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October 09, 2002
And they're going to be mad
Best way to figure out if you should listen to a reviewer is by reading a review of a work you're already familiar with. So, if you're not from Chicago and don't realize that you should implicitly Trust Roger Ebert, you could have a look at his review of, say, "Grave of the Fireflies"
It tells a simple story of survival. The boy and his sister must find a place to stay, and food to eat. In wartime their relatives are not kind or generous, and after their aunt sells their mother's kimonos for rice, she keeps a lot of the rice for herself. Eventually, Seita realizes it is time to leave. He has some money and can buy food--but soon there is no food to buy. His sister grows weaker. Their story is told not as melodrama, but simply, directly, in the neorealist tradition. And there is time for silence in it. One of the film's greatest gifts is its patience; shots are held so we can think about them, characters are glimpsed in private moments, atmosphere and nature are given time to establish themselves.Japanese poets use "pillow words" that are halfway between pauses and punctuation, and the great director Yasujiro Ozu uses "pillow shots"--a detail from nature, say, to separate two scenes. "Grave of the Fireflies" uses them, too. Its visuals create a kind of poetry. There are moments of quick action, as when the bombs rain down and terrified people fill the streets, but this film doesn't exploit action; it meditates on its consequences.
to see if his opinion more or less lines up with yours. Personally, I thought the parts of the film I saw were brilliant. And so fucking depressing I have yet to actually finish watching it, but they can't all be The Feel-Good Movie of the Summer. . .
Not at all similarly, but I can't come up with a decent transitional sentence at the moment so this one will have to do, it's easy enough to determine if Karin Lee's reviews should influence your borrowing/purchasing decisions. Read the Comics for the Ill: Jhonen Vasquez review:
I Feel Sick is arguably the best of Vasquez's books. The art and storytelling have grown more sophisticated and streamlined without losing Vasquez's wit and sick humour. It's the story of Devi, whose date with Johnny in JTHM went horribly awry when he tried to kill her. Here, she's struggling to make a living as an artist, doing illustrations for horror novels, and trying not to lose her grip on her own work. Things are complicated by one of her unfinished paintings, which appears to have become possessed. Despite, or perhaps because of, the sheer over-the-top surreality of the story (one of Devi's failed dates, we learn, was with a zombie), I Feel Sick is really an excellent story about the sheer hell of being a creative person in a society seemingly bent on squashing creativity at every turn.
Realize that anyone who likes Jhonen, but not so much as to foist Fillerbunny minicomics on the uninitiated is, clearly, an individual of rare insight, and wander around Bookslut for a bit to see if the rest of the crew maintains the same level of coolness.
Except, you know, books, not films, like the introductory meandering suggested. There's more information at Nausicaa.net if I didn't turn you off to the idea of seeing "Grave of the Fireflies." And there's a story that Jhonen was doing a cartoon series on Nickelodeon, but that's just silly.
If there was such a thing, surely his I Feel Sick collaborator, Rosearik Rikki Simons, would mention it on his site.
Or his other site.
Or something.
Posted by Aaron at October 9, 2002 07:26 AM
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