An hour of horrific life choices followed by twenty-five minutes of consequences with a miraculous rescue in the last five minutes. Happy it worked out for the couple, but I remember why I’ve never liked this movie.
The fact this movie is so popular makes me wonder if dominant American culture is just more optimistic than those with Asian cultural backgrounds. It felt hollow without consequences (aside from Ursula’s fate)
Maybe that’s why I’ve always been too timid to contemplate life as an entrepreneur? I don’t think folks would accuse me of having an abundance of moxie.
But dammit, Disney knows how to make song and dance numbers like nobody else! You go Sebastian!
Disney has a formula that works. It can get old, but they know what they’re doing.
Years ago, I had low expectations when I first watched this film. It easily cleared that bar.
Last week I came in with fond memories of first watch. It still easily cleared expectations, though I must admit to being biased for any film that extols the virtues of a cast iron frying pan.
Unlike many Disney films, Tangled doesn’t have a truly surreal standout musical moment, though the showtune at the Snuggly Duckling is awesome.
Also not to be missed is Rapunzel’s wildly fluctuating internal turmoil when she first touches grass.
Yet another classic Disney princess movie. No prince this time, but it’s got lush tropics, a demigod with animated tattoos, and a psychotic crab.
I wonder what a Pacific Islander thinks about the laundering of their culture for popular consumption. On my end, I’ve become more forgiving of appropriation of Chinese culture as mass media has become more diverse.
Maybe I’ve wearied of all the watching-over-your-shoulder critical theory overthinking of the past decade.
I just want to enjoy my time out.
In any case, Disney slammed their formula, with the nice twist of having a brown skinned world at the center of this movie.
When it isn’t featuring a psychotic crab in black light!
I came across this cult classic anime through a YouTube review. A few minutes in, I stopped the review to watch the two-hour film over three sessions.
If you want wild animation covering fast cars, a dude with a massive pompadour, cute girls, all manners of aliens, mechs, and crazy bionic monsters, you got it.
If you want a coherent story, you got it too! Just not very deep. A dude races a fast TransAm while hitting on a competitor as his mechanic deals with the mob.
As an almost entirely hand drawn film, it’s a love letter to a bygone era. It feels more comfortable in the late nineties than in the late-aughts. But with a production value that’s out the roof!
The surreal moments of slow-mo speed as the cars stretch in anticipation of the nitro hitting the engine are pure art. And I love the bold black shadow work throughout the film — it feels like Frank Miller’s comic finally made it to the big screen (I’ve never had the stomach to watch his Sin City movie).
The beauty of a cult classic as a commercial failure in the theater is that it’s now available on several free streaming platforms.
For the price of sitting through a few ads, you can’t go wrong (as long as you’re not expecting anything contemplative).
I’m not sold on the company in Emeryville dealing with internal matters. (I wasn’t hot on Inside Out either.)
But it was cool to have Jazz at the center of the movie.
And those quantum line Jerry’s in the other world were a helluva lot of fun. As I watch more animated films, I crave these I love these moments of visual absurdity. It’s not the best ROI, but a few moments of Jerry can redeem the rest of the time spent in a formulaic feature length film.
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I’m going to start a concerted push on here with my “Notes on My Consumption”. I don’t consume nearly as many books and movies as it might seem. I just decided to stop being so precious about these notes and flush out my three year back log!
The art is lovely, the story is evocative, but it brings up a problem I’ve noticed in some graphic novels — density.
It’s short story in a book format. Nothing wrong about that, but it left me feeling a little empty. One might argue that Dahm preserved liminal spaces for the reader to insert themselves, but I’m not yet ready to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Part of the problem may be that it’s a serialized piece of fiction. Maybe the openness was to make room for the author to infill in future volumes.
Still, this book is a fun read, worth checking out at the library. Maybe my opinion will shift after I’ve read volumes 2 and 3. I’ve put them on hold at the library, it’s certainly earned that.
The knives in our house were ridiculously dull, so I finally took took to the internet. YouTube did not fail*.
As with any varied collection of DIY videos, I was confronted with a conflicting advice that could have frozen me to inaction**. I could have been intimidated by my lack of good equipment. Fortunately, the knives were so dull I was forced to do something.
I started with 5 pounds of pressure**** on each side. Try putting that much pressure on a kitchen scale. No joke. Once a blade was back to mediocre, I ran descending passes (ten to one) on both sides of knife on both sides of the whetstone — 220 in total for this second phase.
Repeat that process for a house full of knives. My forearms were sore***** the next day.
But I had a meat cleaver that could cut paper******.
**On the other hand, the algorithm fed me videos sharpening the silliest things, like a cardboard box. At least my knives were made of metal.
***Two years later and I’m still using our cheap whetstone. I should spend a $40 Japanese whetstone to see what I’m missing. But that would force me to buy at least one knife that cost as much as the stone…and that’s how the damn hedonic treadmill gets started.
****Burrfection recommends against putting so much weight on a knife while grinding. Pick your poison.
*****I now use my legs in an extremely shallow “bow and arrow stance” to shift my whole body back and forth, minimizing the effort in my arms. That’s about the extent of my martial arts now.
******After writing the initial draft, I chopped up a batch of bad apples for composting. Wow, the new knives were scary sharp. I didn’t notice the seeds as I sliced through the cores.
*******I sharpen the kitchen knives about every other month whenever my wife makes a big meat purchase from Costco. I don’t know how we lived years with such dull blades.
Two years ago, I wrote these sentences to start my notes:
Awesome psychological thriller anime by the legendary director. Highly recommended, available for free (with ads) on Funimation.
All that I remember now:
That was a fucking crazy show.
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Paranoia Agent hit my key checkboxes at the time.
Genera fiction: Detective, Fantasy, Slice of Life, Horror. A collage with everything.
Auteur: Narrative told in a quirky way with an open ended resolution.
Weird: A crazy story that toys with artistic effects and taps my favorite gimmick — busting the fourth wall.
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If you haven’t seen anything by Satoshi Kon before, here is a 1 minute short to whet your appetite.
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Since this was the last piece of Satoshi Kon’s catalog, I should rank his major. It happens to follow the path of heartwarming at the top to darkness at the bottom. But Perfect Blue is still better than almost any other anime film you could watch, it’s a classic like Jin-Roh and competes with the best in Ghibli’s catalog. All are highly recommended.
Tokyo Godfathers
Millennium Actress
Paranoia Agent
Paprika
Perfect Blue
Here is an hour long retrospective of his catalog.
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Paranoia Agent is a wacky piece, but after watching a couple reviews of the series on YouTube, I agree that it falls in in line with the rest of Satoshi Kon’s catalog.
It’s a mind bending animation that explores the intersection of delusion and media. Kon explores the idea that our brains and our realities exist on different planes which are mediated by mass media. As one review said, it’s an “animated fever dream”.
However, I heard two critiques that are worth countering.
Someone wondered on a podcast if Satoshi Kon lost control along the way. I agree that Kon plays a high wire act where everything spins all over the place. Midway through the series you’re praying that it all comes back together. But he never lost command of the story. The trajectory could have ended badly but he pulled it off.
Also another reviewer thought that a couple of the tangents felt like filler. At a macro level, any narrative could be boiled down to a simple sentence, but the reviewer didn’t mention which episodes could be cut. Since nothing felt like filler to me, I’d say that the show hit its 13 episode length perfectly. This was an expansive, twisted universe that didn’t overstay its welcome.
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Here is the my ranking of the anime series I had watched:
Mindbending favorites: Space Dandy, Paranoia Agent
Fun Classics: Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Hilda
Almost Classic: Arcane, Cyberpunk Edgerunners
Decent with weaknesses: Kids on the Slope, Kipo and the Wonderbeasts, Terror in Resonance
WTF, but still worth watching: Neo Genesis Evangelion
Flawed with a few great moments: Carole and Tuesday
Honorable Mention (no storyline): Love Death + Robots
Will I watch rewatch Paranoia Agent anytime soon? I doubt it. I moved on after spending a couple of days scrolling through YouTube commentaries. It takes a lot for me to commit to longform media — my protestant work ethic doesn’t allow me to do regularly indulge in such unproductive activities, even if I already know I’ll love it.
If I were to rewatch anything on that list, it would be Space Dandy. That show hits all the wild stuff with a comedic edge, which my wimpy self prefers over the light horror of Paranoia Agent.
Ultimately, both Paranoia Agent and Space Dandy are great works that routinely surprised me. More often than not, I’d end an episode with my jaw agape, OMG what did I just see?! That wuz fucking Brilliant!?!!
What more can you ask for at 22 minutes a pop?
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If all this didn’t do it for you, then at least check out the opening and ending credits that was played for each of the shows, with music by the incomparable Susumu Hirasawa (who also composed the excellent Paprika soundtrack)