This is a review of the Japanese live action movie, Black Butler, not the manga or the anime (of which I only have a limited familiarity). As seems to be the general theme with most of the adaptations of anime/manga that I have seen, it would be inaccurate to call them "Big Screen" movies. They look more like horrendously underbudgeted movies which spend most of their money on replicating the costumes of characters from the show.
If you are unfamiliar with the premise of Black Butler from the manga, don't worry too much as the show plays fast and loose with the source material. The premise is that a teenage aristocrat, Kiyohara Genpu, is employed as a paranormal investigator to solve an ongoing murder mystery. He/she is assisted by a demonic butler, Sebastian, who is as impossibly competant as he is smug. It's set in an alternate world, where it is the near future but full of throwbacks to Edwardian Europe. It's also a place where a trained butler puts the milk In the teapot before pouring it out, so it is a distopia as well.
This movie is terrible. I was hoping for some inventive, erotically charged, paranormal campy action movie, but instead it is a muddled, plodding, offensively boring movie. Most of the film consists of absurdly dressed characters expositing back story at one another for increasingly long periods of time. The costumes themselves are flashy but tacky as hell, and fall into the amateur cosplayer trap of looking totally unworn; basically they look exactly like costumes, and not a thing the character ever wears. When the action does come along, it is too infrequent and so-so to save the movie.
Part of the manga/anime's big appeal was its (somewhat innapropriate) homoerotic innuendo between the child heir and his staff, and those fans hoping for this to appear in the movie will be disappointed. Part of this is down to the complete lack of chemistry between the two actors, part of it is down to the fact that the butler is nowhere near as appealing as his impossibly attractive 2D version, and another part of this is down to the sex of the protagonist, which the movie gets really confused over resolving. Our aristocrat is played by a female actress who makes no effort to look male, yet everyone uses male pronouns for the character. Apparently she is claiming to be male for some weaksauce plot reason, though its never really clear if everyone is convinced she is a boy, or whether they are just obliging. Is Kiyohara trans, or a cross dresser, or in disguise, or confused, or a flamboyant dresser, or just messing around? The movie doesn't seem to know. It's just another detail the movie manages to screw up.
Pronoun Trouble - Does He Have to Shoot You Now?
This is a review of the Japanese live action movie, Black Butler, not the manga or the anime (of which I only have a limited familiarity). As seems to be the general theme with most of the adaptations of anime/manga that I have seen, it would be inaccurate to call them "Big Screen" movies. They look more like horrendously underbudgeted movies which spend most of their money on replicating the costumes of characters from the show.
If you are unfamiliar with the premise of Black Butler from the manga, don't worry too much as the show plays fast and loose with the source material. The premise is that a teenage aristocrat, Kiyohara Genpu, is employed as a paranormal investigator to solve an ongoing murder mystery. He/she is assisted by a demonic butler, Sebastian, who is as impossibly competant as he is smug. It's set in an alternate world, where it is the near future but full of throwbacks to Edwardian Europe. It's also a place where a trained butler puts the milk In the teapot before pouring it out, so it is a distopia as well.
This movie is terrible. I was hoping for some inventive, erotically charged, paranormal campy action movie, but instead it is a muddled, plodding, offensively boring movie. Most of the film consists of absurdly dressed characters expositing back story at one another for increasingly long periods of time. The costumes themselves are flashy but tacky as hell, and fall into the amateur cosplayer trap of looking totally unworn; basically they look exactly like costumes, and not a thing the character ever wears. When the action does come along, it is too infrequent and so-so to save the movie.
Part of the manga/anime's big appeal was its (somewhat innapropriate) homoerotic innuendo between the child heir and his staff, and those fans hoping for this to appear in the movie will be disappointed. Part of this is down to the complete lack of chemistry between the two actors, part of it is down to the fact that the butler is nowhere near as appealing as his impossibly attractive 2D version, and another part of this is down to the sex of the protagonist, which the movie gets really confused over resolving. Our aristocrat is played by a female actress who makes no effort to look male, yet everyone uses male pronouns for the character. Apparently she is claiming to be male for some weaksauce plot reason, though its never really clear if everyone is convinced she is a boy, or whether they are just obliging. Is Kiyohara trans, or a cross dresser, or in disguise, or confused, or a flamboyant dresser, or just messing around? The movie doesn't seem to know. It's just another detail the movie manages to screw up.