Rynling R&D

Asteroid City made me want to punch Wes Anderson in the face. I got up to use the bathroom somewhere around the one hour mark and didn't go back. It was a good decision.

I have a friend who saw the movie on the same day in a different city. She said a fire alarm went off toward the end, and everybody seemed happy to be able to leave the theater.

What I think this movie is trying to do is celebrate the craft and ingenuity of stage plays, but that sort of anti-Hollywood statement feels insincere when your cast is filled with superstars like Tom Hanks. I feel like, if you're going to make a movie, then you should at least try to make use of your medium instead of being precious. The reduced picture size and lo-fi resolution of Asteroid City were especially twee and annoying.

Idk man. I was promised Jeff Goldblum, and my expectations were not met. Fuck this movie.

Blue Thermal (available to watch on YouTube here) is a lighthearted sports anime movie about a college aviation club. The protagonist, Tamaki, is a ditzy freshman who means well but lacks self-confidence. She’s scouted by the mature and handsome aviation club leader Kuramochi, who’s impressed by her preternatural skill at piloting a glider.

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In the end, Blue Thermal is a pleasant way to pass an hour and a half. Not much happens, but that’s okay. The animation is lovely, and not every story has to be exciting or profound.

Pompo The Cinéphile (available on YouTube here) is an anime movie about an aspiring director who makes a debut movie that is exactly 90 minutes long.

Pompo The Cinéphile is set in Nyallywood. The main characters are drawn with a cute anime style, while the supporting cast is drawn in a more realistic style. This necessitates a moderate level of suspension of disbelief. For example, the genius film producer "Pompo" is actually named Joel Davidovich, and why he?/she? is stylized as a cute anime girl is just something you're going to have to roll with. Meanwhile, the aspiring director Gene Fini uses some of the most overtly Japanese body language I've ever seen in an anime, even though he (and everyone else in the movie) is supposed to be American. This is also not something you should worry about.

I have to be honest and admit that the first and last ten minutes are rough. In the first ten minutes, we follow the genius producer Pompo as she works on the set of a summer monster movie, and there are a lot of tits, ass, and panty shots played for laughs. In the last ten minutes, a few characters give earnest and impassioned anime-boy speeches while nondiegetic pop music plays in the background, and this was so cringe that I had to mute the sound while reading the subtitles at 2x speed. Thankfully, everything in between is relatively chill and interesting.

If you don't think about anything too hard, Pompo The Cinéphile is a really fun movie. It reminds me a lot of the Satoshi Kon movie Paprika, in that it's very meta and very stylish and very beautifully animated. Unlike Paprika, Pompo The Cinéphile is a comedy. I'm not sure that kids are the target audience, but there's zero murder and no sexuality (aside from the childish jokes at the beginning). Also, Pompo The Cinéphile is 100% correct about 90 minutes being the perfect length for a movie, and it's exactly 90 minutes long itself. Bless.

I didn’t enjoy Glass Onion as much as I enjoyed Knives Out. This was for purely personal reasons, those reasons being that I love Gothic stories about old houses and that I find both Ana de Armas and Chris Evans to be extremely attractive. Still, I enjoyed Glass Onion a whole lot.

Content warning for spoilers. Nothing explicit, but best to be on the safe side.

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I didn't want to pay actual money for Haruki Murakami's book of essays about t-shirts, so I got it from the library.

Not ten pages in, Murakami talks about how much he loves America, and then he makes a joke about how fat Americans are. I guess, if you don't have the slim and sexually charged body of a preadolescent twelve-year-old girl, you have a weak character and there's something wrong with you.

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Idk, there are a lot of male film critics talking about how brilliant Everything Everywhere All at Once is, and there are a lot of women being very quiet. And that's how I feel about the Murakami t-shirt book, namely, that it's probably best not to talk about everything that's going on there.

I held off on watching The Green Knight because the trailer is stupid and all the reviews I read were unfavorable, but I finally sat down with it this weekend. It's fantastic. I think it's comparable to Crimson Peak in three ways:

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TLDR: The Green Knight probably isn't for everyone, but it is very much for me.

Earlier this week I realized that my husband has never watched anything from Studio Ghibli. He enjoys movies, but he’s in his forties and comes from a country where there hasn’t been a culture of anime fandom until relatively recently. He really likes the Makoto Shinkai movies we’ve watched, which he calls “documentaries about Japan,” so I thought that Whisper of the Heart would probably be the best Studio Ghibli movie to show him. He loved it.

I loved it too. It’s been about ten years since I last saw it, and I was not expecting it to hit as hard as it did.

Whisper of the Heart is about a middle-school girl named Shizuku who loves reading. Shizuku checks out books from the local library, and she’s noticed that there’s another kid’s name on almost all of the library borrower cards inside the covers of the books she reads. She ends up meeting this boy, who is her age but wants to study the craft of violin making in Italy instead of matriculating to high school. Inspired by his determination to follow his dream, Shizuku decides to follow her own dream of writing a fantasy novel.

Shizuku gets really absorbed in her writing. She tells a friend that she has no appetite because she’s too preoccupied with the novel, and then she eats shortbread cookies so she can stay awake while she’s writing in the evening. She stops hanging out with her friends after school so that she can fantasize about the novel while walking home. She only puts in the bare minimum of work necessary to get by at school, and her grades drop. She gets explosively irritated when people interrupt her while she’s writing. When she’s done with the story, she gets super neurotic about feedback. She cries a lot.

I was just sitting there, like, “Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god.”

How dare Hayao Miyazaki come into my house and call me out like this.

Mai Mai Miracle is a pastel-colored anime movie about two sweet little girls who live in the countryside in the 1950s and have sweet little adventures while fantasizing about another sweet little girl who might have lived in the same town during the Heian period. They go on walks, run through the fields, build a dam with some other kids, and raise a wild goldfish, and it's all very lovely and gentle until...

...about fifteen minutes before the movie ends, the father of one of the kids hangs himself after his wife finds out that he was having an affair with a bar hostess in a neighboring port town, and the sweet little group of children breaks up, presumably to never see each other again.

I was not expecting that.

On the other hand, I appreciate the movie's lack of formal structure. I'm starting to get to the point where I find formal structure artificial and annoying, and this has made watching most American movies difficult.

People can read and watch what they want, of course, but I personally think "plot" is overrated.

I suspect this is one of the reasons I enjoy fanfic so much. I am here for the ideas and the characters and the worldbuilding and the quality of the writing. Who cares about the plot?

I dislike musicals; but, other than the singing, the Steven Universe movie is fantastic. I cried a lot, and it was cathartic. There was a lot of internet discourse surrounding the central conflict, and some of it was very, very smart. My own opinion is that everything everyone has said is valid.

Steven Universe Future is also good. Some of the episodes are very on the nose about “life lessons,” but it’s actually useful to see models of different responses to relatable situations. I feel like a lot of the cartoons I watched as a kid involved “morals” concerning why different nationalities are evil, so it’s nice to finally have access to a sincere treatment of how to handle scenarios like “being honest with yourself about an invitation you extended to someone out of obligation even though you knew it would make you feel weird.”

The artwork is ridiculously gorgeous. I’ve started rewatching the movie and new episodes with the sound off so that I can appreciate the visuals on their own, and it’s been filling me with inspiration and creative energy.

Between the impeachment proceedings, JK Rowling finally being held publicly accountable for her transphobic bullshit, and the new season of Steven Universe, I feel like some sort of awful curse is gradually being lifted.

There's a scene with Ana de Armas and Chris Evans at the end of Knives Out (it's a spoiler, but you'll know it when you see it) that lasts maybe two or three seconds longer than it needs to, and it is amazing.

Given the role of Chris Evans in the story, there's no way I can refer to the scene without spoiling it, but let's just say that I'm starting to understand how the subtle framing and editing decisions in the newest Star Wars trilogy have influenced a lot of people to ship Reylo.

I think I'm starting to figure out what Rian Johnson is about lol.

Anyway, I'm going to wait a month to write about this movie.

Spoiler: I loved everything about it.