*** Mushi-shi
*** The Girl who Played with Fire
**** Downton Abbey
*** The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

E and I saw the live-action movie of Mushi-Shi at SIFF a few years back and enjoyed it. This animated series was the original, which explains why the movie is sort of disconnected and episodic. In the series, each episode is largely standalone — a mystery which Ginko the Bugmaster must somehow figure out and solve by applying his knowledge of Mushi, the mysterious supernatural-ish creatures that come in all kinds of forms. It works pretty well in this form, and is exactly like the X-Files or House or any one of a number of TV shows where each episode poses a question that only the hero can solve. The animation is beautiful and some of the stories are interesting, insightful, or touching. That said, the whole thing wasn’t totally captivating; I often did something else halfway while watching the shows, and when my attention took me somewhere else and I didn’t finish the series, I didn’t mind that much. I may even watch some more episodes here and there, if there’s nothing else on.

We watched the first “Girl Who…” movie a while back. I wasn’t crazy about it, thought it was more violence-against-women than I really needed to watch more of. E, however, wanted to check out the other two, and I’m glad we ended up watching them. These two, the third in particular, stepped away from the gratuitous violence of the first movie and were more about Lisbeth’s history and the politics and conspiracies linked to it. The third really got to a long-craved moment of catharsis that was well set up by the whole series, back to the first movie.

Downton Abbey continued our BBC-period-miniseries festival and was outstanding. We liked it a lot. Hugh Bonneville is awesome and the other people too.

*** Crazy Heart
* The Ten
*** The Way We Live Now
*** The Savages
** Leonard Bernstein: the Unanswered Question, six talks at Harvard
*** The Men who Stare at Goats
*** Exit through the Gift Shop

I liked Crazy Heart a lot more than I expected, given my lack of interest in alcoholism or country music, but it just worked and I got sucked in and enjoyed myself. Jeff Bridges as great. The surprise appearance of Colin Farrell as the country superstar helped as well.

I started watching The Ten, couldn’t even get through the first story. It was horrible.

The way we live now was part of our ongoing film series of literary costume dramas in miniseries form produced by the BBC or A&E. Also part of our ongoing Matthew Macfadyen series; he’s been very busy with the costume dramas in the last decade. I wish I could say it was also part of a Shirley Henderson series, because E and I love her, and we really should find some more stuff she’s been in. The BBC costume miniseries is almost the perfect thing for watching at home on DVD or netflix instant: long enough to be complex and sophisticated and keep you occupied for a while, but not so long you get sucked into a months-long commitment like a multi-season HBO series. Anyway, this one was quite good.

The Savages was good and seriously grim. I mean, middle-aged people dealing with their declining father, and also their own screwed-up lives. What could be more fun? Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman were great, and the movie was very good, but depressing as hell.

I wanted to like the Bernstein lectures more. The ones I watched were a little snoozy in places (though it could be that I only found time to watch them late at night, and I was doing it rather than sleeping). The bigger problem for me was his struggle to assemble a theory of music that is based on contemporary (in the 70s when he gave the lectures) theories of linguistics. Clearly, he’d spent some time learning about these linguistic theories, but at the same time the analogy didn’t end up seeming very useful. Aside from a convenient way to explain a few basic concepts, he didn’t seem to use anything from linguistic theory that actually helped make the musical theory more understandable, either to the lay audience or (I’m guessing) to someone deeply knowledgeable about music who wanted a new way to think about why some things are “good” music and some are not. Instead, he just ends up spending a good 1/3-1/2 of each lecture explaining a bunch of linguistics that is mostly irrelevant. I’d like to see more Bernstein lectures where he just tries to explain music on its own terms, or even just talks about what he likes or finds interesting; he didn’t need the linguistics analogy to be interesting or understandable.

The men who stare at goats was really funny but I think I wanted it to just be nuts. And after a while, it wasn’t. By the end it seemed kind of pedestrian. I wanted it to just go over the top and stay over the top and then either end with over the top or end with someone being clearly 100% nuts. Still, it was kind of funny.

I kind of half-watched most of Exit Through the Gift Shop, and it was pretty entertaining. I get the whole thing about how it may or may not be a hoax and how it almost doesn’t matter, since either way it’s pretty much a satire and finger in the eye of the art scene. Or something. So that’s nice.

*** Archer (season 1)
* Afro-Samurai
** The Tick
*** The Fellowship of the Ring
*** Cowboy Bebop (episodes 1-5)
* Dr. Who
** MI:5
**** Black Swan

Remember Coach McGuirk from Home Movies? Well the same guy voices the title character in Archer, and the show is sort of like Coach McGuirk becomes a much better-looking international spy. So the result is pretty funny. I’m looking forward to the next season.

Afro-samurai is such a dumb-sounding name (and looked so ridiculous, like a parody of a stereotype) I figured it had to be pretty good or it would have been laughed out of town. But I couldn’t get very far into it. Maybe it is pretty good, but it just seemed like a parody of anime combined with a parody of blaxploitation, but taken seriously. Not good.

The tick was sort of funny but just… I don’t know, I wasn’t in the mood for that brand of goofy (and its low-budget bad-actingness), so I didn’t continue beyond a couple episodes.

For some reason, I got a craving to watch The Fellowship of the Ring again. And again, it was a fun adventure but my god some of the acting (hi, Gimli). And then there’s Hugo Weaving as Elrond; at the time, The Matrix was pretty recent and it was hard to see him as anything other than Agent Smith, which was just not right. Well, almost ten years later, he still just isn’t right. And then there’s my favorite, the chubby elf (Haldir, I think). The elfy hair just does not look good on a pasty, chubby man. I think since the third movie came out, the tendency has been to see these as some kind of modern epic classic, but I think, on the whole, they’re just what they are: big hollywood action movies. Enjoyable, but pretty quickly forgettable as soon as you leave the theater, without a whole lot you need to chew over in your mind. That about describes how I feel about the books, I suppose (one of the main things worth chewing over being the exact nature of Tolkien’s views on gender, race, and good/evil) , though I know some people think otherwise.

I first watched the whole Cowboy Bebop a few years ago, after hearing how great it was. I enjoyed it but was not blown away. Recently, I read most of the Overthinking It series on Cowboy Bebop (plug: I love Overthinking It), which made me want to re-watch the whole thing with my new deeper Overthought understanding. And this time around… I enjoyed it but was not blown away. Bebop is good and interesting and well done, and there are many things about it to enjoy or appreciate. Stokes’s articles rightly point out a number of those things; but most of what he focuses on were less things to be directly enjoyed than things to chew over afterwards. I might enjoy debating the meaning of Bebop with others who were watching them, but I watched them alone, and they didn’t end up adding a whole lot to my watching experience. Perhaps if I had literally studied them right before watching, but I don’t watch movies in order to have additional homework. This is not a knock on Stokes and Overthinking It: I literally enjoyed reading his articles more than I did watching the actual show (again, this is why I plug Overthinking It). But I did not feel like going through Bebop again and gave up after a couple of discs.

E and I decided to try out the recent Doctor Who reboot and did not get very far into it before deciding it looked awful and we couldn’t bear to go on. Deliberate or not, it seemed to exactly reproduce the cheap & cheezy feel of the original, and I don’t have enough nostalgia for the original that that interests me. MI:5 also failed to win us over. We might give it another shot, since people say it’s so good, but the first episode at least just was not that interesting and we were not particularly interested in sticking around to see what these people did next.

I’m not even going to try and review Black Swan much, beyond saying that E and I both thought it was terrific. I know some people think it was awful and some think it was glorious camp and unintentionally funny, and many don’t particularly like Aronofsky’s work (I liked Pi, but hated Requiem so much I hadn’t seen any more of his movies until now). There’s no question it was melodrama, but the thing about good melodrama is that if you accept it and enter its world, it can be very compelling. I entered Black Swan’s world completely and found it “holy shit!” worthy.

optic: lol http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyfbRz4ObFY
optic: love that scene
luna: gary oldman rules
optic: EVERYONE
luna: i especially loved gary oldman in the fifth element
optic: i felt like his role in leon and his role in the fifth element were pretty much the same role with slightly different props
optic: who is dumb enough to make a nefarious deal with a giant ever-expanding maw of pure dark evil chaos
optic: or whatever
optic: i mean, how can that possibly end well
luna: agrd
optic: if i ever am running my own company and need to call an all-hands meeting, im using gary oldman
optic: depending on how much money the company has, possibly the actual in-flesh gary oldman
luna: i would use alan rickman
luna: now i have a machine gun. ho-ho.
luna: best line ever?