FunBlog

Raymond Chen discusses Hello Kitty Air, an airline devoted to Hello Kitty, with Hello Kitty images plastered over everything including the barf bags.

(Actually I’m not sure that this should be under the category Japanese Culture. Hello Kitty is a Japanese invention, but it seems to be Taiwanese women who are “way too into this Hello Kitty thing.”)

You may need to be in the right mood to watch this one. It’s very funny, but much of it is painfully funny, the sort of humor that strikes home and makes you wince even while laughing. I guess that there is a certain amount of pain in all humor, and a really skillful humorist can invoke a lot a pain and make it really funny. That’s pretty much what happens here.

Peter Bretter (Jason Segel) is something of a schlub. He’s actually a decent guy, but he’s not terribly good looking or immensely talented. He makes a decent living as a musician but he’s never going to be a star. He has a bad habit of sitting around eating vast quantities of Froot Loops.

Peter is in a long-term relationship with Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), the beautiful blond star of a popular TV series. She’s everything that he is not: effervescent, popular, the center of attention. There is a certain feeling of inevitability when she dumps him.
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This show has a special meaning for me because it reminds me of the science fiction stories that I loved as a boy, stories by people like Heinlein and Clarke and del Rey, many of which dealt with the early days of space exploration and settlement. These stories featured brave, self-reliant pioneers who navigated their way around the solar system using slide rules. They had little patience with bureaucratic rules; they got themselves into trouble by taking one chance too many; and they got themselves out by means of their wits and their engineering skills. I can see in retrospect that many of them were flawed characters, but they were always interesting.

Planetes represents the same sort of hard-SF. It is actually better written than many of the stories that I remember, but it has the same sense of wonder and hope and excitement.
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Did you ever have a college professor who was a complete, total insufferable jerk? I suppose in my time I may have had a run-in or two with a professor, but I don’t think I ever had one as bad as Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) in this edgy comedy.

Lawrence is an English Lit. professor who likes to humiliate his students, or anyone else whom he takes to be less intelligent, including his slacker brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church.) Actually Chuck is his “adopted brother”, as Lawrence points out at every opportunity. The plot takes off after Lawrence, as a result of his own arrogance, suffers an injury that leaves him temporarily unable to drive, and Chuck moves in as his live-in chauffeur.

The best thing in the movie is Ellen Page as Lawrence’s daughter Vanessa. She manages to be both cute and scary as a smart and talented apprentice jerk. (Despite her snarky remarks she wants to be like her father, which I suppose in a twisted way suggests that he isn’t totally unredeemable.)

A movie with such an unlikable main character might be pretty unpleasant, but this has some pretty funny material that kept me entertained. (I particularly liked the dysfunctional Christmas dinner.) Some people may have a hard time swallowing the hero’s ultimate redemption, but by that time I was in a good enough mood that I was willing to make the effort to go along with it.

Jeff Lawson reports that two years after watching The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumia he finally figured out that Kyon is a jerk.

Which of course is true, but necessary. Haruhi wouldn’t fall for a nice guy. She wants a partner in crime. These guys are funny to watch, but I really wouldn’t want to get too close to them.

What would you get if you gave Makoto Shinkai, who created Voices of a Distant Star on his personal computer, enough money to hire a professional staff and make a theatrical feature? Apparently the answer is this movie, a gentle, wistful tale of young love and loneliness. Maybe this is the story that he was really trying to tell with VODS, now stripped of its science fiction elements and reduced to its bare essentials.
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This anime is best thought of as a series of clever, spooky short stories with some continuing characters. Viewed that way it is quite entertaining.

There’s another way to look at it that’s a bit less satisfactory. We have here the story of a young man who is irritatingly immature, yet it is strongly hinted that he will someday become a person of consequence. So this could be the story of how he overcomes his youthful immaturity and becomes a true hero–except in the end a year has passed and he still has a long way to go.
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Jeet Heer in Slate revisits the story of Fredric Wertham, an American psychiatrist who started a campaign against comic books in the 1940’s and 50’s, arguing that they promote juvenile delinquency and homosexuality. The campaign was a great success, culminating in mass book burnings and Congressional hearings. Many publishers went out of business and the rest were forced to accept a draconian censorship regime.
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