WHAT I WATCHED THIS WEEK: CHARLES

With the holidays steadily creeping upon us I’ve been stockpiling certain shows to watch doing the Christmas lull(Heroes, Terminator, Grey’s Anatomy, BBC’s MERLIN to name a few), during this stockpiling I’ve freed myself up alot of time to watch some things I’ve been putting off for awhile. So here we go until early January when my viewing schedule is all filled up I’m going to do a Friday recap of what I’ve watched during the week.

First up is:

5 CENTIMETERS PER SECOND

PLOT SUMMARY: A tale of two people, Tono Takaki and Shinohara Akari, who were close friends but gradually grow farther and farther apart as time moves on. They become separated because of their families yet continue to exchange contact in the form of letters. Yet as time continues to trudge on, their contact with one another begins to cease. Years pass and the rift between them grows ever larger. However, Takaki remembers the times they have shared together, but as life continues to unfold for him, he wonders if he would be given the chance to meet Akari again as the tale embarks on Takaki’s realization of the world and people around him.

– ANIMENEWSNETWORK.COM

• I remember hearing about this when I randomly picked up a issue of ANIME INSIDER and the story kinda hit me in a very personal way. Cut to about a year later and I finally get around to watching it and I was blown away. The overwhelming sense of longing and heartache burst through every scene. I think that the overall silent quality of the film makes it that more engaging. The movie is broken up into three vignettes, the first deals with the two main characters as pre teens and their naive devotion to each other. The scenes of Takaki riding the train through the snow just to see Akari kinda breaks your heart. The second part actually changes up things alot because it’s mostly seen from the point of view of a classmate of Takaki who’s in love with him. Her pain at loving him, but knowing that he’ll never really look at her as anything other than a friend was hard to watch because you feel so bad for her. The third part is really short and shows Takaki as an adult who’s not happy with his current life and we also see that he and Akari don’t speak. This ending is what makes the entire movie. In most romantic dramas you want the two leads to get together that your willing to have the story go totally unrealistic just to please that base human emotion of longing. This movie is more Casablanca than 50 first dates and it’s that makes it more of a piece of realistic art than a fluffy romantic film. It feels like a novel more than a film with most of the dialogue occuring through letters and inner thoughts. If you haven’t seen this or much less heard of it, do yourself a favor and watch it.

check out the official website for the movie here

KUJIBIKI UNBALANCED

– ANIMENEWSNETWORK.COM

• Here’s where things get really weird…A couple years back I was watching this anime series called GENSHIKEN that is all about a group of Otaku who love this anime called KUJIBIKI UNBALANCED. On the DVD for Genshiken they added a couple little OAV’s for Kujibiki and it was awesome. On Genshiken the group would cosplay as characters from Kujibiki and they’d buy manga(in one case dirty manga) of the show and the normal nerd stuff. Then Kujibiki was a play on all the kinds of anime there are with young girls and weird plots, it was about a student council at a school that had to do all these tasks to stay in the school and it was crazy anime fun. Genshiken ended and I had moved on, until I heard that they were actually making episodes of Kujibiki Unbalanced to put on TV and DVD(here). Well I netflixed them and when I started to watch I was kinda shell shocked. As soon as it came on I knew something was up because it didn’t have that really addictive theme song from Genshiken. I shoulda known there to stop in my tracks but I kept watching and found something called Kujibiki Unbalanced that I had never seen before. The only couple of things they kept were the Student Counsel President’s weird choice in headware and the lottery. From there we get into a odd change of the guard. In this Kujibiki the kids are older, they’ve added quite a few characters, taken away the best designed character from the OAV’s and tweaked things about those who remained. Like I said certain things are the same, but with the changes the show is a little less wacky and weird. It’s still the usual anime level weird but it’s really bland now, it could literally be any anime with a nerdy guy surrounded by young girls. Now on the weird scale there’s something that even made me go hunh, the main character lives with his sister who for some reason spends all of her time trying to kiss and snuggle with him in her underwear…it’s really really creepy. The only thing keeping this slightly different Kujibiki on my que is the Genshiken OAV on the discs, otherwise it woulda been taken off post haste. I did like the previews for next episodes being done by the characters from Genshiken, and it was priceless when a few of the characters talked about how they didn’t like this new imagining of the show. Hilarious. Hopefully the next batch of Genshiken will come out soon and I can get the original Kujibiki Unbalanced back. Here’s hoping.

Good old Genshiken, OTAKU for life

KUJIBIKI UNBALANCED OAV intro(from GENSHIKEN )

vs

KUJIBIKI UNBALANCED TV intro

INSANITARIUM

• I’m not gonna waste time putting up a summary for this movie because it is awful and easily forgettable. I only watched this because OLIVIA MUNN from ATTACK OF THE SHOW was in this. Well she was, and I’m never mad when I’m looking at her but man this movie blows. I even have to admit that I don’t mind Jesse Metcalfe on occasion but after seeing this I think I’m going to steer clear of anything else he’s the lead in. I also usually enjoy Peter Stormare because he’s weird but man he shouldn’t have been in this movie…or maybe he should have, I don’t know. I can’t hold this against Olivia, although she was pretty awful in it. I really feel bad holding this awful waste of space on any of the actors and I’m pretty quick to forgive actors, all you gotta do is put out a good movie and I’ll usually give you a pass(Not you Nicholas Cage, not you).

You know I can't say anthing bad about you Olivia.

12/12/2008 | Categories: anime, DVD, Movies, What I watched this week | Tags: anime, Five Centimeters per second, Genshiken, Kujibiki Unbalanced, Olivia Munn, What I watched | Leave a comment