#april is THAT romcom girlie for me

[clairedaring]

Definitely, Maybe (2008) dir. Adam Brooks

[anosci]

Media Thread 2024

im making a list of media ive watched/played/etc this year with brief thoughts. its going to be far less featured than my music list, but still a bit long.

list below the cut

January

1/ Portal Revolution (2024) i went in expecting a very polished set of portal 2 styled test chambers. i was NOT expecting a story that captured my imagination very good experience

2/ The Ancient Magus' Bride (2017) every review i saw for this said it's bad. huh??. sure it's not perfect but i quite enjoyed it. a bit soft, a bit atmospheric, a bit girly. amazing job actually drawing me into a british fantasy setting.

3/ Violet Evergarden (2018) at worst, it feels a bit like its on rails, maybe eager to lose focus. but overall i rather enjoyed the story of the most traumatized girl in the world slowly learn to be human. idk if its "65th best anime ever" good, but… a lovely ride!

February

4/ Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010) i heard this was somewhere between nfsmw 2005 (which i love) and burnout paradise (which i just Couldn't get into). i heard correctly. i fell in love with this. with the semi-open world. the daynight cycle and weather. and with drifting somehow! (but mostly weaving through traffic.) captivated. also worth mentioning: the cop mode was an interesting variation in gameplay. not my fav, but good.

March

5/ Titanfall 2 (2016) finally playing this and.. yeah I see why ppl were comparing it to HL2. I'm more "nodding along with this assessment" than feeling it, tho… idk. it's good but it doesn't resonate with me. the movement, though! that slaps! is this… schmoovement?

6/ Need for Speed: Heat (2019)

this was hard to get into, specifically because the pacing was just kinda... wack(?) for me anyway. plus a lot of other small little spots of friction. but it was never enough to turn me away (mw2012, burnout paradise)

by the end of the "storyline" races, i found myself having a good time. maybe a mixed bag, but well worth the 3 dollars or w/e it was.

April

May

7/ Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai (2018)

a damn good bait and switch. i feel the focus got a bit wobbly in the middle, but i found myself enjoying the overarching exploration of Puberty Syndrome nonetheless. i do not like tsundere but this was played honestly enough that i evaded cringing. the show is an interesting web of relationships centered around a bit of a straight shooter. i think it worked nicely, though i fear it wasn't focused enough to truly stick with me. i cant help but imagine a heavily trimmed version with just the first and final arc. that would've blown some socks.

8/ Rascal Does Not Dream of a Dreaming Girl (2019)

yeah the show was good enough that i watched the movie immediately after. (im not as interested in the 2nd movie tho.) i feel like i chugged a pint of stupid juice before watching this but i still followed the key plot points i think. is madoka genre? there's something satisfying about this explanation of the loose anime thread, though i think this might've worked better as The Anime (RE: trimming etc). a bit of kudos for giving some weight to "it was all just a dream"

9/ Kaguya-sama: Love is War (2019) this show is at its best when it's needlessly dramatic and convoluted. sometimes, it's brilliant. but, sadly, it also wants to stay in the episodic high school romcom genre, complete with serious pining. maybe that part's ok but it's surely not for me. i do not trust this to stay fresh for 3(?????) seasons.

June

10/ Dungeon Meshi (2024) i have the opposite of a soft spot for high fantasy stuff. hate it. this reeks of it. and yet, whenever im watching it, i am FULLY drawn into the world with a sense of wonder and anticipation. there were so many characters and all of them were delightful. my only real complaints were that, especially towards the end, the pacing was wack. feels like they chopped it to bits for the anime... and for what? a つづく? man... ill probably actually grab the manga.

July

11/ Hitoribocchi no OO Seikatsu (2019) it's cute before it's anything else. i was drawn in by a very relatable protagonist that literally has a panic attack first episode, but… that didn't last. I got 3 episodes in before deciding that the show isn't for me. the person that this show is for, though, i think is in for a treat. nako is alright.

12/ Ride Your Wave (2019)

very…. summer. maybe a little too bright for me (not literally but. vibe. ily.) i somehow missed the "supernatural" tag and wasn't sure how grounded to be, which was fun lol everything is connected in a satisfying way, but something didn't quite click for me. not sure what it was. or wasn't. i'd still call it a good watch

13/ Weathering with You (2019)

I saw a review of this that went as follows: "discout kimi no na wa". that's… almost right, but really reductive. it didn't hit as hard for me, but carried an atmosphere all of its own. i think its biggest weakness was deploying the damsel in distress trope for the climax. absolutely throwing away a lot of character development... second weakness was not leaning into the supernatural angle, but I also think that's 100% a matter of taste. I think the two could have been solved in one stone, but meh... aside from that: vibes were off the charts, and the art direction wall to wall great. every frame a painting etc

August

14/ Mother 3 (2006)

for the first time since November 2008 (apparently), I decided to revisit Mother 3.... via Lauren the Flute's Let's Play. I remember way back then that I thought M3 was a little weaker than EB for me. Revisiting it has solidified that opinion for me: It's super strong at some parts and really weak at others, to my taste at least. For the most part, everything I remembered as "my fav bits" from 16 years ago are my favorite bits today. To comment on Lauren's playthrough specifically: at glance, she seemed to be the most emotionally invested. and. yeah! It wasn't the best stream setup, but it was the most resonant. another LP of hers may appear here lol

September

October

15/ Beastars (2019)

Furry anime? "Yes", but the nontherian kind. Zootopia ass. This immediately had me suspicious from episode 1. But then, I kept trying to see if I was wrong. and the show kept delivering some fascinating symbols! the hype was back! and then it threw all of that away. "you were reading it backwards the whole time dumbass". augh. if I hadn't done that, I think it'd be an ok watch. what kills me is that some of the plot threads here would make an INCREDIBLE anime. but they withered away from a lack of focus as some really annoying threads were added instead. also the icky biological essentialism. what a terrible aftertaste. :(

props for having (half of) a really good sex scene though i guess? I was kinda impressed.

16/ Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! (2020)

what a delightful nod to not just the art of animation, but the practice of it. the shitty parts. the deadlines. the overworking. said with reverance!

each of the characters were interesting foils for each other, though to varying degrees. Kanamori became my favorite. she took the role of manager, a role thats somewhat antagonistic usually. yet in here she looked like a badass mob boss, fighting for the creatives, brandishing huge clever strength.

lovely show!

November

17/ BNA (2020)

it is ASTOUNDING how much more I enjoyed this than Beastars. I can't help but make the comparison since they're kind of companion shows: 2020 furry anime. but. god damn.

treating beastmen (furries) as a separate class, like humans with "superpowers", did wonders for the plot.

I think both BNA and Beastars tried to show a rigid system of thinking and say "it doesn't have to be this way. tear down the barriers.", but BNA actually pulled it off. the bad guy became a Big Bad obsessed with racial (species-ial?) purity, whos downfall was literally in mixing blood.

what im saying is BNA is the pro-choice + antifa version of Beastars.

watching this was fun because it was well structured. i picked up plot elements from their foreshadowing. fun! animation great. idk. all around good time, even if i dont think itll stick with me. fun watch!

18/ Haibane Renmei (2002)

I had an itch to revisit this again. it's a flawed masterpiece. and the flaws are all petty things. budgetary stuff. i wish the soundtrack were longer and the shots larger and the folly higher quality. as-is it feels like peering through a foggy window into a beautiful garden.

but MAN it's a good damn garden.

the finale is a bit too "hardcore action" than it needs to be but every other aspect is just. a delight.

i realized this time that my initial reaction to the show was probably heavily influenced by these surface level complaints. "i wish the soundtrack were less orchestral" i probably said at the time. but now i think it should've been more. i can't imagine it veering too far away from what it has. mushishi has its sound and haibane has this sound. iykyk

19/ Charge!! Cromartie High School (The Movie) (2005)

the live action adaptation of the manga, on kenny lauderdale's rec. it's very...... low budget and 2005-core. but despite that, it does a great job at being CLEAR with its delivery of jokes and information. clear hilights for me: the hijacker scene (until the ***ism) and the "getting the team back together by walking towards the camera" scene. also the drugs scene lmao.

there were quite a few jokes and gags that misfired or just didnt work at all, but that might be to-be-expected for a film like this. a fun watch as a fan of the source material, but only just.

20/ Arcane S2 (2024)

holy shit this is drop dead gorgeous 110% of the time. every frame a god damn painting.

the plot felt like A LOT of threads that weave in and out of each other. just when everything feels like it's starting to resolve nicely, a thread you forgot about barges in and undoes everything. rinse and repeat. it's fun actually.

very underwhelmed with the ending but w/e. a nice watch

December

21/

[gretagerwigarchive]

Q&A: Greta Gerwig, "Damsel" in Shining Armor

BY Graham Fuller, April 11, 2012.

source: http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/798721/qa-greta-gerwig-damsel-in-shining-armor

In “Damsels in Distress,” which opened Friday, Greta Gerwig plays the most eccentric yet of writer-director Whit Stillman’s opinionated gilded youths. A proselytizing do-gooder with obsessive compulsive order at a Northeastern university, Gerwig’s Violet leads a quartet of ultra-feminine women determined to save suicide cases and counter the ubiquitous musk of masculinity by disseminating bars of hotel soap.

Perfection being unachievable, Violet plunges into depression when her yahoo boyfriend has an extracurricular fling with one of her protégées, while conflict with her dissenting new friend Lily (Analeigh Tipton) brings on a crisis of values. Like many a girl before her, she realizes the only option is to dance away the heartache. Faced with Stillman’s rhetorical approach to melodrama and his precise dialogue, Gerwig acquitted herself admirably, her pleasing performance being another rung on her ladder to indie superstardom.

The 28-year-old actress-writer-director, who did achieve untrammeled perfection in the mumblecore movies that made her name (“Hannah Takes the Stairs,” “Baghead,” “Nights and Weekends”) and in Noah Baumbach’s “Greenberg,” could be at a crossroads. The trailers for the Tribeca Film Festival entry “Lola Versus” (opening June 8) and Woody Allen’s “To Rome With Love” (June 22) indicate she could become the dominant mainstream romcom actress of the next decade if she so chose, though one suspects her heart lies more in lo-fi, low-budget movies over which she has some control.

Then again, sitting opposite her for 20 minutes at the “Damsels” press junket, I was persuaded she could become the American Catherine Deneuve.  

Violet’s much more constrained than most of the characters you’ve played. Was it a leap for you to relate to someone as straight as she is?

No. There were certain physical things that felt creative. The way she sat, the way she ran, the way she held her body, and the way she put herself together felt very not like Greta, not like me at all. But I connected strongly to the core of Violet, which is her fire. She’s a zealot, the Joan of Arc of her cause, and I have a lot of that in me, a lot of “I will fall on my sword for this thing!” In Violet, though, it’s contained within a very OCD young woman. I just had to build all the constraints.

There’s a misconception she’s one of Whit Stillman’s preppies.

She’s not a preppy exactly. She’s an idealist, a utopian, and her influences are not contemporary in the least. With preppies, I think there’s a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses element, and I don’t think Violet has that sense of comparison. She marches to the beat of her own drummer and does what she does regardless of what anyone else is doing.

How did you get on with all those pastels and girly clothes she wears?

I know. I love costumes. I’ve heard it said a million times but it’s true: a costume makes you feel like the character. I had 38 costume changes in the movie and had to go to fittings for hours at a time. We’d try some looks and Whit would say, “I think it’s too caricatured. She’s not that far gone and we’re not making a period piece.” It’s not how I dress, but…

She’s quite neurotic. She has a possibly Freudian aversion to the male scent and she’s very controlling. Was that fun to get into?

So much fun [laughs]. Her opinions are so strange.

Why the fixation on…

Scent? I think it’s just visceral. I think she believes in the fallen state of man and that you have to mask it otherwise we’re wallowing in sin. She sees the natural world as deficient and [dispensing soaps] is one way of controlling it. Whatever her sense of Christianity is – and I think she is Christian – she believes it your duty to improve everything. She thinks we shouldn’t be merely content with all the gifts God gave to the world, but that you have to polish them. That’s the way she actually looks at it.

Violet becomes especially interesting when she tells her friends she’s attracted to a guy [played by Adam Brody] who’s a liar.

Whit said to me, “Don’t you think truth-tellers are terrible bores?” And I guess they are, kind of. I think he’s attracted to people who are self-inventors. Even though he’s lived in Europe, he makes movies about Americans, and I think that idea of self-reinvention is deep in the American psyche – it’s a big part of what we come from. I’m always interested in how the history of a place influences its citizens even far removed from the inception of it, and I like that idea that you can be anything you want, that you can transform, that you can come here from another country and decide that you’re this person now.

Tell me about speaking the very ornate, hyper-articulate dialogue that Whit Stillman wrote for Violet and if it affected your acting.

It did. I think the biggest thing for me was that I had to get the voices of other actors [who worked with Stillman earlier] out of my head, specifically the voices of Chris Eigeman and Kate Beckinsale. They were great favorites of mine in his films, which I love. I have such a good idea of what the parts he writes are like when they are executed well, and I didn’t want to merely imitate them. A lot of it was trying to find my own way of doing it in my own rhythm. I don’t know if it was successful, but that’s what I did.

Playing Violet, I had the largest number of words I’ve ever had to work with on a movie script, and it was a wonderful challenge because the words are so good. It’s much harder when the writing’s bad. You’ve a lot more work to do. With good writing, you have to figure out how to let it come through you instead of imposing yourself on it.

Was “Damsels” a more formal experience than the early films you made?

It was definitely more formal than on the almost entirely improvised films I helped to devise and make – very different from those. But when I made “Greenberg,” that was very precise. That’s the closet analogy. I’ve since worked with Woody Allen. People compare Whit to Woody, but I found Woody much less precious about his lines. Woody says, “Oh, do whatever you want. Don’t say my lines, say your own lines.”

Did Whit Stillman talk to you in “isms” – you know, “naturalism,” “realism?”

He didn’t specifically use those words, but when I gave more broad or comic takes, he would say, “Make it smaller,” or “Can you say it normally?” He didn’t like anything that made the result seem self-conscious. He wouldn’t like it if you played a funny line as if it were supposed to be funny. We had to be in the moment and play it as if it were supposed to be sincere, which it is for him. So he didn’t speak in “isms,” but he did have “isms” in him, if that makes sense [laughs]. I think he was guided by “isms.”

Did you have to work hard at making your dancing seem gawky?

No. [laughs] I’m just gawky. I didn’t have to work at that. I’ve always been too tall and embarrassed about the size of my body and the length of my arms. I danced a lot as a child, but if as a child you grow up feeling you’re too big, I don’t think you ever lose it. And I haven’t.

Are you writing at the moment?

I wrote a movie that was shot over the fall and winter and which should be at film festivals later this year. It’s a very small film and very under the radar, and I’m trying not to talk about it too much. I love writing. Somewhere between writing and directing and acting is where I’m happiest.

Who directed it?

It’s a secret [laughs]. I’m in it.

What was it like working with Woody Allen?

He’s a person I’ve idolized my whole life, and a lot of my life decisions have been based on things he’s done. I moved to New York because Woody Allen lives in New York. So it was amazing – it’s a really funny film – but it was hard to process because it went by so quickly. It’s always hard when you do those things that mean so much – to have the experience while you’re having it. I’m hoping he’ll cast me again so that I can actually feel like I’m living it.

Are you ambitious or more driven by creative fulfillment?

I think they’re one and the same. I am driven by creative fulfillment, but in the world of movies that inevitably means ambition. I’m not Emily Dickinson – I’m not writing poems in my attic – but if all I cared about was fulfillment I’d be doing something else. I certainly care about public engagement because I’m making things for people to go see and participate in. I’m hugely ambitious but, without sounding too pretentious, I’m ambitious to make great things that deepen people’s experience of life. And I hope I get to do that.