FunBlog

Brian Ashcraft of Wired was having terrible luck with cell phones: he ran through four of them in less than a year. So he took his next one to the Kanda Shrine near Akihabara, which specializes in spiritually purifying electronic equipment. Result: one shiny new purified and blessed cell phone.

He describes the process in a photo essay: Gadget Blessings: Shinto Priest Protects Electronics From Bad Mojo.

(Presumably it won’t let him browse for porn, but he doesn’t seem to mind.)

O’ Horten is a quirky little Norwegian art-house film. The aptly-named Odd Horten is a shy, taciturn railway engineer who retires and then wanders around for the rest of the movie having a series of comic adventures. Eventually he is inspired to do something that may or may not transform his life.

Maybe I would like this more if I were Norwegian. It isn’t as funny as I hoped. Most of the material is mildly amusing. The ending is mildly inspiring and mildly heartwarming. The hero is so withdrawn that we never really get into his head or identify with him.

The movie isn’t awful, but you may or may not find it worth your time to watch.

A horrible shock awaits K-ON! fans as Atarashii Prelude reveals the awful truth:

How To Deal With A Jealous Ritsu

The Fall Of Hirasawa Yui

This may not be Hayao Miyazaki’s most profitable film, but it is probably the most beloved. Totoro toys and memorabilia are perennial favorites, and his image appears on the Studio Ghibli logo. The film is a family classic, appealing to even the youngest children, but still interesting to adults.

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Up is probably the best movie Pixar has made since Toy Story. It isn’t the sort of game-changing breakthrough that Toy Story was in its day, but it is a solid, workman-like piece of storytelling that hits all the marks it aims at. It is funny, heart-warming and technically excellent, one of the best American animated films of the last ten years. If it doesn’t win this year’s animation Oscar I will be very surprised.

Carl Fredricksen (Edward Asner) is an old man who has spent his life dreaming of adventure. In particular he wanted to go off to the mysterious land of Paradise Falls in South America to search for the legendary explorer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). However life got in the way and he never got around to it. Now his home is about to be razed for an urban renewal project and the authorities are about to bundle him off to a nursing home.

So he ties thousands of balloons to his house, rigs up a primitive steering system and takes off for South America. Too late he discovers that a little boy named Russell (Jordan Nagai), who has been trying to earn a merit badge in Helping the Elderly, has stowed away under his porch. Neither of them imagines the surprises that await when they finally reach Paradise Falls.

Some of the younger members of the audience seemed restless. This is probably best suited for ages 10 and up; probably a 5 year old would find much of it difficult to follow. It is not particularly scary by the standards of recent animated films. Certainly there’s nothing nearly as nightmare-inducing as the climax of Toy Story. Many people have remarked on how sad the opening sequence is, but I think it is the sort of thing that seems sad to adults and tends to go over the heads of children.

The tourists are even allowed to consult the Oracle at Delphi. That scene reminded of when Chaz and I visited an ancient temple at Ise in Japan. Outside the gates, monks sat on platforms inscribing scrolls. “You may ask anything you want,” our guide told us. “Will there be peace in our time?” asked Chaz. The monk gave a look at our guide. Our guide said, “Ah, I think maybe a better question may be more like, ‘How many monks live in temple?’ ”

Roger Ebert: My Life in Ruins

Apparently they are working on a third SnS series. (Probably for 2010. Unless they have been working on it for quite a while in secret, they can’t possibly have it ready for Fall 2009.)

I’m looking forward to this with more trepidation that anticipation. Consider what J.C. Staff has done so far with the franchise:

• The first TV series was quite good in my opinion. (Some disagree).
• Then there was a very lame OVA, which added a pointless onsen episode to the story.
• Which was followed by a movie which was almost as lame. It just rehashed the beginning of the TV series, adding nothing of importance, but playing a nasty trick on anyone who might be intrigued enough by the movie to go watch the TV series. The movie was told in a way that would spoil the ending of the TV series for anyone who hadn’t already seen it.
• Then there was the second TV series which was a mixed bag. The beginning was very weak and rather annoying, but in my opinion the series redeemed itself at the end.

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I’ve argued in previous posts that you as a non-Japanese-speaker can pick up a lot of information by listening to the Japanese sound track while watching anime with subtitles–nuances that are not available in the translation. One of the most useful and interesting things to listen for is whether the characters are using polite or plain speech.

English has different levels of formality. Consider the difference between “Is this Joe’s place?” and “Is this the residence of Mr. Blow?” [1]. They may mean the same thing, but they suggest very different situations. However Japanese goes far beyond English in it’s levels of formality. Polite speech (keigo) amounts to a completely different dialect with its own verb conjugations and specialized vocabulary [2]. Because there is no real English equivalent the subtitles rarely attempt to show that it is being used, but sometimes you need to know when it is being used (or not used) in order to fully understand the characters’ reactions.
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