faire weekend updateSo I spent five hours yesterday being "gating lead" at the Faire. This mostly entailed sitting around, occasionally punctuated by taking money from the one or two people who decided to user our gate. Our two "security" volunteers provided most of our entertainment. Wise-ass highschool kids really shouldn't be given positions of authority. When they are, though, it can be fun to watch, provided you don't care very much. They weren't doing any real harm, so I had no reason to care. For some reason, I had decided that the time between 4:00 and 6:30 was only an hour and a half. I spent a couple days thinking this, and was nervous I wouldn't have enough time to get into downtown Toronto during that time, since 4:00 was the time I was supposed to stop volunteering at the Faire, and 6:30 was the time Steamboy started at the Elgin theatre downtown. Kyle had already bought tickets and I was supposed to meet him there. Steamboy was pretty cool, all around. It reminded me a lot of Metropolis. The big difference, though, was there was a heck of a lot of humour here, and not really the sort of humour you would expect from anime. Actually, any humour at all in these big, epic message movies is a welcome change. And yes, it is a big, epic message movie, although I've come away not really knowing what the message was supposed to be. It seems like it's beating you over the head, but you'd figure the message would be obvious at the end, and it isn't. The most obvious is that using science to make nasty superweapons (ie. nuclear bombs (implied but not explicitly stated)) == bad. But we kind of know that already. Mainly because a billion anime movies have beat that into our heads. The right answer to the "what is science for" question would seem to be "to make people happy," except that it's kind of not. Frivolous use of science for happiness' sake seems to get the thumbs down as well. The good and proper use of science is left as an exercise to the viewer. Not a hard exercise, admittedly, but it's nice we're allowed to think for ourselves a little. There's also a bit in there about the 19th century idea of the nation state, which I would have liked them to work with a bit more. I suppose it's a bit esotheric and it might have weighed the movie down, but I like that sort of thing. The movie is also, I should add, very easy on the eyes. One might say a "visual tour de force," if one were inclined towards movie review cliches. I'm not. Count yourselves lucky. I ran into Karl and Vicki as I was leaving. That was cool, since I haven't seen Vicki in ages. I couldn't stop to talk, though, since I was trying to find Kyle and Rin. Rin wasn't feeling well, so Kyle took her home early. They missed Zebraman, which was sad, because Zebraman was awesome. Oh, how terribly, terribly awesome. It was kind of a weird mutant bastard child offspring of the mating of cliche 70s Ultraman-like shows and Mystery Men, with a little bit of Mars Attacks thrown in for fun. Oh, and a whole lot of weird, left-field craziness. This movie rocks. It's so cool, I doubt it will see any sort of wider release. The DVD doesn't have subtitles, alas. I'd guess a Chinese bootleg probably would, if you could find it. Words cannot express how awesome this movie is, so I won't try. It's just that awesome. Kyle said there were a bunch of people at Limbo and I should go visit after the movie. So I did. Except I saw xio walking to the subway when I was driving along Dufferin and when I got there, Limbo looked decidedly quiet. Except the lights were on. I spent a good five minutes trying to decide whether (and how) I should try to get somebody to answer the door. I settled on knocking on the window. I think I got Liz out of bed. So Saturday was, on the whole, more eventful than usual. Today is back to the more usual sort of day, except that there's supposed to be some sort of party thing for Faire volunteers somewhere tonight. I actually feel like going this year, whereas most years I really can't be bothered. Trouble is I can't remember where it is. I'll probably have to phone Ann Marie or something. comments:
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