FunBlog

I just upgraded to version 2.6.1 (after leaving the site at version 2.5.1 for a dangerously long time.) In the past a “second-digit” version upgrade has sometimes caused trouble.

If you notice something obviously wrong with how things display, leave a comment and I will try to fix it.

There’s not much to this one: just a short and funny OVA.

At first glance it looks like a standard kodomo (children’s) anime, with simple, brightly colored artwork, bouncy inane music, and relentlessly upbeat characters. On closer examination there’s clearly something wrong with it. In fact it’s a parody, and a particularly hilarious one if you have a sufficiently twisted sense of humor.
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Granted, I haven’t seen every movie that Woody Allen ever made, but it’s quite possible that Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the most depressing Woody Allen move ever. I find it a bit reminiscent of Annie Hall, though not as funny.

The story revolves around two friends who spend a summer in Barcelona. Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) is a free spirit who ends up having affairs with some emo artists. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is a girl of more conventional tastes who marries her convential American boyfriend but secretly wishes she was having an affair with an emo artist. Neither ends up very happy.
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Tropic Thunder is a hilarious sendup of war moves, particularly Apocalypse Now (not to mention Hearts of Darkness.) It is also a sendup of Hollywood itself, a place where people are so busy putting on an act that they lose all connection with reality.

The story focuses on four actors: a washed-up action hero (Ben Stiller), a fat comedian who specializes in fart jokes (Jack Black), a rapper best known for promoting a beverage called “Booty Sweat” (Brandon T. Jackson) and an obsessive method actor (Robert Downey Jr.) who dyes his skin to play an African-American and insists on staying in character even off camera. They are the leads in a doomed movie based on the memoirs of a Vietnam War hero (Nick Nolte).

Filming is going nowhere due to the titanic egos and general incompetence of the actors, so the director decides to dump them somewhere deep in the jungle and film them with hidden cameras, hoping for some documentary-style realism. Things go horribly wrong and soon the actors are being hunted by drug smugglers, all the while assuming that this is just part of the movie.
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One of the main advantages of watching anime in Japanese with subtitles is that even if you don’t understand Japanese you can pick up a lot of information that will be lost in the English dub. A little effort spent in learning a few words can pay off in a wealth of information about the culture and the relationships between the characters.

I’ve collected a lot of notes on the subject and I’m going to try to organize them into posts. If you have been watching anime for years you will probably find this stuff very elementary, but newer viewers may find this useful.

The first thing to master are the honorifics. There are only 5 to learn, but there are many subtleties in how they are used. (more…)

It stands to reason that a musical featuring ABBA songs won’t get much respect. After all, ABBA didn’t get much respect even back when they were popular. Still, they were popular for a good reason. Sure, they wore funny costumes and memorized the lyrics phonetically, but the songs were a lot of fun: bouncy, energetic and life-affirming.

So I went into Mamma Mia! hoping for some good mindless fun, and I got it. For the first few minutes, listening to the inane dialog, I was worried. Then Meryl Streep started belting out “Money, Money, Money” and everything fell into place. There’s some serious talent here, not to mention pretty scenery.

I’m not going to try to describe the plot. It’s some sort of silliness about a wedding on a Greek island, obviously strung together for the sole purpose of fitting in as many ABBA song and dance numbers as possible. It doesn’t mean anything. The only thing to do is sit back and enjoy it.

Photos of cosplayers at Connecticon 08.

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