Category: Reseñas

Review: Carrie

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

I was born in 1985. Growing up, I didn’t watch movies from before the eighties. I had no control over what I could watch on TV, as I lived in my older brother’s bedroom. After I hit my twenties, I only watched a handful of movies from the seventies and earlier. The big ones, mainly: Jaws, Chinatown, Taxi Driver. I was aware of Carrie from popular culture. I knew that its protagonist was a shy girl who got bullied in school, lived with her religious nutcase of a mother, got deceived into going to the prom, had pig’s blood dumped onto her head, then proceeded to slaughter everyone inside. I didn’t know who Sissy Spacek was. The times I heard her name, I wondered who would have been so thoughtless as to call her child “Sissy.”

Recently I realized that I somehow managed to miss all of Sissy Spacek’s work from after I was born. Literally the only thing I briefly caught her in was Andy Samberg’s Hot Rod. She played Samberg’s mom. I didn’t even remember her from that movie, and by then, she was already old; sorry to say, I’m not attracted to old people. Hell, I’m not even attracted to most women my age. Also, I turned off the movie not even halfway through because I found it too goofy, and I was only watching it because Andy Samberg somehow managed to marry Joanna Newsom, with whom I was obsessed at the time.

Recently, as a forty-one-year-old man, I had the misfortune to come across Terrence Malick’s haunting Badlands, experienced Sissy Spacek properly for the first time, and I was struck in a way I couldn’t deny. Where had this girl been all my life?

Now I’ve watched Sissy’s Badlands, 3 Women, the godawful Welcome to L. A., Prime Cut, Ginger in the Morning, and two episodes of The Waltons she starred in. I was running out of her big roles from the 70s.

I didn’t want to watch Carrie. I hate horror movies, I don’t like Stephen King, and I didn’t want to see Sissy Spacek get abused. But tonight I put my big-boy pants on and started watching it. Sissy’s Carrie gets harassed by seemingly her entire class of girls for being bad at volleyball. In a strangely-erotic scene, we witness Sissy caressing her breasts as well as the rest of her beautiful, pale, freckled body in the shower, before she experiences menstruation for the first time. When Carrie, who had no clue what was happening to her because her mother is a sickening nutcase, begged her classmates to help her, they mocked her relentlessly and threw tampons and pads at her as Sissy curled into herself in a corner of the showers. Then a teacher came and slapped Carrie. Then she got called into the director’s office, who proceeded to call her Cassie four times.

By then I was done. I didn’t want to keep watching. People are terrible, I have had to deal with and witnessed terrible behavior at school, but I had a hard time believing that Carrie had happened to land in a class where virtually all the girls were sociopaths. I didn’t buy that the school director, principal or whatever that careless fuck was would get her name wrong four times after getting corrected. This was just piling on for some purpose that didn’t sit well with me.

It already hurt to see Sissy Spacek behave like a scared wild animal who can only expect to be mistreated. But I continued watching nonetheless. Thankfully, the rest of the movie is more nuanced than that. There’s cinematography and imagery to praise, particularly a sequence involving a circling camera during the prom dance. There’s a surprise along the way that I don’t want to spoil regarding the circumstances around Carrie getting invited to the prom. But in the end, I got mostly what I already expected to encounter: a shy, traumatized girl gets bullied, eventually invited to the prom, ends up on stage as the prom queen, and gets pig’s blood dumped onto her, which convinces her that every human being in sight deserves to die. I can’t exactly blame her for breaking.

The prom scene is extremely memorable, but simultaneously way sillier than I expected. Some general spoilers from now on. I got the sense that the filmmakers, when trying to put it together, ended up thinking, “She’s telekinetic, yes, but how on Earth would she use telekinesis to murder all these people?” So we have some silly moments with Carrie controlling a hose and spraying people. Electricity gets involved, someone dies who didn’t deserve it, and eventually the whole place seems to burn.

Looking back, I doubt that Carrie tried to kill people in the beginning. She went directly for the hose and went around spraying whoever was available. She could have launched any objects in sight as projectiles, but didn’t. Then, some people got electrocuted, and she pivoted to murder as if thinking, “Oh well, I’ve already caused some people’s deaths. May as well go all the way.”

Also, a couple of bastards get their car and themselves blown up after they attempted a little hit-and-run on the bloodied prom queen. Good riddance to those pig fuckers.

Before I watched the movie, I didn’t know what happened to Carrie after she returned home, and now I wish I still didn’t know.

What maybe hurt the most regarding Carrie is that, leading to the prom, she had started to assert and believe in herself. She put her abusive mother in her place, she made a beautiful dress for herself, and hoped that for once in her tragic life, she could spend a single evening in public without being abused.

Sissy did an extraordinary job playing Carrie. She inhabited all the fear, pain, hope, gratitude, murderous revenge. I understand how everyone for decades remembered her as “the girl from Carrie,” although this is a role completely unlike her as a person, as far as I can tell from interviews and her autobiography. And of course, Sissy was hauntingly beautiful on this movie. Also, her mother didn’t name her “Sissy.” That comes from the nickname her brothers used for her as their sister.

Travolta was also in the movie, playing a dumb motherfucker. Didn’t like him one bit, but I guess Travolta played him just fine.

I don’t have the kind of temperament that would allow me to like this movie even if I wasn’t obsessed with Sissy Spacek to begin with; seeing her being bullied and abused isn’t something I would do for fun. People liking this movie seems to me more like bonding over shared trauma. I can admire what the film accomplishes. Enjoying the experience of watching it is another matter.

Carrie White is a Medusa of modern times. She deserved better.

Review: episode “The Odyssey” from The Waltons

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

I’ve now watched the second and likely last episode of the Waltons I’ll watch in this demented life of mine. Not because the show was bad; I found it compelling for what it was trying to do. But I have no other reason to watch it other than because a precious angel haunted two of its episodes: 70s Sissy Spacek.

You can download the episodes freely from the Internet Archive.

Sissy plays a sheltered girl who couldn’t wait to get out of her strict, religious nutcase of a mother’s clutches. In the previous Spacek appearance (“The Townie,” from the first season), she swore she would marry our wannabe-writer protagonist John-boy if only he asked, and days later she was already falling for a John Dillinger-wannabe. She convinced him to run away with her and get married, only for her to change her mind the moment that arrogant kid crashed his car. The girl is trouble, reckless not in a fun way; despite my obvious allegiance to Sissy, that John-boy is just too good-hearted of a kid to have to deal with that shit.

Anyway, the episode starts with John-boy being unable to write because his family home is full of crotch spawns who actively hinder the protagonist’s creative impulses. He decides to head off for a couple of days to a cabin somewhere uphill. We see him travel for a while decidedly not uphill. The plot made a big deal about a storm coming, and the production had to blow some leaves in John-boy’s face while he pretended to hear thunder, even though the sky was California blue. I’m surprised that the fans themselves didn’t appear in the shot. I’m not insulting the show, though; I’m sure they did the best they could with early-seventies resources. They could have paraded Sissy around until some financier fell in love with her and threw hundreds of thousands at them, like it happened for Ginger in the Morning.

John-boy reaches that isolated cabin only to find out that someone is hiding there: Sissy. He soon learns she’s run away not only from her mother but from her current legal guardians, who, according to her, were exploiting her. We never really find out if Sissy’s character exaggerated it. Given that her main preoccupation is marrying someone who could save her from a life of servitude, this girl and her romance-addled brain likely just hurried to get themselves acquainted with the first bad boy they could find.

Then, the episode reveals a twist that actually shocked me for a show as wholesome as this. I guess I had mistaken wholesome for sanitized. The second half of the episode deals with increasing complications that force Sissy to act out troublesome emotions and exertions. It would benefit this post if I could be more specific about it, but all I would want to mention are spoilers about the second half of the episode, and I don’t want to ruin the experience of discovering something new for anyone who may be reading these words.

I think Sissy did a fine job with the material that fell on her pale, freckled shoulders. One of the saddest points of that ordeal was Sissy’s character clearly realizing that John-boy would have made a fine husband. Just not for the kind of ambitious girl she was then.

The ending also left me unexpectedly sad. Partly because this was one fewer glimpse of seventies Sissy that I have left to discover, but also because I would never find out what else happened to that reckless girl who had gotten herself in such a mess of a life. We are told that she and John-Boy remained friends into adulthood, but we never get to see the life she made for herself. In the same way Sissy’s haunting loveliness inhabited this show for a short time, we only got to witness a small part of a fictional life likely full of hardship, poverty, and terrible decisions.

Review: episode “The Townie” from The Waltons

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Now, why would I watch a random 1972 episode from a long-dead TV show? Why, because Sissy Spacek starred in it. It seems I’m in my “dig up episodes of a long-dead TV show to see more of her at that age” part of my obsession.

The episode is freely downloadable from the Internet Archive.

Sissy’s haunting loveliness inhabits a sheltered girl living alone with her religious nutcase of a mother, who has been raising Sissy’s character alone after her husband died. The episode starts with Sissy dating a certain John-boy, whom I assume is one of the main characters of The Waltons. A guy named John who’s a wannabe writer, because fuck me sideways.

Sissy is sick of being subjected to her mother’s impositions and restrictions. She wants to get married and leave as soon as possible. She even tells John-boy that she’d marry him in a heartbeat if only he asked. But John is a sensitive, sensible young man who only hears foolishness in such reckless behavior. Sissy is more in love with the notion of a passionate life waiting for her somewhere away from home than with our John-boy, so she starts dating this John Dillinger wannabe with a fancy period car. Initially she seems like she’s just trying to make John-boy jealous, see if he’d grow a pair. When he even gives her his blessing for dating that other guy, she clearly resents John’s pussyness. Will she choose that arrogant new man as her ticket out of their small town?

I appreciated Sissy’s acting here. She showed the raw hurt of her character in a scene in which she refused to grow up to become like her mother. In another scene, I noticed that she had a smiling fit in a moment when she definitely shouldn’t have been smiling. In any case, seeing her on screen is plain haunting.

I was struck as well by how this TV show earnestly tried to tell a human story. The Waltons came out seemingly before TV shows, and movies for that matter, became vehicles for subversion in order to further the goals of some groups. Better times, like most everything I experience from the 70s.

Sissy only stars in another other episode of The Waltons, in the second season, so I’m likely watching that next.

Review: Ginger in the Morning

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This is a review of an obscure 1974 romantic comedy, or at least I’m assuming that’s what’s supposed to be, starring Sissy Spacek and a bunch of other people who don’t matter as much. The movie was filmed in 1972, when our little Texan from Quitman was a mere twenty-two year old. The story seems mostly set near Albuquerque, a few decades before the rise of Walter White’s empire.

The whole movie is up on YouTube for some reason, and that’s where I watched it. Shown below.

Now, why did I bother watching this film? Because I also picked up this strawberry-blonde hitchhiker while watching Terrence Malick’s Badlands, and the same as the hapless protagonist of this movie, now I can’t get that little Texan out of my mind. As far as I’m concerned, Sissy Spacek in the 70s was the most precious flower. I usually don’t get interested in people, other than a previous burning obsession with Joanna Newsom back in 2010-2012. So I went to the trouble of immersing myself in a movie from fifty fucking years ago because there’s a limited amount of material that captured the passage of 70s Sissy Spacek through this world before entropy set in, and god damn it, I’m going to get through all of it.

Sissy plays a hippie hitchhiker. Being that gorgeous and young, it’s a surprise she hadn’t been killed yet; plenty of serial killers must have been roaming around in the 70s. Now, I don’t like hippies, and I think that giving people like that any power will ruin a society, but Sissy remains her delightful, charming, vulnerable self. Like the protagonist, I was inclined to give her a pass on whatever she said about coffee giving one wrinkles, or about whipped cream being synthetic, as long as I could see her smile. So I can’t blame the protagonist that much for pussyfooting around Sissy’s character’s whimsical nonsense that the world hadn’t yet beaten out of her.

That said, I experienced an arc of my own with the male protagonist. He started out as a sensitive, good man who, after his divorce, may have deserved the good luck of picking up Sissy. He was respectful and kind to her. However, shortly after the movie introduced a drunken friend of his, the whole movie, as well as my respect for the male protagonist, collapsed. And it happened fairly early.

This is a spoiler, but whatever: the same way the male protagonist’s cowardice led him to pussyfoot around Sissy’s nonsense, he also decided to speak about Sissy, for whom the guy had already fallen hard, as just some random “sure thing,” a “hot number” he picked up on the road, in order to placate his friend. Sissy heard him talk about her as though she were nothing more than an easy lay, and naturally her respect for this man shattered completely.

Now, we know that the male protagonist didn’t really mean it. But it doesn’t matter. The guy is in his late forties as far as I can tell, and he not only decided to talk that way about someone he clearly had fallen for, but also proceeded to blame his friend as if that drunkard had pried the words out of him. From then on, I was on the wounded hippie’s side: she should have taken the next bus to Colorado or wherever the fuck she was going and forgotten this whole episode even happened. The male protagonist showed a clear incapacity to connect with her emotionally, and even raised his voice when she was there hurting. I could see how he had ended up divorced.

I didn’t get the impression this was part of his character arc, as some flaw that he was supposed to fix; I suspect that the screenwriter was treating it as “Well, he’s a man. That’s relatable, isn’t it? She should just get over it.” That impression was enhanced later by the casual way the screenwriter treated spousal abuse; the male protagonist, drunk at that point, seemingly found it hilarious.

We never learned all that much about Sissy’s character as a person other than that she was a songwriter, wrote poems, was a hippie, and thought that some of her random delusions were facts. But Sissy sold all of it with her charm, beauty, and peculiar mannerisms: her casual and disarming sincerity, never concealing either her enthusiasm or hurt, the way she looks into other people’s faces as if taking it all in openly, those precious smiles of hers. And she also plays the guitar briefly; Sissy’s initial goal was to become a songwriter.

In an introduction for the 50th anniversary of the movie, the fifty-years-older male actor said that the movie had been financed because someone introduced Sissy Spacek to the money guy, who proceeded to fall in love with her, and gave them hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce the movie. I assume that the 70s was a sequence of random men casually encountering Sissy Spacek and falling madly in love with her. Sissy’s eventual husband, the art director for Badlands, saw her first coming down some stairs, all strawberry-blonde, beautiful, fair, small, and dressed in baby-blue overalls, and was struck instantly.

The dialogue was simultaneously cringier and cleverer than I thought it would be. The most moving part of the movie for me was a little monologue about deer hunting; I thought that was quite touching, and it came from the drunk otherwise involved in collapsing the movie. But I wish this story had been instead about Sissy Spacek and the male protagonist getting to know each other more and falling in love properly, and her eventually deciding for good reasons that she shouldn’t continue her doomed journey as a hippie hitchhiker. Instead, the film we got seemed unwilling to take Sissy’s character’s hurt seriously.

Watch it if you enjoy the 70s, and especially if you’re as enamoured with 70s Sissy Spacek as this old heart of mine is.

Review: Prime Cut

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Arte, ReseñasLeave a comment

A 1972 lurid crime thiller that I only found about because of my ongoing obsession with 70s Sissy Spacek. This was Sissy’s first feature film, in which she starred alongside Gene Hackman (who’s always compelling) and some older guy I had never seen before.

Sissy started with hopes of becoming a professional songwriter, but it didn’t pan out that way. Because she moved in the right circles and her cousin was a professional actor, and also because Sissy was mind-meltingly beautiful, doors soon enough opened for her to star in films. Prime Cut was filmed relatively shortly before Malick’s Badlands, which would make Spacek into a cult actress for independent filmmakers (eventually working with Robert Altman, David Lynch, and others), and also would make her the subject of infatuation for I’m assuming thousands of people worldwide. I’ve only been enamoured with her since I truly awakened to her existence about two weeks ago, but on my search for clips, I’ve read the words of poor saps who saw her back in the seventies or eighties and have never been able to forget her since. I hope my case eventually passes, as it feels almost like rubbing salt on a wound at this point.

Anyway, this is a movie that simultaneously tries to make selling young women (likely teenagers) a terrible thing to do, while also having Sissy paraded naked, with her delightful little body and titties out for our viewing pleasure. In one scene, she’s dressed in a beautiful see-through dress in an upscale restaurant; for some reason, the same man who saved her from sexual slavery decided to dress her up and parade her around in a dress that clearly displays her tits. I’m not complaining about any of this, mind you: I like when movies cater to my desires, and I absolutely wanted to see as much of 70s Spacek as humanly possible, including her pretty tits. The hypocrisy just irks me the wrong way. Ultimately, though, I suppose the movie is not apologetic of the fact that it caters to one of men’s most basic fantasies through the ages: that of rescuing a gorgeous, innocent princess from worse men, then keeping her to yourself so she can carry on your bloodline.

Now, this movie is a six or a six-and-a-half at the most. We’re treated to editing that repeats the same things over and over without much movement (driving cars, loading weapons, shooting, a combine chase). Some dialogue is plain dumb. There’s also not much to the plot beyond an out-of-town “detective” rescuing a gorgeous princess, then fighting the evildoers who captured her.

Things I appreciated: the sense of inhabiting the 70s was wonderful. Those cities from fifty years ago. The general ethnic homogeneity to the extent that they had to invent slurs for the Irish. Gorgeous upscale hotels that you can hardly imagine existing anymore in that form. The beautiful Midwest stretching from horizon to horizon. Quaint 70s fairs full of happy, fit young people who didn’t grow up on smartphones. Better times.

Some of the characters were memorable in their little details. Hackman’s role was of a nasty crime boss who sold fresh girls as cattle, and placing him in the plains of the Midwest instead of a city like Chicago gave him a peculiar air. He was also named Mary Ann for some reason; not sure if that was ever explained. His brother was a greasy guy who always wore a wife beater and constantly had a sausage at hand from the industrial butchery where he worked. I can’t say I liked seeing him, but he was memorable.

Now, Sissy’s character. A girl raised in an orphanage seemingly dedicated to providing fresh meat for the sex-slavery circuit. In a monologue, Sissy tells the protagonist that growing up, she used to make out with her best friend at the orphanage (another girl), pretending that one of them was a man. That she even put on a low voice to sell the act. She said she imagined how a grown man’s hands would feel roaming all over her. Naturally, she falls for the protagonist the moment he rescues her, and for the rest of the movie she gets led around as she experiences the wonders of an upscale restaurant and a fair with childish innocence. There’s a moment in which the protagonist and his crew are dealing with a couple of dairy farmers in a pointless exchange except for the fact that Sissy is in the background eating cotton candy with delight. She also looked mesmerizing in her white dress.

So, to anyone reading this (not sure why anyone would read a review of a random movie from 1972, let alone one written by me), watch this movie if you’re interested in inhabiting the 70s for a while, or if you’re afflicted with a burning obsession with 70s Sissy Spacek that prevents you from sleeping properly and fills you with ungovernable despair because you didn’t live through the 70s and were unable to meet the perfect creature that Sissy Spacek was during that limited span of time.

Some photos of the movie. And by “of the movie,” I mean of Sissy Spacek in the movie, which is why I watched this to begin with.

Review: Vinland Saga

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This will not be a traditional review. I finished reading Vinland Saga about an hour ago, and what I mainly want to record is my profound disappointment.

Three years ago, I wrote a review of the then-ongoing series. I have not reread it before writing this, but it should explain well enough why the story once mattered to me. Vinland Saga contained one of the most powerful mid-story transformations I can remember; not necessarily because it was the finest turn ever written, but because of how completely it transformed one story into another while retaining many of the same characters. The first half followed Thorfinn as he pursued revenge and drowned his grief and rage in the life of a warrior. I loved it. The second half is where the story broke apart.

I’ll spoil the whole thing. I don’t care.

Thorfinn renounced killing and eventually came to treat armed defence itself as a betrayal of his ideals. As a personal vow, that was his prerogative. If he wanted to stand still and allow someone to batter his skull rather than kill in self-defence, he was free to do so. But Thorfinn was no longer responsible only for himself. He had accepted responsibility for an entire settlement, and he expected everyone within it to live under the consequences of his oath. He sailed across an ocean to found a colony beside native Americans whose land, customs, beliefs, fears, and political interests he could not control. He had no credible answer for what would happen when the two societies clashed over property, weapons, ethnicity, religion, ways of life. Things were already deteriorating when disease came, and it all went predictably to shit.

The quality of the writing nosedived. Characters increasingly became moral mouthpieces. Some lost most of their practical intelligence when the thesis required it.

We also got the typical “Oh God, I killed a man; I’m spiritually ruined forever” beat from a major character who had been fighting men who were killing members of his community.

My disconnect from Thorfinn became extreme. He was opaque, and not in the way of a mysterious or deep character; his motivations and feelings no longer felt human. He was certain of his philosophical position while no longer having doubts, fearing sufficiently for his family, or having guilt over the other families endangered by his ideals. His pacifism was, in reality, a dangerous moral experiment, but the manga treated it as a truth whose failures were always someone else’s fault.

There is an extraordinary version of the second half hidden inside this disappointing one: a former killer becomes convinced that violence reproduces itself. He tries to found a society upon radically different principles. Then he discovers that his personal oath isn’t the same as being responsible. He could have remained personally unwilling to kill while confronting the fact that he had brought families into a place where he couldn’t guarantee their safety, he had no authority over the natives, and had no workable response to fear, disease, or cultural incompatibility. He essentially volunteered dozens of people for martyrdom.

Now that the story is over, I mourn what it did with my favorite character: Hild. One of my favorite characters in all of manga. An independent, determined inventor who, when her family was murdered, she managed to survive on her own in the wilds. Once she rejoined a community, she used her abilities as an engineer, hunter, sniper, and protector to help those she cared about.

Hild was the moral counterweight to Thorfinn. She already had the answer to what the protagonist should have become: someone who retained the capacity for violence, understood its cost, and chose carefully when to use it.

The second half of Vinland Saga wanted to tell a profound story about discovering common humanity, yet tried to do so by making most characters involved less psychologically human. As if the author committed to the pacifism bit but couldn’t find honest ways for people to go along as the story required.

And Hild deserved more than to wave goodbye from a boat.

Review: Colorful

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I only found out about this little gem yesterday. It’s an anime movie from 2010, and its premise captured me instantly: a sinful soul is given a second opportunity on Earth by being placed in the body of a middle schooler who killed himself. He’s assigned an angel of sorts as a guide, who will determine if the protagonist earns the right to receive another chance at life, or if his soul will instead disappear.

The newly-returned soul wakes up in a hospital bed, watched over by his tearful parents and angry older brother. The protagonist knows nothing about these people, feels no kinship with them, nor does he retain any memories of his previous life that was deemed sinful. He tries to adjust to his new life as the younger son of an unremarkable family in a quiet Japanese town. He discovers that the boy whose body he inhabits was friendless and quiet, spending most of his time painting, for which he had a talent. At school, he’s approached by an ugly, awkward girl whose interest in the protagonist he finds repellent, and by an attractive extroverted girl whom the protagonist finds himself attracted to.

The protagonist is soon told by his heavenly guide the circumstances that led the previous occupant to suicide. The details would be spoilers; in any case, as a result, the protagonist feels himself repulsed and alienated from his new family, and tries to distance himself from the previous occupant of his new body by being himself.

What follows is a small tale of quiet sorrows and private beauty about whether we can live with the failures of other people, and with our own. The mother who betrays her family can also love her son desperately; the boy who has suffered can also be cruel; a life that appears irredeemably gray may still contain colors its owner has stopped being able to see.

As the protagonist behaved in an increasingly nasty manner toward his new mother, I found myself feeling bad for her as well as the rest of his family. I never had a mother whose quiet, dignified sorrow felt so familiar, or a father with whom I could speak and who cared about me. I caught myself thinking that the kid had it good enough: a beautiful town, a relatively ordinary school life, parents who cared about him, and decent people within reach.

The setting is rendered with aching detail; every single location seemed modeled after a real place, and the characters feel like they’re navigating through painted-over photographs. It made me want to be there, to walk along the same sidewalks and witness the same sights.

This story possesses the Japanese sensitivity that I repeatedly find in their fiction and almost never in what’s created around these parts. Although the movie lacks the usual silliness, derangement, and perversion that I’m usually drawn to, it hit me hard, and I suspect it will hit anyone who has ever wanted out and, even after choosing to remain, has continued to feel like a stranger in this place.

Review: The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, REALLY Love You

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I was watching some YouTube reactors reacting to my guilty anime pleasure of the season, Chainsmoker Cat, when one of them mentioned that this studio had also been behind 100 Girlfriends. I had never heard of that show, but the premise implied by the title intrigued me.

The anime is about a pure-hearted high school boy named Rentaro, who has been rejected by girls a hundred times. The last one said that the notion of dating him made her sick. The god of love shows up and tells Rentaro that he shouldn’t worry about love, because he’s been assigned a hundred soulmates at birth. We later find out that it was due to this very god’s absent-mindedness that Rentaro ended up with such preposterous romantic luck, but it gets more complicated: if one of his soulmates falls for him but Rentaro fails to return her feelings, she will die. Thus, our boy sets off on a journey to casually meet a hundred soulmates and make sure that he loves every single one of them.

This turned out to be my favorite romantic comedy since the classic Toradora! It sets itself apart in various ways: it doesn’t wait around for the will-they-won’t-they bullshit: he begins dating nearly every soulmate within the same episode in which she appears. The focus is on the relationship afterwards, and on the complicated dynamics of having to maintain not even two or three girlfriends at a time, but ten by the middle of the second season. The way the girls bond with each other and deal with the fact that their boyfriend is a ten-timing young man who nevertheless has unbounded love for all of them is one of the main highlights of the story. And its tone is just right up my alley: zany, deranged, delightfully perverted. Among the recurring bits, there’s a shapeshifting chemist who casually drugs the cast and also pees herself, while two of the girls maintain a quasi-open lesbian relationship everyone is aware of but nobody brings up.

I was surprised by how different the author managed to make the girls, helped by the brilliant-as-usual voice actresses. We start out with tropes like the big-breasted horny one, the tsundere, the shy bookish type, the cold and brilliant beauty, but the cast gets weirder from there, and finding out whom the protagonist ends up bringing in is one of the entertainments of the story.

The author could have made the lucky protagonist, Rentaro, a horny fiend, but he’s a genuinely-good kid whose superpower isn’t having been born with a hundred soulmates assigned to him, but his boundless capacity for love. This kid truly wants to make each of them happy. One must admire his commitment to filling his entire existence balancing the emotional demands of enough girlfriends to found a new town and possibly reinvent feudalism.

Now, there are a few things that bother me. Sometimes the show gets too cutesy, although not to the extent that I want to drop it. It also has a couple of weak episodes, particularly the “kiss zombies” bit from the first season. Also, I suspect the show was strongest near the beginning, when Rentaro had only two or three girlfriends. The intimacy gets inevitably diluted by the time you reach ten.

I have to admire both an author as well as an anime production that has promised to introduce a hundred different romantic partners in a single show. The logistics alone voice-actress-wise are unhinged.

There’s hardly a better summary of the entire show than the glorious karaoke scene from S02E07, shown below almost in its entirety:

100 Girlfriends works because it takes Rentaro’s devotion completely seriously. It may well be the best harem comedy ever made.

Review: Burning

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, ReseñasLeave a comment

I’m sick of Western fiction, so I asked ChatGPT for recommendations of Korean films. Amongst many, it recommended Burning, a 2018 film I had never heard of. It turned out to be one of the most mesmerizing movies I’ve ever seen.

We follow a protagonist whose mother abandoned him and whose father is on trial for having assaulted someone. The protagonist lives in a rural house near the border with North Korea. He works odd jobs for a living. Right off the bat, he meets a childhood friend of his, a cute young woman who seems to get by on odd jobs and men’s attention. Shortly after they meet and share an intense moment, she announces she’ll leave on a trip to Africa. The protagonist ought to go regularly by her tiny apartment to feed a cat that he can’t even see.

When the young woman returns, she’s not alone. She’s accompanied by a rich-looking Korean guy (played by Steven Yeun, usually most known for American movies), and the protagonist immediately slides into that sickening humiliation known well by those who’ve liked or loved a girl only for her to casually force you to see her act intimately with another man as if you were meant to endure it. The rich guy’s smiles and comments seem to suggest he enjoys inflicting that kind of humiliation. What is an isolated, poor young man who has fallen in love with a chaotic, existentially-damaged young woman supposed to do when she’s being absorbed into a superior man’s life?

That summarized plotline disguises a lot of what the movie actually is about. What you’re truly living throughout this movie is uncertainty. Someone’s inadequate access to reality, knowing that you’re barred from possessing enough authority, information, or self-knowledge. The young woman’s cat exists, or maybe it doesn’t. The childhood well where the young woman claims she once fell exists, or maybe it didn’t. The protagonist is supposed to have rescued her from that well, except that he can’t remember doing so. The protagonist is supposedly a writer who cannot write. For most of the film he observes, accumulates details and fails to turn them into meaning.

The sense of place in this movie is sublime. You feel right there. The scenes are allowed to linger as much as they need without having to rush to the next bit of conflict.

By the end, two opposite interpretations remain open and equally valid. The young woman was at the bottom of an invisible well, depending upon another lonely and uncertain person to confirm that she was real. Whether that well existed doesn’t seem as important as the fact that’s how she experienced herself. What we call reality is just the story we become willing to act upon.

Review: Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

This is the first movie of a trilogy that modernizes the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, or something. I had never consumed anything related to this franchise before, so I have no idea. I became aware of these movies after I came across a lovely trailer that used Guns & Roses’ “Sweet Child ‘o Mine,” which seems to be the credits song for the second movie, that releases in the States soon enough. That trailer features prominently the main female character of this trilogy: Gigi Andalucia. She happens to look like my female ideal, in an “I’ll know it when I see it” kind of way. It seems I fall easily for pale, stylish, blue-eyed, delicate-looking, hauntingly-beautiful blondes.

Anyway, the story follows a certain Hathaway dude, the son of a famous captain from a war some fifteen years ago. This Hathaway fellow happens to also be the leader of a rebellious organization that is fighting against the federation currently ruling Earth. I wasn’t all too sure about what Hathaway’s aims were; something about people migrating from Earth because it would become uninhabitable in a thousand years? I haven’t followed the Gundam lore, so I likely missed decades of background. This franchise is old.

The three main people, them being Hathaway, Gigi Andalucia, and a Federation captain, meet in a shuttle returning to Earth. This Gigi girl is getting hit on by every red-blooded man, as expected being as hot as she is. Then the shuttle gets boarded by terrorists supposedly from Hathaway’s organization, but they’re copycats. Hathaway gets pissed and drops them with the help of the captain. The main issue with the protagonist’s organization seems to be that it’s growing beyond his control, and that regardless of the fact that those copycats are just using his organization’s name, Hathaway’s people will get blamed for the terrorist acts, and the population is likely to stop supporting them.

We get to know more of this Gigi Andalucia girl. And oh man, she’s trouble. Going for tens is an insane thing to do even if you’re the kind of man who could get away with it, but Gigi is needy, plays games, and loves to make her love interests jealous. She knows everyone she meets is aching to bring her to bed. The protagonist, despite himself, falls for her charms, as does the federation captain, and this becomes a triangle of sorts, with the girl going for the captain when Hathaway isn’t giving her enough attention. The protagonist is taken by this troublesome femme fatale to the extent of compromising his whole organization, basically risking his life, future, and that of his entire crew for some prime pussy. I don’t know if I can blame him. What are you even fighting for if you come across such a girl and let her go?

I guess that’s all I have to say plot-wise. I understood about half of the political stuff. I was very intrigued by the worldbuilding. Visually, the movie is impressive. 3D used well for machines, landscapes, water, etc. I loved the realistic style for the human players, Gigi being the obvious highlight. Beautiful, sophisticated locations. The movie was often delightful solely for the visuals.

Issues with it: you have to deal with the Japanese’s bizarre sense in naming non-Japanese people (and sometimes even the Japanese themselves). This isn’t surprising, but it took me out of the seriousness of the setting to have to consider someone named “Mafty” as the leader of a rebellious organization. I’m quite sure there was someone named Quacks somewhere. I suspect this is from the source material, most quite old. Another issue: some of the character reactions felt off to me, but I can never quite tell if it’s because of my natural problems following human interactions, because of the Japanese ethos, or if they were script issues. Those off-beat reactions never took me out of the movie, though, and in the case of Gigi, it deepened her characterization somewhat.

Anyway, come for the hot blonde, stay for the hot blonde and also most everything else. I should check out more modern anime movies. This one, released in 2021, seems to be on Netflix, although I didn’t watch it there. Hopefully the second movie will release in Spanish cinemas.