TUESDAY BONUS: Alternate Contenders (Part 2)

I promised you guys ten movies I’ve seen and enjoyed and which I’d recommend that others see (and hopefully enjoy) which you wouldn’t encounter in the pages of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. I already got my discursive disclaimers out of the way in the post covering the first half of the list, so here come the back five:

6. Rollerball (1975)

You may or may not have noticed that my personal list of non-canonical movies had 200 entries, but I’ve been referring to it as 200+. Rollerball is the reason, because on separate occasions I willingly sat down to watch one version, then the other, and thus the (both) after the title. Make no mistake, the 21st-century remake of this flick was pretty dire. But that doesn’t mean the source material isn’t any good, hence I’m specifying the 1975 original. I watched this movie with some friends one night in high school and I was immediately taken with it. It’s one of those dystopian science-fiction movies that didn’t require a big budget because it simply extrapolates on current trends until it ends up in nightmarish territory. Some of Rollerball’s predictions look quaint now (they looked quaint in 1991, too) especially the “futuristic” fashions. But in terms of big concepts like celebrity culture, professional sports, corporate greed and mob mentalities, it’s still incredibly relevant.

7. The Secret of NIMH

I intended this alternates project to be more of a dialogue with the Master List, not an argument, but in this particular case I cannot for the life of me understand how this movie is not already in the books. It’s an animated children’s movie, but there are plenty of those on the list, mostly Disney films (obviously). The director of The Secret of NIMH, Don Bluth, was a Disney animator who broke away to form his own production studio, which I think was kind of a big deal historically in and of itself, just showing that the House of Mouse’s dominance in the arena could be challenged. How many times in your life have you heard “Somewhere Out There” from An American Tail? (That, along with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, is one of the lullabies I’ve sung to all my kids when I get bored with Brahms.) How many sequels upon sequels to The Land Before Time have you seen in the kid-video sections of stores? Those are all Don Bluth joints, and The Secret of NIMH started it all. And it’s a fantastic movie, gorgeously rendered, action-packed (I came very close to including Justin the Rat in my childhood heroes dream team), based on a classic children’s novel, and maybe best of all the hero and main character is a mom. I’d love to share this movie with my kids, when they’re ready; as it stands now, between the fierce barn cat named Dragon, the terrifying Great Owl, the vicious in-fighting among the rats and the children-in-peril climax, if I tried to get the little guy to watch it he would be traumatized. But when he’s eight I bet he’ll love it.

8. Spider-Man 2

Finally, a superhero movie!!! And not only that, but a superhero sequel, which (The Dark Knight notwithstanding) is usually a rightly reviled, unfortunate byproduct of the Hollywood system. But in this case, it’s more of an Empire Strikes Back kind of situation. Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man movie is very good, and not a flick I would mind sitting down and re-watching at all. But it hews very close to some major milestones from the original comic books: Spidey’s origin and his final showdown with the Green Goblin (both cinematically compressed by necessity). Spider-Man 2 builds on the origin story and gets immeasurably better by exploring more themes and ideas that the first installment simply didn’t have time for. And the Doctor Octopus storyline isn’t so much a recreation of a specific run of issues from the comics, but a synthesized take on the character that makes sense for the movie. (And Alfred Molina is amazing as Otto Octavius, it goes without saying.) I remember getting goosebumps in the theater the first time I saw the trailer for Spider-Man 2 (in front of Return of the King, maybe?) and the movie itself did not disappoint. It’s really what everybody says they want in a blockbuster: big spectacle and thrills but also genuine emotion. It’s the spiritual predecessor of the current crop of exceptionally good Marvel movies like Iron Man and Captain America.

9. Starship Troopers

I’ve actually blogged about this before, although my focus that time was on the original Heinlein novel. But I have no shortage of love for the film it inspired! At this point we are veering strongly back into the dumb-movies-for-boys territory I've staked out previously. Still, there’s a ferociously sharp satire lurking beneath the late-90’s CGI effects and all the other shiny blockbuster trappings. Starship Troopers is simultaneously an action movie about interplanetary war, a statement movie about the politicization of war, and a wicked parody of pop culture’s glorification of war. So by my reckoning it’s a movie about movies, and should have at least been nominated for an Academy Award. (Except of course that it does not exactly put forth an unambiguous “movies are great, yay!” kind of message. All the more reason to see it, though.)

10. Team America: World Police

The 1001 List features some movies about puppets (Pinocchio) and movies featuring some sequences of puppetry (Being John Malkovich) and even movies with puppet characters acting alongside human actors (The Muppet Movie, The Empire Strikes Back). But how many movies on the master list are performed entirely by puppets? NONE. This is a terrible oversight given the existence of Team America: World Police, which is of course Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s infamous savaging of the opposing yet equally indefensible post-9/11 worldviews. And just like Rollerball, what was devastatingly insightful when the movie first came out is every bit as applicable today. I know that Parker and Stone’s sensibilities and sense of humor are not for everyone, but you have to admit their total output represents a tremendous pop culture phenomenon. South Park has been on tv just about my entire adult life, The Book of Mormon is an acclaimed Broadway smash, and in many ways even their flameouts and failures (Orgazmo, That’s My Bush!, Cannibal! The Musical) have been objects of fascination. Team America: World Police is furiously trenchant but it is also hilarious. I saw it in the theater with a bunch of my buddies and we absolutely howled through the entire thing. Probably that’s the best way to experience it, on the big screen with a group of rowdy 29-year-olds, and I understand that option may not be readily available. But any approximation you can manage would be worth the effort. Me, I might just have to bust out my DVD copy this Memorial Day weekend for a re-watch. You know, for the troops.

So that's my list! (Or sub-list, I guess!) Hopefully all of this has provided some food for thought. There's one more thing I'd like to touch on before abandoning the topic altogether, and that's which movie from my personal list of 200+ would be the absolute last film I'd want added to the 1001 List, the one I would actively warn people away from. But that will have to be a post for another day!

Social calls

Kind of a quick counterpoint to Friday’s post: my family and I went to a cookout at my buddy Clutch’s house this past weekend, at which a good time was had by all. My wife got to relax by way of handing the baby off to other moms, and the little guy got to eat watermelon and jump on a backyard trampoline, so he was basically in heaven. The little girl was a tad shy and clingy, but that’s completely understandable for a two-year-old. I, on the other hand, wasn’t feeling shy at all, as the mutual friends in attendance whom I’ve known for decades far outweighed the neighbors and friends and co-workers of Clutch’s wife who were strangers to me.

What struck me, in a weird bit of (rare!) self-awareness, was how loud and animated (but mainly loud) most of my conversations with my friends got. We were talking about stupid stuff (like the current Doctor Who series and whether or not there will ever be a live-action Flash movie) yet I managed to find myself yelling things that probably did not strictly speaking need to be yelled. I didn’t quite reach the point of completely embarrassing myself (I don’t think) but I did surprise myself at least once or twice.

In hindsight, it occurred to me that nowadays I split my time between home and work pretty much exclusively. At work I make every effort not to be an annoying co-worker and not to draw undue attention to myself, and that means being extremely tight-lipped more often than not. At home, I have a two-month-old whom I try not to startle as he dozes through each day, plus a toddler and a (near-)kindergartner for whom I try to set a good example of bare-minimum decorum and self-control, or at least indoor voices. I don’t necessarily think that, left to my own devices without other overriding concerns, I would tend to live with the volume knob constantly twisted far to the right. It just had been a really long time since I’d been able to crank it up, and apparently I had a fair number of decibels all saved up.

More and more of the same

So I finally finished reading the stupid textbook for my stupid certification exam. Now I just have to figure out how to jump through the hoops of actually getting certified, which apparently involves purchasing an exam voucher from one company and then contacting a separate testing provider and scheduling a time to come take the exam under controlled conditions and then waiting to get my results back (and doing it all over again if I fail to get the 84% correct answers that constitutes a passing score). It is a racket, I tell you.

In the mean time, I still have yet to attend a staff meeting since I got back from paternity leave. A week or two ago I made use of one of the little tricks I’ve picked up over the years: as the lone techie guy around these parts, sometimes I volunteer to submit “periodic” reports on how our in-house web applications are being utilized, with statistics and trend analysis and all that. They are fairly easy to generate and make it look like I am keeping busy. The periodicity of the reporting tends to be entirely determined by how often I feel like I need to justify my continued existence or remind people that I still work here. So I sent one of those reports to my government supervisor the same afternoon that the third staff meeting in a row got cancelled. She thanked me for it (via e-mail from parts unknown), so that’s a good sign.

Of course it was not too long afterwards that I attended our department’s very first meeting with newly installed boss’s boss, where somehow an introductory meet and greet (with free bagels and scones) turned into a spirited discussion of the future online collaboration needs for the agency, which brought up some of the underutilized projects that I’ve been working on around here for years. So suddenly I am a key player in some hotly contested areas, or so it felt in the heat of the moment. There’s a tendency for these things to be fiercely debated in the moment, until someone takes it upon themselves to look into what should be done about the issue, and then interest dissipates and the status quo reasserts itself as everyone gets distracted with their primary duties once again. Maybe I’ll have some new big project to pivot to after I get my certification and finish the old big project. Time will tell.

Saturday Grab Bag Na-na-na-na

After Tuesday's first post went up, my wife informed me that our school system does not, in fact, indifferently leave families high and dry if a school-aged child is deemed not quite ready for kindergarten. Apparently there are other official remedial programs designed to get a five-year-old up to speed (and, presumably, keep those knee-biters off the streets). I wanted therefore to walk back a bit of my low-level indignation from earlier. I am less outraged about hypothetical situations that might befall other people!

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Speaking of the little guy, we are continuing with his weekend Movie Nights but he has been opting lately to re-watch movies he already owns rather than trying new ones. Honestly that's fine with me (I can certainly understand the comfort-level impulse), and it makes things logistically easier as well, as I'm not juggling the Netflix queue or blowing money on new Blu-rays or anything. Last weekend he finally re-watched Cars 2, having not seen it all the way through since I took him to the theater for the first time in his life, despite the fact that I bought it for him on DVD shortly thereafter. I've been a defender of Cars 2 in the past, acknowledging that it's not Pixar's finest film; every list has to have something in the bottommost position, but that doesn't mean it still can't be a list of good things end-to-end. I feel like people slagged Cars 2 unfairly because it really seemed like a calculated cash-in, and of course prominently featured Larry the Cable Guy, an easy target for any self-proclaimed aesthete. But, uh, yeah, on second viewing Cars 2 really did not hold up. I still don't think it's as bad as some people wail that it is, but there are countless better ways to spend two hours.

But despite diving back into his long-standing Pixar/Disney collection, the little guy is still thinking and talking about Toy Story a lot. Which makes me meditate on it, as well. Another thing that occurred to me is that Woody, given the way he lords over the other toys and always tries to keep them all focused on a very focused philosphy of their existence as Andy's playthings and what he interprets that to mean, is very much like a charismatic cult leader. Which is a turn of phrase my wife and I use to describe the little guy all the time, so his affinity for the Sheriff just kind of makes perfect sense.

(Just the other night at bedtime my wife picked up a Disney storybook and asked the little guy "Do you want me to read you a Toy Story story?" and he answered "No, I don't like Toy Story stories I only like Toy Story movies because 'Toy Story story' is too hard to say!" That made me laugh.)

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For a while there in the early-mid 00's, my geeky buddies and I were going to comic book conventions regularly, by which I mean about once a year. The rapid growth of my family in the past half-decade has curtailed that somewhat, but I'm still on the electronic mailing lists for several of these events. It's fairly amusing to me, because it seems that the major thrust of these direct-message marketing strategies is to e-mail former attendees every time an upcoming convention books a single celebrity personality for an appearance. On the one hand, I could care less about the personalities at the conventions. I have never stood in line for (much less paid for) an autograph or photo op, and while I acknowledge that walking through an exhibit hall and seeing an actress from a show I used to kinda like prompts a positive response in me (along the lines of "oh, neat"), those moments are far down the list of Reasons Why I Would Go To A Comic Convention, below such entries as browsing dealers' collections for old comics, buying cheap toys on the last day when the dealers are trying to unload stock, getting insider news about upcoming projects, people-watching the cosplayers, picking up free swag, and of course hanging out and bonding with my buddies.

But the other, more ridiculous aspect of the strategy is that it attempts to cast a wide net one loop at a time. Comic conventions have evolved to address a broad array of interests, some only tangentially related to comic books in the sense that geeks who are into the X-Men tend to also be into genre tv shows and video games and whatnot. But just because there's a high likelihood that a convention attendee might also dig horror movies doesn't mean that an appearance by the guy who played Jason in the Friday the 13th movies is going to be a big draw for many specific people. It makes sense to gather lots of different appeals to different niche audiences under one roof, and it would even make sense to me to hit the marketing mailing list with a full list of celebrities scheduled to attend, from the comics writers and artists to the washed up actors still milking the fact that they were on a hit show once, to the active pro-wrestlers and the chicks whose sole claim to fame is being the live model for the covert art for a fantasy MMORPG. Somewhat less sensible (to me) is e-mailing the entire list with the announcement that the actor who played Tommy the Green Ranger is going to be at the con. Which, I swear, is an actual e-mail I received this week, and not some implausible reductio ad absurdum I dreamed up to make this point.

He's fresh off breaking the Guinness World Record for number of boards broken with a karate chop while skydiving (seven! and I'm still not making this up!) so, at least I learned something. And so have you, you're welcome.

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I know I still haven't posted anything about the end of Community's fourth season (I'm working on it, I've got a lot to say about it (SHOCKER) and it might very well turn into a week's worth of posts or something, and it's not like I don't have plenty of time since season five will be a mid-season replacement at best) BUT did you know that my wife and I were also regular viewers of The Office and we hung in there until the bitter end and tuned in for the series finale this week? All true. There seems to be some divided opinions out there on teh interwebs as to whether or not Steve Carrell's cameo as Michael Scott was appropriately scaled or a squandered opportunity. So, for the record: appropriate! I'm in the camp that believes the show probably should have ended when Michael Scott left for Colorado, but given the fact that they kept going for two more years, the finale was much better served focusing on the other characters, both major and minor, than being overwhelmed by a Michael-driven plot, subplot, or even a runner. It would have been weird to wrap up the series without Carrell, but the amount of screentime and dialogue he got was perfect: one last "that's what she said" and one last bizarre and inappropriate talking head about his relationship to his (former) employees, plus an indication that he and Holly did in fact have their kids-and-a-picket-fence happy ending. Works for me.

Halfway out of my shell

Today I managed to forget my building badge, so I'm more or less chained to my desk. I had tossed my badge on top of my work bag on the passenger seat of my car last night, but on the drive to the train station this morning I decided to make a quick sidetrip for gas (since I was running on fumes) and then when I finally got to the parking garage I rushed to gather my stuff and get out to the platform. The badge of course slid off the top of my workbag, but not into it, so when I grabbed my bag and nothing else, the badge got left behind.

Fortunately I had a few lunches stashed in the office kitchen and I wasn't planning on running any other errands today, so limited freedom of movement is a drag, but not a huge one. I called one of my colleagues to come down to the security office and escort my visitor-badged self up to our suite, and she obliged me. When we got into the elevator together in the lobby, she asked me if I had any big plans for the upcoming holiday weekend, and I said no, because my wife has to work that Saturday and also because we're too wiped out keeping up with the newborn's needs and the other two kids' insanity to plan or do much of anything. And then we got to another floor and some people got off and others got on and my colleague and I were physically separated and our conversation was cut off, before I had a chance to ask her if she had big plans.

I felt bad, which was magnified by my acute awareness that this is probably one of my biggest social challenges, remembering to turn questions back around to the asker. Which is shameful for a functioning adult, but it is a constant struggle. I sometimes enjoy telling people that I was very shy as a child, because the vast majority of people find that impossible to believe, which at least lets me know how far I've come. Nevertheless, I was painfully timid once upon a time, at least with strangers (or really anyone who wasn't a member of my immediate mom-dad-Little-Bro family or a close friend), and to this day all I've done is close the gap somewhat between the ease I feel with people I'm extremely comfortable with and the unease I feel with people I'm not.

My parents were usually willing to let my shyness slide, except for certain cases, e.g. when we would go visit my grandparents, who were lovely people but nevertheless fell under the heading of not being part of my daily life, and therefore just as likely to trigger all these irrational fears that they wouldn't want to hear anything I had to say, wouldn't understand my point of view, &c. &c. But of course my folks would find it distressing that they made the however-many hours trip in the car to get the extended family together, and my grandparents would want to interact with me, and I would defensively refuse. So my parents made it their mission to convince me that my grandparents really did want to hear my voice and that I could talk about anything, because it had nothing to do with what we were talking about and everything to do with simply talking. And slowly but surely that sunk in.

So for a long time, when I started getting a little more confident in myself and a little less intimidated by brand new situations and first impressions and all that, I would allow myself this elated sense of pride for managing something as simple as answering a direct question with a direct answer instead of a nervous shrug, and bonus points if I elaborated on the answer unprompted. Somehow I got stuck in that feedback loop so much that it was years and years before I realized that conversation is not just you-ask-I-answer any more than it's you-ask-I-try-to-disappear. All well and good that I can field a small talk inquiry without freaking the hell out, but so much more socially acceptable to volley you-ask-I-answer-I-ask-you-answer back and forth.

Ah, well. Just another thing to vent about on the blog and then try to work on in the real life, I suppose.

Flat out impossible

The little girl has recently been cracking me up when we sit down together to read one of her picture books. We'll be going along from page to page and then we'll come across an illustration of something desirable to her, like a cupcake or a doll, and she will try to pick that thing up off the page and out of the book. In the cases where it's something to eat, she will then pantomime shoveling it in her mouth with lusty lip-smacking sounds. But then, she'll try a couple more times to grab the picture, all the while saying* to me "Can't do it! Can't take things out of books!"

(* This is entirely a side-issue, but the little girl is still in the communication borderlands between baby talk and fully recognizable speech. And yet the vast majority of the time I feel like I know what she means and what she's trying to say, so much so that my brain just kind of auto-translates things and later, like right now, if I try to transcribe what actually came out of her mouth, I find it extremely hard to do so. I know that it was some mixture of fast-cadence sounds in the zigga-digga-zooba phoneme family with actual words like "can't" and "book" but an exact reproduction eludes me. So forgive me for the shorthand.)

The thing is, she doesn't say this as a complaint, or even as a question aimed at something she doesn't understand. She has accepted this as a facet of reality, and it's more like she and I are sharing a little joke, like she's doing a little philosophical observational stand up comedy: "Ya ever notice how the representations of objects are not the objects themselves?"

I don't know why I find this so funny (above and beyond my love of surrealism, and of my daughter). But I love that she is perceptive, and I love that she is a hoot.

I do wonder about her perspective on lots of things, of course. Yesterday, for the first time, I went through the process of taking care of all three children by myself in the evening while my wife was at work. It was supposed to be the first day where I left for work in the morning, the babysitter came over to the house, my wife left the two younger kinds with her while dropping off the little guy at daycare on her way to work, and then I would come home in the afternoon, pick up the little guy, and relieve the babysitter. Unfortunately, there was a bit of a miscommunication/misremembering and the babysitter thought we wanted her on Thursday this week rather than Wednesday, so what ended up happening was the little guy did not go to daycare, my wife stayed with the kids until I was able to come home early, and then my wife went in to work late.

None of that was too big a deal, but it did give me the opportunity to take all three kids outside to play for a while, as opposed to having to jump right into the cook/serve dinner, baths, bedtimes drill. However, when one child out of three is a mere eight weeks old, then taking them all outside to play really means sitting someplace (preferably with an unobstructed view) while holding the infant, and watching the other two amuse themselves, hopefully not in too self-destructive a fashion. The little guy and the little girl tend to resemble A Field Guide to Abrasions and Contusions from the knees down as it is, so sometimes that is hoping against hope. And sometimes, like yesterday, between rushing home and knowing I would have to pick my battles mindfully for the evening, I just tend to let things play out as they will, even when that means the little guy is taking one of the toddler riding toys up to the top of the driveway and accelerating back down again on its back, and his little sister is doing the exact same thing as her idolized role model.

Fortunately, the little girl's riding toy had some rudimentary steering ability, which was to the good specifically because she doesn't quite know how to steer it, meaning that when she would start rolling down the driveway she would inevitable trace a slow arc over to the grass on one side or the other instead of flying straight down at ever-increasing speed. Every time this happened, she would just kind of laugh and say "No!" as if she were talking to the riding toy (which looks like a giraffe on wheels) and trying to cajole it into doing what she wanted. At first I thought this was another amusing example of her inability to distinguish between responsive living things and inanimate objects, but then I stopped and thought about all the times I've talked out loud trying to cajole my car (or computer or whathaveyou) into doing what I wanted. So maybe her worldview isn't quite so unsophisticated as all that.

A boy and his dog and his ronin (Sword of the Stranger)

Hey! It's (my arbitrarily self-declared) ANIME MONTH!!! Off to a bit of a late start, but better late than never, I always say.

Coincidentally enough, there is an anime film due up for attention from the 1001 Movies Blog Club later this month, which I will get to in due time. But today the subject at hand is a 2007 flick called Sword of the Stranger. I ran across reference to this film quite by accident. Noted interwebs gadabout and friend-of-the-blog Harvey Jerkwater was kind enough to direct my attention to a couple of blogs about movie mechanics, Film Crit Hulk and Cockeyed Caravan, and I've been reading through a ton of their archives recently. Both are fantastically illuminating, but Film Crit Hulk wrote up a thinkpiece on action sequences in movies, how they are supposed to work and sometimes don't, and in the comment thread of that post several people raved about the action sequences in Sword of the Stranger. Since I had never even heard of this movie but May was coming, I added it to my Netflix queue, and now here we are.

It is certainly a movie that has quite a bit of action in it, and the action is handled deftly enough. There is a fine line to be walked in cinematic action sequences, especially fight scenes, between giving everything a speed and immediacy that conveys a feeling of breathless chaos to the audience, and yet keeping everything clear and comprehensible and logical so that it does not devolve into a meaningless assault on the senses. Sword of the Stranger does in fact walk that line and delivers some admirably well-constructed swordfights. Beyond that? Not a lot.

On the one hand, it's a simple and straightforward tale that every culture has multiple versions of: a child is being hunted by powerful forces with a sinister agenda; the child encounters a good adult who would be a potential protector if he weren't so self-interested; the child offers to pay the adult for protection; they stay one step ahead of the bad guys, bickering all the while; the adult delivers the child to safety and gets paid, only for the child to then be betrayed into greater danger; the adult realizes he cares about the child enough to risk his own life in a rescue attempt for no reward. I don't really have a problem with archetypal stories, and in fact I realized that this particular story has a built-in advantage in that the Selfish Protector might live or might die saving the child, because surviving the ending is a complete non-factor in both his personal redemption arc and the overarching plot. Most action movies we all assume that the hero is going to live past the closing credits, and no amount of suspension of disbelief can make the climax of the flick truly feel like the hero's ultimate fate is in question. Vanquishing evil usually means outliving it, but apparently not always. (Spoiler: the Selfish Protector in Sword of the Stranger does, in fact, live. You may now return from the edge of your seat.)

On the other hand, there are some more complex trappings in the story which at times made me feel like I must be watching the fourth installment in a six-film cycle or something (as far as I've been able to determine, though, that's not the case). The film is set in feudal Japan, and the bad guys are a Japanese faction working with representatives of the Ming emperor. The emperor wants the child because he fulfills some prophecy and his blood can be used to make an elixir which grants eternal life. The Ming representatives are all highly skilled warriors who can fight without tiring or feeling pain because they are all taking another drug-like elixir that bestows those benefits (but not, as it turns out, immortality). The most deadly and ruthless Ming warrior is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed foreigner. The Selfish Protector is a red-haired foreigner. Where are these non-Asians from, exactly? Why are they far and away better swordsmen than any of the Chinese or Japanese characters? Where does the pain-blocking drug come from, assuming its production is less resource-intensive than the immortality elixir? None of those questions are ever answered.

One of the things that I like about anime, and why I wanted to dig into it some more, is because it does offer a certain amount of insight into Japanese culture - although maybe insight is not quite the right word. Exposure might be better, because insight would imply understanding, and I'm not always left with the feeling that I understand Japanese culture any better for having watched an anime film. Why this historical epic about daimyos and monks should come down to a duel to the death between a Swede(?) and an Irishman(?) is beyond me.

But the pure artistry on display is worth the price of admission and then some. Sword of the Stranger takes full advantage of the fact that it is an animated feature wherein anything that can be conceived and drawn can be put on screen. The camera moves can be fast and furious and capture angles that would be physically impossible for human beings in the real world. The flick of a sword can send the exact right amount of blood flying dramatically across the frame. Because everything is unreal, everything gets equal weight in its rendering, as opposed to live-action blockbusters that try to have their cake and eat it too, with actors and CGI effects interacting uneasily at best. Even Pixar movies, which of course I love, pride themselves on their exacting modeling of real-world physics, but there's a lot to be said for an animated film that embraces a more stylized approach that depicts things your brain knows are impossible yet come alive before your eyes.

In the end, though, at least as far as Sword of the Stranger is concerned, marveling at the technical achievement of the arresting visuals, not just things I've never seen before but those things presented in a way I've never seen before, is really the only takeaway I had from the film. The look and feel served the story admirably, but it was only a passable story to begin with. Hopefully later this month I will have a chance to ruminate on some anime that brings just as much innovation to what's being said as how it's being said.