alexsarll | Entries tagged with ghibli

London life appears to be cycling up again, the diary filling and the weeks of temperance (through illness or lack of event, not some talismanic fool belief in detox) coming to an end; if doubt remains, then you always know for sure that it's kicking off again once you're stood in the back room of the Wilmington watching giant robots fight off space dinosaurs with the help of indie rock. Back to the clubs and pubs and dinner parties - and back to Kentish Town. Did ever a district combine side street charm with high street horror to such an extent? Four places I wanted to go before Ale Meat Cider - one simply failed me, and three were on unscheduled shutdown (one by the fire brigade). In the meantime, I've been reading, and putting the new Necron list throught its paces on the tabletop*, and relishing Gregg Araki's Kaboom, which mixes his usual polymorphous perversity with apocalyptic conspiracy and creative swearing, and less so Arrietty which is, like every non-Miyazaki Ghibli film I've seen, faintly disappointing. The visual richness, the gardens into which you just want to melt, are present and correct - but the characters and the plot just feel a little...conventional, up until an ending which is at once conventional and not even a logical conclusion of what has gone before.

And, most importantly, I've been to the Isle of Wight with

xandratheblue. Yes, it's still definitely England, even if it's not Great Britain, but it's my first time overseas in years, or with her. So we meandered around the island on a bus that seemed to be the equivalent of the Circle Line if it had a view and was faintly reliable, and saw clicking owls and cartwheeling monkeys and a Roman mosaic of a cock-headed man (NOT LIKE THAT), and stayed in a hotel on a lake, and because she's a city girl she seemed almost as excited to have rabbits and sheep pointed out from the train window as to travel on a hovercraft. Though it was noticeable that the other passengers were a lot more subdued on the return trip, presumably because of the Costa Concordia footage on the screens in the waiting room. I don't know why, given we were using a totally different means of transport and the captain wasn't Italian. Though in his shoes I wouldn't have been able to resist a loud 'Mamma mia!' or two within earshot of the nervous travellers.

*With most pleasing results, except against Blood Angels.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Stupid Hoe - Nicki Minaj

The TV version of The Walking Dead is very, very well-done but - for my purposes - entirely pointless. I'm way further on in the story than this early, funny stuff. I want to know what happens to Rick next, not see a variant edition of what happened to him way back when. Perhaps if the comic ever ends and I'm not getting my regular fix, I'll come back and watch the DVDs, but for now? Surplus to requirements. Obviously I'm glad it exists, earning the creators money and getting new people into the comic, and I'm not faulting the craftsmanship, but I won't be persevering, and I suspect that after this experience I also won't be bothering with the TV Game of Thrones.

It was a good weekend for picnics, but I also made one deeply peculiar trip to Acton (which is essentially a small provincial town that happens to be on the Tube). I assumed the pub the Indelicates were playing would be something like the Windmill, but it was a quiet, wooden pub downstairs with the gig in a function room up top, and at first I thought I had inadvertently wandered into a private party for children. I briefly thought I might not be the oldest person there, before realising that the chap with the impressive 'tache was the promoter's dad, and he was going downstairs for a nice quiet pint. The supports were both fairly generic, but that's forgivable in teenagers, and they had good enough voices that hey, maybe in two bands' time they'll be worth another listen. I got ID'd, simply because they were IDing everyone, but my weary, disbelieving glare was apparently sufficient proof of age, so I got my black wristband OK. The DJs did play some young people's music, but a lot of it was stuff like Cornershop, which I suppose is the same to them as the Clash were for clubs in my teens. And then there was the bit where a girl who didn't like the moshing came to stand with us, and we were a bit puzzled at the proximity until we realised she was swallowing her pride and going to stand with the grown-ups where it was calmer...I mean, as if I hadn't been feeling old enough already from having met my Cthulhuchild in the afternoon (and presented him with a cuddly Cthulhu - you know how some third-rate religions don't like their deities depicted? That's 'cos those religions' deities know they don't look cool enough). And it hit me during conversation with Simon that I have now lived for longer than there was between the end of World War II and my birth. Bloody Hell.
So the set...I think it was the first time I've seen 'Roses' live, and it didn't disappoint. Given the crowd I was surprised they didn't play 'Sixteen' or 'We Hate The Kids' (even though these were clearly nice kids, they could have done with the warning about their peers and their future). The absence of 'Jerusalem', though, made perfect sense, given most of the crowd would have been too young to vote in last May's debacle.
In summary: dear heavens I felt old. But cool old. Mostly.

The Runaways is not entirely free of the standard rock biopic and My Drug Hell tropes. But coming straight after attempts to watch Synechdoche, New York and Outkast's Idlewild, both of which have a bit of novel surface detail but are otherwise almost wholly cliche, it at least felt lively. Yes, I may be biased in favour of a film which has scenes of punked-up, drugged-up sapphism set to songs from the first Stooges album, but I still wouldn't have expected two Twilight alumni* to be quite so convincing as Joan Jett and Cherie Currie. Svengali Mick Foley isn't bad, either. Well, he is - he's a diabolical sleazeball, but still someone I could see myself taking as a management guru, especially when his heckler drill for the girls in the band is so reminiscent of the wrenches scene from Dodgeball.

*Of whom Dakota Fanning was also Satsuki in Totoro, which when you see her using her impossible platform boots to crush up pills for ease of snorting, and inevitably looking like a great ad for drugs while she does it, is really quite wrong.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: '39 - Queen

...which title I pick not just because the song's been stuck in my head since Saturday's Prom Night, but because the first issue of Grant Morrison's 'Superman Beyond 3D' is the comic I was hoping and expecting Final Crisis would be. Only in one spread does the 3D effect have quite the same mind-twisting force as it did in the Blazing World scenes of Alan Moore's Black Dossier, but even if for the rest of the issue it's just a gimmick then hey, 3D is a pretty cool gimmick. And this...this is what I want from a Grant Morrison Event. Dead worlds! Limbo! Dr Manhattan with the serial numbers filed off! Cross-time lunacy and alternate heroes and giant crashing spaceships and only Superman left to save the day. It's as if Levitzseid has got Grant enchained at the heart of his monstrous engine of destruction, perverting his mighty Morrison powers in the furtherance of DC's Anti-Fun Equation...but Grant's too good to go down without a fight, and so by some ludicrous contrivance freed an aspect of himself to write a good Final Crisis comic.
The second best comic of last week, incidentally, was the conclusion to Book One of Warren Ellis' Doktor Sleepless. Just when I was worried we were getting a Planetary-style loss of focus, it turns out that the mysticism and the techno-evangelism have a perfectly sensible reason for being in the same book. I think we were perhaps meant to come away from the book with the idea that Doktor Sleepless is not the hero after all; personally, I'm backing him all the way.

Speaking of mad science: never mind the cure for cancer - isn't unlocking telomere structure the first step on the road to immortality in the Fall Revolution books?

Finally got round to watching Brokeback Mountain on Sunday - yes, I know, I fail at gay. I was a bit puzzled at first; I was expecting it to be one of those manly American buddy movies where you're thinking guys, just bone already - except then they do. But whether this was intended or not, I really didn't feel any chemistry off them until it happened. Which worked, I think. As did the scenery, obviously; I'm sure if that hadn't been so beautifully, expansively shot then the film would never have been able to cross over to the extent that it did. I wasn't convinced by the flashbacks - I thought they upset a flow which was otherwise brilliantly established - but otherwise, it's just such a well-judged film. Details which don't sit right at first (are the women being deliberately established as deadening forces, in the manner beloved of misogynist homosexuals?) come clear in time: it's not that the women are dead hands, it's that society is. A homophobic rural society especially, but not exclusively; even if Jack and Ennis had settled down somewhere nice and friendly just outside San Francisco, the mere fact of domesticity would mean what they had couldn't stay as pure as it was when it was born up on Brokeback Mountain.
(For another consideration of how uneasily passion sits in a mundane world, consider My Zinc Bed, which features excellent performances from Jonathan Pryce and Paddy Considine, and a rather strange accent from Uma Thurman. Of course, neither of these made me cry a fraction as much as Kiki's Delivery Service; I already know how malformed this world is, it's seeing the contrast of what a decent one would be like which breaks me down)

Current Mood: lame, in the literal sense
Current Music: We're Back - Heartbreak

I'd never really considered the state of Japan in the forties, but David Peace's Tokyo Year Zero makes a plausible case for it not being very much fun. The characters are more damaged than those in Peace's The Damned Utd; the police system in which they operate makes The Wire look decadently overfunded and The Shield feel like a community relations masterclass. Unusually for a politically-engaged historical work these days, no contemporary resonance seems intended - perhaps because to do so would imply support for the Iraq war, although the relentless, incantatory squalor of it all reminds us all how much is sacrificed in the short term during even the most justified regime change. The one thing that has briefly managed to throw me out of the moment depicted is the presence of characters named Miyazaki and Nakamura. Common family names they may be in Japan, for all I know - but to me they have very specific holders.

Being intrigued by the glimpsed red-top headline "MUM OF 5 IS FIRST LESBIAN BIGAMIST" (and frankly, who wouldn't be), I felt obliged to investigate the story, which turned out to be rather desperate. But one of the participants being called Beddoes reminded me of the poet of the same name - "'Twas in those days
That never were, nor ever shall be, reader, but on this paper; golden, glorious days" - (himself less than entirely straight), whose aunt turns out to have been Maria Edgeworth. Of whom one contemporary divine said "I should class her books as among the most irreligious I have ever read ... she does not attack religion, nor inveigh against it, but makes it appear unnecessary by exhibiting perfect virtue without it ... No works ever produced so bad an effect on my mind as hers". Which even within the inglorious field of believing religion to be key to morality, must take some kind of biscuit. And to bring us back from there to the modern news - more fun with islamic dress. Which reminds me, can we maybe make Salman Rushdie a Lord? Or a secular saint? Please?

Current Mood: edge taken off life
Current Music: Melody (Extrait de Melody Nelson) - Serge Gainsbourg

The Cat Returns is the first non-Miyazaki Ghibli film I've seen (well, as far as I recall - it's quite possible some of the strange anime I half-remember from childhood afternoons was theirs). And this means that for most of the film I'm thinking, well, that was pretty good, but Miyazaki would have done it so much better. The way they move, the faces, nothing is quite in that perfect pitch he almost always manages. The lead has, I suppose, a certain similarity to the girl in his one mis-step, Spirited Away, in that she's far too much the whiny victim compared to Miyazaki's normal protagonists. And the plot...it feels too much like a dream, or an old fable, and these are subtly different forms to film, where the same structures will not suffice.
But by the end, these objections fall away - in part because the film seems to be getting the hang of itself more, but also because its charms are taking effect, and I realise that if it's not Miyazaki, it's still better than almost anyone else.

When I'm objecting to censorship demands made by scum, representatives of the Lost Left like to ask "Ah*, but what if there were a work of art which went against *your* values like that?" And I always say to them, well, there are plenty, none of which I want banned, and some of which are even really good. There are beautiful passages in the King James Bible, for instance (always helps to have Shakespeare on the translation team), and Hero may be a propaganda film for a vile state, but it's also a stunning piece of cinema. The film's message is that China's unity is paramount - there is a subtlety in how characters come to realise this, true, but its nonetheless made explicit that this excuses all manner of deaths and oppressions for the supposed Greater Good. And yet - the point may be vile, but it is never made artlessly. Within the film, it works. That may be a bubble world, a thought experiment which doesn't map on to the real world, but considered as art, it doesn't matter. The Chinese government and military approved of this film enough that it has 18,000 soldiers as extras - but considered as art, the main thing is that given they're playing soldiers (albeit of a much earlier era), this makes for some absolutely stunning massed scenes. And the smaller fights...you know how everyone got excited about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon even though the fight scenes had some really ropy effects? These are the fights those fights dream about being. They're jaw-dropping, they express character perfectly, and above all they are things of utter beauty.
So yes, it's poison. But art can be poison sometimes and still be wonderful.

Hoorah! Grant Morrison's Batman run has resumed! Boo! It's illustrated prose, and illustrated at that by some obviously computer-generated-in-a-really-nineties-way McKean wannabe. There are some great ideas in this tale of how the Joker's periodic self-reinventions work (and they have something to say about the world beyond the Batman and the Joker, which is where Alan Moore always says 'The Killing Joke' failed). But they would all have been much better expressed as, you know, a *comic*. And I've not seen Batman look less threatening since he was being played by George Clooney (who I still think, tragically, could now make a great Batman but will never get a second chance).

*Yes, delivered in the tones of Stewart Lee's Jesus. How did you guess?

Current Mood: lazy
Current Music: The Story Of The Blues (Pts 1 & 2) - Wah