Yeah, apparently when my family was out Christmas shopping for me, my dad asked why I couldn't be interesting in normal stuff lol. Not sure what 'normal stuff' is, but I don't think my Genghis Khan obsession fits in with it.

Hope you guys all had a great Christmas :) Mine was pretty good. One of my gifts hasn't arrived yet (which worries me about what exactly my dad ordered lol), but hopefully it'll be here soon. Boxing day was pretty sucky, mainly because I don't like a lot of the people on my mom's side of the family. Isn't that terrible of me? :/

I'm working on my Best of 2008 list 8D I love doing those.

Now I'm going to bore all of you with my ranting about Genghis Khan: To the Ends of the Earth and Sea, which I got for Christmas. And I shall pit it against Mongol harhar!
When looking at the two movies released this year about Genghis Khan, Mongol is definitely the better. Before watching it fully (actually, I'm only 2 hours in as I write this), I skipped through it and the first thing I thought of was how it looked like a low-budget Japanese film or a made-for-TV movie. Mongol is a visually stunning film which I've repeatedly capped and used as desktop wallpapers; even my icons were barely touched. That's not a good point when Mongol had a (estimated) lower budget. Everything seemed really clean and stuff, too. I mean, would their clothes really be that flawlessly white in nomadic Mongolia in the 1100's? Probably not. The battle scenes were pretty good. I even found myself cringing every time a horse fell over lol.

I found this one pretty hard to follow. Maybe it was just me, but it seemed to jump around a lot. I'd imagine if you had no prior knowledge about Genghis Khan, it would be difficult. Mongol also suffers a tad from this. I had absolutely no idea what the connection between Chiledu and Hoelun was the first time I watched it, or why the Merkits were so bad. The addition of Kulan in Genghis Khan is strange. I actually had to Wikipedia her and I guess she was one of his wives who travelled with him during his battles (although the article is unsourced). She enters the film as a warrior that was captured - it reminded me of Mulan. They show only her eyes before she takes her helmet off and I thought "'sup Mulan?" lol And sure enough, that's basically it. I can't really see a woman being a soldier at this point in history, though. She just seems kind of pointless and takes up too much time, other than to show Temujin's respect towards women.

A lot of the film seems odd or ridiculous to me. The ridicuolous part is some of the dialogue, with the characters all saying some totally unbelievable sentences. It's like if you had to make a skit for history class and needed to cram a bunch of information in a short time, so the characters say unbelievable things to get the point across. There's also way too much talking and I think that really slows the movie down. There's also one part where Temujin is talking to his army and the next second the horses are charging into battle. Some sort of transition would've been nice. A lot of the acting sucked too - either too overdramatic, or not showing enough emotion. At one Borte is smiling when she's talking about living in poverty and the struggles she's gone through. Seriously now? I like the casting a lot better in Mongol. Even Khulan Chuluun, who wasn't even an actor, faired better than most of this cast in Genghis Khan. To be fair, Jamukha is portrayed quite differently in the two films; him being the comic relief at times in Mongol, but... god, the acting was just pretty terrible in Genghis Khan. I also really like the dialogue actually being in Mongolian in Mongol. Made it all more believable, but I'm sure that was a big undertaking for the cast that wasn't Mongolian. With the entire cast save for Kulan being Japanese in Genghis Khan, I'm sure this would've been way too hard.

I also think it was a really smart idea to break his life into parts, as it the case in Mongol. With just one film I think it's hard to really get everything across. With Mongol supposedly going to be a trilogy, there's room go to more in depth and show more without worrying about making the film too long. Mongol ends with the battle with Jamukha, while Genghis Khan apparently ends with the beginning of the invasion of China (I haven't finished it yet).

It's nice to have two different retelling's of Genghis Khan's life, but unfortunately, this one falls terribly short of Mongol.