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Sunday, November 10, 2002
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 Sunday, November 10, 2002
started 11/10/2002; 9:23:20 AM - last post 11/10/2002; 12:24:49 PM
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Doc Searls - Sunday, November 10, 2002 
11/10/2002; 1:23:20 PM (reads: 3631, responses: 1)
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Still beats the crap out of most other Disney stuff 
| | Saw Spirited Away last night. Pretty amazing movie. All the reviews have been stellar, so our expectations were high. |
| | A little too high, it turned out. |
| | It's beautifully imagined, wonderfully told. But the animation is old fashioned by modern standards. The mouth movements and words barely correspond to each other, since the visuals are Japanese and the audio is English. (Subtitles would have been box office death, I guess; but it would have made a better movie.) And while the protagonist, Chihiro, is more human than most movie humans, some other characters, such as Haku, the boy who serves as her love interest, seem as flat and dull as any second banana in a low-budget Saturday morning cartoon. |
| | Best voice: Suzanne Pleshette, who does old evil females beautifully. She's Zababu (not sure about the spelling), the Grande Dame who runs the establishment where most of the story taks place. And she was also the voice of the evil old female lion (forget the name) in Lion King II: Simba's Pride. (I see here she just married Tom Poston. Nice to know he's still around.) When I was a kid, she was a major babe. Did a great job in The Birds, where we last saw her laying on the ground with her eyes pecked out. |
Side of the mornin' to ya
| | After three solid days of rain, it cleared last night. The stars were spectacular. Out in the channel the oil platforms looked like little boxes of lights, reflecting off the water. Far down the coast the lights of Oxnard lined the horizon below the Santa Monica Mountains. |
| | This morning we woke to a clear and cloudless sky. For the first time since we moved here, the Channel Islands were not only visible, but clear in all their detail. |
| | Gotta go do something with it. |
Old Data Programming Interface
| | This is a major disappointment, because this really destroys the utility of a Web Services API — if the same query returns different results depending on the input method, we're put into the position of parsing through HTML in order to get the "real" results. |
| | Another problem with private infrastructure serving as a public one. |
discuss
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Dave Sifry - Spirited Away
11/10/2002; 4:24:49 PM (reads: 569, responses: 0)
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Doc, I agree with you for the most part. Hayao Miyazaki continues to please. We've been showing our daughter a selection of his movies, starting with Tottoro, then on to Kiki's Delivery Service (Majou no takyuubin), and the first movie she saw in a theatre was Spirited Away. Miyazaki has a way of transporting you into a magical universe armed only with a delightful story filled with interesting characters.
Along with you, I didn't like the dubbing. Apparently there are some theatres playing the movie with subtitles. For now, we're contenting ourselves with renting the untranslated video from the local Japanese-language video store. I'm looking forward to hearing the nuances in the native Japanese.
We're also watching some of the better Disney animation too - mostly Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King (story stolen from another Japanese, Kimba the White Lion, by Tezuka, creator of Astroboy btw) - and while Disney does the highest quality animation in the US, its stories are boringly simplistic compared to even half-decent Japanese anime, let alone Miyazaki's work.
When we went to see the movie on its opening weekend, the theatre was packed, and that warmed my heart. This movie deserves to be as popular here in the US as it was in Japan when it was released last year.
discuss
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