FunBlog

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.

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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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How many people remember when Batman was a lighthearted tongue-in-cheek TV show about a somewhat pompous “Caped Crusader” who battled absurd over-the-top villains? That era seems pretty distant now.

The Dark Knight is the latest and darkest in a series of movies in which Batman is a grim, somewhat alienated hero, struggling furiously against a dark world dominated by corruption, inhumanity and madness.

(I don’t mean to suggest that the lighthearted Batman was the “real” Batman who has been lost. The Batman story always had dark elements. Batman, after all, is the guardian of Gotham City, and “Gotham” was the name of the English town that was famous in the late Middle Ages for being inhabited solely by lunatics.)

In any case this movie manages to be grimmer than any of its predecessors, and is definitely not for kids.
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It’s no secret that movies based on old TV shows generally stink. In many cases that may be because the original source material wasn’t very good. In the case of this movie I don’t think that’s the case. For those too young to remember: Get Smart was a 1960s spy spoof created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, probably the two funniest comedy writers of the era.

The movie doesn’t try to follow the original too closely. This is a Get Smart with high production values and cool special effects, with a Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) who is intellegent, nerdy, neurotic and clumsy, an Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) who is cool and snarky, a hot-tempered Chief (Alan Arkin), a Siegfried (Terence Stamp) who is a creepy psychopath who is not at all funny, and a Larabee (David Koechner) who is not stupid but a total jerk.
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I initially had mixed feelings about this show, but it’s definitely interesting, if a bit unsettling. I find that it grows on me as I rewatch it.

The show has some offputting elements. It has a grim vision in which the bright, safe world of everyday life is a thin veneer over a dark reality of lawless violence. Also the hero can be annoyingly stupid.

Good points: Firstly, Murasaki, a bossy 7-year-old girl who is an absolutely wonderful character. I think it’s worth watching the show just to see her. Murasaki is played by 11-year-old Aoi Yuuki, and it should be interesting to watch her future career. This show actually has several great characters, but Murasaki outshines all the others.
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Maybe being a superhero isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. You find a whale stranded on the beach. You pick it up and toss it back into the ocean. Then you get a bill for the yacht it landed on.

Nevertheless the hero of Hancock seems to handle it worse than most. At the beginning of the movie John Hancock (Will Smith) is a drunken bum living in a shabby trailer. He has a bad habit of flying low over the streets of Los Angeles while swigging from a whiskey bottle, colliding with birds, traffic signs and the occasional building. Indeed, the opening scenes provide graphic illustrations of why you shouldn’t use superpowers while under the influence of alcohol.
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Three announcements in quick succession:

1) ADV Films is in deep financial trouble and has once again lost the rights to several of their current anime series (including, frustratingly, Kanon just days before they were scheduled to release the final DVD.)

2) FUNimation Entertainment has acquired the rights to all the series orphaned by Geneon when it abandoned the North American market last fall. I predicted something like this, but this seems to have worked out even better than I expected. They plan to finish the incomplete series like When They Cry, the second season of Rozen Maiden, and The Story of Saiunkoku.

3) FUNimation Entertainment has acquired the rights to the series lost by ADV.
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WALL-E, a gentle children’s sci-fi movie from Disney and Pixar, starts out on a future Earth that has been abandoned by humans because it has been covered with garbage. The hero, a robot whose name stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, spends his days picking up the trash, crushing it into cubes with his built-in trash compactor, and stacking the cubes into gigantic pyramids.

He has been at this for 700 years. His fellow robots have all broken down. His only companion is a pet cockroach which he feeds with 700-year-old Twinkies (still good as new.)

One day a spaceship lands and disgorges a beautiful, shiny flying robot named EVE. WALL-E is instantly infatuated. EVE turns out to be sort of a robot tsundere, but he eventually wins her over. (Awww…Robot love!)
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Rumiko Takahashi is best known for sprawling epics that go on and on seemingly forever, but this series suggests that her greatest talent is writing short stories. Each of the 13 episodes is an independent short story. The stories are clever and whimsical, though sometimes with dark elements. All are set in modern Japan. The only connection between them is that sometimes you can catch glimpses of characters from other stories.

Many manga artists and anime writers prefer to work with fantastic characters or exotic foreign locations. Here however the characters are fairly realistic, even though some of the stories have fantasy elements. The milieu seems very Japanese; an American could probably learn a lot about Japanese society just from watching this series.
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OK, let’s agree up front that I’m not in the target demographic for this movie. I watched a few episodes of the TV series and found the story of four rich, witty and somewhat shallow young women trying to make it in New York City mildly amusing, but not amusing enough to watch regularly.

The movie is pretty much like the TV show, but with a bit more nudity. (Or if you’ve been watching on basic cable, a lot more nudity.) Probably most readers are already familiar with the TV show and thus already know whether they would like the movie.
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Well, it seems to be official. Rumiko Takahashi will finally bring the InuYasha manga to an end with the next issue. That’s 558 chapters in 56 volumes over a period of almost 12 years. Will the ending be worth it? Come on. There’s no story in the world that justifies 56 volumes. I suspect most fans feel more exhausted than thrilled at this point.

But what about the anime series that ended 4 years ago, having caught up to the manga and run out of material? Will some animation studio pick up the series and finish it, now that it has an ending? Or will fans who slogged through the first 167 episodes be left without ever knowing whether Naraku got his just deserts, and whether Inuyasha and Kagome ever got off the dime and admitted their feelings for each other?
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Dreamworks brings us a new animated film which is both funny and a worthy addition to the canon of great Kung Fu movies.

The story is set in ancient China, where Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim), a large tortoise who invented Kung Fu, has a vision that tells him that Tai Lung (Ian McShane), an evil snow leopard, will soon escape from prison and lay waste to the valley. He decides to find a worthy student to whom to give the Dragon Scroll, which will grant invincibility.

Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) is sure that the honor will go to one of his five top students: Tigress, Monkey, Mantis, Viper or Crane (played respectively by Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, and David Cross.)
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This recent anime hasn’t received much attention and I think it deserves more. It’s short and amusing; rather dark but witty and cute.

This is a set of traveler’s tales, where the characters arrive at a new town in each episode and get involved in some local story. It’s tempting to compare it to Kino’s Journey–except that if Kino’s Journey were a shoujo series and the protagonist were a cute but bratty little sorceress, and the stories were more spooky than satirical, it wouldn’t be Kino’s Journey at all.
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Rumiko Takahashi is surely the most successful living manga artist, and the most influential since Osamu Tezuka. Just about every anime fan is familiar with at least some of her work, including popular series like Inuyasha and Ranma 1/2. This one is less well-known. It is much shorter than most of her other works, and also much darker. (Inuyasha has some dark moments, but it alternates them with much lighter material.)

Takahashi’s success is largely due to the fact that she is a good storyteller (though she tends to have trouble bringing a long series to a conclusion in a reasonable amount of time.) This is evident here: the stories are unsettling but compelling.
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Probably everyone knows what to expect from the latest Indiana Jones movie: thrills and chills leavened with cheerful good humor; lots of fun with no concern about passing the refrigerator test.

Actually this sort of thing is much harder to pull off than it looks–you have to keep the audience so enchanted while they are watching that they won’t ask questions. Get things a little bit wrong and it will become annoying or tedious. No one does this kind of thing better than Steven Spielberg.

This one is reminiscent of the first movie in the series: Raiders of the Lost Arc (1981), but it’s set in 1957, which I think is about 17 years later in movie time. Instead of Nazis for villains it has evil KGB agents. Once again there’s a quest for an implausible treasure. Its witty and thrilling and fun, but mostly forgettable.

…I think.

This pamphlet arrived in the mail:

(Click for larger image.)

Ever since the scientific community adopted heliocentrism as fact, attempts have been made to prove it. Some of these attempts should have worked. Remarkably, not only has NOT ONE of these attempts produced proof, but also the results of all of them are consistent with the hypothesis that the earth is at rest.

The general argument seems vaguely familiar:

1. The King James Bible clearly states that the Earth is fixed and the Sun moves around it.
2. Scientists claim that the Earth actually moves around the Sun. They have been trying to prove this for centuries, but have never succeeded (at least, not to our satisfaction.)
3. Q.E.D.

Now it would be easy for some wise guy to set up a web site as a joke, but a direct mail campaign costs real money. Also the web site seems “funny-strange”, not “funny-ha-ha.”

Maybe The Economist is preparing a special report on Japan for their next issue. That might be why they have just posted on their web site a strangely unfocused column that seems to be mostly about the Tokyo dining scene, but which begins with a description of a high-tech toilet that is far more sophisticated than the one I described.

This one features a massive remote control that appears to have tremendous potential for evil if it should fall into the wrong hands.

The full title of this movie is The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, but nobody is actually going to say that. It’s a sequel to 2005’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardroble and the first thing I should warn you about is that if you haven’t seen that movie, or read the book by C.S. Lewis on which it was based, you shouldn’t bother with the sequel. Prince Caspian jumps right into the action, and without that previous exposure you won’t know what is going on, or who the main characters are, or why you should care what happens to them.

On the other hand, if you saw and liked The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (I’m just going to write TLTWTW henceforth) then it’s probably worth seeing the sequel. The spectacular final battle sequence is worth the price of admission by itself.
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Chinese President Hu Jintao has just completed a rare state visit to Japan, supposedly establishing an “everlasting warm spring” in the relationship between the two countries.

Meanwhile the writers of Nijuu Mensou no Musume (The Daughter of Twenty Faces) seem to be busy trying to set Sino-Japanese relations back several decades. Consider the following elements from Episode 2:

1. All of the Chinese characters are depicted as duplicitous.
2. One of them is drawn in a way that amounts to an offensive racial stereotype.
3. The most sympathetic Chinese character, an attractive woman, gushes about how much she enjoyed “entertaining” Japanese troops during the war.

I predict that this is one anime that will not be popular in China, and it probably won’t be licensed for Region 1 either. It’s no great loss. I’ve rarely seen a story so riddled with logical holes.

Even if you didn’t already know it, the title of this series should tip you off that the team of manga artists known as CLAMP has a weird sense of humor. In spite of this, or perhaps because of this, I generally like their stuff. I’ve spent many enjoyable hours watching anime series based on their work. That’s what makes this particular series such a disappointment.
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The season of Summer blockbuster action flicks is upon us, and the first one will probably prove to be one of the best of the lot.

Iron Man is quite likely the original mecha story from which the entire genre descends. (The original comic book was created by Stan Lee in 1963–though Lee may have been influenced by Robert Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers which was published in 1959.)

The film’s most notable feature is Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as Tony Stark. He is not your typical run-of-the-mill tormented, angst-ridden superhero. Stark starts out as a wise-cracking, irresponsible playboy (though a brilliant inventor), and that’s pretty much how he ends up too, though he does develop something of a social conscience after being held prisoner by Afghan terrorists. Downey manages to make a potentially unlikeable character seem sympathetic, as well as devilishly charming.

The other big star is the computer-generated gadgetry. Like all mecha shows this is largely about gadget porn, but it is gadget porn done right. The gadgets look cool and fun and at least vaguely plausible. I tend to have trouble with mecha shows because too often the technology is painfully, self-evidently absurd. This movie manages to pull it off. It’s a wild, fun ride, and no fair applying the refrigerator test.

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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This is mostly interesting as a proof of concept: a demonstration that if you were sufficiently talented and fanatically dedicated you could create a professional-quality anime all by yourself, or perhaps with the help of a few friends.

In 2001 Makoto Shinkai quit his job as a video game developer and spent about seven months working head-down full-time to create this 25-minute anime on his computer. A friend handled the music and sound effects; Makoto and his fiancée did the voice acting. (It was later redubbed using professional seiyuu.)
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This story is a bit too melancholy for my taste, but it is interesting and original and has a small but devoted following.

One thing to keep in mind is that this is an anti-war story, and such stories usually do not have cheerful endings. It would tend to defeat the purpose.

In any case it is a thoughtful story with a unique premise. Considering that it is from Studio DEEN, the artwork is surprisingly adequate, with attractive backgrounds and impossible, beautiful flying machines. I found the character designs a bit disconcerting at first, but quickly got used to them. The music is haunting (I’ve had “Hikari ni tsusumare musuu no hana-tachi wa…” stuck in my head for days.)
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After testing the site with Safari for the first time I ended up making some massive, long-overdue changes to the stylesheet, which hopefully will allow things to display better in more browsers and screen resolutions.

In particular I eliminated the use of pixel metrics, replacing it with logical sizes (inches and points.) I also reduced the dependence on bitmap images for formatting and fixed some malformed relative URLs, which Firefox and IE handled correctly but Safari didn’t like.

If the site now looks WORSE in your browser, let me know what your configuration is and I’ll see what I can do.

I’m going to risk making a fool of myself and try to guess the ending of the second season. (If you have read the books and know the right answer, please keep quiet.)
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…simply and elegantly in a series of cartoons: here. (via)

Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) is a failure as a governess. She has been fired from her last 3 jobs for gross malfeasance and no one else seems likely to hire her. In desperation she resorts to a bit of subterfuge to wrangle a job as a social secretary to Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams), an American actress. Delysia clearly needs a social secretary (or at least some sort of professional help) in order to juggle the 3 men in her life.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is set in 1939, and it is actually the sort of screwball comedy that was popular at that time–right down to some overly broad acting. Nevertheless it is pretty funny, and anyone who has a certain fondness for that sort of movie is bound to like it.

Amy Adams is delightful as a scatterbrained actress prepared, if necessary, to sleep her way to the top. McDormand and Ciarán Hinds (as a jaded lingerie designer) provide a slightly more serious tone. It’s all totally implausible, but satisfying.

In cast anyone’s wondering why certain pictures in the Air (TV) review were replaced by equivalent pictures from the movie, it has to do with the fact that the WordPress makes it easy to overwrite existing image files with the same name. Anyway it’s fixed now.

I’ve had my doubts about this sequel, but at this point, all I have to say is this: Episode 21 rocks!

The Other Boleyn Girl is a 16th century soap opera. At the beginning of the story Sir Thomas Boleyn learns that King Henry VIII’s marriage is on the rocks. Naturally he orders his daughter Anne (Natalie Portman) to try to become the King’s mistress. She agrees readily enough, but unfortunately the King’s eye falls instead on Anne’s gentle, pure-hearted younger sister Mary (Scarlett Johansson.)

I presume most readers will know the rough outlines of what is going to happen: Henry VIII marries Anne Boleyn and the marriage ends badly, but not before producing the future Queen Elizabeth I.
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