Fast-paced, fun adventure which is made better if you don't think about it too hard.
The things Molly and Cole get up to are literally incredible and it's an outright miracle they survived half of them.
The prose-style can be a bit breathless and overbearing at times, with chapter cliffhangers amounting to "Or was it???"
and "Little did they know they had it all wrong!" I think I would've enjoyed a few more chances to catch my breath
between impossibly deadly disasters.
I was looking for a fun space adventure, and this book is that, especially if I can keep myself from rolling my eyes
long enough to enjoy it.
I might be tempted to recommend it to younger readers who might be more forgiving, but one thing that might temper my
recommendation is that Molly and Cole kill an awful lot of people and there don't seem to be many consequences to that.
Maybe it'll catch up to them in later books, but it's rather disconcerting and out of character for most YA I've read.
Of course it ends on a horrible cliff-hanger. I think I might give the next one a try at some point, but I need a break
from this first.
We're just about a month away from Doctor Who's 50th anniversary (November 23rd, or "Doctor Who Day," as I have it in my
calendar every year). I'm pretty excited.
This weekend I went to Toronto for Who Party Toronto's 'A Day with Philip Hinchcliffe'.
It was the first time I'd been to one of their smaller events (I'd been to their larger one-day Who Party conventions a
couple times. This was small, intimate and a lot of fun. I ended up buying the special edition
of Robots of Death
for Mr Hinchcliffe to sign, since I only had the original region 2 DVD (which was the one of the first DVDs they
released back in 1998 or something). I've got a lot of respect for Philip Hinchcliffe's era of Doctor Who (essentially
Tom Baker's first 3 years). And had to get in a question
about the line he's producing for Big Finish,
coming out next year starring Tom Baker and Louise Jameson as Leela, because that's just awesome.
In a couple week's I'll be back in Toronto for Reversed Polarity, a weekend-long
convention by the people who did Polaris and Toronto Trek. I always loved Toronto Trek. I went to Toronto Trek III.
Funny story: when I went to Toronto Trek III, I went to the Doctor Who news panel, hosted by DWIN
and asked whether the Valeyard would be coming back. Because I thought the whole idea of an evil version of the 12th or
13th Doctor was an awesome idea. I now note that we will have reached the 12th (or possibly 13th) Doctor. Hm...
Anyway, I've got a hotel room for Reversed Polarity and everything. And I've signed up to do a bunch of panels. Ellen
will be joining me on Saturday, but I'm not sure I know anyone else who's going. But I'll find out, I guess. I'm looking
forward to it. You can probably expect a con report, even though I've been bad at doing those lately.
For the actual anniversary itself, I hear they are probably going to be showing the 50th anniversary special in theatres
in Canada. I suspect that means Toronto. I was thinking about throwing a party, but as I don't have cable, I'd have to
wait to be able to watch it by other means. Right now my plan is to wait and see what's showing where.
The intent of the movie seems to be to take tropes from [[wiki:wuxia]] films and apply them to the conflicts and
problems facing modern-day China: corruption, crime, marital infidelity, directionless youth. A Touch of Sin is an
anthology movie: four stories about four people from four Chinese provinces. So you get these stories about four
problematic lives with extra added violence.
It didn't do much for me. It probably would have helped if I had more context about the broad cultural understanding and
symbolism around those cultural conflicts. And it didn't help that it had all the ponderous pacing of a typical East
Asian art house film. It wasn't bad. Just kind of dull.
And oddly inconsistent. I could never get a handle on the structure of it. It's four separate stories and there's (
nearly) no characters carrying over between them. Sometimes two characters share a scene (like at the end of one
character's story, that character gets off a bus, but the shot lingers on another character we've never seen before,
then clumsily switching to a new scene featuring them). Other times there's just an abrupt scene change to new
characters. It just left me with the impression that the director didn't know what he was doing.
The violent bits added a bit of comical levity to the whole thing, which made it a bit more watchable. Hard to say if
comical levity was what he was going for, though.
Pretty much the reason I picked this day to go to Toronto. I love Hayao Miyazaki. He hasn't made a movie I haven't
liked. He's even made a few I've profoundly and deeply loved.
This was a movie I liked.
And I liked it quite a bit, despite its flaws.
It's the story of [[wiki:Jiro Horikoshi]], the guy who created the World War II Japanese Zero fighter plane. So it was
always going to be a bit problematic. Miyazaki straddles his usual lines of "war is bad" and "airplanes are awesome!"
while going to some pains to acknowledge the contradiction in this case. He tries to link Jiro to other famous
aeronautical engineers, [[wiki:Giovanni Battista Caproni]] and [[wiki:Hugo Junkers]], who are also depicted as being not
entirely onside with their fascist governments (that's a bit of a real-life understatement for Junkers). Caproni comes
to Jiro in dreams (those scenes reminded me a little bit of [[wiki:The Cat Returns]]), which is a bit odd, but I was
happy enough to go along with it.
Speaking of, Jiro's sister Kayo quite a bit reminded me of Mei in [[wiki:My Neighbour Totoro]], even when she's like in
her twenties and a medical intern or something. Still, she's pretty good at stealing her scenes.
Aside from airplanes, the film centres on the romance between Jiro and Satomi, a girl he helps during an earthquake, and
whom he chances to meet again while on a retreat. The whole thing hit me kinda hard, because, you know... resonance.
It's very touching, even if the stoic nature of Japanese romance is a bit brow-furrowing in spots.
The ending is a bit abrupt, but given that this is based on real life, I'm not sure there is a tidy wrapping-up point.
You never get to see Jiro actually designing the plane he's famous for. It ends on a dream with Caproni, skipping over
the messy entirety of the war. Which is probably for the best, but it makes it feel less well-constructed than you'd
expect from a Miyazaki movie.
Overall, it's lovely, and it's Miyazaki and you should see it. It's a good film, just not a great one. And to give
Miyazaki credit, the balance he's trying to pull off is really hard. It's not his usual thing, plot- and tone-wise, and
I don't know if he's entirely successful, but you can tell it's something he's passionate about. So I'll give it to him.
Quick side note: the foley art and sound design is really cool once you figure out what they're doing.
Also: Jiro is voiced by [[wiki:Hideaki Anno]]. You know, the Evangelion guy. Weird. He's pretty good, though.
I hate to break it to you, but you will probably never get to see this movie.
It's a full-length Canadian animated film by and about a couple guys on a hitchhiking road-trip across the country,
starting in BC.
And one gets the feeling various substances were involved in its creation.
I'm not going to say it's good or anything, because that would be a lie, but bits of it were actually enjoyable. I was a
bit worried because the start of the movie is way weird and makes almost no sense, with talking puddles of oil and songs
about boiled hotdogs, but it does settle down a bit and you can tell they actually get better at the whole animating and
storytelling thing as the movie goes on. Characters start to have character and bits of it are funny.
So good on 'em.
I just wish they'd gotten to Ontario in the movie. The movie ends somewhere in Saskatchewan, probably because they hit
their two-hour runtime and decided it was as good a place as any to stop. But I was sad I didn't get to see any places
I've actually been.
R100 is the story of a mild-mannered salaryman with a penchant for violent S&M play. He sighs up for an S&M service
where scantily clad women will show up unannounced and beat him mercilessly for his enjoyment. But things get a little
out of hand, as one might expect.
It's also a film within a film, and the title refers to
the Japanese rating the film's supposed 100-year-old
director thinks it should have. Because this shit messed up, yo.
It's weird. And fun. The film's actual director, [[wiki:Hitoshi Matsumoto]] (or "Matchan")
is a very strange man. This is his (I think) 3rd movie I've seen at TIFF,
and each one is weirdly twisted. This one is no different. Just when you think it might get kind of horrible, it totally
stops taking itself seriously and you just enjoy the whole ludicrous ride.
Side note: how many weird-movie-directing middle-aged comedy dudes have screaming fangirls? I wouldn't have thought any,
but apparently there's at least one.
