Fantasia, Part 1

[petronia]

The usual assortment of geeks, freaks, punks, otaku, goths, lolis, Asian exchange students, and indie film gonzos. Fantasia is resistant to the P4k-indie brand of hipster, I find, which is odd because IME they all read comic books and/or have lived in Asia. The girl tees this year are white with black sleeves, hot pink (summer 09's "in" colour!), and electric blue, all steals at $15 apiece. But the cost of popcorn has gone up.

Moon: not actually a Fantasia movie, but could so well be I'm reviewing it in this section anyway. XD Smart, classy, affecting old-school SF, like a good episode of The Outer Limits; a Sam Rockwell one-man play of sorts. Written and directed by one Duncan Jones, son of Dave, who no doubt at one point envisaged the Major Tom jokes coming his way and decided it was worth doing anyhow. Takes place on the moon but disregards most of what gravitation has to say about it, with no effect on plot.

Yatterman: my guess is that Miike Takashi uncomplicatedly enjoys being at the career juncture where people give him large sums of money to remake the cheesy tokusatsu serials he used to watch as a kid, because who wouldn't? He doesn't play this particular one straight, but the subversion is dialed down to kid-friendly levels. A bit of fourth-wall breaking here, a few rocket-launcher boobies and robot makeouts there... In any case Miike's thing is to take every shot to its logical conclusion of unblinking childlike wonder even if a sane adult would get embarrassed halfway and cop out, and that never stops being entertaining. Sakurai Sho stars and (one suspects) was directed not to try to act. You'd probably like it if you liked Anno Hideaki's take on Cutie Honey.

The producer attended in costume and showed a hilariously bullshit introductory video in which Miike told us we, the Fantasia attendees, were the only audience that understood him, and also that all Japanese filmmakers lived together in an idyllic village of straw huts. Actually, watching the room react one could hardly imagine any audience being more on board, although the Japanese would probably have gone into hysterics at the original seiyuu cameo. I don't believe the straw huts story, though.

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I also went to see the Star Trek movie again! As per astrael_nyx it's worth watching once for the story/characters and once for the lens flare cinematography, so I'll take her advice and not go for a third. XD Will add some of the getting-from-A-to-B plot points, since my brain tends to filter out obvious babble, and the great winterwear in the Delta Vega scene. XD; Maybe it was the effect of watching Moon just beforehand, but I kept thinking "so here are two entirely unrelated groups of marooners in a hurry who didn't just bundle their maroonee in the nearest thermal spacesuit-like thing but found them a GQ overcoat for classy surface living, huh." Though I'm sure it's made out of that Japanese space putty that turns rock solid when you hit it with a shovel or whatever.

Comments

[dipping_sauce]

Takes place on the moon but disregards most of what gravitation has to say about it, with no effect on plot.

I saw a few signs inside the bunker, near the floor, reading "1G area" or something similar, so I just assumed there was artificial gravity inside Sarang.

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

Space putty?

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

I just saw Moon! It's not the kind of SF film you ponder after you leave the theater, but I liked it - good acting. Being left alone for three years apparently turns you in a better (or at least calmer) person. The scene at the end, where it's just Gerty and John in the infirmary, was really sweet, in a strange way. (An astronaut and the AI programmed to take care of him, awww!)