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This movie shines from a technical standpoint, with competent acting and advanced makeup and special effects, yet as a story it leaves me cold.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, very loosely adapted from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, tells the story of a man who is born old and ages backwards, growing younger as time passes. Part of the problem with this is that we know from the start pretty much how this has to turn out, and indeed it is all very predictable. Worse, while there are many colorful characters, none of them really came alive for me. They are all stock characters that we have seen many times before.

The whole thing seems like a tall tale, and it might have worked well at that level, but a good tall tale is generally short and witty. Fitzgerald was wise to make it a short story. The movie, at 2 hours and 40 minutes, wants to be an epic, and it drags as we wait impatiently for the next predictable stage in the hero’s life.

Once again it’s time to look back on the past year and pontificate on what was noteworthy in the world of anime. This is not intended as any sort of definitive list. I’ve only sampled a small part of what was available, and of course my interests are idiosyncratic and may not match yours. Also I am excluding any series that began in the Fall of 2008 and is continuing in 2009. These will be eligible for consideration next year.

Outstanding Anime Series of 2008

No Winner. I’m sorry. I just didn’t see anything this year that I would award 5 stars to.

Noteworthy Anime Series of 2008

On the other hand, there were a number of solid, entertaining series that I considered time well spent.

Bamboo Blade. This tale of the misadventures of a high school kendo club was consistently funny and charming.

Clannad. Surprisingly the latest collaboration from the people who brought us Kanon (2006) and Air (TV) turned out to be a funny and upbeat comedy, though with a rather sad backstory. (This statement applies only to the original series. Watch the sequel at your own risk.)

Hakaba Kitarou. A stylish adaptation of the classic horror comic from the 1960s. Not to be confused with Ge Ge Ge no Kitarou, a long-running series that featured more child-friendly versions of the same characters.

Hatenkou Yuugi. Spooky variant on the magical girl genre, with a delightful heroine.

Itazura na Kiss. I could almost imagine this romantic comedy playing on American television–in the 1950s, perhaps starring a younger version of Lucille Ball. The hapless heroine suffers every imaginable humiliation, but always manages to bounce back by the end of the episode.

Kure-nai. Dark, noirish thrillier, lit up by the wonderful character of Murasaki.

Shakugan no Shana Second. This sequel is strictly for fans of the original series, and perhaps not for all of them. It gets off to a very weak start, especially compared to the powerful opening of the first series. Things don’t really start to turn around until about half way through, after which it builds to a suitably resounding climax.

Shugo Chara! A classic magical girl series that is extremely cute and very funny. It’s also very long and noticeably padded in places. It would probably be better if edited down a bit.

Telepathy Girl Ran. I would classify this not so much a magical girl story as a child detective story. “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those darned kids!” (The comparison is unfair since the writing is about 10 times better, but I couldn’t resist.)

xxxHOLIC Kei. A rare bird–a sequel that’s every bit as good as the original.

Disappointing Anime Series of 2008

I’m going to skip this category. I had a whole bunch of snarky comments saved up, but they mostly boil down to two principles:

1. Most sequels aren’t as good as the originals.
2. Anything adapted from a series of light novels will have a strong start to introduce the characters and premise, but then will probably wander around without ever going anywhere.

Interesting, But Not To My Taste

ef–a tale of melodies. This is not just a sequel to ef–a tale of memories; the two form an integrated whole and should probably be viewed together. Once again the artwork is stunning and the stories are compelling, and it addresses some of my objections to the original series. Unfortunately the explanations are often implausible and some of the answers to the questions raised by the first series are answers that you might be happier not knowing. Frankly, watching this is like being kicked repeatedly in the gut.

Ga-Rei Zero. “I’ve got a great idea! Let’s introduce the heroes, then kill them off at the end of the first episode! It’ll be like a Gainax ending, only at the beginning!”

Kaiba. An innovative anime with a strong European flavor. I really wanted to like this one. Innovation is always praiseworthy and I want to see it succeed. Unfortunately I found that I just did not care what happened to any of these characters.

Kannagi. This series has nice animation and some nice moments, and raises interesting questions about the implications of Shinto religious teachings. However ultimately it’s mostly just routine, uninspired harem comedy shtick.

Kuroshitsuji. “I’ve got a great idea! To show our mastery of dark humor, let’s start the series with an episode featuring cannibalism! The good guys will EAT the bad guy! That’ll get their attention!”

Shigofumi. Dark, beautifully drawn, a searing indictment of Japanese society. This has justly been compared to Kino’s Journey, but you have to imagine what that show would be like with a Kino who acted cold and heartless, and a Hermes who was really irritating.

This is not the show to watch if you are looking for searing drama, tearful heartbreak or gut-clenching action. It’s more like the ultimate feel-good show, a cheerful vision of a future world in which people are nice to each other and nothing really bad happens to anyone. I don’t think I could stand to marathon this series, but I find that an occasional episode is a good way to regain my emotional equilibrium after watching something like Neon Genesis Evangelion.

This is another example of Nozomi Entertainment’s publishing strategy: find a quality show that has languished unlicensed for several years; license it cheaply and release it without a dub as an inexpensive DVD box set.
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Usually Will Smith makes upbeat movies, either comedies or uplifting dramas like The Pursuit of Happyness. Seven Pounds is different; it’s rather dark and sad and not everyone is going to like it. It’s also the sort of movie that tries to hide the real story until near the end, revealing it bit by bit.

Will Smith portrays an IRS agent who clearly isn’t following the rules. He seems to want to play God, using his position to reward the virtuous and punish the wicked. Also there seems to be something that’s troubling him, but we don’t know what it is.

And that’s about all I can say about the premise without giving too much away. This is a powerful, tragic story. It’s well done, and worth watching if you are up for that sort of thing.

I going to try to be fair with this one, since I’m clearly not the targeted demographic. This movie delivers what it intends to deliver, which is a 90 proof dose of teenage girls’ sexual fantasies.

Twilight involves a girl named Bella (Kristen Stewart) who goes to live with her father in a small town in a remote part of Washington state. At her new high school she is fascinated by Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a pale young man with large sensuous lips who stares at her with a look of burning hunger. (Or maybe it’s just a bad case of indigestion. It’s a bit hard to tell at first.)

Actually all the members of Edward’s family look like that: pale and sort of gothic, and with good reason, since they are all vampires. However they are good, “vegetarian” vampires who eat only animal blood.

To my mind, this sort of thing robs the vampire myth of much of its power. If you are immortal and beautiful and rich, but you aren’t actually undead and you don’t have to kill humans, that doesn’t seem like much of a curse, no matter how much Edward wails about it. These vampires are just having too much fun.

There are also some bad vampires who do want to kill humans, and some Native Americans who obviously don’t approve of vampires (though it is strongly hinted that that is because said Native Americans are actually werewolves.) There’s plenty of action and brooding passion and romance, and it all builds up to a suitably thrilling climax.

Then after the climax they spend at least 10 minutes setting things up for a sequel. Fair warning: my daughter is skeptical about whether the sequel will be worth watching. She says that the second book in the series this is based on is mostly an extended setup for the third book. But we’ll leave that problem for another day.

…the main characters Nagisa and Honoka will be named Natalie and Hannah in the English-dubbed version.

ANN: Pretty Cure to Run on Canada’s YTV in Early 2009 (via)

I’ve often complained about the dubs done by American anime publishers, but fortunately they seem to have stopped stooping to this level of obnoxiousness. It takes a supreme level of arrogance to license a show and then use the dub to rewrite it–in this case by making the characters Canadian instead of Japanese.

If you think your customers don’t want to watch a Japanese show, there’s a simple solution: don’t license anime. How about paying someone to make a Canadian show?

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7. “First decimal place” upgrades like this are more likely to cause problems than the usual bug fix upgrade. If you see anything on the site that seems broken, please let me know by leaving a comment (or use the “Contact Me” link on the right.)

OK, you know the drill. The far-flung members of a family return to their parents’ house for Christmas (or for Thanksgiving, or whatever) but things aren’t what they used to be. Kids grow up; people change. A series of crises flare up. Hopefully everything will work out satisfactorily before the closing credits. (Cue the group hug.)

Nothing Like the Holidays is a better-than-average example of the genre. Alfred Molina and Elizabeth Peña play the parents of a Puerto Rican family in Chicago. They have three sons: one is sort of a goofball; one has become a Yuppie New York lawyer, married to career-driven Jewish woman who isn’t enthusiastic about having children; and the third is a veteran just back from Iraq. There’s also a daughter who is a Hollywood actress, but is wondering whether it’s worth continuing to pursue a marginally successful career.

It follows the standard formula, and perhaps inevitably the ending feels just a little too pat. However the acting is good and there are some very funny moments. You could do a lot worse for a holiday movie this season.

Note, however that this is PG-13. Do the preschoolers a favor and take them to something else.

Probably no anime series was more anticipated in the Spring of 2007 than Lucky Star. The studio had previously released two big hits in a row: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Kanon (2006). Naturally the fans were expecting something special.

So it’s understandable that there was a certain amount of grumbling on the ‘net when Lucky Star turned out to have neither the off-beat brilliance of Haruhi nor the emotional resonance of Kanon. Nevertheless the show soon found an audience for its peculiar charms and became very popular in its own right. Certainly the fan-art websites are bursting with drawings inspired by the cute character designs (I’m using one as my desktop wallpaper at the moment.)
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Australian director Baz Luhrmann seems to be trying to recreate the sprawling, glamorous blockbuster movies of the 1940s and 1950s. I think he does a pretty good job of capturing both the good and bad points. This is a long movie that starts out much like a John Ford western, then turns into something more like a wartime romance.

Australia involves an English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman) who comes to Australia just before the outbreak of World War II to round up her husband, who has been playing at being a cattle rancher. She intends to sell the place and drag him home. But it turns out that her husband has been murdered, the overseer is a crook, and the only potential buyer for the place is your standard-issue Evil Cattle Baron.

After thinking it over she decides to save the ranch by driving a herd of cattle across the badlands to Darwin to sell to the army. She will have to rely on the assistance of an Aboriginal boy and an uncouth and cynical, but ruggedly handsome cowboy (Hugh Jackman).

As I said, this has many of the same weaknesses of the films that inspired it. It’s long, hokey, sentimental and implausible. Also the attempts at political correctness may make it embarrassing for people a few decades from now to watch. (The difference between “respectful” and “patronizing” can be subtle and is not always immediately apparent.)

Nevertheless it’s beautiful to look at, and if you are able to just get into the spirit of things and sit back and enjoy it, it’s a ripping good story.

I’m not sure that Bolt qualifies as a “classic” but it may well prove to be the best family film of this holiday season.

Bolt (John Travolta) is a dog who stars in a TV show about a dog with super powers. Being ignorant about how special effects work, he thinks that he actually does have super powers. Due to a series of unfortunate events he gets loose and ends up being shipped in a box across the country to New York City. If he is to be reunited with his beloved Penny (Miley Cyrus) he must make his way back across the continent, aided by a street-wise alley cat (Susie Essman) and a deluded hamster (Mark Walton).

This is lightweight material with a predictable ending, but it’s funny and charming. The animation is also pretty good–and I say that as one who is not a great fan of 3-D computer-generated animation.
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My last post seems to have struck a nerve.

First, I want to emphasize that when I said “writing is more important than art in animation” I did not mean that the artwork is of no importance. High quality drawing and animation, when combined with good writing, can improve the viewer’s experience enormously. If you want to scale the peaks of the art form and achieve true artistic immortality (as opposed to mere commercial success), you must show excellence in both areas.

On the other hand, if you have good artwork without good writing you will probably end up with something like Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings; technically impressive but a commercial and artistic failure. (And no, I’m not blaming Tolkien for the incoherent screenplay.)
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“I wouldn’t say that writing is more important than art in animation…” says Ogiue Maniax.

Personally WOULD say that. In fact, I’ll say it right now. Writing IS more important than art in animation. If the writing is good enough you can get away with artwork that’s pretty bad. (It will probably be hailed as edgy, unconventional artwork that defies conventional notions of beauty.) On the other hand, if the writing is bad, the most beautiful artwork in the world won’t save it.

Consider: what’s the most successful American animated TV series ever? Obviously The Simpsons. Why do people watch it? For the witty, satirical writing. Let’s face it, the artwork is pretty crude. In fact, to call the character designs “crude” would be flattery.

What’s the second most popular American animated TV series currently on the air? Probably South Park. In this case the artwork isn’t too bad, considering that it’s obviously done by a bunch of sixth graders with a budget of $16.56 per episode. Nevertheless I’m pretty sure that most people tune in for the vulgar but hilarious writing.

I approached this series with a certain amount of apprehension. On the one hand, it’s widely regarded as a great classic. On the other hand, many people will tell you that it has a terrible ending–in fact it’s the series that inspired the term “Gainax ending” .

It actually wasn’t all that bad, and I’m prepared to give it a qualified recommendation. If you have watched lots of anime and consider yourself something of an expert, you really need to watch this, if only so as to know what the other fans are talking about. If you have only watched a few series you should watch this only if the description below really appeals to you–otherwise there are plenty of other series that you will enjoy more. If you have never watched any anime but you are curious about it, and somebody told you that this is the greatest series ever made, you should stay far away from it. If this is the first anime series that you watch, you will probably never watch another.
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I guess that after writing movies like Adaptation and Being John Malkovitch Charlie Kaufman decided that he wanted to do something really weird and surreal. The sort of movie where a character might decide to buy a house that happens to be on fire, then live in it for many years. Still on fire. (OK, I get it. It’s a metaphor for…something or other.)

Synecdoche, New York is extremely weird, sometimes hilarious and often confusing and disturbing. It tells the story of Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) a hypochondriac theater director in Schenectady, NY. He receives a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and decides to use the money to produce a play that will reveal some sort of universal truth about life, based of course on his own life. He rents a huge warehouse in New York City, hires a bunch of actors and begins the construction of a giant set that gradually seems to become a duplicate of the city outside. As the actors strive to portray Caden and the people he knows, the characters become more real than the real people they are based on and seem to take over their lives.

This doesn’t really do justice to it. The movie is actually much stranger and more surreal than my description suggests. This is definitely not going to be to everyone’s taste.

Still there may be a logical explanation for everything that happens, something that is hinted at but never confirmed.
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In any case there are many other possible interpretations and you are free to pick the one you like.

The standard formula for a movie comedy these days seems to involve thirty-something men who haven’t yet grown up. There is nothing particularly original about Role Models but it manages to be one of the funnier examples of the genre, with a satisfying balance of off-color humor and sentimentality.

At least in this case the heroes have jobs and don’t live with their parents. Danny (Paul Rudd) and Wheeler (Seann William Scott) work for a soft drink company, traveling from school to school lecturing the kids about drugs. “Remember, if somebody offers you drugs, just say ‘No thanks, I’m having a Minotaur!’”. (Minotaur is a powerful energy drink. It’s made from caffeine and ginseng, and it can turn your urine bright green.)

Wheeler is perfectly content with this life, but Danny is fed up. He’s disillusioned, depressed and angry, and he’s drunk enough Minotaur to anesthetize a bull. He ends up assaulting a cop and driving the Minotaurmobile into a statue.
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oni light novelNozomi Entertainment seems to have adopted a unique but sensible business model for importing anime. They look for a series of decent quality that has gone for several years without being licensed. Generally this will be a series with specialized appeal, not a blockbuster hit, but with a devoted following. Having licensed it (presumably at a bargain price) they release the entire season at once as an inexpensive thinpak box set. Generally they do this with subtitles only, since an English dub is by far the greatest expense in preparing an anime for U.S. distribution.

This is one of their latest offerings: a well-known series, beloved by some, snickered at by others, even the inspiration of a notorious parody. Naturally I couldn’t resist checking it out. I found it weirdly entertaining. I suppose the same could be said of many anime series, but this one is weirdly entertaining in its own very special way.
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ef–a tale of melodies provides a neat answer to one of the main objections that I raised to it’s predecessor ef–a tale of memories. Unfortunately it strikes me as the sort of answer that creates more problems than it solves.

oni visual novelApparently there are two identical-looking Japanese cities called “Otowa”, one in Japan and one in Australia. No explanation is provided as to how this came about; even the characters sound a bit disbelieving as they explain it. Did the Japanese, perhaps, decide to build duplicate cities when they colonized Australia in 1945?

This does indeed solve one major problem: we now learn that Kei lives in Japan while Chihiro lives in Australia. But the more I think about this the more problems I see. For example, both cities must have been devastated by earthquakes at about the same time, and rebuilt in the same way. How likely is that?

Furthermore Yuu Himura and his church have to exist in both cities simultaneously. Is he a supernatural being? Or does he have an identical twin brother?

Maybe this is all part of a brilliant master plan by the writers. On the other hand, maybe the writers just realized what a monstrous plot hole they had created when they first combined two separate visual novels into a single anime, and are now engaged in the wildest backfilling operation in history in an attempt to cover it up.

Happy-Go-Lucky is a mostly-cheerful, mostly-upbeat slice-of-life film featuring a character who is so perky that she at first seems rather annoying. After a while it becomes clear that she is deeper than that; the forced perkiness is one way she reacts when she is ill-at-ease.

‘Poppy’ (Sally Hawkins), a London elementary school teacher, has her bike stolen, but instead of getting upset about it she cheerfully decides to learn to drive. This leads to a series of slightly out-of-control lessons with a tightly-wound angry driving instructor (Eddie Marsan). In between we have interactions with her roommate and her sister, an over-the-top flamenco teacher, an angry young student, a babbling homeless man and a tall, handsome social worker.

That’s about it. There’s no real plot, just a portrait of an upbeat, unflappable young woman. For those who like this sort of thing it’s pretty good.

Rachel Getting Married turned out to be quite a bit darker than I expected. I’m not saying it’s bad–it’s actually a pretty good psychological drama, but you shouldn’t go in expecting to see some witty verbal sparring leading up to a warm feel-good ending.

Kym (Anne Hathaway) an affluent girl with a prescription drug problem, checks herself out of rehab and returns to the family home to participate in the wedding of her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt). Everyone greets her with guarded warmth, half expecting her to find a way to ruin the ceremony. These suspicions are justified. Kym may be clean and sober now, but she obviously hasn’t mastered the personal demons that led her to abuse drugs in the first place.
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The original poster didn’t include any information, but from internal evidence I conclude that this is located in the shopping district called Canal City Hakata in Fukuoka, Japan (a city in northern Kyushu).

Since my post on Japanese honorifics seems to have become pretty popular, I am going to post my notes on family titles. Once again, this is for the benefit of people who watch anime with subtitles but do not know Japanese, and who want to be able to pick up nuances that the subtitles leave out. (In dubbed versions these are totally lost.) This stuff will probably seem pretty elementary to long-time fans.

English, of course, has a number of family titles: words like “Mom”, “Dad”, “Grandma” etc. Japanese has many more of these, with numerous variations which can tell you quite a bit about the characters who use them. I won’t try to cover every possible title, but will focus on the most common ones heard in anime.
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Sometimes the popularity of an anime series can be measured by its longevity. In this case the original 1995 television season was followed by 5 movies, 2 OVAs and 3 more TV seasons, the latest of which has just finished broadcasting in Japan.

The longevity probably has as much to do with the strength of the stories’ setting as with the popularity of the characters. This sword-and-sorcery parody is set in a well-drawn fantasy universe, with stories that are comic, but just dark enough to hold an adult’s interest.

It is interesting to compare the first season to the latest effort. The visual style has changed over the years. The latest series looks different, largely because the anime industry has shifted from hand-drawn cel animation to all-digital techniques. Yet I think the most important difference–and the main reason to check out the first season if you haven’t already seen it–is in the writing. The first season is a lot funnier and tells a better story.
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The Duchess is a soap opera about the glamorous and scandalous lives of the rich and famous–though 200 years later almost no one remembers these particular celebrities.

17-year-old Georgiana Spencer (Keira Knightley) marries the rich and powerful Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes) but the marriage proves a disappointment. The Duke is cold and distant man who cares only about her ability to give him a son. Georgiana consoles herself with a glamorous lifestyle of fashion, parties, gambling and dabbling in Whig politics. Nevertheless she is devastated when her husband starts an affair with her best friend Bess Foster (Hayley Atwell).
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Click for larger images.

But I pose the question: “Why do the Japanese seem to erase the physical structures of the past rather than preserve them? Do the Japanese have a sense of nostalgia?” The West is a sentimental culture, in which one society uses previous ones as a point of reference. The West’s notion of progress inherently presumes that society is always building upon the past, like layers of sedimentary rock. So the Romans looked to ancient Greece, the Renaissance states looked to ancient Rome, and so on. The pantheon and Parthenon remain potent and well-preserved symbols of their civilizations. But the Japanese, rather than pamper their patrimony, have the habit of tearing down temples, shrines or massive gates that are hundreds of years old, only to immediately construct replicas.

“The ideal form of beauty for the Japanese is the cherry blossom,” says the Japanese fund manger, in perfect American-accented English. “It is temporary, impermanent. It is beautiful, but quickly disappears.” I accept his polite reply, but know that there must be more to it.

From The Economist.

From an office email
kami

Following the problems in the sub-prime lending market in America and the run on Northern Rock in the UK, uncertainty has now hit Japan. In the last 7 days Origami Bank has folded, Sumo Bank has gone belly up and Bonsai Bank announced plans to cut some of its branches. Yesterday, it was announced that Karaoke Bank is up for sale and will likely go for a song while today shares in Kamikaze Bank were suspended after they nose-dived. While Samurai Bank are soldiering on following sharp cutbacks, Ninja Bank are reported to have taken a hit, but they remain in the black. Furthermore, 500 staff at Karate Bank got the chop and analysts report that there is something fishy going on at Sushi Bank where it is feared that staff may get a raw deal.

Apparently this was originally from BBC News.

To begin with Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist has nothing at all to do with The Thin Man. On the other hand it does remind me of the screwball romantic comedies of the 1930s. There are significant differences though: the characters are somewhat younger; the music is different; and there’s this really gross running gag involving chewing gum…
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I suppose this was inevitable. Still, the picture creeps me out.

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.

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.

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