Dear All,
In the last two months I drew a non-pig comic for my final project at Cartoon School.
If you would like to get a .pdf copy of it, please visit the link:
Enjoy!
Monday, May 6, 2013
Monday, April 15, 2013
Dog City Press!
Dog City is a small press comics magazine dedicated to publishing quality minicomics.
Each issue of Dog City consists of a curated selection of minicomics packaged in an artfully designed cardboard box.
Issue 1 of Dog City contains over 120 pages of comics in the form of 8 mini-comics by more than 10 creators from around the world. The box also includes stickers, screen-printed art cards, a poster and a printed magazine about comics and comics culture.
Lear more about it HERE.
One of the comics is mine! With a beautiful screen-printed cover! Plus 7 additional comics by other cartoonists, a poster and all kinds of freebies! It's a collector's edition! A super deal! (shipping within the United States already included)
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Monday, April 8, 2013
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Monday, March 25, 2013
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Imitating Alec Longstreth
Another part of my homework for Visiting Artist Seminar. Alec Longstreth this time.
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His comic
My comic
Imitating Lilli Carré
Another part of my homework for Visiting Artist Seminar. This time I picked Lilli Carré.
Based on her three comics below:
I made two slightly different comics:
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Based on her three comics below:
I made two slightly different comics:
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Monday, February 25, 2013
Imitating Melissa Mendes
As part of my homework for Visiting Artist Seminar, I am to make some comics based on some of the visiting artists for this semester. The first one I picked was Melissa Mendes, who is an alumnus from Center for Cartoon Studies. Based on her two Freddy comics below, I made two slightly different Freddy comics.
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Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Sea monkey ad
This was part of a group assignment we had to do called "The Silver Age". It was a little painful, but we managed to get it all done! The text and drawings are mine, and the grey color tones were set by Sara Sarmiento. The sea monkeys look like an obvious scam. I feel sorry for people who actually ordered those things.
Friday, February 15, 2013
Sexual offense - first version
Sunday, February 3, 2013
My drawings made into t-shirts!
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Friday, January 25, 2013
My classmates at cartoon school
We are a class of sixteen. Here is a short introduction on my fellow classmates and links to their work online, when applicable.
Alexis Dexter, Ben Gowen, Steven Krall and Tom O'Brien worked together last semester in their anthology about commuters on a train. Below is a scan of a page from each person's work for that anthology.
Work by Ben Evans, Josh Lees and Luke Healy has already been mentioned in my previous post.
Juan Fernandez, Will Payne, Allison Banister and Mathew New worked together on a time travel delivery man anthology.
Juan Fernandez has become super skillful in screen printing. He's usually covered in paint late into the night in the lab.
Last but not least, Eleri Mai, Simon Reinhardt, Sara Sarmiento and Aaron Shrewsbury's anthology was about an underwater city.
Aaron Shrewsbury began his career with no loftier aspiration than to procure a steady income. Things change. A former magazine creative director, Aaron has been a painter for sixteen years. This is his fifth comic. [text extracted from their anthology, bio page]
Eleri Mai Harris grew up on the beach in Hobart, Tasmania, but never quite mastered the art of surfing. Or swimming, for that matter. A journalist by trade and cartoonist in training, you can find more of her work at elerimai.com [ibid.]
Sara Sarmiento hails from Princeton, New Jersey, and more recently NYC. A book shelver, theater electrician, enumerator, canvasser, dog walker/trainer, bicycle ambassador and cartoonist, Sara likes good coffee, anything bike related and trickster stories. [ibid.]
Simon Reinhardt was born in 1988. He currently lives and cartoons in Vermont. [ibid.]
Alexis Dexter, Ben Gowen, Steven Krall and Tom O'Brien worked together last semester in their anthology about commuters on a train. Below is a scan of a page from each person's work for that anthology.
Alexis Dexter
Ben Gowen
Steven Krall Jr.
Tom O'Brien
Work by Ben Evans, Josh Lees and Luke Healy has already been mentioned in my previous post.
Juan Fernandez, Will Payne, Allison Banister and Mathew New worked together on a time travel delivery man anthology.
Mathew New writes an awesome comic called "Billy Johnson"
Juan Fernandez has become super skillful in screen printing. He's usually covered in paint late into the night in the lab. Aaron Shrewsbury began his career with no loftier aspiration than to procure a steady income. Things change. A former magazine creative director, Aaron has been a painter for sixteen years. This is his fifth comic. [text extracted from their anthology, bio page]
Eleri Mai Harris grew up on the beach in Hobart, Tasmania, but never quite mastered the art of surfing. Or swimming, for that matter. A journalist by trade and cartoonist in training, you can find more of her work at elerimai.com [ibid.]
Sara Sarmiento hails from Princeton, New Jersey, and more recently NYC. A book shelver, theater electrician, enumerator, canvasser, dog walker/trainer, bicycle ambassador and cartoonist, Sara likes good coffee, anything bike related and trickster stories. [ibid.]
Simon Reinhardt was born in 1988. He currently lives and cartoons in Vermont. [ibid.]
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Fragile things, by Neil Gaiman
My favorite story from this book is called "Other People". There is a pattern in the stories. Somehow the ending to the story "Feeders and Eaters" is very similar to "Other people"'s, and did not surprise me. I also noticed a tendency to leave certain things unexplained in almost all the stories (such as "How to talk to girls at parties", "The facts in the case of the departure of Miss Finch"), as things left to your own imagination tend to be more interesting.Below is a transcript of "Other People":
“Time is fluid here,” said the demon.
He knew it was a demon the moment he saw it. He knew it, just as he knew the place was Hell. There was nothing else that either of them could have been.
The room was long, and the demon waited by a smoking brazier at the far end. A multitude of objects hung on the rock-gray walls, of the kind that it would not have been wise or reassuring to inspect too closely. The ceiling was low, the floor oddly insubstantial.
“Come close,” said the demon, and he did.
The demon was rake thin and naked. It was deeply scarred, and it appeared to have been flayed at some time in the distant past. It had no ears, no sex. Its lips were thin and ascetic, and its eyes were a demon’s eyes: they had seen too much and gone too far, and under their gaze he felt less important than a fly.
“What happens now?” he asked.
“Now,” said the demon, in a voice that carried with it no sorrow, no relish, only a dreadful flat resignation, “you will be tortured.”
“For how long?”
But the demon shook its head and made no reply. It walked slowly along the wall, eyeing first one of the devices that hung there, then another. At the far end of the wall, by the closed door, was a cat-o’-nine-tails made of frayed wire. The demon took it down with one three-fingered hand and walked back, carrying it reverently. It placed the wire tines onto the brazier, and stared at them as they began to heat up.
“That’s inhuman.”
“Yes.”
The tips of the cat’s tails were glowing a dead orange.
As the demon raised its arm to deliver the first blow, it said, “In time you will remember even this moment with fondness.”
“You are a liar.”
“No,” said the demon. “The next part,” it explained, in the moment before it brought down the cat, “is worse.”
Then the tines of the cat landed on the man’s back with a crack and a hiss, tearing through the expensive clothes, burning and rending and shredding as they struck, and, not for the last time in that place, he screamed.
There were two hundred and eleven implements on the walls of that room, and in time he was to experience each of them.
When, finally, the Lazarene’s Daughter, which he had grown to know intimately, had been cleaned and replaced on the wall in the two hundred and eleventh position, then, through wrecked lips, he gasped, “Now what?”
“Now,” said the demon, “the true pain begins.”
It did.
Everything he had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told—told to himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each one was pulled out of him, detail by detail, inch by inch. The demon stripped away the cover of forgetfulness, stripped everything down to truth, and it hurt more than anything.
“Tell me what you thought as she walked out the door,” said the demon.
“I thought my heart was broken.”
“No,” said the demon, without hate, “you didn’t.” It stared at him with expressionless eyes, and he was forced to look away.
“I thought, now she’ll never know I’ve been sleeping with her sister.”
The demon took apart his life, moment by moment, instant to awful instant. It lasted a hundred years, perhaps, or a thousand—they had all the time there ever was, in that gray room—and toward the end he realized that the demon had been right. The physical torture had been kinder.
And it ended.
And once it had ended, it began again. There was a self-knowledge there he had not had the first time, which somehow made everything worse.
Now, as he spoke, he hated himself. There were no lies, no evasions, no room for anything except the pain and the anger.
He spoke. He no longer wept. And when he finished, a thousand years later, he prayed that now the demon would go to the wall, and bring down the skinning knife, or the choke-pear, or the screws.
“Again,” said the demon.
He began to scream. He screamed for a long time.
“Again,” said the demon, when he was done, as if nothing had been said.
It was like peeling an onion. This time through his life he learned about consequences. He learned the results of things he had done; things he had been blind to as he did them; the ways he had hurt the world; the damage he had done to people he had never known, or met, or encountered. It was the hardest lesson yet.
“Again,” said the demon, a thousand years later.
He crouched on the floor, beside the brazier, rocking gently, his eyes closed, and he told the story of his life, re-experiencing it as he told it, from birth to death, changing nothing, leaving nothing out, facing everything. He opened his heart.
When he was done, he sat there, eyes closed, waiting for the voice to say, “Again,” but nothing was said. He opened his eyes.
Slowly, he stood up. He was alone.
At the far end of the room, there was a door, and as he watched, it opened.
A man stepped through the door. There was terror in the man’s face, and arrogance, and pride. The man, who wore expensive clothes, took several hesitant steps into the room, and then stopped.
When he saw the man, he understood.
“Time is fluid here,” he told the new arrival.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Movies watched in 2012
So I haven't written my movie reviews since November 2011... Here is a list of what I've watched since. Contains movie spoilers. But I'm not spoiling the good movies. And for many others, I can't even remember what the movie was about anymore... I'm highlighting the ones I would recommend.
December 2011:
Megamind - really nice animation about a superevil, big brained, blue bad guy who tries to fight superman. Everything changes when he starts falling in love with the reporter he tries to kidnap, thinking she's superman's girlfriend. He has a gun that dehydrates anything, and also transmutes people into other people. Probably the nicest animation watched in the year.
Chasing Amy, by Kevin Smith - Ben Affleck plays this cartoonists who is after this woman. His roommate was also a cartoonist (an inker - people in the movie kept calling him a "tracer"), but whinier, who also has a half crush on Ben Affleck's character (maybe). I don't remember anything about this, except that it wasn't a bad movie. I've concluded that I like to think I like Kevin Smith's movies, but I really don't. I think he's a great guy, though.
The Tree of Life - whoever liked the movie The Tree of Life probably took many drugs before watching it. It probably didn't help me when I couldn't tell the brothers apart (were there two brothers, or three?). Apparently they kept showing the child that was Sean Penn's character when he was a boy. The image of one dinosaur squashing the other dinosaur's head in the middle of the movie was really odd.
Apocalypse Now, by Coppola - suggested by my boss, because he said it was based in Conrad's "Heart of darkness" and that it had similarities with our work environment. Awesome movie, with great actors (somehow I consider Martin Sheen a great actor, too). Dennis Hopper is a crazy journalist and Marlon Brando, the main guy referred in the movie, only shows up near the end. And yes, my boss was right, the movie did remind me of our work environment.
Swingers - also suggested by my boss, about this guy who is trying to go out and have fun after his girlfriend ditches him due to the long distance. It was fun to watch. The only thing I remember was the quote "you are so money, man, and you don't know it".
After hours, by Scorcese - crazy half-surreal movie about this guy who never manages to get home after work. He keeps meeting weird problematic women that lead him to worse and worse scenarios.
On the flight to Taipei:
Harry Potter and the deathly hallows: part 2 - plane - no comments. Can't remember a thing. I think it followed the book closely. I still have a crush on Snape. But the book is better. It's harder to have a crush on Alan Rickman just from what they show in the movie. While watching, I noticed how the three kids who play the three main characters improved in their acting skills (that is, Hermione and Ron did, Harry didn't).
Colombiana (written by Luc Besson) - woman sees her parents being killed by some drug lord, runs away to U.S. and becomes a trained assassin who seeks revenge. It was kind of cool, seeing hot chick kicking ass. Same style of movie as Angelina Jolie's Salt, even though the plot was completely different.
Contagion, by Steven Soderbergh - this was not a good movie to watch on a plane to Taipei. Basically Gwyneth Paltrow's character gets infected with some nasty swine flu while eating at a restaurant in Hong Kong (which was my flight destination!) and a lot of people get infected and die in the U.S. after she brings back the virus. People get contaminated on the plane by her. I mean, why show this movie ON A PLANE???
Rio (incomplete, animation) - I didn't finish watching this and that didn't bother me. It was sort of stupid.
January 2012:
Puss in Boots (plane) - I usually like Antonio Bandera playing Puss in Boots, but I can't remember what happened in this movie at all. Must have been ok.
Moneyball (plane) - nice movie about how this guy (played by Brad Pitt) manages to turn around a team using statistics to hire people. Jonah Hill plays the nerdy guy who Brad Pitt first hires and helps him interpret the stats.
Crazy, stupid, love (plane) - it felt like a great airplane movie, but I'm sure I would be pissed if I had watched it anywhere else.
The Help - cheesy like Fried Green Tomatoes, but somehow I liked it
Friends with benefits - Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis - some parts of the movie gave me a headache
Do começo ao fim - a love relationship between two brothers. So yeah, it's about gay love. And yeah, it's about 100% incestuous love (they weren't even half brothers or anything). Other than the guys been sort of hottish, the movie wasn't worth it at all. Also, they skipped the part where the two brothers were teenagers, which would be the most interesting part of the story. Somehow it goes from two cuddly, super-attached brothers to two adults in love, not showing the transition when they first realize they prefer their brother to anyone else.
Sherlock Holmes: A game of shadows, by Guy Ritchie with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law - Meh. Not even as good as the first Sherlock Holmes movie. There was a lot of action and fighting, and very little deduction. So it's more like a 007 pretending he's Sherlock Holmes.
Chico Xavier - fictional movie based on the real life of Chico Xavier. It was interesting. Probably would only interest people who want to know more about the guy (who was a famous medium in Brazil).
The Promise - proof that Chinese can also spend a lot of money making a visually pleasing movie with lots of special effects that sucks ass. Not that I needed proof.
February 2012:
The girl with a dragon tattoo, by David Fincher, with Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara. After reading the book "The girl who kicked a hornet's nest", it was fun to watch the first movie of the series. I had wanted to read the book but now I feel I don't have to anymore, since I know what's going to happen. It was helpful to have read the third book of the trilogy to understand better some parts of the movie.
The Debt, by John Madden, screenplay by Matthew Vaughn, with Helen Mirren and Jessica Chastain - about this group of young people (two men and a woman - both men of course have a crush on the woman) who try to catch a Nazi man, but he manages to run away. Many years later, the same woman tries to find the Nazi man again, and he's in this old people's asylum. I liked it.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - didn't understand anything, was recommended by a friend.
The lives of others (Das Leben der Anderen) - really nice movie, recommended by a friend long time ago. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film the year it was released. It's not exactly a happy story, but the end is sort of cute.
Limits of Control, by Jim Jarmusch - really boring movie where we follow this black guy (same actor who played the ice cream salesman in the movie Ghostdog) doing his rounds as a secret agent or something. A lot of messages get passed around inside small match boxes, and you get to see the guy swallow those pieces of paper a lot. I don't remember anything else.
16 blocks, with Bruce Willis and Mos Def - generic bad movie.
The Twilight Saga - Breaking Dawn Part 1 - this movie should be called "breaking down". This finally did it for me. I've been watching all the movies of this saga (I know! So sad!), but this movie was SO bad that I don't even care to watch Part 2. Enough of this shiny teenage vampire thing.
Mission Impossible 4 - I watched a bad copy of the movie, which might have taken parts of the enjoyment away. The problem is, since I knew what would happen in the movie, I wasn't interested in watching it again with a good copy. All I remember are sand storms and Tom Cruise climbing a tall building with special velcro-suction-type gloves. And one of the gloves flew away.
War horse, directed by Spielberg - long and cheesy.
The ides of March, with George Clooney and Ryan Gosling - I remember liking it when I saw it. About political campaigns and how everything inside political campaigns are nasty. I think both George Clooney and Ryan Gosling slept with the same cute intern or something.
The way, by Emilio Estevez, with Martin Sheen - the movie was boring but the scenery was amazing. Watching the movie made me want to walk the Camino de Santiago as well.
Another earth - indie movie where this teenager hits someone else's car when Earth sees another planet just like Earth on the sky. She goes to teenage jail while the pregnant wife and son of the other driver die in the crash. When she comes out, she decides to participate in a competition to go to the second earth, as well as help clean the widower's (a music teacher) house, which was messy since the accident. It was recommended by a friend, and I liked it. Later I googled and read that the main girl (this cute blonde chick) wrote the script herself, because she wanted to play smart blonde roles.
March 2012:
Hugo, by Martin Scorsese - not at all close to how cool the book "The invention of Hugo Cabret" is. A lot of special effects, visually pleasing, but not a good movie.
The Rum Diary, with Johnny Depp - don't remember anything about it. Popcorn watch
The flowers of war, by Zhang Yimou, with Christian Bale - nasty, bloody, overdramatic drama about these girl students who are locked up in a church in China while Japanese soldiers are taking over. Christian Bale is a traveling salesman that has to pretend he is the priest and eventually he takes the role of protector of the girls. There are also some beautiful whores inside the church, and in the end the whores pretend they are the school girls, to get raped in a commemorative event by the Japanese soldiers. A lot of people die in a bad way in this movie, and it is implied that the whores get raped and die, but most of the girl students survive to tell the story.
Machine gun preacher, by Marc Forster (same director of Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland) - it was interesting to watch. Based on the real story of Sam Childers. Is it ok to use violence and kill some people to bring back your kidnapped child in a war-torn zone?
Jack and Jill, with Adam Sandler (and Al Pacino…!) - terrible but I watched until the end, I don't know why. The first question I had in mind was "how can they be identical twins if one is male and one is female???". I hope Adam Sandler had some fun doing this.
Young adult, by Jason Reitman, with Charlize Theron - Charlize Theron plays this writer of young-adult girl cheesy romances, who has problems having proper relationships. She goes after her high school sweetheart in her hometown and is an asshole to him and his pregnant wife. A movie about a screaming loser woman coming to terms with herself.
Extremely loud and incredibly close, by Stephen Daldry (same director of The Reader and the Hours), with Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks, based on novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. The kid was cute. The movie was interesting.
May 2012:
There was an European Film Festival in The Centro Franco-Moçambicano in Maputo so I got to watch quite a lot of movies. Almost two movies a day, for a week.
Bullhead (Belgium - Rundskop) - about this guy who got his balls cut in a fight when he was a kid and has to take horse hormones ever since. Because of that (?) he has violence and relationship issues. I think in the end they take him down, not sure he dies or not. It was an intense movie, but not necessarily good.
José e Pilar - my favorite movie from this festival batch, a documentary about José Saramago and his Spanish wife Pilar. Watching it made me like Saramago better. I always imagined him to be someone who was a pain in the butt and snobbish. He seemed like a funny old man.
Operation Casablanca - a comedy, spoof spy movie. It was ok. One of my friends thought it was his favorite from the festival.
Easy Money (Swedish - Snabba Cash) - about some drug dealing dudes. I liked it ok.
Black Ice / Gelo Negro (Musta Jaa) - Finnish drama about this woman doctor who finds out her husband is having an affair with a much younger woman. She then befriends her husband's girlfriend without having her. I had a hard time differentiating all the three blonde women who show up in the movie (main character, her husband's mistress, and her sister-in-law). The best scene is when the doctor does a vaginal examination on the mistress while she is passed-out drunk to check whether she is pregnant. When the young woman wakes up, the doctor tries to convince her that she is lesbian.
Black Brown White - about this guy who works in human trafficking driving truck back and forth. He starts falling in love with this beautiful black woman from Ghana, who is determined to get into Switzerland. I found the movie sort of cute, but a friend said it was stupid and cheesy, and she was right. A better review may be found here.
Once / No mesmo tom - Irish movie about this dude who plays the guitar on the street and befriends this girl who sells flowers in the street and can sing and play the piano. They decide to record some songs together, and there is some hinted romance between the two but she is actually married with a child. The guy then goes to London at the end of the movie, following his dream or something like that. The songs are quite fun to listen.
Chico e Rita - animation about Cuban musician couple. Also sort of cheesy. Man who plays the piano well falls in love with beautiful woman who can sing. They become a couple but he cheats on her all the time or gets drunk and seems to be cheating on her and she gets pissed and goes to U.S., taken by some businessman who sees her as a promising star. She does become a star, he can't get her back, he tries to go to U.S. and manages to get her back, but then he somehow ends in Cuba again, all old and poor. Then he gets a chance to go to U.S. again, and finds her also old and poor, waiting for him to get her (!) and working as a cleaning lady in some hotel. I think I only liked it because it was an animation. Also, I am confused about how many times they went back and forth between Cuba and U.S.
With your permission (Til døden os skiller, Danish movie) - about this crazy couple. The guy is sour and annoying, and works in a restaurant on a passenger boat that crosses the river everyday. His wife is crazy, complains about everything and stays at home all day on the couch eating. What brought them together was the love for opera, but he had a hearing problem that didn't allow him to listen to opera anymore. When the wife auditions to sing and starts rehearsing for Turandot she changes her lifestyle and he becomes the lamer one of the couple. I can't remember how it ends. The movie is funny in a depressing way.
A Second Childhood / Juventude Infinita / Una Sconfinata Giovinezza - a couple where the man is a writer with some degenerative disease and the wife is beautiful (played by Francesca Neri).
Lila Lila - Daniel Brühl, actor of Good bye Lenin, stars in this as a waiter who found a typed book inside a chest of drawers he bought and decides to publish it to impress this girl he likes who only pays attention to literary types. He does get the girl, temporarily, but loses her when this old man starts blackmailing him about the real origins of the book. Also because the girl is a pain in the ass. When he finally manages to publish a second book by himself telling the story of his first book and becomes famous again, there is a hint that the girl might be interested in him again.
June 2012:
The 40-year old virgin - that was fun to watch. I like Steve Carrell and Catherine Keener. My favorite scene is the reference to "Born to kill"- "I love you long time".
Superbad - don't remember it. I think Alex made me watch it. Two kids going around to parties? The nerdy kid (McLovin?) is the same actor as the son of the bad guy in "Kick ass".
Funny People, with Adam Sandler - don't remember it. Adam Sandler is dying and being an asshole to Seth Rogen. Something like that.
Watchmen - not a bad movie given my expectations. It did not disappoint, and it was visually pleasing. I found the comic book so complicated when I first read it, but this movie adaptation seemed fine to me.
Tamara Drewe, by Stephen Frears - random movie about this woman who gets a nose job and goes back to her hometown and messes around with a married writer. This was the "comedy" that my taxi driver was watching in this.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off - a classic with Matthew Broderick that I needed to watch. It might have been more fun to watch it when I was a teenager.
Ghost World - rewatch, because I don't remember having watched before. Steve Buscemi is great in it, and I can't believe Scarlett Johansson is there, too. Ugh. Based on Daniel Clowes's graphic novel. I haven't read it yet.
Rango, animation with Johnny Depp - my sister said it was fun but I didn't. About this lizard who becomes the sheriff somehow and decides to go search for water to help the people in this dry town in the wild wild west.
July 2012:
Towelhead, by Alan Ball - this was a weird movie about this Arab-American hairy teenage girl who gets sexually harassed by her neighbor (Aaron Eckhart) and helped by another pregnant neighbor (Toni Collette). I'm not sure sexual harassment is the right term because sometimes the girl looks for Aaron Eckhart. Her father is very strict, and her mother doesn't really care about her. It was a weird movie.
Geek Charming, by Disney - about Dylan and Josh. Josh is an aspiring movie director, and to enter a competition he decides to make a documentary about Dylan, the most popular girl in the high school. Of course, they end up dating and it's happy etc. Given all the other movies I've been watching, this was not so bad. I hesitated before giving my movie copy away.
Juno - pretty cool movie with Michael Cera and Ellen Page. They are high school kids who make a baby (everybody knows it was probably Juno's idea, and not Michael Cera's character's). Juno then decides to give the baby for adoption but she wants to pick the parents, and finds a couple whose woman (Jennifer Garner) really wants to be a mom. It's a light, well made movie.
The man who knew too little - Bill Murray as a clueless man who gets caught in some real spy stuff problem. I can't remember anything except a fun scene where Bill Murray is in the middle of a lot of Russian dancing.
Shame, movie by Steve McQueen - sucky movie with the young Magneto - Michael Fassbender - as a man who has a boring job and is obsessed with sex. It doesn't even have that good porn scenes, and I don't remember what happens in the end. I don't think he gets cured of his sex obsession.
September 2012:
Stephen Bissette, one of the teachers at Cartoon School, sometimes shows movies to students. They are all kind of weird.
Existo - the first one of the Steve movies I watched, this was the MOST weird. The only thing I remember about it is this conversation:
"how do you feel about Existo coming back", a reporter asks this lady (? she looks like a man in drag), the owner of the club Existo usually performs
"moist", she says
Why would anyone keep a copy of this movie baffles me.
Song of the South (removed by Disney) - Steve said this movie was removed by Disney in fear that people would find it racist. I didn't think it was racist, and the main song Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah was awesome and stays in your head all the time if you don't watch out.
Stars in Shorts - Seven (or six?) short movies with an all-star cast. Alex and I watched it with a friend in Boston. It was the only one I watched in the movie theater in months. It was ok, though the first one where this mother and son are driving to a funeral they do not want to attend was the best.
October 2012:
Wedding Singer, with Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore and Christine Taylor
I walked with a Zombie (1943) - black and white movie about this woman who goes work in Africa and the wife of her boss acts like a zombie. Shown by Steve.
Zombieland - the actor from the Facebook movie is one of the few survivors after zombie-disease takes over earth. He and Woody Harrelson (who looks like an asshole, but plays a role that is suitable for him. He is obsessed with Twinkies). Then they meet two sisters, the older of which is played by Emma Stone. It was fun to watch, and not scary at all.
Freddy got fingered, by Tom Green - messy movie with Tom Green.
Minority Report (again) - I liked watching it again
Bridesmaids - I was not expecting this movie to be so funny. Even when I tried to think it wasn't so funny, I still laughed. It was pretty good.
O Brother Man - the art and life of Lynd Ward - documentary about Lynd Ward. It wasn't so much a documentary as it was a voice over reading on top of Lynd Ward's illustrations. I liked the movie fine, though I did fall asleep in the middle of it. My classmates all hated it, I think. The woodcuts are amazing, independent of the movie. The only remarkable thing I remember is "Ward is DRAW written backwards".
Public Enemies, by Michael Mann, with Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. Johnny Depp plays this famous bank robber.
Black Gold, with Antonio Banderas as an Arab... I don't know how this movie found its way to my computer. It was terrible.
American Psycho, with Christian Bale as the psycho. Christian Bale does a great job to creep me out in this movie. During the day he is the standard Wall Street asshole, during the night he hunts women to kill. He never gets caught and people don't really pay attention to what he says, even when he tries to confess he is a mass murderer. I saw this the same month I was reading the comic book about Dahmer. I guess it was serial killer month for me.
Incubus, with William Shatner and in Esperanto (shown by Steve). William Shatner plays a super nice guy that not even the devil can tempt. That's all I have to say about it.
Phantom of the Paradise, by Brian de Palma. It was a very interesting movie. Probably my favorite from all the ones shown by Steve that I watched. I went to find the soundtrack afterwards.
November 2012:
Wild boys of the road (1933) - a boy decides to run away with his best friend when he realizes his parents don't have much money. On the road, they are joined by a runaway girl, they all get kicked around and get into trouble (the worst being his friend getting his leg crashed by a train), ending in some court in New York City (or some other big town). The judge decides to punish them not with jail, but with work - they have to work to pay for their train ride back home. I probably would never watch this movie if Steve wasn't showing it.
December 2012:
The PhD movie - boring movie adaptation of the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper, about graduate student life.
Brave (Pixar) - beautiful animation, story is sub-par compared to other Pixar movies. Irish girl with nice red hair wants to be an archer and doesn't want to marry any of the suitors that her mother brings to her. She then wishes for something that makes her mom transform into a bear, and thus follows the saga of transforming the mom back into a human before the end of three days, in which her mom will permanently become a bear. The bear was really cute and I definitely liked the mom a lot better in that shape and form. I read some reviews at amazon where all the mothers were annoyed by the movie, saying the young girl was spoiled. That was more fun than watching the movie.
Une Vie de Chat (A cat in Paris) - nice French animation about a girl who doesn't talk, her mother detective, a cat, a thief, and some gangsters. The colors are really nice. Too bad I couldn't synchronize the subtitles properly to the sound.
On the flight to Taipei:
The Dark Knight Rises - reminded me a lot of 007 The World is Not Enough near the end. It was a bit longer than it needed to be. I couldn't wait for the end of the movie. Probably didn't help that I don't really like Christian Bale anymore.
The Bourne Legacy - it was fun, even though it was with Jeremy Renner, and not with Matt Damon anymore. They kept showing some scenes that ties back to the last Bourne movie, trying to say "look, this is really related to that movie with Matt Damon, it happens around the same time!"
A Chorus of Angels - Japanese movie about a teacher - reminded me a lot of David Lean's movie Ryan's Daughter, but not as good. The pace is slow, about a teacher that stopped teaching in a small island 20 years ago after her husband died in an accident. When she discovers one of her ex-students is being sought by the police related to killing a man, she decides to go back to the small island and talk to all her ex-students. At every encounter, each student thinks he/she was the cause of her husband's death.
Wolf Children - anime by Mamoru Hosoda about two kids (a girl and a boy) who were born from a werewolf father and a human mother. This woman falls in love with a werewolf when she is in college and they have babies. Then the werewolf dies soon after the second baby is born and she has to raise them by herself. Eventually they have to pick whether they want to adopt human or wolf lifestyles.
Tenchi the Samurai Astronomer - cute, from the same director of Okuribito, but not as good. Apparently it was based on a real Japanese astronomer, who didn't know anything about Copernicus or elliptic planetary trajectories. They use ellipse occurrences to determine which calendar is more accurate.
Rurouni Kenshin - Japanese movie about kick-ass Samurai who pledged not to kill again. The wig the main character was using bothered me a bit.
December 2011:
Megamind - really nice animation about a superevil, big brained, blue bad guy who tries to fight superman. Everything changes when he starts falling in love with the reporter he tries to kidnap, thinking she's superman's girlfriend. He has a gun that dehydrates anything, and also transmutes people into other people. Probably the nicest animation watched in the year.
Chasing Amy, by Kevin Smith - Ben Affleck plays this cartoonists who is after this woman. His roommate was also a cartoonist (an inker - people in the movie kept calling him a "tracer"), but whinier, who also has a half crush on Ben Affleck's character (maybe). I don't remember anything about this, except that it wasn't a bad movie. I've concluded that I like to think I like Kevin Smith's movies, but I really don't. I think he's a great guy, though.
The Tree of Life - whoever liked the movie The Tree of Life probably took many drugs before watching it. It probably didn't help me when I couldn't tell the brothers apart (were there two brothers, or three?). Apparently they kept showing the child that was Sean Penn's character when he was a boy. The image of one dinosaur squashing the other dinosaur's head in the middle of the movie was really odd.
Apocalypse Now, by Coppola - suggested by my boss, because he said it was based in Conrad's "Heart of darkness" and that it had similarities with our work environment. Awesome movie, with great actors (somehow I consider Martin Sheen a great actor, too). Dennis Hopper is a crazy journalist and Marlon Brando, the main guy referred in the movie, only shows up near the end. And yes, my boss was right, the movie did remind me of our work environment.
Swingers - also suggested by my boss, about this guy who is trying to go out and have fun after his girlfriend ditches him due to the long distance. It was fun to watch. The only thing I remember was the quote "you are so money, man, and you don't know it".
After hours, by Scorcese - crazy half-surreal movie about this guy who never manages to get home after work. He keeps meeting weird problematic women that lead him to worse and worse scenarios.
On the flight to Taipei:
Harry Potter and the deathly hallows: part 2 - plane - no comments. Can't remember a thing. I think it followed the book closely. I still have a crush on Snape. But the book is better. It's harder to have a crush on Alan Rickman just from what they show in the movie. While watching, I noticed how the three kids who play the three main characters improved in their acting skills (that is, Hermione and Ron did, Harry didn't).
Colombiana (written by Luc Besson) - woman sees her parents being killed by some drug lord, runs away to U.S. and becomes a trained assassin who seeks revenge. It was kind of cool, seeing hot chick kicking ass. Same style of movie as Angelina Jolie's Salt, even though the plot was completely different.
Contagion, by Steven Soderbergh - this was not a good movie to watch on a plane to Taipei. Basically Gwyneth Paltrow's character gets infected with some nasty swine flu while eating at a restaurant in Hong Kong (which was my flight destination!) and a lot of people get infected and die in the U.S. after she brings back the virus. People get contaminated on the plane by her. I mean, why show this movie ON A PLANE???
Rio (incomplete, animation) - I didn't finish watching this and that didn't bother me. It was sort of stupid.
January 2012:
Puss in Boots (plane) - I usually like Antonio Bandera playing Puss in Boots, but I can't remember what happened in this movie at all. Must have been ok.
Moneyball (plane) - nice movie about how this guy (played by Brad Pitt) manages to turn around a team using statistics to hire people. Jonah Hill plays the nerdy guy who Brad Pitt first hires and helps him interpret the stats.
Crazy, stupid, love (plane) - it felt like a great airplane movie, but I'm sure I would be pissed if I had watched it anywhere else.
The Help - cheesy like Fried Green Tomatoes, but somehow I liked it
Friends with benefits - Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis - some parts of the movie gave me a headache
Do começo ao fim - a love relationship between two brothers. So yeah, it's about gay love. And yeah, it's about 100% incestuous love (they weren't even half brothers or anything). Other than the guys been sort of hottish, the movie wasn't worth it at all. Also, they skipped the part where the two brothers were teenagers, which would be the most interesting part of the story. Somehow it goes from two cuddly, super-attached brothers to two adults in love, not showing the transition when they first realize they prefer their brother to anyone else.
Sherlock Holmes: A game of shadows, by Guy Ritchie with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law - Meh. Not even as good as the first Sherlock Holmes movie. There was a lot of action and fighting, and very little deduction. So it's more like a 007 pretending he's Sherlock Holmes.
Chico Xavier - fictional movie based on the real life of Chico Xavier. It was interesting. Probably would only interest people who want to know more about the guy (who was a famous medium in Brazil).
The Promise - proof that Chinese can also spend a lot of money making a visually pleasing movie with lots of special effects that sucks ass. Not that I needed proof.
February 2012:
The girl with a dragon tattoo, by David Fincher, with Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara. After reading the book "The girl who kicked a hornet's nest", it was fun to watch the first movie of the series. I had wanted to read the book but now I feel I don't have to anymore, since I know what's going to happen. It was helpful to have read the third book of the trilogy to understand better some parts of the movie.
The Debt, by John Madden, screenplay by Matthew Vaughn, with Helen Mirren and Jessica Chastain - about this group of young people (two men and a woman - both men of course have a crush on the woman) who try to catch a Nazi man, but he manages to run away. Many years later, the same woman tries to find the Nazi man again, and he's in this old people's asylum. I liked it.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - didn't understand anything, was recommended by a friend.
The lives of others (Das Leben der Anderen) - really nice movie, recommended by a friend long time ago. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film the year it was released. It's not exactly a happy story, but the end is sort of cute.
Limits of Control, by Jim Jarmusch - really boring movie where we follow this black guy (same actor who played the ice cream salesman in the movie Ghostdog) doing his rounds as a secret agent or something. A lot of messages get passed around inside small match boxes, and you get to see the guy swallow those pieces of paper a lot. I don't remember anything else.
16 blocks, with Bruce Willis and Mos Def - generic bad movie.
The Twilight Saga - Breaking Dawn Part 1 - this movie should be called "breaking down". This finally did it for me. I've been watching all the movies of this saga (I know! So sad!), but this movie was SO bad that I don't even care to watch Part 2. Enough of this shiny teenage vampire thing.
Mission Impossible 4 - I watched a bad copy of the movie, which might have taken parts of the enjoyment away. The problem is, since I knew what would happen in the movie, I wasn't interested in watching it again with a good copy. All I remember are sand storms and Tom Cruise climbing a tall building with special velcro-suction-type gloves. And one of the gloves flew away.
War horse, directed by Spielberg - long and cheesy.
The ides of March, with George Clooney and Ryan Gosling - I remember liking it when I saw it. About political campaigns and how everything inside political campaigns are nasty. I think both George Clooney and Ryan Gosling slept with the same cute intern or something.
The way, by Emilio Estevez, with Martin Sheen - the movie was boring but the scenery was amazing. Watching the movie made me want to walk the Camino de Santiago as well.
Another earth - indie movie where this teenager hits someone else's car when Earth sees another planet just like Earth on the sky. She goes to teenage jail while the pregnant wife and son of the other driver die in the crash. When she comes out, she decides to participate in a competition to go to the second earth, as well as help clean the widower's (a music teacher) house, which was messy since the accident. It was recommended by a friend, and I liked it. Later I googled and read that the main girl (this cute blonde chick) wrote the script herself, because she wanted to play smart blonde roles.
March 2012:
Hugo, by Martin Scorsese - not at all close to how cool the book "The invention of Hugo Cabret" is. A lot of special effects, visually pleasing, but not a good movie.
The Rum Diary, with Johnny Depp - don't remember anything about it. Popcorn watch
The flowers of war, by Zhang Yimou, with Christian Bale - nasty, bloody, overdramatic drama about these girl students who are locked up in a church in China while Japanese soldiers are taking over. Christian Bale is a traveling salesman that has to pretend he is the priest and eventually he takes the role of protector of the girls. There are also some beautiful whores inside the church, and in the end the whores pretend they are the school girls, to get raped in a commemorative event by the Japanese soldiers. A lot of people die in a bad way in this movie, and it is implied that the whores get raped and die, but most of the girl students survive to tell the story.
Machine gun preacher, by Marc Forster (same director of Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland) - it was interesting to watch. Based on the real story of Sam Childers. Is it ok to use violence and kill some people to bring back your kidnapped child in a war-torn zone?
Jack and Jill, with Adam Sandler (and Al Pacino…!) - terrible but I watched until the end, I don't know why. The first question I had in mind was "how can they be identical twins if one is male and one is female???". I hope Adam Sandler had some fun doing this.
Young adult, by Jason Reitman, with Charlize Theron - Charlize Theron plays this writer of young-adult girl cheesy romances, who has problems having proper relationships. She goes after her high school sweetheart in her hometown and is an asshole to him and his pregnant wife. A movie about a screaming loser woman coming to terms with herself.
Extremely loud and incredibly close, by Stephen Daldry (same director of The Reader and the Hours), with Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks, based on novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. The kid was cute. The movie was interesting.
May 2012:
There was an European Film Festival in The Centro Franco-Moçambicano in Maputo so I got to watch quite a lot of movies. Almost two movies a day, for a week.
Bullhead (Belgium - Rundskop) - about this guy who got his balls cut in a fight when he was a kid and has to take horse hormones ever since. Because of that (?) he has violence and relationship issues. I think in the end they take him down, not sure he dies or not. It was an intense movie, but not necessarily good.
José e Pilar - my favorite movie from this festival batch, a documentary about José Saramago and his Spanish wife Pilar. Watching it made me like Saramago better. I always imagined him to be someone who was a pain in the butt and snobbish. He seemed like a funny old man.
Operation Casablanca - a comedy, spoof spy movie. It was ok. One of my friends thought it was his favorite from the festival.
Easy Money (Swedish - Snabba Cash) - about some drug dealing dudes. I liked it ok.
Black Ice / Gelo Negro (Musta Jaa) - Finnish drama about this woman doctor who finds out her husband is having an affair with a much younger woman. She then befriends her husband's girlfriend without having her. I had a hard time differentiating all the three blonde women who show up in the movie (main character, her husband's mistress, and her sister-in-law). The best scene is when the doctor does a vaginal examination on the mistress while she is passed-out drunk to check whether she is pregnant. When the young woman wakes up, the doctor tries to convince her that she is lesbian.
Black Brown White - about this guy who works in human trafficking driving truck back and forth. He starts falling in love with this beautiful black woman from Ghana, who is determined to get into Switzerland. I found the movie sort of cute, but a friend said it was stupid and cheesy, and she was right. A better review may be found here.
Once / No mesmo tom - Irish movie about this dude who plays the guitar on the street and befriends this girl who sells flowers in the street and can sing and play the piano. They decide to record some songs together, and there is some hinted romance between the two but she is actually married with a child. The guy then goes to London at the end of the movie, following his dream or something like that. The songs are quite fun to listen.
Chico e Rita - animation about Cuban musician couple. Also sort of cheesy. Man who plays the piano well falls in love with beautiful woman who can sing. They become a couple but he cheats on her all the time or gets drunk and seems to be cheating on her and she gets pissed and goes to U.S., taken by some businessman who sees her as a promising star. She does become a star, he can't get her back, he tries to go to U.S. and manages to get her back, but then he somehow ends in Cuba again, all old and poor. Then he gets a chance to go to U.S. again, and finds her also old and poor, waiting for him to get her (!) and working as a cleaning lady in some hotel. I think I only liked it because it was an animation. Also, I am confused about how many times they went back and forth between Cuba and U.S.
With your permission (Til døden os skiller, Danish movie) - about this crazy couple. The guy is sour and annoying, and works in a restaurant on a passenger boat that crosses the river everyday. His wife is crazy, complains about everything and stays at home all day on the couch eating. What brought them together was the love for opera, but he had a hearing problem that didn't allow him to listen to opera anymore. When the wife auditions to sing and starts rehearsing for Turandot she changes her lifestyle and he becomes the lamer one of the couple. I can't remember how it ends. The movie is funny in a depressing way.
A Second Childhood / Juventude Infinita / Una Sconfinata Giovinezza - a couple where the man is a writer with some degenerative disease and the wife is beautiful (played by Francesca Neri).
Lila Lila - Daniel Brühl, actor of Good bye Lenin, stars in this as a waiter who found a typed book inside a chest of drawers he bought and decides to publish it to impress this girl he likes who only pays attention to literary types. He does get the girl, temporarily, but loses her when this old man starts blackmailing him about the real origins of the book. Also because the girl is a pain in the ass. When he finally manages to publish a second book by himself telling the story of his first book and becomes famous again, there is a hint that the girl might be interested in him again.
June 2012:
The 40-year old virgin - that was fun to watch. I like Steve Carrell and Catherine Keener. My favorite scene is the reference to "Born to kill"- "I love you long time".
Superbad - don't remember it. I think Alex made me watch it. Two kids going around to parties? The nerdy kid (McLovin?) is the same actor as the son of the bad guy in "Kick ass".
Funny People, with Adam Sandler - don't remember it. Adam Sandler is dying and being an asshole to Seth Rogen. Something like that.
Watchmen - not a bad movie given my expectations. It did not disappoint, and it was visually pleasing. I found the comic book so complicated when I first read it, but this movie adaptation seemed fine to me.
Tamara Drewe, by Stephen Frears - random movie about this woman who gets a nose job and goes back to her hometown and messes around with a married writer. This was the "comedy" that my taxi driver was watching in this.
Ferris Bueller's Day Off - a classic with Matthew Broderick that I needed to watch. It might have been more fun to watch it when I was a teenager.
Ghost World - rewatch, because I don't remember having watched before. Steve Buscemi is great in it, and I can't believe Scarlett Johansson is there, too. Ugh. Based on Daniel Clowes's graphic novel. I haven't read it yet.
Rango, animation with Johnny Depp - my sister said it was fun but I didn't. About this lizard who becomes the sheriff somehow and decides to go search for water to help the people in this dry town in the wild wild west.
July 2012:
Towelhead, by Alan Ball - this was a weird movie about this Arab-American hairy teenage girl who gets sexually harassed by her neighbor (Aaron Eckhart) and helped by another pregnant neighbor (Toni Collette). I'm not sure sexual harassment is the right term because sometimes the girl looks for Aaron Eckhart. Her father is very strict, and her mother doesn't really care about her. It was a weird movie.
Geek Charming, by Disney - about Dylan and Josh. Josh is an aspiring movie director, and to enter a competition he decides to make a documentary about Dylan, the most popular girl in the high school. Of course, they end up dating and it's happy etc. Given all the other movies I've been watching, this was not so bad. I hesitated before giving my movie copy away.
Juno - pretty cool movie with Michael Cera and Ellen Page. They are high school kids who make a baby (everybody knows it was probably Juno's idea, and not Michael Cera's character's). Juno then decides to give the baby for adoption but she wants to pick the parents, and finds a couple whose woman (Jennifer Garner) really wants to be a mom. It's a light, well made movie.
The man who knew too little - Bill Murray as a clueless man who gets caught in some real spy stuff problem. I can't remember anything except a fun scene where Bill Murray is in the middle of a lot of Russian dancing.
Shame, movie by Steve McQueen - sucky movie with the young Magneto - Michael Fassbender - as a man who has a boring job and is obsessed with sex. It doesn't even have that good porn scenes, and I don't remember what happens in the end. I don't think he gets cured of his sex obsession.
September 2012:
Stephen Bissette, one of the teachers at Cartoon School, sometimes shows movies to students. They are all kind of weird.
Existo - the first one of the Steve movies I watched, this was the MOST weird. The only thing I remember about it is this conversation:
"how do you feel about Existo coming back", a reporter asks this lady (? she looks like a man in drag), the owner of the club Existo usually performs
"moist", she says
Why would anyone keep a copy of this movie baffles me.
Song of the South (removed by Disney) - Steve said this movie was removed by Disney in fear that people would find it racist. I didn't think it was racist, and the main song Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah was awesome and stays in your head all the time if you don't watch out.
Stars in Shorts - Seven (or six?) short movies with an all-star cast. Alex and I watched it with a friend in Boston. It was the only one I watched in the movie theater in months. It was ok, though the first one where this mother and son are driving to a funeral they do not want to attend was the best.
October 2012:
Wedding Singer, with Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore and Christine Taylor
I walked with a Zombie (1943) - black and white movie about this woman who goes work in Africa and the wife of her boss acts like a zombie. Shown by Steve.
Zombieland - the actor from the Facebook movie is one of the few survivors after zombie-disease takes over earth. He and Woody Harrelson (who looks like an asshole, but plays a role that is suitable for him. He is obsessed with Twinkies). Then they meet two sisters, the older of which is played by Emma Stone. It was fun to watch, and not scary at all.
Freddy got fingered, by Tom Green - messy movie with Tom Green.
Minority Report (again) - I liked watching it again
Bridesmaids - I was not expecting this movie to be so funny. Even when I tried to think it wasn't so funny, I still laughed. It was pretty good.
O Brother Man - the art and life of Lynd Ward - documentary about Lynd Ward. It wasn't so much a documentary as it was a voice over reading on top of Lynd Ward's illustrations. I liked the movie fine, though I did fall asleep in the middle of it. My classmates all hated it, I think. The woodcuts are amazing, independent of the movie. The only remarkable thing I remember is "Ward is DRAW written backwards".
Public Enemies, by Michael Mann, with Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. Johnny Depp plays this famous bank robber.
Black Gold, with Antonio Banderas as an Arab... I don't know how this movie found its way to my computer. It was terrible.
American Psycho, with Christian Bale as the psycho. Christian Bale does a great job to creep me out in this movie. During the day he is the standard Wall Street asshole, during the night he hunts women to kill. He never gets caught and people don't really pay attention to what he says, even when he tries to confess he is a mass murderer. I saw this the same month I was reading the comic book about Dahmer. I guess it was serial killer month for me.
Incubus, with William Shatner and in Esperanto (shown by Steve). William Shatner plays a super nice guy that not even the devil can tempt. That's all I have to say about it.
Phantom of the Paradise, by Brian de Palma. It was a very interesting movie. Probably my favorite from all the ones shown by Steve that I watched. I went to find the soundtrack afterwards.
November 2012:
Wild boys of the road (1933) - a boy decides to run away with his best friend when he realizes his parents don't have much money. On the road, they are joined by a runaway girl, they all get kicked around and get into trouble (the worst being his friend getting his leg crashed by a train), ending in some court in New York City (or some other big town). The judge decides to punish them not with jail, but with work - they have to work to pay for their train ride back home. I probably would never watch this movie if Steve wasn't showing it.
December 2012:
The PhD movie - boring movie adaptation of the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper, about graduate student life.
Brave (Pixar) - beautiful animation, story is sub-par compared to other Pixar movies. Irish girl with nice red hair wants to be an archer and doesn't want to marry any of the suitors that her mother brings to her. She then wishes for something that makes her mom transform into a bear, and thus follows the saga of transforming the mom back into a human before the end of three days, in which her mom will permanently become a bear. The bear was really cute and I definitely liked the mom a lot better in that shape and form. I read some reviews at amazon where all the mothers were annoyed by the movie, saying the young girl was spoiled. That was more fun than watching the movie.
Une Vie de Chat (A cat in Paris) - nice French animation about a girl who doesn't talk, her mother detective, a cat, a thief, and some gangsters. The colors are really nice. Too bad I couldn't synchronize the subtitles properly to the sound.
On the flight to Taipei:
The Dark Knight Rises - reminded me a lot of 007 The World is Not Enough near the end. It was a bit longer than it needed to be. I couldn't wait for the end of the movie. Probably didn't help that I don't really like Christian Bale anymore.
The Bourne Legacy - it was fun, even though it was with Jeremy Renner, and not with Matt Damon anymore. They kept showing some scenes that ties back to the last Bourne movie, trying to say "look, this is really related to that movie with Matt Damon, it happens around the same time!"
A Chorus of Angels - Japanese movie about a teacher - reminded me a lot of David Lean's movie Ryan's Daughter, but not as good. The pace is slow, about a teacher that stopped teaching in a small island 20 years ago after her husband died in an accident. When she discovers one of her ex-students is being sought by the police related to killing a man, she decides to go back to the small island and talk to all her ex-students. At every encounter, each student thinks he/she was the cause of her husband's death.
Wolf Children - anime by Mamoru Hosoda about two kids (a girl and a boy) who were born from a werewolf father and a human mother. This woman falls in love with a werewolf when she is in college and they have babies. Then the werewolf dies soon after the second baby is born and she has to raise them by herself. Eventually they have to pick whether they want to adopt human or wolf lifestyles.
Tenchi the Samurai Astronomer - cute, from the same director of Okuribito, but not as good. Apparently it was based on a real Japanese astronomer, who didn't know anything about Copernicus or elliptic planetary trajectories. They use ellipse occurrences to determine which calendar is more accurate.
Rurouni Kenshin - Japanese movie about kick-ass Samurai who pledged not to kill again. The wig the main character was using bothered me a bit.
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Imitating Julie Delporte #1
I was trying to imitate Julie Delporte's stlye but I didn't have her drawings in front of me as a reference, so this didn't come out as planned. I will try again soon. I won't be able to write in French, though.
Friday, December 21, 2012
Update on Anthology Homework
Regarding the previous post on my anthology homework, my classmate Luke Healy posted our group's entire anthology online. You can see it here. I think it will take you to his flickr.
We sewed three signatures together for each book, and then glued them together in perfect binding. The cover is screen printed, with a die cut in the front. The map of the Earth is a picture printed on newsprint paper stuck to the first page of the book.
We sewed three signatures together for each book, and then glued them together in perfect binding. The cover is screen printed, with a die cut in the front. The map of the Earth is a picture printed on newsprint paper stuck to the first page of the book.
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