not up to snuff, though; Aang looked terrible, in particular, and that style they went with with the nose shadow just looked terrible, in my opinion. The character animation was genuinely bad enough that I would say it made the movie hard to watch. The plot, thankfully, wasn't so terrible. The pacing leaves something to be desired, as I felt that it moved really fast for the third act, but it was generally OK; the writing though, was clearly pandering often, making references that needn't be made and that genuinely distracted from the content of the movie.

Overall, I appreciate the role the movie has as a bridge between ATLA and TLOK, but it wasn't nearly as good as either, though it does seem to be much better than any other attempt at Avatar outside of the two aforementioned shows. I give it a strong 2/5. It definitely wasn't "good", but it was by no means awful, and it does have its place in the canon. Maybe a younger audience could enjoy the very straight-forward direction and infantile humour more than I did... Then again, I'm not sure a much younger audience would even have the history to appreciate their feckless attempts at fanservice.

In the Mood for Love is a bit of a different story. The movie is good, really good; however, it is a little worse than I remembered. I was floored the first time I watched it, but now it does leave something to be desired. It was very slow in the middle, and it felt like there was a lot of time where things were happening in the background, maybe some implication of happenings that we're all aware of but aren't shown, in between the on-screen events. I suppose I can appreciate that, in a sense, but it was boring. The cinematography was great, and this whole thing is dripping with aesthetics, but the acting is a little awkward, at times, and it does feel like they were reading off a teleprompter sometimes; never Tony Leung, but even Maggie Cheung wasn't that great in some of the line reading parts, though her "physical" acting (if that's what I can call it?) was very good -- her crying scenes in particular. The ending was also a little weird? I have to assume there's some cultural thing I don't get with that, but it was way too long and I just didn't get it.

Overall, it's very good. A strong 4/5, but definitely not perfect.

And that was it! I wore shorts, again.