Recommended Movies/Books/Graphic Novels, as of 3/21/14
At the movies:
The Wind Rises/Kaze Tachinu: A beautiful and effective movie, and well worth seeing on the big screen, especially if you have any interest in aircraft, imagination and the creative process, or Japanese history. I could wax rhapsodic on so much in this lovely film, but the most important highlights include:
1) This is an unconventional biopic, in that there is no clearly defined villain for the hero to defeat, but a series of specific engineering and historical obstacles that influence his designs and decisions. What emerges instead of an A-to-B-to-C-to-ending plotline is a portrait of a man's soul, and a careful exploration of the question, "what if something you create is used for destruction?"
2) The backgrounds, especially of the protagonist's home and Tokyo in its early days, are simple beautiful and, like so many Ghibli films, lovingly depicted in a spectacular amount of detail. I cannot wait to watch this again on DVD to see all the little things that I missed this first time around.
3) I never thought that I would ever be interested in aircraft design (especially for war) in anything other than an academic way. To my great surprise, this film convinced me entirely otherwise.
4) The dream sequences in this are the best part. I would give almost anything for the lucid experience the movie portrays, and for the elegant, relaxed depiction of beautiful and terrible things.
In sum: see it in theaters if you can. It's not appropriate for very young children, and even older children may find it a bit dull. (There is intense, extended dialogue about rivets, wing design, fuel line placement, and tuberculosis.) The English dub turned out to be very nicely done, but I'm eager to hear it in Japanese, too.
Veronica Mars: I enjoyed this very much, but it felt more like a pilot episode of a new series instead of a feature film--which, don't get me wrong, would have made my day. If the credits had started to roll, only to be replaced with the words, "Veronica Mars makes her return to TV in 2015," I would have been on my feet cheering, because this film gave us a lot of interesting plot points that could easily extend into a season-long plot arc. In Veronica's absence, Neptune has gotten better and worse, and all the characters have grown and changed in (mostly) interesting ways. I did love seeing Veronica getting back into her girl detective mode with very little difficulty, and I like thinking about the ways the plot could go. (Wallace and Mac's new jobs alone could provide enough plotlines to keep a season humming along nicely, too.) It was a lot of fun, and I'm glad I saw it in the theaters.
In books:
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs: I've been thinking about this book on and off ever since I've read it, and not in entirely good terms. It reminds me of the days when I would binge-read a long, completed fanfic and only later think, "Wait, what the hell did I just read?!" (Cassandra Clare's "Draco Dormiens" series springs immediately to mind in this category.) Like a really good fanfic, this book had its strong points: eerie vintage photos accompany the narrative and help set an overall creepy tone that mostly holds up pretty well; the pacing is fast and furious and the stakes appropriately high. But also like fanfic, there are too many points in this story that felt overly contrived or rushed, and in this case, I couldn't shake the feeling that someone had made a set of specific suggestions for Riggs to follow and instead of holding true to this vision, he cleaved too truly to the suggestions, for better or for worse. This book is already in development for a movie (Tim Burton is currently attached as a director) and the franchise opportunities must be sending up dollar signs for the studio and publisher. I only hope that future installments allow Riggs to reclaim his own vision and develop the characters more completely and in a less, well, fanfic-y way.
In graphic novels:
Blue is the Warmest Color, by Julie Maroh: The artwork in this is simply gorgeous. There's so much depth and emotion wrapped up in all the shades of grey, and when the color blue does appear, it's startling and effective. (I think the story lost a bit of momentum when full color was introduced about two thirds of the way through.) The plot I didn't love quite as much; it read like an opera, a little like La Boheme updated for a gay coming of age story set in France in the 1990s, complete with a tragic ending and tragic-comic middle. But there's an undeniable pull to the story, even though it's familiar and sad, and I like the framing device of one of the characters reading the other's diary to recount the events of the story. It's also explicitly erotic and honest about the main characters' desire for another. I really hope this book makes its way onto required reading lists at colleges around the country, and not just as an object of controversy.
The Wind Rises/Kaze Tachinu: A beautiful and effective movie, and well worth seeing on the big screen, especially if you have any interest in aircraft, imagination and the creative process, or Japanese history. I could wax rhapsodic on so much in this lovely film, but the most important highlights include:
1) This is an unconventional biopic, in that there is no clearly defined villain for the hero to defeat, but a series of specific engineering and historical obstacles that influence his designs and decisions. What emerges instead of an A-to-B-to-C-to-ending plotline is a portrait of a man's soul, and a careful exploration of the question, "what if something you create is used for destruction?"
2) The backgrounds, especially of the protagonist's home and Tokyo in its early days, are simple beautiful and, like so many Ghibli films, lovingly depicted in a spectacular amount of detail. I cannot wait to watch this again on DVD to see all the little things that I missed this first time around.
3) I never thought that I would ever be interested in aircraft design (especially for war) in anything other than an academic way. To my great surprise, this film convinced me entirely otherwise.
4) The dream sequences in this are the best part. I would give almost anything for the lucid experience the movie portrays, and for the elegant, relaxed depiction of beautiful and terrible things.
In sum: see it in theaters if you can. It's not appropriate for very young children, and even older children may find it a bit dull. (There is intense, extended dialogue about rivets, wing design, fuel line placement, and tuberculosis.) The English dub turned out to be very nicely done, but I'm eager to hear it in Japanese, too.
Veronica Mars: I enjoyed this very much, but it felt more like a pilot episode of a new series instead of a feature film--which, don't get me wrong, would have made my day. If the credits had started to roll, only to be replaced with the words, "Veronica Mars makes her return to TV in 2015," I would have been on my feet cheering, because this film gave us a lot of interesting plot points that could easily extend into a season-long plot arc. In Veronica's absence, Neptune has gotten better and worse, and all the characters have grown and changed in (mostly) interesting ways. I did love seeing Veronica getting back into her girl detective mode with very little difficulty, and I like thinking about the ways the plot could go. (Wallace and Mac's new jobs alone could provide enough plotlines to keep a season humming along nicely, too.) It was a lot of fun, and I'm glad I saw it in the theaters.
In books:
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs: I've been thinking about this book on and off ever since I've read it, and not in entirely good terms. It reminds me of the days when I would binge-read a long, completed fanfic and only later think, "Wait, what the hell did I just read?!" (Cassandra Clare's "Draco Dormiens" series springs immediately to mind in this category.) Like a really good fanfic, this book had its strong points: eerie vintage photos accompany the narrative and help set an overall creepy tone that mostly holds up pretty well; the pacing is fast and furious and the stakes appropriately high. But also like fanfic, there are too many points in this story that felt overly contrived or rushed, and in this case, I couldn't shake the feeling that someone had made a set of specific suggestions for Riggs to follow and instead of holding true to this vision, he cleaved too truly to the suggestions, for better or for worse. This book is already in development for a movie (Tim Burton is currently attached as a director) and the franchise opportunities must be sending up dollar signs for the studio and publisher. I only hope that future installments allow Riggs to reclaim his own vision and develop the characters more completely and in a less, well, fanfic-y way.
In graphic novels:
Blue is the Warmest Color, by Julie Maroh: The artwork in this is simply gorgeous. There's so much depth and emotion wrapped up in all the shades of grey, and when the color blue does appear, it's startling and effective. (I think the story lost a bit of momentum when full color was introduced about two thirds of the way through.) The plot I didn't love quite as much; it read like an opera, a little like La Boheme updated for a gay coming of age story set in France in the 1990s, complete with a tragic ending and tragic-comic middle. But there's an undeniable pull to the story, even though it's familiar and sad, and I like the framing device of one of the characters reading the other's diary to recount the events of the story. It's also explicitly erotic and honest about the main characters' desire for another. I really hope this book makes its way onto required reading lists at colleges around the country, and not just as an object of controversy.