gankutsuou: spelling???

Gankutsuou: the Count of Monte Cristo: anime series

so if you like dumas, and you like space, and you like to have your brain washed by subliminal messages hidden in cartoon clothing patterns, this series is definitely for you.

i really liked it, sort of. i do have possibly unjustifiable reservations. the reservations stem from the fact that, though much of my disposable income goes toward procuring manga, i don't know japanese culture, and i don't speak japanese at all, and so some stuff in it was a little incomprehensible to me, but probably not actually incomprehensible at all. from an outsider's perspective, i didn't always quite get the point of what was going on. but this is all from an outsider's perspective, so just preface every sentence to come with "to my undereducated american eye."

things i liked: there were a lot of really good moments, heart-wrenching stuff and dramatic stuff. a comparison to buffy was even in order when things got darkest--and that is the holy grail of t.v. praise coming from me. i also really liked eugenie. and i think that the turning of dumas's french politics into gankutsuou's imaginary space french politics was pretty damn well done--detailed and nuanced and interesting. also, great titles music.

things i didn't like: it got a little self-involved at times--i think. more interested in showing cool pictures than making a plot happen. again, i think. this is the part where, you know, any knowledge of japanese culture at all would come in handy for me. like it's possible that the parts i thought were kind of self-indulgent might have been metaphors that i didn't understand, etc.

things that i don't know if i thought they were good but i did think they were AWESOME: hmm. giant robot duels--as crow t. robot might say, giant robot duels are the kind of padding i like to see in a film! no matter that it's a space retelling of a classic french novel. throw in giant robots. just throw them in. please. NOW. and all the homosexuality: thank you. thank you for...oh, god, there is no such thing as too much depiction of that relationship between the young men and their older male--what was the term sailor moon used in a similar situation? role models, that's it. role models. also the animation style, with the graphemes that stood still as the clothing they filled in moved: i don't think i was the person who was being subliminally messaged by that clothing, but if i was, i'm sorry for taking down whatever communist government i took down while i thought i was sleeping.

in short, it was a really good retelling of the french novel the count of monte cristo...in japanese...in space...with aliens and giant robots and a vengeful space-mask-spirit instead of a rebellious but holy friar and a vampiric zombie edmond dantes.

Iron Man 2: return of the confusing yet delightful plot sequence

Iron Man 2: movie starring robert downey jr., gwyneth paltrow, and plenty of others, some of whom look amazing in catsuits but i'm not naming any names but oh my god

i've heard that certain message boards on the internet are (or were) at war on the subject of iron man 2: hot or not? my personal opinion: pretty hot.

scarlett johansson was in a catsuit some of the time.

that's neither here nor there. and it's not like i disagree with those who assert that the plot is a big mess. and i like terrence howard better than don cheadle (in the part of rhodey, at least). but, okay, some movies are about big life stuff, seminal events in their characters' histories, and other movies are about watching robert downey jr. act a part that he does really really well. iron man 2, to me, is about one stressful-butt week in the life of tony stark--the threads don't come together, and they could have to make a better movie, but...

at the risk of repeating myself, scarlett johansson was in a catsuit some of the time.

that's neither here nor there. at the risk of repeating myself, sometimes LIFE doesn't come together into neat interconnecting strands until years after the stressful week in question. i realize that these characters aren't real, but the way that iron man 2 imitates life isn't invalid, to my understanding. now, this particular imitation of life might not have been what we in the criticism biz call "on purpose" on the film's creators' part*. iron man 2 threw a lot of material at the viewing audience, and didn't necessarily tell us how to process it.

but, yeah, i liked it. i'd be being a douchebag if i said i didn't like it, if i tried to make myself not like it because i thought it didn't come up to my personal standards of plotmaking qualityness. and the liking of it didn't leave a bad aftertaste in my mouth as my liking kick ass did.

also robert downey jr. is so awesome. all the principals are awesome. i didn't like don cheadle like i liked terrence howard, but he did do a good job.

and scarlett johansson may or may not be in a catsuit for some of the time. i mean, she doesn't look bad in it, you know. whatever, really. oh god.


*yeah, i'm not in the criticism biz and i have no idea what things are called.

How to Train Your Dragon, or, how dreamworks has gots one job but it does it well

How to Train Your Dragon: pixillated movie starring vikings

just as a side note, i begin to despair, i am afraid, of ever marketing this blog with any real success. bah. these capitalist pigdogs who advertise for writers on craigslist are not looking for a snarky yet sensitive movie reviewer with no formal experience. bah bah. will i ever make money at writing anything? in the words of rammstein in their song du hast, "NEIN!"

anyway, how to train your dragon. what can i say? i really really liked it. i don't like it more than shrek II, because shrek II is one of my favorite movies period, but i think i liked it as well as up. because up was wonderful, but also a little corny and random, while how to train your dragon was less touching and more cliched, but the cliches it employed were employed VERY SUCCESSFULLY.

the question, in fact, of how something can be cliched and successful at the same time was brought up at one point in the post-movie discussion. what it boils down to, for me, is that, at the risk of being proved extremely wrong, i feel like there are very few things that can be good without having a solid basis in cliche. i feel like a lot of stuff we're supposed to swallow as good is simply considered good because it's not cliched, and the lack of cliche is its main weakness, because its creators were so busy concentrating on not falling into any cliches that they didn't bother to concentrate on making the production itself worthwhile. it's cliched to say that cliches are cliches because they're true, but that little example of circularity kind of just represents what i'm talking about. cliches might not be true, but they're the most solid representations of whatever they represent available at the cultural moment they exist within. not necessarily the best representations, but, as how to train your dragon proves, when done right, cliches are certainly up there among the best representative tools available.

the strength of the whole dreamworks shrek-vein production aesthetic is that it doesn't just acknowledge its cliched-ness, but frolics about within its cliches more than an elderly woman in a bed of noodles in an intensely irritating robin williams vehicle. i mean, there's nothing in how to train your dragon that we haven't seen before: misunderstood shrimpy kid, by dint of his immense powers of careful observation and mechanical tinkerage, saves his village and his pet from disaster, and wins the heart of the blonde. but it's a superb example of this movie that we all know.

just as an example: we all know, coming into the theater, that if the main character is shrimpy and filled with wisecracks and mishaps, he's eventually going to prove his bravery against impossible odds, odds that have defeated brawnier and less wisecracky men. what he thought were his weaknesses will be proved his strengths. from heidi to mannequin*, this story has been found timeless, and for good reason: we like our losers to come out on top, and never tire of the irony behind the idea that weaknesses may be strengths. how to train your dragon follows this formula faithfully. but usually in this type of movie, the hero suddenly turns into a skinny badass with either/both the donning of some sort of armor or/and a "let's get serious" montage. in how to train your dragon, they're pretty careful to show that hiccup always was kind of a badass, with or without a montage. like, he's genuinely interested in the work of figuring out what dragons do and don't like and how to get along with them--he's not just using dragons to get ahead with his peers; rather, his success in class is a guiltily gratifying side affect of his research, but the research was more than enough for him in the first place. despite similarities in their constructions, this, the love of learning for its own sake, the genuine badassery of being interested in something one is good at and has thought of first, is not the idea that gets produced within the viewer by weird science--it's not the affect of tron--it's really not the affect of any zero to hero movie i can remember seeing as such**--and it's awesome! i mean, seriously! thank you, dreamworks! and this wasn't the only cliche that was subtly torqued in order to be thoughtfully done, to be done well. they were all done well.

as another example (this edit courtesy of the fact that i just saw the movie again last night) of cliches that how to train your dragon did right, the "strong pretty girl" is turning into quite the cliche herself in moviedom. she's a really good idea, don't get me wrong, but when you get someone like athena's daughter-girl in percy jackson and the spiders from mars (whose eyes weren't even that gray, come on!), you realize that the trickle-down theory works about as well in characterization as it does in economics (that was pointed but really really outdated). she walks! she talks! she fights! she drives a car! she has a line or two! and, in something like the words of marc bolan, "she gets cgi on her...she gets cgi...." but there's nothing else going on there. literally. we feel like we have to like the strong pretty girl, because she's proving that girls are able to be strong while being pretty--go girls! but we do, secretly, feel that these female characters are just about as devoid of meaning as they used to be. except that we feel bad making fun of them for it. the jessica biel character in blade III is another good example of this sort of smoking-hotttt-but-idiotic characterization (not jessica biel herself, nor her acting job, but the way she's written in the script)--dare i call it "the wonder woman phenomenon," when i only know periphoral stuff about comic books? eh, i'll do it. that's what the internet is for: random claims about random stuff that one doesn't particularly understand, made with style. i'll be expounding on my several theories about crop circles any entry now (that was a joke).

BUT, in how to train your dragon, strong pretty girl was actually strong and pretty. again, a person can think of a thousand examples in which the pretty girl is wanted both by the musculaturated male and the shrimpy guy--or a person can think of a thousand examples of the pretty girl not wanting the shrimpy guy until he proves himself worthy of her interest--but these examples do not often do justice to the pretty girl (hughes' some kind of wonderful is just leaping to mind as a movie that does not do justice to the pretty girl). the strong pretty girl is even worse, because she despises the shrimpy guy due to his lack of being like her, and often pummels him with vigor. but astrid has REASONS for both pummeling and ignoring hiccup: she takes her fighting seriously, and, more importantly, she takes herself seriously. this is the essence of the strong pretty girl cliche, i think, and i really like it. she doesn't dislike hiccup because she percieves him as weak or not cool or not attractive--she dislikes him because she's interested in fighting dragons for all the right reasons (shouldering her parents' responsibility) and she knows, vaguely, that he's interested in it for all the wrong ones (getting a girlfriend). she's also jealous of him, because, like with his success in dragon training being a guiltily gratifying side-affect of the ramifications of his personality, the acclaim of society for her dragon-fighting talents is more important to her than she realizes before it gets taken away--you could read her as being kind of mad at herself as well as mad at him. anyway. she's INTERESTING, is what it about boils down to. with someone like jasmine from alladin, you mostly think "tiny waist, feisty personality--i don't know about you, but i want to go to there." but astrid's got more going on. anyway.

so, yeah. i really liked it. also i liked the soundtrack. i thought it was real good. and as far as regional orchestration goes, thanks for hitting the fifes a little harder than the bagpipe side of things, soundtrack dudes. also the voice acting was AWESOME. it was really, REALLY quality. jay baruchel baruch-excelled. america ferrara was amerzingly ferrabulous. yeah. every one of them was so damn good. i wish i had the brain capacity to remember more than two names, because they all rocked.

and toothless was freaking adorable. i am almost too ashamed to admit this, but my longing exceeds my shame--i want the plush toy. real bad. i want a giant one to use as a back pillow. i know tiny children are making them for three cents a day.

as rammstein would say, "dort an klavier; lauschte ich ihr." yeah, i have no idea what that means.

*these are really terrible examples--that is, heidi isn't a good example of this phenomenon, and mannequin is far too...unique...to be a good example of much of anything, except of the way that kim cattral looks in a terrycloth bandeau.

**it's also not the effect of i was a teenage werewolf. but this may be somewhat beside the point.