FunBlog

Ghost Town is an American comedy with an unusual British feel to it. Much of this comes from Ricky Gervais, a British comedian who plays the main character, a curmudgeonly dentist named Bertram Pincus. (The script provides a typically unconvincing explanation of why a British dentist is living and working in New York City.)

Pincus has little use for people. The thing he enjoys most about his job is that it lets him stuff cotton into people’s mouths so that he doesn’t have to listen to them. His life is turned upside down when a botched medical procedure leaves him temporarily “dead”, after which he is able to see dead people in the manner of The Sixth Sense.

This is a real pain because all of the ghosts want his help in resolving something that they left undone. The pushiest of the ghosts is Frank Herlihy (Greg Kinnear) who wants to keep his widow Gwen oni (Téa Leoni) from remarrying. But Pincus start to fall for Gwen himself, which puts him in the middle of a love triangle (or maybe quadrangle.)
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Cosplayers and other characters at the New York Anime Festival. (Click for larger images.)

Tara Aso, Japan’s newly-designated Prime Minister, has acquired a somewhat scary band of followers in the Akihabara district due to his reputation as a manga fan. Apparently he is particularly fond of Rozen Maiden.

Of course I wish him well, but I’m not sure that Shinku, Suigintou and Suiseiseki will be much help in dealing with a shaky economy, an upper house controlled by the opposition, and a sclerotic ruling party infested with cronyism.

This series is one of my all-time favorites and I’m sorry that nobody has seen fit to license it yet. Some shows seem destined to win awards and critical praise, but not to attract a real mass audience. Sometimes they are eventually recognized as true classics.

The story is an unusual variant of cyberpunk, a genre usually associated with dark stories about a lawless world in which hackers with few scruples battle cabals and power brokers who are even less scrupulous. Dennou Coil has some elements of this, but the overall tone is much lighter–partly because the story is told from the viewpoint of an optimistic child. The result is clever and thought-provoking, but also charming.
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The latest movie from Joel and Ethan Coen is another grimly funny story featuring ruthless people who are not nearly as smart as they think they are. The premise is pretty convoluted, but I’ll try to summarize it:

A disgruntled former CIA analyst (John Malkovich), who is married to the worlds scariest pediatrician (Tilda Swinton), decides to write a tell-all memoir. Somehow a copy ends up in the hands of a middle-aged physical trainer (Frances McDormand) who needs money for cosmetic surgery to “reinvent her life.” With the help of her oni moronic coworker (Brad Pitt) she hatches a scheme to blackmail the author.

Meanwhile a sleazy Treasury agent (George Clooney) is carrying on affairs with all of the female characters, which thoroughly complicates everyone else’s plots.
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According to this article in The Register, the Kanda-Myojin Shrine near Akihabara does a brisk business blessing laptops to protect them from viruses and other mishaps.

I’ve been burned by articles in The Register before, but this one includes a photo of the ceremony.