Device Notes

This is a very loose retelling of the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter , a story adapted and referenced countless times in anime, films, and video games. Princess Kaguya comes to Earth, experiences beauty and love there, then is taken away by the moon people. In this version, she arrives in 2030 Japan and becomes the companion of Iroha, a high school girl who lives alone in Tokyo. Iroha is smart and talented, but constantly stressed and sleep deprived because of her effort to manage both school and paying her own bills. Princess Kaguya brings some chaos and eventually some new joy into her life. There are other details, but it's better to learn them from just watching the film. In the original Tale of the Bamboo Cutter , Princess Kaguya is sent to Earth because forming attachments there is meant to be a punishment. In other versions of the story, including this one, she leaves the moon of her own accord because she wants to experience the many pleasures that exist on Earth. Depending on w...

Some of my friends have misgivings about Chloe Zhao's films. I do not, as I'd only ever seen part of Eternals before watching this. The harshest criticisms of her other films had to do with their subject matter. People objected to Eternals 's role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe; or, they objected to Nomadland because they found it patronizing about poverty. Hamnet is a film with seemingly neutral subject matter, so I wondered what could possibly go wrong.  There is a scene in this film where William Shakespeare, distraught over the death of his son, runs off in the middle of the night and stands at a riverbank.  We understand he's thinking about jumping in and ending his life.  Then he recites to himself: "To be or not to be..."  This was about as silly as the bit in Interstellar  when Matt Damon's character says "you have literally raised me from the dead," and McConaughey's character helpfully informs him that their mission is cal...

The poster for  Summer Wars  had the tagline "connection itself is our weapon."  This sentiment is not exactly hard to come by.  It could be the tagline for  Yu-Gi-Oh! , Pokémon ,  One Piece ,  Shaman King ,  Mob Psycho 100 ,  Dandadan ,  Gachiakuta , and of course  Digimon .   Summer Wars  has more in common with these than Our War Game  and Belle , the two films that are supposed to be the same as Summer Wars .   The more emotional scenes in all those series are similar to those in Summer Wars : dramatic, spectacular, maybe a little sappy.  The editing becomes snappy as Sakae calls everyone in town and encourages them to help mitigate the crisis.  In voiceover, she explains the joy she felt at her first meeting with Wabisuke, offering him the home he never had.  The music swells as Natsuki defeats the hostile AI, powered by messages from people asking her to "save our preciou...

The header image is from Ne Zha 2 , which came out a few weeks ago and is now the highest grossing non-English language movie ever.  (It's the seventh highest period.)  The movie is not bad.  It's certainly better than the first Ne Zha .  I don't have that much to say about it, and you've definitely seen similar movies before.  But it's worth seeing.   What I find interesting about it is how similar it is to the other movies that made $2 billion.  Its scale and spectacle put it in the same camp as the Avatar movies.  What I wonder now, though, is if in ten years the list of highest-grossing movies will be dominated by movies like Ne Zha 2 , mass market movies made for an audience of over a billion people.  I'd like to see if it's the audience or the formula that made the difference.     A Touch of Sin (2013) This film gave me a new appreciation for filmmakers who make similar films over and over again.  Jia Zhangke isn...

The Brutalist has, in the last few weeks, become the film to see from 2024.  This is not only because it's an Oscar movie, but because it's one that's actually supposed to be good.  It's also over three and a half hours long, which means it at least thinks it's up to something important. It is a cacophonous film, featuring overlapping dialogue and voiceovers, diegetic needledrops that cross edits and a nondiegetic score that builds to staggering foghorns.  It has multiple aspect ratios, slow-motion footage, time-lapse footage, montages, documentary reels, dizzying camera angles, disorienting close-up oners, and, obviously, grand reveals of monumental structures. The film has two main parts, titled "Part 1: The Enigma of Arrival" and "Part 2: The Hard Core of Beauty," with an "overture" and an epilogue.  Part 1 expresses a whiggishness, mainly about America but also about the rest of the world.  It feels pleasantly old-fashioned, as lon...

The best moment in Liz and the Blue Bird is near the end, when we see the main character from the first-person perspective of another character.  Something similar happens in The Colors Within .  The difference is that in Liz and the Blue Bird , the transmission of a new perspective is the climax, something the characters need to get past acute stress; in The Colors Within , it serves a similar purpose, but it's not as big of a surprise.  From early on, we know that Totsuko, who sees people as projecting colorful "auras," hopes to write a song to convey the feeling she gets from her friend Kimi's color.  The film is about Totsuko, Kimi, and Rui forming a band and writing their own original songs.  There are other details, of course.  Totsuko lives in the dormitories of a Catholic school, goes to pray alone in the chapel every day, and forms a bond with Sister Hiyoko, one of the nuns on the staff.  Kimi was a student at that school, but drops out and...