FunBlog

A while ago I suggested that Hollywood could alleviate the headache-inducing tendencies of 3-D movies by developing a holographic projection system.

I was only semi-serious, but apparently it is possible. All it requires is processing power several orders of magnitude greater than what we have today.

is everything Miyazaki makes is now an instant classc? How about Howl’s Moving Castle?

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And BTW, 20 miles is a big deal now? What a whiner. Just move somewhere where they built freeways or something. And be happy it was shown 20 miles away. Tokikake was only shown in LA and NY, 2000 miles away for me.

Ani-Nooto

I’ve never seen Howl’s Moving Castle, so I can’t say whether it’s a classic. All I know is that everyone seems to hate it, which doesn’t encourage me to watch it.

As for Ponyo, I think it does qualify as a classic in the category of children’s movies. Or if it’s too early to say that, I predict that it will come to be considered a classic. The obvious comparison is to Totoro, which most people consider a classic. The two are similar in many ways, including the fact that the endings are too low-key for some adults, but are appropriate to the story and the intended audience.

As for the 20 miles, there are about 10 theaters in that driving radius and only one was showing Ponyo, which I think is a good indication of Disney’s level of commitment to the film. They could have done a lot worse, but they also could have done better.

The sad thing is, I think this is an anime that mainstream Americans could really appreciate, since it’s a really good movie for children. Most Americans can’t accept an animated movie like Princess Mononoke, but they probably would have no problem with this one.

Post Grad is no great classic, but it’s rather cute and pretty funny–not a bad way to spend 89 minutes.

Ryden Malby (Alexis Bledel) has just graduated from college and is confident that she will quickly land her dream job with a publishing company. Unfortunately though she’s book-smart she is rather ditsy and not as good at interviews as she thinks she is. She’s also not very smart about romance. Her hunky “platonic boyfriend” (Zach Gilford) is crazy about her but she just isn’t interested in him that way.

The job-hunting and romantic subplots are pretty predictable. What makes this worth watching are the comic contributions of Ryden’s oddball family (Michael Keaton, Jane Lynch, Bobby Coleman and Carol Burnett). They turn what might have been an uninspired story into something hilarious. The movie is warm and upbeat and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Finally after all these years I got to see a Hayao Miyazaki movie in a theater on a big screen. This mini-review is based on the dubbed version currently in the theaters. When I get hold of the DVD I will probably write a more detailed review with pictures.

Ponyo is a gentle children’s story comparable to My Neighbor Totoro. If you are in the mood for something like that, this is pretty good. The story is supposedly inspired by “The Little Mermaid”, but it has little resemblance to either the Disney version or the grim original story by Hans Christian Anderson.
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Henry DeTamble (Eric Bana) has a problem: a time travel disorder. Every so often he has something like a epileptic seizure which causes him to vanish from the present and appear somewhere and sometime in the past or the future. He has no control over it. To make things even more inconvenient, he always arrives naked.

One day a pretty girl (Rachel McAdams) walks up to him and acts like she knows him. Apparently his future self has gotten acquainted with her during visits to the past. He has no idea who she is, but she claims that he is her best friend.

The Time Traveler’s Wife can be appreciated as a bittersweet romance, but what really appeals to me is the dexterity with with it handles the time travel paradoxes.

Most movies about time travel just pull a resolution out of the air without much concern for whether it actually makes sense. This movie on the other hand is a meticulously plotted tour de force in the tradition of Robert Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps”. As in that classic story the ground rules are totally deterministic, so there is ultimately no ambiguity about whether the convoluted plotline is workable or not. In this case it works.

The story finally ends, in a suitably anticlimactic manner. It feels like the folks at Kyoto Animation are as sick of it as we are.

So why did they do it this way? I suspect that the real reason, regardless of the rationalizations they may have come up with, is that the production company ordered N episodes and they only had enough source material for N - 7. KyoAni has a lot of talent, including some of the world’s best animators, but coming up with new story ideas is not their forte.

Incidentally, the ending provides the strongest evidence so far for what I called “Theory 4″ in my Spoiler Notes for Haruhi Suzumiya.

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Hayao Miyazaki’s second most successful movie (after Spirited Away) is a dark, exciting adventure story that resonates with the power of myth.
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