time is an illusion
I moved back home after finishing my exams in mid-March, and was wondering, just how do you spend half a year of time when the entire world around you slows down to a crawl? Well, apparently it is possible, because now with less than two weeks left until the next chapter starts, it seems I have. Wild.
Anyway, the movies!
Germany has experienced an increase in Corona cases ever since I returned from the UK in early August, and it seems we're about to face another increase of lockdown regulations soon (how school will look in two weeks is still entirely a mystery to me). However, cinemas have been open here for about two months with certain regulations (two seats blocked to either side of a party, every second row blocked), with cinemas re-running old favourites and lots of kids movies. Also, cinemas offer that you can book them to play video games with your friends on the largest screen, which sounds really cool if you're into that.
I didn't really feel withdrawal from new media - partially because even in the last year, I was a combination of too busy in general and uninterested in what came out to keep up with a lot of things. I haven't watched any new seasonal anime since fall, and the only movies I saw this year are The Shadow, Knives Out, Parasite, and Tanya The Evil - all in January/February. I kept up with the whole "Auteur film maker Christopher Nolan WILL make cinemas screen his movie and if it's the last thing he does" debacle of several postponements, and when they finally settled on August 27 for a release, I was mildly looking forward to it. While I skipped Dunkirk for reasons of "I'm currently oversaturated when it comes to war misery" and still do not know what to make out of Interstellar (apart from WE MUST LOVE ELSE CORN GRAVIATION LEAVES of course), I do have a soft spot for his movies of bombast and pretty cinematography, and they are best appreciated on the big screen - although none of the cinemas are currently running the really big screens, even less so for the OV showing I attended yesterday.
TENET
One CIA special agent is sent to investigate a special kind of ammunition, only to find himself entangled in a conspiracy on a scale that exceeds human imagination.
That's about as much as you should know going into it - I had seen one trailer, and only taken away that yup, of course there would be time manipulation involved, because that's as much a fixture in Nolan's movies as is Sir Micheal Caine (who cameos in this as... basically himself, and honestly, that's a flex I respect). My track record with time travel in media is not great, let's say - so I went in fully prepared to have my brain thoroughly scrambled. To my surprise, however, not only did I have no problems keeping up, but I saw all of the twists coming from quite far away.[SPOILERS]
- Neil being a double agent I guessed from the "I'm a physics Master" on, and it was confirmed in the vault - very explicitly so to my surprise.
- The protagonist fighting himself in the vault I assumed the second the conveniently masked goon appeared.
- Kat having seen herself jump of the boat ~to freedom~ was obvious the moment they made their Vietnam plans.
- Neil being the one to get shot at the end was obvious the second the Protagonist saw the corpse - although I wonder if we had ever seen the lucky charm coin before? I can't remember, but the focus on that detail again was very explicit for Nolan I thought.
- I also assumed Neil would turn out to be an adult version of Max - which is a fan theory apparently (some speculating it's from Maximilien -> Neil(imixam). I don't think it was implied in the end, it more just seems like a typical trope to consider when you have a limited cast of characters, but it is possible (depending on how far back in time you can reverse).
That is not to say the reveals weren't still satisfying, because seeing how things actually play out from both perspectives is pretty cool. But the underlying reason I think is that the plot was just not that well structured or compelling. I like the world building, and the glimpses we got of the Protagonist and Neil interacting (as well as the very short glimpses into the Protagonist having a character beyond "duty driven and empathic"), but there wasn't enough of that, and you could easily have made more room for it if there had been less of a drag earlier in the movie (in between the cold open and the Protagonist getting his mission, and the entire fetch-quest-ness until we met Sator). It would have served well to make the final twist more emotionally resonating, but alas.
The other reason why the movie didn't land emotionally for me was that so much of it relied on you caring for Kat, and in between going "why this" at Kenneth Brannagh's Russian accent (I'm sure my Russian friends will have Opinions™), the domestic abuse and toxicity, and the unbelievabilty of how these people ended up like this in the first place.
Another minor gripe I had was that I really had issues understanding things, audibly. In between the bass-pumping score and characters tending to speak quietly, there was also always a lot of background noise that made things difficult (on the sail boat? No chance). I wonder if the copy at our cinema had issues with the sound file or if it just is like that, but I regretted my decision to watch the OV for that reason. I'm sure I missed some verbal clues, but maybe that made me more alert to visual ones? Who's to say.
Overall, it is a movie of spectacle, and as that, it worked for me, although I think it might have worked better as a limited series of, say, eight episodes, to give the main characters a bit more breathing room. The critical consensus for the movie seems to be stylish but cold, and that is very much true. If you have a soft spot for Nolan or Looper, I think it might be worth a watch, but as it stands, it's more an Interstellar to me than an Inception. Three Paradoxa out of Five.
To my absolute surprise, my main takeaway was that I'm now fully invested in seeing Robert Pattinson as Batman, because he was ridiculously charming as Neil and that caught me utterly offguard. #justiceforneil
Unexpectedly, however, TENET was not my first cinema visit - our local non-franchise cinema apparently during the Corona break decided to join in on the Kazé-managed programme of airing one anime movie per month. Just in time for me moving away for the forseeable future, of course. While the October release is one I really want to see (The Dragon Dentist, based on an animation short that was really cool), the August release was simply announced as Girls Love Double Feature. Now, I've never really gotten into Shoujo-Ai as a genre - it rarely gets adapted or even scanlated, and those series that do tend to be ecchi or straight up porn for an audience of straight guys. The headliner or the double feature was Kase and the Morning Glories, however, about which I had only heard good things, so I decided to go check it out. By the time I booked, I was the only one, but to my surprise a good handful of people showed up (three of which ended leaving during the second OVA, but we'll get there).
I didn't check what other movie would be shown, but I did see somewhere on the social media that they also would show the first episode of the TV anime Citrus, but it sounded like that was only one location. Imagine my horror when first, among the trailers that were shown was an ad for NTR (pure straight guy fantasy smut) which resulted in akward chuckling in the cinema, and then would you guess it, the first thing was the first episode of Citrus. When K was stranded at my place in January of last year, we watched it on the grounds of hey, how often does Shoujo-Ai get TV series treatment, but it was a painful experience. It's another of the sexual fantasy type series - newly acquainted step sisters making out, topped with sexual assault (three times in the first episode!) and all the other trope greatness. I am not ashamed to say I was on my phone for the entire painful, painful 25 minutes.
Kase and the Morning Glories
Third year high school students Yui, dedicated gardener and flowergirl, and Tomoka, the school's track-and-field star, are newly in a relationship. In between looming college applications, school trips and different friend groups, there are several stumbling stones in the way.
The following Kase and the Morning Glories was a godsend afterwards, let me tell you. Both content-wise and just visually - imagine Natsume Yuujinchou's prettiest water colour backgrounds, all soft pastell colours, and very cute character designs. As an OVA, this movie adapted not the entire series, but sort of starts in medias res, that is to say, when the two girls already are in a relationship. There were a lot of obvious callbacks to events earlier in the story for manga readers to notice, but I didn't feel lost at all, and it was kind of refreshing to skip straight past the will-they-won't-they part to just fluffy relationship shenanigans. That said, there still are a ton of Shoujo-type misunderstandings playing out, so if you have no patience for that, this might not be for you. However, Kase is also quite forward in a way I did not expect of a series that seems fluffy of the type of "handholding is the maximum you'll see here". Overall, this was just a very sweet OVA, pretty to look at, and fluffy without being totally saccharine. Oh, also the goddamn National Trust is invoked. I'm serious. Four flowerpots out of five.
Fragtime
High school student Misuzu can stop time for 3 minutes, something she uses to flee any even remotely uncomfortable social situation. When she uses her power to get up close and personal with the class idol Haruka, however, it turns out that she is not affected by the time manipulation. Now faced with someone knowing what she did, a strange relationship begins to form.
The final installment of the day was Fragtime, a property I knew nothing about. Apparently it's a one-hour OVA based on an 18 chapter manga, which is already... a choice. (Rule of thumb is that depending on density of writing and page count, ~1-2 chapters can be adapted into a 23 minute episode.) Additionally, the studio that produced the OVA went bancrupt halfway through, and apparently did not pay the animators? For that, I didn't think it looked as bad as some said, but the overall impression was "Aku no Hana did it better", partially because that series eschewed the idea of "if these two damaged people get into a relationship, their issues with self-acceptance and role performance are going to magically disappear!" in favour of "honeslty? y'all need therapy". Maybe more spaced out, it could still have worked, but compressed into a one hour movie, it was quite jumpy in terms of character development. Plus, it never quite became apparent to me why Misuzu did the initial thing in the first place, and some clarification would have been welcome. It sure made three adults uncomfortable enough to leave ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ Two grains of sand out of five.
On a final note regarding these three GL things though - all three included the main character remarking about how good the other girl smelled. I guess that's a trope :')
Anyway, the movies!
Germany has experienced an increase in Corona cases ever since I returned from the UK in early August, and it seems we're about to face another increase of lockdown regulations soon (how school will look in two weeks is still entirely a mystery to me). However, cinemas have been open here for about two months with certain regulations (two seats blocked to either side of a party, every second row blocked), with cinemas re-running old favourites and lots of kids movies. Also, cinemas offer that you can book them to play video games with your friends on the largest screen, which sounds really cool if you're into that.
I didn't really feel withdrawal from new media - partially because even in the last year, I was a combination of too busy in general and uninterested in what came out to keep up with a lot of things. I haven't watched any new seasonal anime since fall, and the only movies I saw this year are The Shadow, Knives Out, Parasite, and Tanya The Evil - all in January/February. I kept up with the whole "Auteur film maker Christopher Nolan WILL make cinemas screen his movie and if it's the last thing he does" debacle of several postponements, and when they finally settled on August 27 for a release, I was mildly looking forward to it. While I skipped Dunkirk for reasons of "I'm currently oversaturated when it comes to war misery" and still do not know what to make out of Interstellar (apart from WE MUST LOVE ELSE CORN GRAVIATION LEAVES of course), I do have a soft spot for his movies of bombast and pretty cinematography, and they are best appreciated on the big screen - although none of the cinemas are currently running the really big screens, even less so for the OV showing I attended yesterday.
TENET
One CIA special agent is sent to investigate a special kind of ammunition, only to find himself entangled in a conspiracy on a scale that exceeds human imagination.
That's about as much as you should know going into it - I had seen one trailer, and only taken away that yup, of course there would be time manipulation involved, because that's as much a fixture in Nolan's movies as is Sir Micheal Caine (who cameos in this as... basically himself, and honestly, that's a flex I respect). My track record with time travel in media is not great, let's say - so I went in fully prepared to have my brain thoroughly scrambled. To my surprise, however, not only did I have no problems keeping up, but I saw all of the twists coming from quite far away.[SPOILERS]
- Neil being a double agent I guessed from the "I'm a physics Master" on, and it was confirmed in the vault - very explicitly so to my surprise.
- The protagonist fighting himself in the vault I assumed the second the conveniently masked goon appeared.
- Kat having seen herself jump of the boat ~to freedom~ was obvious the moment they made their Vietnam plans.
- Neil being the one to get shot at the end was obvious the second the Protagonist saw the corpse - although I wonder if we had ever seen the lucky charm coin before? I can't remember, but the focus on that detail again was very explicit for Nolan I thought.
- I also assumed Neil would turn out to be an adult version of Max - which is a fan theory apparently (some speculating it's from Maximilien -> Neil(imixam). I don't think it was implied in the end, it more just seems like a typical trope to consider when you have a limited cast of characters, but it is possible (depending on how far back in time you can reverse).
That is not to say the reveals weren't still satisfying, because seeing how things actually play out from both perspectives is pretty cool. But the underlying reason I think is that the plot was just not that well structured or compelling. I like the world building, and the glimpses we got of the Protagonist and Neil interacting (as well as the very short glimpses into the Protagonist having a character beyond "duty driven and empathic"), but there wasn't enough of that, and you could easily have made more room for it if there had been less of a drag earlier in the movie (in between the cold open and the Protagonist getting his mission, and the entire fetch-quest-ness until we met Sator). It would have served well to make the final twist more emotionally resonating, but alas.
The other reason why the movie didn't land emotionally for me was that so much of it relied on you caring for Kat, and in between going "why this" at Kenneth Brannagh's Russian accent (I'm sure my Russian friends will have Opinions™), the domestic abuse and toxicity, and the unbelievabilty of how these people ended up like this in the first place.
Another minor gripe I had was that I really had issues understanding things, audibly. In between the bass-pumping score and characters tending to speak quietly, there was also always a lot of background noise that made things difficult (on the sail boat? No chance). I wonder if the copy at our cinema had issues with the sound file or if it just is like that, but I regretted my decision to watch the OV for that reason. I'm sure I missed some verbal clues, but maybe that made me more alert to visual ones? Who's to say.
Overall, it is a movie of spectacle, and as that, it worked for me, although I think it might have worked better as a limited series of, say, eight episodes, to give the main characters a bit more breathing room. The critical consensus for the movie seems to be stylish but cold, and that is very much true. If you have a soft spot for Nolan or Looper, I think it might be worth a watch, but as it stands, it's more an Interstellar to me than an Inception. Three Paradoxa out of Five.
To my absolute surprise, my main takeaway was that I'm now fully invested in seeing Robert Pattinson as Batman, because he was ridiculously charming as Neil and that caught me utterly offguard. #justiceforneil
Unexpectedly, however, TENET was not my first cinema visit - our local non-franchise cinema apparently during the Corona break decided to join in on the Kazé-managed programme of airing one anime movie per month. Just in time for me moving away for the forseeable future, of course. While the October release is one I really want to see (The Dragon Dentist, based on an animation short that was really cool), the August release was simply announced as Girls Love Double Feature. Now, I've never really gotten into Shoujo-Ai as a genre - it rarely gets adapted or even scanlated, and those series that do tend to be ecchi or straight up porn for an audience of straight guys. The headliner or the double feature was Kase and the Morning Glories, however, about which I had only heard good things, so I decided to go check it out. By the time I booked, I was the only one, but to my surprise a good handful of people showed up (three of which ended leaving during the second OVA, but we'll get there).
I didn't check what other movie would be shown, but I did see somewhere on the social media that they also would show the first episode of the TV anime Citrus, but it sounded like that was only one location. Imagine my horror when first, among the trailers that were shown was an ad for NTR (pure straight guy fantasy smut) which resulted in akward chuckling in the cinema, and then would you guess it, the first thing was the first episode of Citrus. When K was stranded at my place in January of last year, we watched it on the grounds of hey, how often does Shoujo-Ai get TV series treatment, but it was a painful experience. It's another of the sexual fantasy type series - newly acquainted step sisters making out, topped with sexual assault (three times in the first episode!) and all the other trope greatness. I am not ashamed to say I was on my phone for the entire painful, painful 25 minutes.
Kase and the Morning Glories
Third year high school students Yui, dedicated gardener and flowergirl, and Tomoka, the school's track-and-field star, are newly in a relationship. In between looming college applications, school trips and different friend groups, there are several stumbling stones in the way.
The following Kase and the Morning Glories was a godsend afterwards, let me tell you. Both content-wise and just visually - imagine Natsume Yuujinchou's prettiest water colour backgrounds, all soft pastell colours, and very cute character designs. As an OVA, this movie adapted not the entire series, but sort of starts in medias res, that is to say, when the two girls already are in a relationship. There were a lot of obvious callbacks to events earlier in the story for manga readers to notice, but I didn't feel lost at all, and it was kind of refreshing to skip straight past the will-they-won't-they part to just fluffy relationship shenanigans. That said, there still are a ton of Shoujo-type misunderstandings playing out, so if you have no patience for that, this might not be for you. However, Kase is also quite forward in a way I did not expect of a series that seems fluffy of the type of "handholding is the maximum you'll see here". Overall, this was just a very sweet OVA, pretty to look at, and fluffy without being totally saccharine. Oh, also the goddamn National Trust is invoked. I'm serious. Four flowerpots out of five.
Fragtime
High school student Misuzu can stop time for 3 minutes, something she uses to flee any even remotely uncomfortable social situation. When she uses her power to get up close and personal with the class idol Haruka, however, it turns out that she is not affected by the time manipulation. Now faced with someone knowing what she did, a strange relationship begins to form.
The final installment of the day was Fragtime, a property I knew nothing about. Apparently it's a one-hour OVA based on an 18 chapter manga, which is already... a choice. (Rule of thumb is that depending on density of writing and page count, ~1-2 chapters can be adapted into a 23 minute episode.) Additionally, the studio that produced the OVA went bancrupt halfway through, and apparently did not pay the animators? For that, I didn't think it looked as bad as some said, but the overall impression was "Aku no Hana did it better", partially because that series eschewed the idea of "if these two damaged people get into a relationship, their issues with self-acceptance and role performance are going to magically disappear!" in favour of "honeslty? y'all need therapy". Maybe more spaced out, it could still have worked, but compressed into a one hour movie, it was quite jumpy in terms of character development. Plus, it never quite became apparent to me why Misuzu did the initial thing in the first place, and some clarification would have been welcome. It sure made three adults uncomfortable enough to leave ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ Two grains of sand out of five.
On a final note regarding these three GL things though - all three included the main character remarking about how good the other girl smelled. I guess that's a trope :')