Netflix Reviews, Vol. 1

Hello! As Jim Anchower would say, it's been a while since I rapped at ya, but life has been taking up a lot of space. I got a lot going on, you know, a lot of irons in the fire, if you will.

Here's the first in what I hope to be many installments of a movie review aspect to my blog. I figure I like to talk about movies until I'm blue in the face and I have a near-endless supply thanks to Netflix, so it's a match made in heaven. I'll only do movies that I haven't seen and that aren't completely mainstream movies that everyone's seen (like LOTR or Star Wars or King Kong).

Today I'm hittin' you with Howl's Moving Castle. A Japanese cartoon with a really cool fairy-tale kinda theme, Howl's Moving Castle is about a young girl who works in a hat shop and her adventures after being turned into an old woman by an evil witch. I'll be honest, I have no idea why the evil witch targeted this girl because I was pretty stoned when I started the movie. I got distracted and decided to watch it more sober, but I started from where I left off, not the beginning.

The best parts of this movie were the ones that carved it out as a fairy tale - the transformed old lady constantly talking to herself about, well, herself, the strange scarecrow with a turnip's head that hops around and follows her, the little kid apprentice, and of course the gigantic awesomeness of the castle. Like most anime, the art is great, with beautiful backgrounds and cool perspectives and camera angles. Also, like most anime, unfortunately, it gets a little too heady at parts.

Rating - 3 of 5. Howl's is at it's best when it sticks to it's fairy tale roots, staying away from analysis of people's relationships and the mysterious origins of their particular mental hang-ups and complexes.

Up next... Thumbsucker