Princess Mononoke. So, I was forced to watch this three times in a college course, and ever since then I have hated this movie with a vengeance. A good 15 years later I sat down to watch it again and… it’s not as bad anymore. I still don’t enjoy it as much as I’ve enjoyed other Ghibli films like Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. Many of Ghibli's stories feel like I need to understand folklore in order to get the deeper meaning, but this one feels like I need folklore plus historical context. I probably won’t ever come back to this one, but I release it with far less irritation than the last time I watched it.
Children Who Chase Lost Voices. I always get the feeling, watching Japanese animated movies, that if I understood more of their literature and lore, I would get way more out of the story. As it is, I still enjoyed watching this. Overall, it’s a story about death and how you do (or don’t) handle the loss of a loved one. It isn’t my favorite of this director’s works, but it was a good movie.
The Phantom of the Opera (2004). I re-watched this partly because I had been convinced to go read the book (review further down). I remember being hyped as heck for this movie in 2004. The trailer looked incredible. Grand. Sweeping. I watched the movie in theaters with sky-high expectations and was frustrated by many issues in it (Why do you not pick singing OR speaking? Why is there a horse underground? How is it the main character doesn't seem to know that the Angel of Music and the Phantom of the Opera are the same person, when early on he leads her by the hand to his lair and sings in the same voice to her? etc etc etc). I watched it again a few years later with NO expectations, and that improved the experience immensely. Here's the deal, even with the aforementioned problems, this movie does two things excellently: Grandeur and Music. The set design, costume, and sweeping shots all combine to give you a real, glorious sense of grandeur throughout the movie and that is only enhanced by a perfectly timed score punctuated with songs so iconic you can't get them out of your head for weeks. It still stirs aching emotions in me when I watch it, so all in all I would say this is a movie worth returning to every few years.
The Wild Robot. The entirety of my review: *LOUD UGLY CRYING* also amazing soundtrack and the visuals and the story and the *LOUD UGLY CRYING*
Books
The Wild Robot, The Wild Robot Escapes, and The Wild Robot Protects by Peter Brown. So this is going to be one of those situations where I enjoyed the movie more—whether it’s because I saw it before I read it, I’m not sure. Maybe I outgrew the book demographic bracket. I did enjoy parts of the story, and I appreciated the concept of there not really being a villain—just several competing needs that conflicted. Overall I would say the movie adapted it well enough to enjoy watching without reading the books, though a few key things were changed in the adaptation. If you're over 13, you may not get a lot from reading it.
The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. I plugged a bunch of questions about the 2004 movie into ChatGPT, all the things that had plagued me for so long, and one of the responses I got back was approximately, "Have you considered reading the book? Things will make some more sense if you do." Well, that's fair. Adaptation issues are an age-old problem. I was warned that it's a fairly old and extremely melodramatic gothic story and that I should be prepared for wild mood swings, among other things. That was probably one of the largest differences with the movie, the novel characters' moods are like Houston's weather. If you don't like it, wait five minutes.
It's written in serial installments that were originally published in a newspaper of some sort, so the format of each chapter is interesting in that context. The Phantom's backstory is completely different, as is the final confrontation scene and the Phantom's fate at the end. His disfiguration is also quite a bit worse than the movie's comparatively trivial bit of scar tissue. All in all, reading the book made more sense of some things, like Christine's "confusion" or vacillation over the Angel of Music vs the Phantom of the Opera, and it expanded the grandeur of the underground labyrinth wonderfully. Probably my favorite "Ah, that's clearly a bit the movie had to shorten drastically, and NOW it makes some sense" moment was watching how long it took Christine to convince the Phantom to let her return to the surface the first time he took her to his lair. If you can flow with the emotional moodswings and you're the sort of person who leans toward read the source material of movies, I'd say this is an interesting enough work to pick up.
Buried Deep by Naomi Novik. I love Novik’s work, so I picked up her short story collection. I probably shouldn’t be surprised that it was a mixed bag for me, since the only short story collections I’ve ever loved without reservation were Peter Beagle’s. Here, some were excellent, some less so. Some I would genuinely love to see a whole novel about—especially the one about the tower. Interesting read, if you like Novik’s other work.
Beast by Chawna Shroeder. I had very mixed feelings about this story. On the one hand, my analytical brain kept protesting, “People don’t talk like that,” or “That reaction makes no sense,” or “This is totally a plot hole if anyone paid attention to it.” But the rest of my mind kept yelling, “Shush! It’s an allegory, and a beautiful one at that. Pipe down!” And that is most of what I have to say about it—Beast is a Christian allegory about a girl treated like an animal so long that she thinks of herself as one, until she is adopted by the King of the land. For the whole novel, she wavers between how she has seen herself her whole life and the new life offered to her by the King. And if you can duct-tape your analytical brain's mouth shut long enough, it is a beautiful thing to read.
Stepping Into Sunlight by Sharon Hinck. I probably didn’t start really connecting with the main character until halfway through, but once I did it was a ride. In the wake of surviving a violent convenience store robbery, Penny—the wife of a Navy pastor—struggles to raise their son and keep up with “life as normal”. Her childlike faith is shattered, agoraphobia encroaches, and depression dogs her every move. Her questions become more raw and her reactions more real as the defensively perfect layers of her personality get peeled away by the constant battle to just get through another day. This was a healing novel to read, and I’d recommend it to people dealing with PTSD and trauma.
Dreams Underfoot by Charles de Lint. Now here's someone who reminds me of Peter Beagle. This short story collection is low fantasy (which means fantasy in our modern setting) that starts slow and captures you halfway in, so that you're not sure exactly what point you stepped into the magical and left the mundane behind. Some were gritty. Some were light-hearted. Some were horror. The spread was lovely and the more of the short stories you read, the more you see repeat characters tying them together into a very loose web--exactly the sort of thing I need for inspiration. I will be picking up more of his books.
The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo. I, uh. Did not write down my impressions soon enough. I mostly enjoyed this. It was about a Chinese woman one or two hundred years ago who receives a proposal to be a "Ghost Bride" or a woman who is ceremonially married to a rich dead man so that his spirit can be more at rest. Except he haunts her to coerce the arrangement. Her own spirit gets separated from her body, and she sets out to find a way to free herself from his attention. I enjoyed it while I was reading it, though I recall feeling parts of it were a little contrived.
Shows
Severance Seasons 1 & 2. This show is really weird but really cool. I’ve heard it compared to Lost in terms of the weird mysteries that it sets up, but compared favorably because it actually answers those mysteries. I can confirm that by the end of season 2, MOST of the mysteries that were set up were answered. The concept here is that people can have a surgery to separate their work experience from the rest of their life. So, their work persona has no memory of the rest of their life, and who they are outside of work has no memories from work. This sets up all kinds of interesting ethical questions, and the further you go down the rabbit hole, the weirder everything gets. There’s a low-level “disturbed” undertone to the story, but it never devolves into actual horror. I’m quite looking forward to season 3.
Black Mirror season 7. So… for a couple of seasons now, Black Mirror has felt like there are three main writers at the helm. One writer engages with new or mildly recycled ideas about radical technology and the ways in which humans can take what was meant to be a good thing and turn it into a hellscape—which, in my opinion, is what Black Mirror has always excelled at. One writer treats Black Mirror like a modern day Twilight Zone show and doesn’t engage much with sci-fi tech ideas—this has crept in for two or three seasons. It's okay, but not really what I signed up for.
And one writer punches across the political aisle as hard and tastelessly as possible. And I do mean tastelessly, because everything revolves around the mockery or the message, while characters and story are mangled vehicles to serve the mockery and the message. The writing becomes lazy and cartoonish, making these episodes stand out in garish contrast to the episodes that focus on what Black Mirror is actually good at—making us look at ourselves and our deepest flaws as they are enabled by the next levels of technology. Suffice it to say, three episodes were (I think) excellent, one was not that great but reasonable, and two of them punched me in the face. I think I will continue watching in the future, but I’ve begun to hit the “skip episode” button at the point where I see it winding up a mean left hook. I’m tired of trying to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Anime
Dororo. A feudal lord in Japan, upon seeing the suffering of his famine-stricken land and the failure of his own ambitions for power, makes a deal with twelve local demons. In exchange for prosperity, protection, and power, they can have anything he owns. As payment, they take from his newly born son his arms, legs, eyes, ears, nose, speech, pain receptors, bones, and skin. Yet the child somehow lives. Abandoned to die, he is discovered by a prosthetic-crafter, who helps him live and grow. As an adult, he embarks on a journey to gain his body back, which he can only do by slaying each of the demons that took something from him. This show is something else. A story of ghouls and what it takes to wrench your life back from them while not becoming them. It is fairly dark, but it is an excellent story with major character growth.