MovieChat Forums > Gamera daikaijû kuchu kessen (1997) Discussion > Why doesn't the acting ever improve?!?

Why doesn't the acting ever improve?!?

posted 17 years ago by YouKnowMyName68
1 reply | jump to latest

It ALWAYS bothered me about this. You can see this history in this genre as approached by the Japanese movie industries early on from the late 50s to the 70s and onwards the acting never, NEVER, seems to improve and the screen play you want to hire assassins to kill the screenplay writers, themselves. The only instance where this finally seems to have been resolved and set as an example is The Returner. The dialog and the interaction between most of the main leads actually seems to be credible but still very shaky. I had this joke that the acting in animated movies are more credible than the ones portrayed by living persons....there's something 'off' with the way the Japanese act that sure isn't helped when it's in the sci-fi genre.

What you see is not necessarily what you get,
Not trying is dying, keep trying unto death....

[–] e25171971 9 years ago

It's a matter of different cultures; writing, acting, and directorship in Japan are driven most by melodrama tropes because it puts emphasis on emotion - a key focus of Japanese films - through exaggeration. While we in western cinema prize "realism" above all else, particularly in modern film where dark and gritty and joyless faux-realism is the flavor of the day, their films tend to focus on the point of the work and use melodrama's exaggerations to better emphasize that point.