Cowboy Bebop (2021)
Let’s get this out of the way, first: this was bad, to no one’s surprise, but I gave it the ol’ three-episode college try. The original 1998 series was storytelling perfection and accepted as such by a wide margin of viewers and critics, so any kind of reboot is not only unnecessary, but doomed. The individual episodes borrow heavily from the original series, with some very glaring changes. The dialog isn’t nearly as nuanced in comparison; everything needs to be quick and snappy and overly-insulting, so the audience doesn’t lose attention (this is Marvel’s fault), with a lot more profanity and sexual references. My biggest gripes are the changes done to Vicious, the antagonist, and the woman caught between him and Spike, the protag. Vicious’ character was altered for the worse…much worse. He went from a mysterious, unaffected, calculating mob boss to an emotionally unstable dweeb who stumbled his way into power. Julia has a bigger role, and of course she had to have an arc where she starts to take control and domineer Vicious (who, admittedly, deserved it just because of his annoying characterization). I took some quick peaks at the episodes past the third one, and it doesn’t get better: they had Julia, instead of Vicious, be the one to knock Spike off of the ledge in the church in that one iconic scene. Cowboy Bebop was originally about Spike coming to terms with his past and his attempts to move on from it (or not). The same with the deuteragonists: Jet, Faye, Ed; they all had appropriately-sized conflicts and resolutions. Now everyone gets an arc stuffed into the narrative, the mystery behind everyone’s origins are revealed in the first few episodes, and the only real value left that you don’t get from the original is more fight scenes and better special effects, both of which are decent but not great, and don’t make for a good story by themselves.
Eureka Seven
A dissatisfied 14 year old boy falls in cahoots with an group of anarchists and co-pilots a legendary mech, the Nirvash. Every mecha shonen series that came after Neon Genesis Evangelion is going to be compared to that series, so there wasn’t a lot of hope that this would be considered original. But it was. Compared to NGE, Eureka Seven’s worldview was much brighter, though the global-scale humanist nonsense was overcooked. The character had noticeable arcs, which only secondary characters in NGE enjoyed. The romance between Renton and Eureka felt a little too saccharine (their names, inside a heart, were carved on the damn moon in the last episode), but it was believable given their ages and the situation they were in. There were a significant amount of criticism that the series dragged. E7 was 50 episodes that could’ve been cut down to the traditional 26-episode, single season series. I didn’t mind it, because it gave the characters and plot time to breathe. Additionally, there were giant robots that air-surfed on glowing ribbons of energy. Why wouldn’t you want to see a lot of that?
The Dark Knight Rises
Bane breaks Batman’s back before belligerently binding Bruce’s burghal. With a bomb. The last of the Christopher Nolan Bat-trilogy, and it was a pretty good ending. Nolan’s films suffer from Ray Bradbury syndrome, where you’ll hear impossibly elevated dialog spoken by characters from every walk of life, from butlers to street cops to business magnates. I saw some of the filming done in downtown Pittsburgh. They made snow in summer.
My Neighbor Totoro
While their mother is hospitalized with an illness, Two sisters discover a mysterious creature in the forest near their new house. You might assume this is a horror movie based on that description, but you’d be incorrect. No discernable plot or villain, but “merely” a bunch of experiences the sisters have with Totoro. The low fantasy movies of Miyazaki have a great commonality to them, in that the normal, straight characters don’t freak out when they come across supernatural elements in the real world. They see it as an interruptive, but expected, occurrence, as though they knew at some point in their lives something strange would happen but were unclear on the details.
Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai
An unusual high school student begins some kind of relationship with an famous peer who has turned invisible via the “Adolescence Syndrome.” I don’t really do romance series, but my daughter convinced me to try it since it was so well-written. It takes the Teen Wolf route where adolescent development is an analogy to supernatural morphing, though in Rascal the concept is treated with a little more subtlety than turning into a monster. The story turns out to be more mystery at times than romance, since there’s a lot of “whodunnit” or “whoizzit” types of arcs. It’s really better than way, since the relationship dynamics between Sakuta and Mai were pretty bad. Mai was too rich and famous for getting too invested with a normie like Sakuta, and she moderately abused him, emotionally and physically, throughout the episodes, with some instances of genuine affection.
Hook
Peter Pan does the unthinkable: he grows up and has kids of his own, and Captain Hook captures them. If you know Robin Williams movies, this is one of them; you’ll know what you’re going to get. It didn’t have the depth or maturity of Bicentennial Man, but Hook was still a fun trip.
28 Weeks Later
After the events of 28 Days Later (or during them? I think these periods overlap), London is secured from the rage virus…or is it? I read somewhere the theme of this movie is “no good deed goes unpunished,” which seems accurate to me. People who decide to do the right thing get killed, people who betray others or don’t bother with anyone else’s safety survive. Anyways, I have two very huge problems with the plot, here. The first is when the patrol (Doyle) spots the two kids leaving the quarantine zone. I don’t know much about military procedure, but in a situation where there’s a highly contagious virus with a 100% mortality rate, anyone posing a risk would be dealt with immediately. Doyle’s CO would’ve given him the orders to shoot the kids on sight, regardless of who their parents were, not chase them down and rescue them. Second: Don’s wife, who was found to have a potential immunity to the virus, became a military asset and was kept, restrained, in an installation with absolutely no one guarding her. There would be at least a dozen dudes with guns with eyes on that room. I’ll let Don have the all-access swipey card that allowed him to get into the installation in the first place, but sneaking into his wife’s room with no one guarding her? That killed the movie for me.
Ergo Proxy
An investigator in the domed utopia of Romdeau looks into the murders committed by a strange Proxy creature. If you have nine and half hours to spare, you can watch the entire series in one video, here. The thinking man’s seinen anime series. We have approximately 948942 seasons of My Hero Academia, but we can’t get a second season of this? That’s fine, though, since the story concluded well enough; it would’ve been a cash grab to continue it. Despite committing the sin (to me) of the tortured protagonist with an alternate personality, the trope was handled gracefully. There weren’t really any long scenes where he’s constantly struggling, badly constipated with his own existence. He’s more pensive than agonizing. Like Neon Genesis Evangelion, you’ll need to watch it more than once and pay attention to everything to get the full backstory on the Proxies and their purpose, or read a decent explanation here. Some explanations I’ve read say there’s a heavy element of gnosticism in the plot, but overall I think it’s closer to nihilism, since the Proxies demonstrate the ultimate futility of the domes themselves, as well as the plan humanity had for them.
Oats Studios
A badly-named series of shorts on Netflix, from the titular studio. More horror, gore, and dystopian earth scenarios masquerading as science-fiction. I liked Adam Part 2 the most, since it didn’t rely on repulsive visuals to tell the story. For some reason, part 1 wasn’t included but it can be watched here. Regardless, all of these shorts were very well done, it’s just too bad that everything needs to be repulsive and depressing.
Willow
A midget dwarf little person fledgling wizard finds a baby prophesied to take down the evil Queen Bavmorda. I’m pretty sure I saw this in theaters when it came out, though I feel like I would know for sure if I did, as solid high fantasy stories were right up my 11-year old alley. Aside from some of the dodgy effects, the story hold up well today. The video game tie-in was a favorite at the time.
5 Comments
Willow: “Give me the baby!” I never saw it but caught bits and pieces of it when it came out on DVD. I was substitute teaching at the time, and kept hearing facsimiles of that famous line in the schools. I agree Hook was a standard Robin Williams film. My favorite line came when he threw his cellphone out in the snow — typical of his quick thinking humor. I watched the Adam trilogy and wondered if they simply got tired of it. It must have been some hard work, but the story had so much ahead of it; I’m really disappointed with the way they dropped it.
I assume you meant Batman trilogy, and not “Adam.” But I agree: I liked the first two, but the third was okay.
That Willow line…things like that, those phrasal templates, are the types of things that would now be memes today.
Btw, the last line in the Batman review read “They made snow in winter” when it should’ve said “summer.” I fixed it. It was a funny instance of some kind of muscle memory, where “snow in winter” just came out the fingers automatically 🙂
No, the Adam stuff came out to a trilogy.
I’m an idiot.
My comment actually still applies, incidentally. The first two Adam parts were great. The third was eh. Whenever you see a religious figure in a story like that, he’s likely going to be the bad guy, and is was pretty obvious with that episode.