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Eureka (ユリイカ) (2000) — A bus driver (Yakusho Kōji) and two middle school kids (Miyazaki Masaru and his real-life sister, Miyazaki Aoi, in her second film) have to pick up the pieces of their broken lives after surviving a bus hijacking/hostage situation. It's a long journey (the film runs for over 3½ hours), and the sepia-toned monochrome only adds to the somber mood.

Journey to the West (2013)

I saw this movie cold turkey not even knowing it was a
Stephen Chow comedy about the Chinese fable
of an apprentice demon hunter on his quest to enlightenment
to become a Buddhist monk via India (that’s the west part).

It must be cultural but for me the opening scene was very
heart wrenching. I guess they have so many children in
China that to kill off a couple innocents in the opening scene
is acceptable. The acting was subperb but the rest of the
movie was ruined for me by that first scene. Even sweet heart
Qi Shu couldn’t save the movie for me but I did have to chuckle
at some of her scenes.

erilaz wrote:For those of you in the San Francisco area, IDOL IS DEAD, a horror-comedy starring BiS, is playing at the Roxie Cinema's Little Roxie this Thursday at 7:00 pm.



http://www.roxie.com/ai1ec_event/nippon ... idol-dead/

It was fun. The film has idols, wota, a mad scientist, bloody murders, and… well, the sort of weirdness that one should expect from a Japanese horror-comedy. モー娘。even gets mentioned. My only real complaint is that it's too darn short (63 minutes).

The Tale of Princess Kaguya (かぐや姫の物語) — The latest from Takahata Isao (Grave of the Fireflies, Pom Poko) is exquisite, with a visual style quite unlike anything Studio Ghibli has done before. SEE IT!

Speaking of Halloween, I only got a handful of callers this year again (less than 10).
Comments I over heard in previous years:
"Shall we stop here? Naw, this is a cheap neighborhood."
"Nobody lives here." (so my lawn needed mowing)

ok, Back to Halloween night
to complete my Akira Yamaoka introduction from Japan Expo …
Full concert here if interested: http://youtu.be/9WWdrqytcd4
Silent Hill


The Boy In the Striped Pajamas

My Halloween movie was Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 classic, The Birds. Like a lot of great movies, it's set in this part of the world (San Francisco and Bodega Bay, to be precise), and it also has special visual effects by the godlike Ub Iwerks.

We don't celebrate Halloween here, but nevertheless, I watched Ghostbusters. I can never get enough of that movie.

I just got home from seeing Big Hero 6.

OH. MY. GOD. That had to be one of the most enjoyable movies I've ever seen. And man, I so want San Fransokyo to be a real place! There are so many hilarious little details (like the 218 Building) that I'm going to be doing hours of freeze-framing when it comes out on DVD and Blu-ray.

Being Disney, there's also a delightful animated short (Feast) before the feature, and being Marvel, you definitely want to stick around until after the credits….

Ooh, I definitely wanna see BH6. I'll have to wait til it's on DVD/PPV.

Gran Torino was on but I wasn't paying too much attention to it. I'll probably try to watch it once I'm back home.

Saw Interstellar. It wasn't perfect. There was one character in particular who was just comically bad and threatened to ruin the film a la Sunshine, and there was an extended mystical sequence which made you think they were going to descend into handwavy spirituality. But in the end, the film tied up the mystical loose ends and wound up being true science fiction. While following a somewhat cliched storyline, borrowing liberally from a bunch of greater (and not so great) predecessors, it still had imagination enough for two or three normal movies. It showed nature as fierce and terrible as well as beautiful, but never evil. It left a bunch of commonplace SF tropes moderately to completely unexplained, so I couldn't recommend it to someone who doesn't at least occasionally read science fiction. But I very strongly recommend it to any SF fan who's able to put aside nitpicking over a couple of blunders that are not really essential to the story.* The actual in-space sequences rival Gravity for apparent verisimilitude.

*Phil Plait complains particularly about the fact that the rocket launch pad was seemingly amidst a bunch of offices. Yes this makes absolutely no sense. But it doesn't really matter, and I'm guessing it probably saved a bunch of money in set design and may have served some cinematic purpose such as making the ship seem more immediate and tangible to the audience.

I'll definitely get the blu-ray when it comes out.