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Salt is a bleak and violent spy thriller. It has a competent cast and a steady stream of special effects, but I didn’t enjoy it much.

Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) is a CIA super-spy who is accused by a Russian defector of being a Soviet mole. At the same time her husband is kidnapped. So she goes on the run with her former CIA colleagues in pursuit, trying to rescue her husband and foil a dastardly plot.

Plausibility is not the movie’s strong suit. Most of the story revolves around an elaborate scheme, like something out of Mission Impossible, but much more elaborate and much more dependent on coincidences and uncontrollable events. Any hope of suspension of disbelief is further undermined by the movie’s jarring lack of concern for getting the details right. (What the heck is a “NATO uniform” supposed to look like, anyway? The movie shows us the answer, but why?)

Worse from a story-telling standpoint is that none of the characters seems particularly sympathetic, not even the heroine. This is a big problem for me. If I cared about the characters I might be willing to overlook the other flaws in the story, but if I don’t care about the characters I have nothing to do but look for plot holes, which are to be found in abundance.

As a final annoyance the ending is sort of inconclusive, as if they wanted to be sure to leave room for a sequel.

The move supplies generous helpings of crashes and explosions. If these are what you are looking for, you may find it satisfactory.

I have mixed feelings about Dinner for Schmucks. On the one hand it is pretty funny, and I’ve said before that I’m prepared to forgive a lot if the movie is funny enough. On the other hand the humor is on the sick side, and none of the characters are particularly likable.

Tim Conrad (Paul Rudd) is an analyst at a sleazy private-investment firm who is desperate to wrangle a promotion in order to impress his girlfriend (Stephanie Szostak) enough to convince her to marry him. He gets a chance but it depends on getting at good score at the top brasses’ secret monthly “dinner for idiots.” Each executive is required to bring a person who is…er…eccentric. The guests will be treated with a show of seriousness and at the end of the dinner the one considered most idiotic will be given an award, while the executives secretly share a laugh at his expense. (Sort of reminiscent of the “pig dinners” that used to be an annual hazing ritual at some fraternities and military academies.)
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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a surreal comedy based on a series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley. Much of the action seems to take place inside the head of the protagonist. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but I enjoyed it.

Scott (Michael Cera) is a 23-year-old video game addict and would-be rock star. He’s dating a 17-year-old girl with the unlikely name of Knives Chau (Ellen Wong). She’s bubbly and innocent and they haven’t really done anything because he’s too much of an insecure nerd to try to take advantage of the situation.

But then Scott meets a really cool girl named Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and falls head-over-heels for her. Surprisingly she also seems interested in him. Meanwhile, he hasn’t told Knives about the situation. (Yes, Scott is more than a bit of a jerk.)

Unfortunately if he wants to date Ramona he will have to defeat her Seven Evil Exes, all of whom are much cooler than he is and have super powers. All of this is very metaphorical unless we accept that in this universe every figure of speech is literally true and all the silliest conventions of comic books are as common as breakfast.

I found Scott pretty annoying at first, but he more or less redeems himself at the end. Also the movie is very funny, and as I’ve said before. I’m prepared to forgive just about anything if it’s funny enough.

Solitary Man is a Michael Douglas tour de force. He completely dominates this movie. No one else can do does such a gleefully spot-on depiction of the charming evil alpha-male.

Ben Kalmen (Douglas) used to be one of the best-known businessmen in the Greater New York area, famous for his string of BMW dealerships and ubiquitous television commercials. But he bent the rules and got into trouble. Now he’s trying to claw his way back up the ladder.

Ben is not, to put it mildly, the most reliable guy in the world. You shouldn’t buy a car from him, and you definitely shouldn’t marry him, but he would be fun to hang out with if you were careful. In fact you might learn quite a lot from him, at some risk to your immortal soul.

Unfortunately he is not quite as quick on his feet as he used to be, and the consequences of a life lived close to the edge are starting to catch up to him.

This is a splendid and believable portrayal of a certain type of individual. Unfortunately they partially spoil it for me at the end with a too-pat explanation for his behavior and a too-pat upbeat ending. Even here though I can rationalize it by remembering that we really only have Ben’s word for the explanation, and he is very, very good at telling people what they need to hear.

The Kids Are All Right is the sort of movie that I admire more than I enjoy–in this case a very well-acted soap opera.

Pet Peeve: when I first tried to look up this movie online I first found a 1979 documentary about The Who called The Kids Are Alright. As far as I can see, the title of the current movie means “all of the kids are right,” which doesn’t really make much sense.

In any case this movie involves a lesbian couple (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) who have two great kids (Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson). For some reason they named the boy “Laser” which seems cruel, but never mind. The kids decide to track down the sperm donor who was their biological father (Mark Ruffalo). Everyone gets along wonderfully until two of the characters decide to do something stupid, hence the soap opera. Everything more or less works out in the end.
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If you’re an anime fan who loves horror shows, you’re probably pretty happy right now. If you don’t like horror then…maybe not so much.

So far Occult Academy is my favorite of the new season: a spooky, tongue-in-cheek show somewhat reminiscent of The X-Files. It features a time-traveler who is a washed-up psychic teaming up with an angry girl who hates everything about the occult. If they can defeat an evil conspiracy they may find the key to preventing the scheduled destruction of the world.

There is nothing tongue-in-cheek about the stylish vampire thriller Shiki. These aren’t funny vampires or tormented romantic vampires. These are old-fashioned scary vampires. A good choice if you really want to be frightened.

Few shows have attracted as much attention as High School of the Dead. Given that it is from Madhouse, it is only natural that it has high-quality animation and a witty script. However most of the attention is due to the way it combines gory zombie-fighting with massive fan service.

Lots of people like fan service. That’s why they call it “fan service.” And there are plenty of people who like bloody zombie action. However I find the combination of the two distasteful enough that I don’t intend to watch any more of it, regardless of how well-made it is.

Also it seems likely that there won’t be a satisfactory ending. Probably there will be 12 or 13 episodes of girls fighting zombies, with blood splashing and skirts flipping, leading up to an ending that is totally inconclusive. The manga certainly hasn’t gone anywhere and the whole zombie premise doesn’t really lend itself to a satisfactory conclusion. The only logical ending is “eventually everyone gets eaten by the zombies” and anything else would probably feel like a cheat.

I suppose I should mention Kuroshitsuji II for completeness. It certainly fits in with the horror theme but I don’t intend to watch it, given that I never got past the first episode of the original series.

I’m not sure whether Nurarihyon no Mago counts as horror or not. The first episode seems like routine shounen wish-fulfillment. A seemingly normal human boy is actually part youkai, and is destined to become the leader of all the youkai clans. Lame comedy ensues when he tries to keep his human classmates from encountering his family’s youkai retainers. However subsequent episodes seem to be getting darker. It’s still possible that this might turn into something interesting.

Among the non-horror shows the pickings are pretty slim. Ookami-san and the Seven Companions is from J.C Staff, and thus combines high-quality animation, cute character designs and a somewhat twisted outlook. The premise seems trite: a high-school club that exists to help out other students, but demands a return favor from them Godfather-style. The gimmick is that most of the characters are based on characters from fairy tales.

Ryouko Ookami is a hot-tempered girl who punches out her opponents with boxing gloves with kitten faces. Her best friend Ringo Akai is a loli who wears a red cloak. Ookami has a stalker, a pathologically shy boy who carries a powerful slingshot.

Now “ookami” means “wolf” and “Akazukin-chan” is “Little Red Riding Hood,” so the outline of the original story is there, but in a very twisted form. The wolf and Red Riding Hood are not supposed to be friends and the hunter is supposed to want to kill the wolf, not make her his girlfriend. I can’t help thinking of the Tex Avery cartoons of the 1940s which depicted Red Riding Hood as a nubile maiden pursued by a lustful male wolf. This show manages to twist everything around.

So far the fractured fairy tales have been rather uneven. The most consistently funny part is the narrator, whose droll remarks seem a constant source of annoyance to Ookami.

The premise of Mitsudomoe is pretty much identical to last winter’s Hanamaru Kindergarten: a young man starts his first job as a schoolteacher, is attracted to a pretty coworker, and is discomfited by some of his female students. However while Hanamaru featured adorable innocent kindergarteners, Mitsudomoe has nasty violent perverted sixth-graders. This is occasionally funny in a kind of gross sort of way, but all too often they take a gross joke and repeat it again and again until I want to scream.

Strike Witches 2 has…Oh forget it.

Inception seems to be doing quite well at the box office. I think it deserves to; it’s a fascinating movie and beautifully constructed. Nevertheless I’m a bit surprised that it is being so well received, for reasons I will get to below.

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an industrial spy with a unique sci-fi modus operandi: he steals information from people by entering their dreams and prying the secrets from their subconscious. He is approached by an industrialist named Saito (Ken Watanabe) who wants him to plant an idea in a rival’s mind, making him think it is his own. This is an extremely difficult task and Cobb initially refuses, but agrees when Saito offers him the chance to be reunited with his children.

Following the standard formula of a heist movie, Cobb recruits a team of experts to help him carry out the scheme. But most of them don’t know that Cobb is bringing his own personal demons into the dream, and this could imperil them all.
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on xkcd.

BARBER: Being a barber used to be great. Back then, everyone wanted to be a barber. There were barbershops everywhere. It’s not that way anymore. It’s Ella Grasso’s fault. She ruined it for everybody.

ME: Huh? How did she ruin it?

BARBER: We used to have a state barber commission. Barbers had a six-year apprenticeship. Barbers had to be men, and we could cut either men’s or women’s hair. The ladies’ hairdressers, they had only a three-year apprenticeship, and they were only allowed to cut women’s hair. When Grasso came in, back in 1980, she cried that it was discrimination. She said that women should be allowed to cut both men’s and women’s hair.

These days when the inspector comes, he only checks the bathroom and the water and says “Sign here and pay $100.” The inspector from the state barber commission used to inspect the equipment and talk to the customers. He was a barber himself with his own shop, so he knew what he was doing. The governor appointed the state commission, so when there was a Democrat governor the inspector was a Democrat, and when a Republican got elected we had a Republican inspector.

Ella Grasso got rid of the state commission and left it all up to the city health departments. There used to be a barbershop on every corner. Now we have these “styling salons.” It just isn’t the way it used to be.

Knight and Day has a premise that will seem very familiar. An ordinary woman (Cameron Diaz) gets mixed up with a handsome, super-competent secret agent (Tom Cruise) who is fleeing from some bad secret agents. Of course the bad secret agents claim that they are really good and he is bad, but we are pretty sure that the romantic lead can’t be the bad guy, right?

This is a common premise, and of course it is pretty implausible. My problem is not that the premise and all the events in the movie are implausible. Most movies are implausible. It is the job of the writers, the director and the actors to take an implausible or impossible premise and make you believe it. In this case they aren’t even trying.
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This is so wrong!

source (via)

…you can’t take your eye off them for one second… (via Crunchyroll.)

After reviewing the key scenes, I think I have figured out the most confusing issues in Angel Beats!. Those who have seen the show may want to read my Spoiler Notes and decide whether you agree with my interpretations.

Colin P. A. Jones discusses the often arbitrary way that Japanese laws are enforced.

Foreign visitors to Japan often comment on how polite the Japanese people are, but little do they know that it is actually against the law to be rude. Under Article 231 of the Penal Code it is a crime to “insult another person in public.” It would be tempting to dismiss this as a quaint remnant of the Code’s Meiji roots (it was enacted in 1907 and written in classical Japanese until 1995). However, several years ago a man was arrested for calling a woman “fat” in a bar. He was also detained for 29 days for this infraction. Given that Japan’s Supreme Court has recently held that liability for criminal defamation may arise from anything posted on the Internet, Japanese people could conceivably soon become famous for being polite online too.

Prosecutorial discretion exists in other countries too (and is often abused) but Japan takes it farther than most.

Ars Technica links to some demo footage of Ni no Kuni: The Another World, a video game being developed by Level 5 and Studio Ghibli.

There’s only so much you can tell from a 2-minute promo clip. The gameplay itself doesn’t look like a breakthrough–sort of Pokemonish in fact. The graphics on the other hand do indeed look amazing. It’s obviously computer-generated, but it looks surprisingly like a Studio Ghibli hand-drawn anime.

On closer examination, the quality isn’t really at a Studio Ghibli level. Maybe more like a second-tier studio’s imitation of Studio Ghibli. Nevertheless it looks vastly better than what we have come to expect from computer generated animation.

Could this approach become good enough to revolutionize CG animation? Possibly. Could it become good enough to kill off hand-drawn animation? Regrettably that’s also possible. We shall see.

Well THAT was controversial! Some people like it and some people really hate it. (All these links are full of spoilers of course.)

I don’t hate it. I still feel this was one of the best shows of the Spring season (but the competition isn’t fierce.) Still, I was originally hoping for something more, something on the level of the other anime adaptations of Jun Maeda stories that I have seen: Air, Kanon and Clannad. All of these were better executed and have far more emotional impact.

Angel Beats seems more like an intriguing first draft that COULD have been truly great with a rewrite and a demanding editor. This is the first time Jun Maeda has actually written an anime series. The other stories were written as visual novels, and adapted into anime by someone else. Writing VNs probably doesn’t teach you everything that you need to know about pacing and character development in a television series.

Steven claims that the ending is totally illogical. I don’t really see a problem.

Show ▼

All in all, an interesting story, even if the execution is flawed. If Kyoto Animation could remake (and greatly improve) Kanon four years after Toei’s original version, perhaps in another four years…?

Bug Bash reveals the regrettable truth about blogging. (via)

1995′s Toy Story was like the original Star Wars: one of those rare breakthrough films that creates or redefines an entire genre of movies. It is hard to remember now what a revelation it was. Computer-generated animation had not previously been considered a genre in itself. It was more of a special-effects technique to enhance traditional hand-drawn animation or live-action movies.

Toy Story astounded viewers. The toy characters looked like real toys! (Unfortunately the human characters also looked like toys, which was sort of disconcerting, but they weren’t on screen much and in the excitement of the moment it was easy to forgive.) But the movie’s success had more to do with the clever writing which made it as enjoyable for adult viewers as for children.
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There are some anime series that seem fun at first, but have flaws that become increasingly obvious as you spend more time with them. On the other hand there are some series that just seem to get better and better the more often I rewatch them.

Figure 17 is in the latter category. I just finished watching it again and I am even more impressed with it.

This time there was something that struck me about the OP and ED that I hadn’t noticed before. This is pretty spoilerish so I added it at the end of my spoiler notes. (Don’t read it if you haven’t seen the show; it’s not that interesting.)

The Karate Kid (2010) is a remake of the popular 1984 movie of the same name, this time using kung-fu. (The studio apparently considered releasing it with the name “The Kung-Fu Kid” but changed their minds.)

You’re probably wincing already, but maybe you should give the remake a chance. It stands up well on it’s own. It’s a fun movie, lightweight but well-made.
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Jonathan Clements, a professional translator, reveals the deliberations that go into bringing an anime series to British television.

“Can you translate it?” Bigwig asked me, all of a sudden.

“Not translate-translate,” added Fiona. “He means: translate it so it’s good.”

“I can translate what people are saying…” I began.

“Yeah, I don’t want to know what they are saying. I want you to write a script that’s better than that.”

“Wouldn’t you prefer,” I ventured, “to know what they are saying first? Then you would know if you wanted to change it.”

Bigwig, Fiona and Gothboy exchanged sidelong glances.

“We want it to be good,” affirmed Gothboy.

“I’m pretty sure,” I said, “that a million Japanese viewers tell you it’s good already, without any interference.”

“We’ll make it better,” said Bigwig.

“But still faithful to the original,” added Fiona hastily.

“Faithful to the original,” continued Bigwig, “but with more Zhzhh.”

“And change the names,” said Gothboy. “So they sound less… Japanese.”

“And we’ll put some music on it from Cradle of Filth,” said Bigwig.

“Or my mate Dave’s band, if they’re cheaper…” said Gothboy, carefully.

I stared at them open-mouthed.

more here.

…apparently. The new OVA xxxHolic Rou seems to wrap up the series pretty neatly, although I suppose they could use it as a launchpad for a new series of stories based on the new situation.

The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos) won the 2010 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It’s a crime drama that features a brutal killing, dim-witted police work, corrupt government officials, a long quest for revenge, and finally a love story of sorts.

Benjamín Espósito (Ricardo Darín), a retired Argentine court officer, wants to write a novel based on a crime committed in 1974, just before the last military Junta seized power. The story is told in flashbacks as he interviews various people involved in the investigation. Of course he really hopes to find a way to bring the killer to justice after all these years–and perhaps he is also looking for an excuse to spend some time with the beautiful supervisor (Soledad Villamil) whom he once secretly adored.

The film has a rather old-fashioned feel. It doesn’t try to overwhelm us with special effects; instead it is low-key, thoughtful and melancholy.

via Don.

X what you’ve seen
O what you saw some but not all of
Bold what you particularly liked
Strike-through what you hated
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I wrote a capsule movie review of Ponyo back when it was released in American movie theaters. Now that I have had a chance to examine the DVD version I am going to write an updated review.

A movie review necessarily gives my first impression after viewing it once. Having a DVD allows me to examine the work in detail, which often changes my impression of it–sometime for the better and sometimes for the worse.
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Please Give is one of those quirky, character-oriented comedies; the sort of thing that’s amusing to watch even though nothing particularly earth-shaking happens.

The characters are all the sort of Manhattanites who hardly ever leave the city and think it would be a great adventure to drive north and see the leaves change. Kate (Catherine Keener) and her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) have a business that involves buying the furniture from dead people’s apartments and selling it at a huge markup at their upscale store to the kind of people who think nothing of paying thousands of dollars for used furniture that they know nothing about.

Kate feels terribly guilty about this (indeed she feels guilty about just about everything.) She tries to make up for it by handing large bills to random homeless people, much to the annoyance of her teen-aged daughter (Sarah Steele).

To add to her guilt, Kate and Alex have bought the apartment of the nasty old lady next door (Ann Guilbert) and are waiting for her to die so they can knock down the wall and start remodeling. In the meantime, of course, they have to befriend the old biddy and her two granddaughters. One granddaughter (Amanda Peet) is self-centered and thoughtless. The other (Rebecca Hall) is shy and unassuming. Neither seems to have fully recovered from the experience of being raised by their grandmother.

The movie contains no real surprises, but it could be an entertaining way to spend 90 minutes.

Japanese companies have developed an electric car made of paper and bamboo.

“Just don’t drive it off-road into a forest full of pandas.”

Eyes flashing, robot conducts wedding in Tokyo.

Somebody asked, “Is that legal? A Robot, since the minister has to sign the Marriage License!”

The answer is that in Japan what the law requires is to update the family registers at the local government office. The ceremony may be important to the families, but it has no legal significance.

You may have heard that Christian weddings are very popular in Japan. What is usually not mentioned is that these usually take place in a replica church with an actor playing the part of the priest. A real priest, after all, won’t usually perform a wedding for people who are not members of his faith.

UPDATE: video here. It actually looks rather cute. The original headline gave me a mental image of a huge robot in an industrial setting laughing manically as it orders its brainwashed minions to get married. The reality is less colorful.

I’ve posted before about the unfortunate side-effects of 3-D movies, such as their tendency to cause headaches and nausea in some viewers. However there is one side-effect that I never would have predicted.

According to this story, a U.S. serviceman came back from a tour of duty in Iraq and found that his wife was pregnant. She denied having an affair and explained that she got pregnant from watching a 3-D porno movie.

The husband seems willing to believe her, saying “I see it as suspicious. The films in 3D are very real. With today’s technology, anything is possible.”

(OK, I admit that this story is probably entirely bogus. TechEYE doesn’t strike me as the sort of publication that does rigorous fact checking, and they don’t give any source for the story. What can I say? Some stories are too good to check.)

Like a lot of sequels, Iron Man 2 is passable but not quite as good as the original.

As the movie begins, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is acting even more obnoxious than usual, but secretly he is under a lot of pressure. He has revealed his identity as Iron Man and put himself in the uncomfortable position of guarantor of world peace. A business rival (Sam Rockwell) is dissing him, the government wants him to hand over his power suit, and the reactor in his chest is slowly killing him. Can he find a way to save the situation?

I find it hard to get excited about CGI special effects these days. The movie’s main strength is in its humor. Robert Downey Jr. is as amusing as ever as the narcissistic billionaire hero, but the best parts come from some of the secondary characters. Sam Rockwell is hilarious as Justin Hammer, the smarmy CEO of a rival defense contractor. Gary Shandling is equally funny in a small role as a dim-witted Senator. And Scarlett Johansson is very watchable as Black Widow, a superhero (and occasional villain) who is likely to have a big role in future movies.

Here’s a surprisingly effective way to view stereoscopic images without special glasses:

This site has a lot more of them (via).

Lisa Katayama calls this a “funny sushi restaurant commercial.” For me the words that come to mind are “bizarre” and “disturbing”.

Greenberg is an interesting but frustrating movie. It is well-acted and smartly-written, but ultimately you’re spending a lot of time with an unpleasant and self-destructive person.

Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is a middle-aged loser, an unemployed carpenter who has recently spent time in a mental institution after some sort of breakdown. Now he has come to Los Angeles to house-sit for his much more successful brother. While there he reconnects with some old friends, all of whom he has treated badly, and begins an affair with a much younger woman (Greta Gerwig) who seems to have a compulsive need to take care of someone less competent than herself.

Roger’s forte is writing ascerbic letters to corporations that have offended him in some way, usually about some trivial matter. He is easily offended. Whenever he starts getting close to someone he always finds something to get mad about and reacts in a hurtful and insulting manner.

From the previews I had some idea going in that he was like this but I was hoping for something a little more entertaining. Perhaps I was hoping for something like As Good as It Gets, in which Jack Nicholson plays a somewhat similar character. Nicholson’s character is nasty but funny, and he ends up taking decisive action to turn his life around.

Ben Stiller is a reasonably talented actor, but he doesn’t have anything like Jack Nicholson’s presence and charisma, and the character he plays never seems particularly funny, just sad. This is probably more realistic, but it is far less entertaining.

So far I see one show that looks really interesting and a few more that are innovative enough that they may be worth a look.

Angel Beats is far and away the most interesting of the new shows. I’ve already written two posts about it so I won’t bother to add more here.

Kaichou wa Maid-sama is a new twist on some old tropes. It’s a shoujo anime featuring a tsundere maid. Both tsundere and maids are overused in shounen anime and manga, but they are pretty rare in shoujo stories. Presumably girls don’t like to think of themselves as tsundere, and they certainly don’t fantasize about being maids.

The shoujo approach is working out rather well. The heroine, a tyrannical student council president who is forced by poverty to work part-time in a maid café, is sympathetic and fairly smart. Her nemesis is a good-looking boy who is too cool for words and seems to enjoy teasing her. The outcome is inevitable.
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The premise may not sound like anything special, but Date Night turns out to be an extremely funny and rather sweet screwball comedy.

Phil and Claire Foster (Steve Carell and Tina Fey) are a typical boring couple from New Jersey. They decide to hire a babysitter and go into New York City to have a nice dinner at a fancy restaurant. Due to an improbable sequence of events they end up having a hair-raising adventure involving gangsters, dirty cops and a variety of New York City lowlifes.

I’m going to resist the temptation to give any more details. Everything in this story is absurd and hilarious. See it and be surprised.

Fey and Carell are two of the greatest comic talents in the movies today. Their portrayal of an ordinary couple who turn out to have unexpected depths of resourcefulness (and craziness) is what makes this movie work.

Whether or not you like Angel Beats, you’ve got to admit that it is pretty audacious to present an anime that looks like a cross between Haruhi Suzumiya and Haibane Renmei. With guns.

After only two episodes, everybody seems to be speculating about what is really going on and how it is going to end, so I’m going to put in my two cents. This is necessarily spoilerish, so it goes below the fold.
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Diary of a Wimpy Kid is funnier than the last 99 “family comedies” that preceded it. Actually it is funnier than most of the adult comedies of the last couple of years as well.

I should probably say that it will seem funny to adults with good memories and kids who are at least as old as the characters in the movie. The younger children in the audience seemed to sit through it in a state of silent incomprehension.

Greg Heffley (Zachary Gordon) has just entered middle school (which in his district apparently begins with the sixth grade.) He is confident that with his talent and intelligence he will easily become the most popular kid in his class. His only worry is whether his chubby and dim-witted best friend (Robert Capron) will slow him down.

Unfortunately Greg is the sort of screw-up whose best-thought-out schemes usually end in disaster.

This is the sort of comedy where the depiction of early-adolescent life rings painfully true. For such a young actor, Zachary Gordon shows some real comic talent. We may be hearing more of him in the future.

Angel Beats is a new anime series written by Jun Maeda, the writer who created Air, Kanon and Clannad. This one however is not being done by Kyoto Animation. It comes from an obscure studio called P.A. Works, which has previous mostly done in-between work for more established studios.

Fans of the earlier shows may well wish that Kyoto Animation were doing this one. The animation would certainly be better (though more moe-ified.) However if this were a Kyo-Ani production we would probably need to call it something like Haruhi Suzumiya Goes to Purgatory. (High School of the Dead might also be a good title, but that one’s already taken.)
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (a.k.a Män som hatar kvinnor) is a gripping thriller for people who don’t hate subtitles–and who are prepared to watch some very dark and disturbing stuff. Those who have read the original novel by Stieg Larsson will know what I am talking about.

Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a muckraking Swedish financial reporter, has just been sentenced to 3 months in jail for libeling a powerful industrialist. Before his sentence begins he is contacted by another industrialist, this one old and retired. Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) wants him to try to solve a long-forgotten mystery: the disappearance in 1966 of his beloved niece. Vanger believes that she was actually murdered by some member of his extended family, which includes some ruthless and unsavory characters.

In order to solve the mystery, Blomkvist finds that he needs the help of a most extraordinary character: Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a young punk-goth researcher and computer hacker with some server social-adjustment issues.
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