FunBlog

This is a well-made and well-acted film, but ultimately one that I find unsatisfactory.

Jenna (Keri Russell) is a strikingly beautiful waitress with a fantastic talent for making pies. She is also miserable. She is trapped in a marriage with an abusive husband, and she has just discovered that she is pregnant. On the other hand her handsome new doctor seems to be falling in love with her. She believes adultery is wrong, but she is tempted to reach out to him anyway…

This is being marketed as a comedy, and there certainly are some funny lines, but fundamentally this is a very sad story and everything in it points to a very sad ending. Instead we get a happy ending, one that strikes me as totally facile and extremely improbable (not to mention possibly harmful to an impressionable segment of the audience.)

Everything depends on this. If you believe the ending you will probably like the film; if you don’t you won’t.
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If you have watched much anime you probably have a pretty good idea of what will happen if some Japanese high school students are suddenly transported to a strange and dangerous new world. They will quickly bond with each other even if they didn’t know each other previously. They may be frightened, but they will face the unfamiliar threats and challenges with courage and integrity. They will stick together, fiercely resisting any attempts to turn them against each other. They will never, ever let each other down.

It is easy to poke fun at the gambatte spirit, but it is a standard part of the genre, and one that gives it a great deal of its charm. To find it missing would be disconcerting.

But what if it does appear to be missing? What if the characters, placed in a frightening situation that they could not have anticipated, behaved less like the people that we wish we were, and more like the people that we fear that we actually are? Could this still be a good story? Actually the answer is “Yes.”
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In a study that has been getting a lot of attention recently, American and Japanese college students were required to judge the facial expressions of digitally altered photos. The American students looked primarily at the mouths, while the Japanese students looked primarily at the eyes. (via Ars Technica.)

This is supposed to explain why Japanese on-line writers prefer emoticons like these:

*_*   ;_;   ^_^

while Americans prefer things like

:-)    :-(

all of which can lead to cultural misunderstandings.

But it is obviously is relevant to the “big eyes” question. To Japanese artists and fans the eyes are much more important for conveying expressions.

This movie is a British parody of American cop/buddy/action thrillers. That’s an easily parodied genre, but the dry British humor makes this surprisingly quirky and interesting.

Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is the most outstanding police officer in London. So outstanding, in fact, that his fellow officers worry that he is making them look bad, and arrange for him to be transferred to a sleepy little village that has not reported a murder in 20 years. Nick is, of course, incredibly straight-laced and marks his first night in town by arresting about a quarter of the population for various alcohol-related offenses. Clearly somebody is going to have to make some adjustments.
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