nenena: (Default)
Other than movies related to long-running anime series, or "movies" that consisted of a series of experimental shorts (hello Amazing Nuts!), Paprika and Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo ("The Girl Who Leapt Through Time") were the two biggest true anime movies last year. Well, them and Gedo Senki. But Gedo Senki was powerfully un-good, so we won't waste time discussing it in this post, since it's already been criticized to death all over the internet. Anyway, what's interesting about Paprika and TokiKake is that they're both based on classic science fiction novels by the same author, Tsutsui Yasutaka.

And I watched them both last week for the first time. So here are my jumbly-thoughts about both.

Paprika. Cut for vague plot-related spoilers, and explicit romance-related spoilers. But if you don't care about knowing who will hook up with who (hint: it's obvious from the beginning), go ahead and read! )

Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo. No spoilers. )
nenena: (Default)
I saw Pirates of the Caribbean 3 tonight. I can't sort out my thoughts about it properly yet, but I will say one thing:

Barbossa RULED this movie. He just did. The whole darn movie was basically two and a half hours of Barbossa being awesome, and that was just fine by me. It was about five minutes into the movie that I realized that Barbossa had suddenly catapulted himself to the status of my favorite character, and he stayed that way all the way through to the end.

Other non-spoilery bits:

Elizabeth was about 300% more awesome in this movie than in the previous two.

DOGGIE! Seeing the return of the shaggy dog literally made the entire movie for me. Those of you who know me know that I have this gigantic hang-up about dogs in movies... As in, if a dog dies, I bawl uncontrollably for hours. I mean, I bawled when a dog died toward the beginning of Jaws. So when I saw the end of PoC II and the poor dog's fate was left hanging in the air... Well, I was kind of beside myself. I've been angsting about that poor dog for an entire year, hoping that maybe his fate would be resolved in PoC II. And it was. And that made me very happy. Yay!

Okay, that's it for the non-spoilery bits. Maybe a longer post with spoilers later.

Oh, and one final thing: PoC III = More, and more egregious, retcons than X3 and Spiderman III combined. Okay, granted, it's kind of hard to top "Your uncle's REAL killer!!" and "She had multiple personality disorder this whole time!" as far as egregious retcons go. But Pirates comes darn close. Those of you who have seen or been spoiled for the movie, you probably know what I'm talking about.

Edit May 28th: Oh yeah, and icky, icky race issues. I heard - and I can't confirm where, but somehow I doubt it's not true - that the producers actually but Chow Yun Fat in yellow face because he didn't look "exotic" enough. And Tia Dalma especially was a big giant Magical Negro.. Well, at least she was until the very end. Without spoiling too much: In the end, instead of helping out the white characters, Tia Dalma basically gives them a giant epic supernatural "Fuck you!" Which was kind of awesome.
nenena: (Default)
Lawsons + Spiderman 3 promotion = win. Lawsons is selling "Black Karaage" and "Red Karaage" in order to tie in with the Spiderman 3 movie. I'm sorry that they don't have a picture of the Red Karaage on the website linked above. But suffice to say, the Red Karaage looks all heroic and cuddly, whereas the Black Karaage looks appropriately menacing.

I tried some of the Black Karaage today. It was liberally coated with black pepper and onion and garlic, and was quite delicious. I think that the Red Karaage is actually the normal "Spicy Karaage" just re-packaged, but I'm not sure. A taste test is in order, I think.