December 2010

new year's eve

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agnes_martin_fireworks

will be doing some virtual celebrating on a group blog called Haze Luux or commetscommets, depending on where you are looking. please come by to watch people igniting cyberfireworks (the ones above are agnes martin's) and guzzling jpeg champagne

oh, yeah and vomiting.

the results will be online for a few days. hat tip David Gray.

Update: Hypothete's posting of Prince's "1999" on YouTube reminded me of this story, which I think I just put out of my mind for eleven years:

On Dec. 31, 1999 I went to a party in an artist friend's Brooklyn studio. Fun, but very sparsely attended because every other New Yorker had left town for cabins upstate, family in the burbs, etc. It was widely believed that due to the Y2K bug the city was going to be in chaos with widespread looting etc. So those of us who stayed did indeed "party like it was 1999."

Paddy Johnson fundraiser

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Paddy Johnson is having a year-end fundraiser for her blog. I gave and recommend you do too. As Brad Troemel noted, hers is one of two places offering any kind of substantive criticism of the new media scene; the other one being [HTML PARSING ERROR]. In any case, she offers a good balance to the "coal powered laptop," "alarm clock that rolls off the nightstand and forces you to scurry after it on the floor until you wake up" brand of institutional journalism. Indie blogs are important; hers, in particular, needs to continue.

Ghibli Experience Downgraded

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IMDb user review of Hayao Miyazaki's recent (2008) kid's movie, Ponyo, with irritated commentary in italics. Not to pick on whomever, but 99% of internet criticism reads exactly like this--it gets old.

As a long-time fan of Studio Ghibli and especially Hayao Miyazaki films, I went to the film right on the opening day.

Oh, good.

When I went out of the theater I had this strange feeling that something was missing, this "magical" feeling I was experiencing in all Miyazaki films before, but I couldn't say why it failed this time.

But you will!

After I thought about the other Ghibli movies, I may know the reason: this film had most of the elements of a great Miyazaki anime: cute characters, wonderful key animation, a great soundtrack composed by Joe Hisaishi and the warm story telling giving you the feeling of watching a high quality Japanese animation film.

Those are in your list of elements????

However, two elements were lacking: a deep story and dramaturgy.

But this movie is aimed at 5 year olds!

The purpose of this film was obviously to entertain small children with a simple story line as in case of "Totoro", so a complicated story as been told in "Spirited Away" or "Princess Mononoke" is not really necessary, but on the other hand, this story was simply too superficial.

Or superficially too simple.

I could not connect to the main characters, because there was no character development, dramatic scenes were only limited and did not last very long.

If you were 5 you would love that!

I really hate to give only 7 stars for a Miyazaki film, because I would give 10 stars to all previous movies right away, but this time it was simply not this wonderful "ghibli experience".

Your rating will surely destroy the studio's career.