sydney, pregnant?

So apparently Jennifer Garner's pregnancy is going to be written into the next season of Alias. We'll see how well they actually pull this off.

Oy. I have yet to fully catch up with last season either. I should get started on that one of these days...

Howl's Moving Castle

I'm making my post-college move this weekend so likely I won't be posting for awhile. I'll be busy furniture shopping and deciding on an exorbitant cable TV/internet package...

I went to see Howl's Moving Castle yesterday with a friend who is a really big Hayao Miyazaki fan. She'd actually seen the movie already but it was all in Japanese so she didn't understand most of it and wanted to see it properly.

I actually think I enjoyed this more than Spirited Away. I thought the supporting characters like Calcifer and Markl and the scarecrow were really cute, and I actually liked the main character, Sophie, more than Chihiro from Sprited Away, maybe because I related better to her or something.

But I have to say that I was kind of confused by the movie though. Sophie's apparent age kept on changing throughout the movie and I wasn't exactly sure what was causing it. The overall plot was a bit murky too. And clocking in at two hours, this was a bit long for an animated movie and I found myself dozing off at the end (I found myself really bored near the end of Spirited Away too). So I did miss some good chunks of the resolution, which must have come on really quickly because I definitely wasn't asleep for more than 10 minutes...my friend explained it all to me but I think I was still left a bit confused.

But the animation is excellent as to be expected, and there are lots of really imaginative details (I'm not sure how much is derived from the book it's based on) so it was still a good viewing experience. My friend did say that she enjoys (and understands) Miyazaki's films more on repeat viewings though so maybe I'll have to give this one another try on DVD.

Mira's note:
I, too, loooove Miyazaki. I'm not much of an anime person in general, but all of his films that I've watched (Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Spirited Away, Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, and now Howl's Moving Castle) I thought were excellent. What I really appreciate about his movies is that you are left feeling like the movie could only have been made through animation. Because there are so many fantastical details that he includes, crazy inventions, that could only be created through animation. Like a scarecrow that bounces around on a stick, a castle created by a hodgepodge of architecture and objects that is powered by a little flame, little wood creatures that tick-tock their heads, etc. Anyway, I love, love, love Miyazaki.

mira's summer movie list

Gotta love summers because of all the movies coming out, but it's hard to prioritize which ones to actually go watch! Unfortunately I won't get to watch everything I want to this summer, but here's to trying!

***Already Watched***
Mr. and Mrs. Smith (June 10)
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (June 11)
Crash (June 18)
Howl's Moving Castle (June 26, reviewed by Jenn)
Batman Begins (June 30, reviewed by Jenn)
War of the Worlds (July 10)

***Still Want to Watch***
Cinderella Man, June 3
Bewitched, July 24
Fantastic Four, July 8
Wedding Crashers, July 15
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, July 15
The Island, July 22
Sky High, July 29
Must Love Dogs, July 29
The Dukes of Hazzard, August 5

harry potter 6, in brief

MIRA:
Cuz Jenn doesn't want to put up any spoilers yet, we'll have a more comprehensive post in a few weeks. However, just for now..

I'm satisfied. :-) How about you, Jenn?

JENN:
I was just over at amazon.com reading some of the customer reviews, and I have to say I'm kind of surprised that some of the reviews were so negative. I thought this was one of the best of the series. Yeah, it's darker, there isn't as much action, or any great new characters, and it was a lot shorter and less ambitious than the last two, but I still loved it. I saw it as kind of the calm before the storm, i.e. the final book. Oh, well, I suppose everyone is entitled to their own opinions. I personally didn't like Order of the Phoenix very much at all, and I can never remember what happens in Chamber of Secrets....

Fantastic Four

I'm not going to make excuses: I knew this was going to be a dumb movie but I went to see it anyway. And it definitely was stupid, but I have to say that I kind of enjoyed it anyway. All those film critics comparing it to other recent superhero stuff like Spider-Man and Batman Begins were really just taking it too seriously. This is just one of those brainless summer popcorn movies that you shouldn't think too much about.

Oh, and Chris Evans as Johnny Storm/the Human Torch was hilarious and kind of hot.

Avenue Q

My first theater review! Since I won't be living in NYC much longer, I figured that a Broadway show was in order. We tried to get rush tickets through the lottery, but didn't win (I wonder if I'll ever get lucky) so we just bought the cheapest regular price tickets instead. They were $46.25, which really wasn't too bad, considering the theater was pretty small so the view from any seat was fine.

Avenue Q won the Tony Award for Best Musical last year, and I'd heard only good things about it. The show is like a grownup Sesame Street: the characters are mostly puppets operated by puppeteers who appear on stage with them, and a few humans, who all live on the fictional Avenue Q. But with songs like "It Sucks to Be Me," "The Internet is for Porn," and "I'm Not Wearing Underwear Today," this definitely is not for the kids...there's even a puppet sex scene. But even with the crude humor and discussions of racism and homosexuality, I thought it was overally really good-hearted and pretty true to life too The characters were all in their 20s and 30s, wondering what their purpose in life should be. Plus it was just unique to have puppets be real adult characters, rather than Bert-and-Ernie types.

I can see why some people might have fond the show offensive, but this isn't supposed to be the same sort of theater experience as Les Miserables or Phantom of the Opera (both of which I also liked a lot too). It's just a hilarious good time with some great puppet work and a lot of catchy tunes.

amazon is so cool!

For their 10th anniversary, amazon.com partnered with UPS to make a few special deliveries: some lucky people are getting their packages delivered by celebrities! How cool is that? So far, the likes of Anna Kournikova, Michael J. Fox, Chris Noth, Nick Lachey, Jason Alexander, Minnie Driver, and Clay Aiken have all delivered packages!

Most have been in California, naturally, so even though I had an amazon.com package delivered on Monday, there was probably no chance that a celebrity would have come with it. Plus I ordered a pair of headphones, which don't have any logical celebrity connections. It's still really cool though!

war of the worlds

Frickin' a! Why didn't anyone tell me this was a scary movie?!?!?!?! I was just expecting flat-out action or something. I wasn't expecting to be hiding in my seat, worried about what would happen next. *sigh*

Aliens are scary. The end of the world is scary. Mass mobs in panic are scary. Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning are scary.

another DVD rundown

My local library is awesome.

City of God: A Portuguese-language film set in the slums of Rio de Janeiro in the 60s and 70s. I really liked this movie a lot. It showed all the harsh realities of living in the so-called "City of God" with both heart and humor but also unforgivingly. The violence depicted is really shocking, because pretty much everyone involved is just a kid, but the narrator, Rocket, is an aspiring photographer and more of an observer of than an active participant in the violence and street wars, and his story provides a somewhat hopeful outlook.

Spirited Away: My first Hayao Miyazaki film. I know that everyone says that he does the best animation anywhere, so maybe I'm just not that big of a fan of animation in general. I liked the movie, it was very imaginative and the animation itself was great, but in my mind it's not going to overtake any of my Disney favorites (i.e. Beauty and the Beast and the Lion King). I guess it's just a matter of preference.

Real Women Have Curves: In almost every review I read of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, America Ferrara (Carmen)'s performance in her first movie was mentioned, so I decided to check it out because I was in need of a chick flick. This one had a little more substance than the average chick flick though...it's about a Mexican-American girl who wants to go to college but instead has to work in her sister's garment factory due to obligations to her family. As the title suggests, all the women in this movie have curves, and there are a few scenes where that's brought up, but the rest is more classic coming-of-age stuff. It was nice to watch a movie in which all the characters are played by wonderfully average and non-Hollywood actors.

Tape: I'm actually not sure why I even borrowed this in the first place...I guess I have a thing for Ethan Hawke in Richard Linklater movies. This was one of those concept films...there are only three characters and it all takes place inside of a motel room. The three actors (Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Robert Sean Leonard) are all very good and the dialogue was also excellent, and you don't lose interest even though there's not much to look at onscreen. The intrigue is supposed to be in how these three people all remember an event in their past differently. I did feel like some of it was strangely over-the-top, but overall it was pretty interesting.

The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason

This book is kind of old news (I think you read it a long time ago, Mira) but I finally remembered to borrow it from the library this week. I finished reading the whole book in a day, today, in fact, so I figured I might as well review it.

Since comparisons to the DaVinci Code have been inevitable, I'll start with that. I liked this book a lot better, because the characters were just college guys at Princeton instead of that annoying, aging professor running all around Europe, and it was all just easier to swallow. Both were very easy, quick reads, but I actually thought the Rule of Four was better written...some of it was a little too English-major-y for me, but I thought it flowed better.

The mystery part was alright. I'm not terribly interested in ancient texts and codes and stuff like that...I much prefer Agatha's Christie's murder mysteries, which I've been reading a lot of lately. But I thought that the story was pretty well thought out. The present action spans only a few days, with the narration skipping back to the past for most of the novel, but the pace is good and it's not confusing at all. The characters were all pretty well developed and convinced me even further that I would never want to be either a thesis graduate student or professor in the humanities...haha, yeah, engineer speaking here.

But I think what intrigued me the most were the descriptions of Princeton and how life goes on there. I considered applying there when I was in high school, and what I remember from my campus visit was that it all seemed so upper-crust and steeped in tradition. From what I read in this book, I guess my impression was about right. My experience at Cornell seemed so completely different, despite the fact that it was still Ivy League. I kept thinking that a novel set at Cornell would probably be so much less interesting and have so much less character, but maybe that's just the bitterness talking. There's apparently some fantasy novel set at Cornell entitled Fool on the Hill that was written not too long ago by an alum, so I'm really curious to check that out and see how my alma mater transfers to the page. Of course, hey, maybe someday I'll write a book set at Cornell too.