Best of 2017

Here are some of my fave things in 2017:

 

Anime

• Yuri on Ice to start the year
• My Hero Academia to end the year (pictured)

Games

• Finishing Final Fantasy XV and playing Final Fantasy XII for the first time
• Finally playing Suikoden

Comics

• • Catching up with stuff from a few years ago: Harbinger Wars; Batman & Robin (N52)
  • Wayward keeping up with my 2017 anime aesthetic
  • Gwenpool being so much fun

Music

• You’re Not You Anymore, the new album by Counterparts
• Linkin Park, Live at Brixton Academy
• Madeon & Porter Robinson, Live at the Forum

Movies

• Seeing Interstellar in 70mm
• Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird, and Saturday Church at LFF
• Thor Ragnarok being awesome
• Silence and The Beguiled being underrated

Arrietty (2010) – review

Studio Ghibli has done it again with Arrietty, creating another masterpiece of animation.

Like all good Ghibli films, Arrietty is about a brave but conscientious young girl discovering a strange new world and going on an emotional adventure. Here, the theme is The Borrowers, based on Mary Norton’s 1950s stories in which small people live in the houses of regular-sized humans and ‘borrow’ things they won’t miss.

Arrietty is a young borrower, discovering the outside world for the first time. There she comes across Sho, a sick human boy with whom she forms a bond. But by making contact with humans, Arrietty has placed her family in possible danger.

It’s hard to find words to describe Arrietty, if you’ve seen a Ghibli film before you’ll know exactly what to expect. It’s magical, exciting, emotional, and beautiful. The animation itself is a wonder. In order to best describe Arrietty, I thought it was best to use a thesaurus. All the words below are relevant:

If you’re a Ghibli fan you won’t find anything particularly new, but you will love it. Arrietty is just wonderful feel-good cinema, full of character, intrigue and imagination. It follows Ghibli’s established narrative models closely, but that’s certainly no bad thing.

And if you’ve never seen a Studio Ghibli film before, go see it. Particularly if you have kids: Take them along to see this in the summer holidays and I guarantee both you and they will enjoy it more than Cars 2.

 

[xrr rating=4/5]

 

Films on TV

Classic melodrama, Nazi pilots, and a slightly mental Western are the highlights of this week’s films on TV.

Seraphim Falls – A kind of art-house Western with Liam Neeson hunting down Pierce Brosnan. It all gets a bit mental when Anjelica Huston turns up, which isn’t a bad thing. Sunday, BBC2 11pm

The One That Got Away – I accidentally caught a bit of this when it was last on Film4 about a month ago. It’s a great example of ‘50s British filmmaking and an excellent WWII film. Unusually, a Nazi fighter pilot is the main character in a film which charts his (real life) attempts at escape from a British POW camp. It’s directed by Roy Ward Baker who, despite an otherwise unremarkable career, also managed to direct the excellent Titanic film A Night To Remember. Monday, Film5 11am

Grave of the Fireflies – I’ve you’ve read this feature before you’ll know that I like to tell you whenever a studio Ghibli film is on. That’s because they are ALL brilliant. Wednesday night/Thursday morning, Film4 1.25am

Letter From an Unknown Woman (pictured) – A beautiful melodrama from the golden age of Hollywood. Like so many Hollywood classics it’s directed by a German émigré, her Max Ophüls. A beautifully shot, moving film about unrequited love in early 1900s Vienna.  Friday, BBC2, 11.35am

Lost in Translation – Some people love it, some people hate it. I myself think its great and have a strong connection to it as it was one of the films that influenced my movie going tastes at an impressionable age. Friday, Film4 10.45pm

 

Arrietty – trailer of the day

So, news is slow and I haven’t got anything to review today. Time for a trailer? Here’s Arrietty, the new Studio Ghibli film. I looks beautiful – although to be fair, praising a Ghibli film for looking great is like praising cake for being delicious, I wouldn’t expect any less.

Interestingly the film’s going to have two English-language soundtracks, an English-English dub and an American-English dub. Personally I’m not sold on the idea – I’m slightly worried the English-English track will be inferior, considering how great the US dubs (usually supervised by John Lasseter) normally are, but the UK version does have Mark Strong and Saoirse Ronan involved so maybe it will be the better version? Or maybe I should just watch it in Japanese with subs.

Anyway, here’s the English-English trailer: