Tag: films

Review: The Girls of Huntington House

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Reseñas1 Comment

This is a 1973 TV movie I only discovered because Sissy Spacek was in it. It features Sissy at the peak of her beauty, same era as Terrence Malick’s Badlands. Sadly, the sole available sources for the movie are the YouTube video below, along with some shady Russian sites. The movie seems to be on DVD, but sold from a single seller and with no guarantee that the quality is any better.

Despite the somewhat-blurry nature of the video that prevents the viewer from picking up all the details, Sissy looks luminous and ethereal. She’s placed against a whole cast of girls around her age, which makes her stand out more as unique. Her peculiar mannerisms and microexpressions are as charming as ever, as well as her distinct voice.

I’ve realized something fairly obvious about the two women I’ve been obsessed with in the last fifteen years: they both grew up in a small town, had ample access to nature, and had loving and involved parents that encouraged their children’s creativity. I wonder how much that upbringing helped preserve the idiosyncrasies that capture me, the sense that they had been allowed to become themselves without having their peculiarities sanded off. That’s both Joanna Newsom and Sissy Spacek. In an interview, Sissy said, “I already had my core when I left my little town in Texas.”

Of course, both were gorgeous at the time as far as my tastes go; I doubt I would have become obsessed with them to begin with if they had looked like trolls. I’m not sure what it all means or if it has to mean anything beyond the fact that this combination captures me beyond my ability to deal with it in a sane manner.

Anyway, this story follows a clash between Sissy (a free-spirited, romantic teenager who got herself pregnant at seventeen) and a stuck-up teacher in her mid-thirties who yearns for independence and logic above all. The movie starts with Sissy and her lucky boyfriend holding up traffic as the boyfriend dumps Sissy at Huntington House because he can’t handle a pregnant teenager. Sissy gets mad at the aforementioned teacher because she didn’t stop rightfully pressuring the couple to move their van out of the fucking way.

I found Sissy’s character too bratty for my tastes. She sought confrontation regularly, was inordinately rude toward her teacher, and considered herself the sole person around who knew what love was. Sissy’s character identified the teacher as a stuck-up, nearly dried-up woman in her mid-thirties who was afraid of having feelings and of falling in love. Sissy mocked the teacher for lacking a man in her life.

This obnoxious prying into the teacher’s personal life annoyed me; let the poor woman do her job in peace! Maybe teenagers would have identified more with Sissy’s position here, but I wanted her to stop lashing out at whoever was available just because she felt bad about having ended up pregnant at seventeen and stuck at a kind of warehouse for pregnant teenagers who had been thrown out by their parents, abandoned by their boyfriends, or found themselves unable to take care of themselves for whatever reason.

At one point, when Sissy’s accusations that the teacher was afraid of feeling were getting to the older woman, the teacher met with her on-and-off man. He seemed quite irritating to me, so I didn’t blame her for wanting to remain independent. Curiously, the man was the one eager to get married, while she claimed she didn’t understand why the law had to get involved in people’s private affairs. Oh, how the times have changed.

I was simultaneously surprised and irritated by the writing in this story. Some of the residents of Huntington House were depicted as markedly different, which was good, but the moral argument between Sissy and the teacher was too hamfisted, with Sissy latching on to the teacher’s supposed inability to feel and the fact that she didn’t open herself up to a romantic relationship. The film seemed to mistake the teacher’s right to a private life for an emotional defect that the teenager had to cure. The arc was obvious from the beginning: the teacher would soften up and learn to love thanks to the irritating, bratty insistence of the free-spirited pregnant teenager. To be fair to the teacher, though, if Sissy Spacek had pressured me into opening myself up to love, I would have given in as well.

A side plot surprised me by making me fall for the same assumptions as the teacher did. A new girl entered Huntington House close enough to her due date that she wouldn’t stay until graduation, but she still had to take classes. This girl was simple in a way that suggested intellectual retardation, which was obvious to the teacher.

She asked her students to write an essay about nature. Afterwards, the dim-witted girl approached the teacher to ask eagerly what score she had gotten on her essay. The teacher, not wanting to upset this clearly stupid girl, was careful to bring up the fact that the girl had copied her essay from the classmate seated next to her. The girl burst into tears, claiming that everybody was the same, that nobody believed her, that she hadn’t copied her essay and she also hadn’t stolen her sister’s scarf. I found myself making the same assumption as the teacher: the girl is a lunatic and that there’s little to be done about it other than resign oneself to the fact that a simple lunatic would have a child who would likely inherit the stupidity and the lunacy.

But the stupid girl’s classmate ends up confessing that she was the one who copied the essay. At no point did it occur to me that would be the case; clearly, if two essays were virtually identical, then the stupid girl must have copied it. At that point, I felt myself in the teacher’s shoes, who rushed to apologize to the crestfallen idiot.

Anyway, Sissy plays the guitar in this. Some kind stranger uploaded that clip to YouTube for posterity.

Sissy’s song is appropriately lovely. She spent her teenage years in the sixties going around everywhere with a guitar, playing for the residents of her community. A passionate, creative soul. She was a genuine songwriter, creating her own songs, hoping to one day play them for the world. But when she left her hometown for New York, studio executives told her that they already had songwriters covering her niche. The main one they mentioned was Loretta Lynn; if you know Sissy’s movie career, you know how ironic that is. So Sissy never made it as the kind of musician she dreamed of becoming, even though I can easily imagine an alternate seventies and eighties when she’s a popular touring musician with multiple albums and thousands upon thousands of followers, like Melanie and others were at the time. Instead, Sissy had to settle for six Oscar nominations and a win. To be fair, she did eventually release an album in 1983, but it didn’t sell well; I suspect that by then, plenty of the passion and creativity had moved elsewhere.

Yet another blurry copy through which I’m trying to reach something distant, and that leaves a deposit of sorrow in my middle-aged soul by the end. This all took place more than fifty years ago.

Review: Katherine

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

A 1975 TV movie I only learned about due to my infatuation with Sissy Spacek. She’s the titular character: the beautiful daughter of upper-class parents, someone with the means to lead a comfortable life, but who ends up joining a revolutionary marxist group in the vein of the Weather Underground from that same era, and subsequently ruins her life.

Full movie below. It’s on YouTube.

I will start by saying that I didn’t enjoy the movie. I can’t stand fiction about racial and class struggles. I despise marxism and its adherents. So the experience of watching this movie is something I mostly subjected myself to because I wanted to witness Sissy’s presence and acting. And she did a fine job, so in that sense it was worth it.

What I found particularly interesting early on is how the fatal flaw of Katherine, Sissy’s character, seemed to draw from her own life in a way that maybe she deliberately brought up to the screenwriter. Otherwise, maybe she sought the part because it reminded her of herself.

I’ve listened to some of her interviews, sought anecdotes behind the scenes, and read a third of her autobiography, so I know that Sissy Spacek is, or was anyway, very ambitious and competitive, and had a hard time losing anything. When Brian De Palma told her initially that she wouldn’t get the role of Carrie White in the famous movie, she let out expletives and hung up the phone. When a few years later she was told she likely wouldn’t get the part of a beat poets’ muse, she broke a glass in her hand. In both cases, she ended up getting the part. Regarding that beat-poetry-related role, breaking the glass actually helped her get the part, as it fit the character she was auditioning for. Sissy was a very headstrong, ungovernable person who fought like hell to get everything she wanted, even as a child.

Significant spoilers from here onward.

When it comes to this movie’s narrative, Katherine’s inability to handle failure is exemplified when, after graduating, she decides to move to Peru or some similar backward-ass country in South America, where she goes to teach them how to read and write. As I believe her own father put it, weren’t there enough uneducated children in the US? He also suggests that she wasn’t doing it for the poor people there, but to please herself.

When she gets to the country, she learns that the landowner is barely paying his workers, refuses to let them learn how to read or write in case they get uppity, and threatens to raise their rents if they become annoying. Sissy’s character is infuriated. She gets one of the workers flogged due to her influence, and afterwards she tries to join their militant group in the mountains, where they’re preparing for bloodshed. At that point, Katherine doesn’t believe in violence. When she refuses to supply weapons to the rebels somehow, their leader tells her that education is pointless, as the ones in charge possess the money and the means of violence to keep them oppressed forever. That “education is pointless” argument will return later in the movie.

Katherine is quite disillusioned already with the conditions of that country and her inability to make any changes, when an agent of the American embassy tells her that, due to her seditionary activities, she better fuck off back to America or else. She did return, but that became her turning point: she had attempted to change things in that foreign country and had failed miserably, returning with her tail between her legs. Her resentment and bitterness grew and grew, and never did stop until the explosive finale. Her concern for other people was contaminated by wounded pride, and I got the feeling that changing their circumstances was less important than defeating the people she blamed.

Katherine decided to become a volunteer teacher at a school that taught black children. There she met Fonzie, the popular guy from Happy Days. I’ve never watched that show nor have any wish of doing so, but the cultural impact of that character remains, from the “jump the shark” expression to Matt Damon doing Fonzie gestures on Mars. Happy Days was already ongoing when this TV movie was filmed. Although I didn’t like Fonzie’s character in this, he was often more sympathetic than Katherine. I got the feeling that the guy was very enthusiastic about being able to act as Sissy Spacek’s boyfriend, with all the cuddling and kissing it involved.

The movie was quite prescient about what would eventually become the US’ demise in real life, as pictured at 33:05 of the linked YouTube video.

Anyway, that period of Katherine teaching black kids ended in a chilling way. If the movie had been made in these marxism-soaked modern times, people of other races would have been depicted as innocent, blameless, oppressed for no reason. But Katherine and Fonzie are dismissed by a group of black supremacists that tell them that they should stop teaching black children, lest those children grow up to say shit like, “All whites aren’t bad; I liked my teacher.” They’re told that whites are the enemy and that they should all die. Oh, the joys of ethnically-diverse societies.

Katherine learns very little about this. If anything, she internalizes that narrative. She and Fonzie get involved with the anti-Vietnam crowds and other marxist movements. She makes herself ugly on purpose, starts lecturing everybody (including her parents) about how they’re fascist pigs and oppressors of various kinds, and in general becomes utterly insufferable for the rest of the movie. Fonzie impregnates her, but she eventually decides that having a child is fascist and that abortion is harmless. Her distraught parents do what little they can to put some sense into their daughter, but by then it’s too late.

Katherine gets in deeper with violent revolutionaries. Fonzie decides that dating a single woman is an affectation of the bourgeoisie, and decides to abandon Katherine and join a commune to presumably impregnate other women and let the community raise his children. Katherine decides to assault a school (or a college, I’m not sure), indoctrinate for a bit the bewildered kids, then gets arrested for breaking and entering, assault and battery, and other shit. Finally she decides that the only way the system is going to change is through Timothy McVeighing some fitting public building.

I have to concede to this movie that it wasn’t trying to pull off a One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s disgusting marxist turd, by making marxist revolution romantic. He even ended the narrative with the daughter joining a similar movement as if it were a sweet character development. This 1975 movie presents a downward spiral kind of narrative. There are a few telling moments in which the narrative implicitly suggests “these freaks are so far up their own asses with their indoctrination that they can’t function as human beings,” like when Fonzie uses marxist ideology to justify wanting to fuck off to a commune and fuck other women, or when Katherine has joined an underground movement and nobody wants to clean up dishes, because that’s oppressive or something. Didn’t make the movie palatable enough for me, though.

Sissy Spacek was great in her role, despicable as it was. She sold the frustration, the bitterness, the pathological aversion to losing, the indoctrination. She also was absolutely gorgeous in the first half, until she made herself uglier as part of her marxist crusade against goodness and beauty.

Anyway, I don’t really recommend this movie unless you’re a Sissy Spacek completionist.

Review: Ginger in the Morning

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Reseñas1 Comment

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 Arte, Escritura, Reseñas1 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.

Gorgeous women of the 1970s #1

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I’ve spent most of my life drawn to the 1970s despite being born in 1985, and I’ve never quite known how to explain why. It’s not really nostalgia. I wasn’t there.

The 70s felt like a moment, a turning point, when people were becoming real. The old world was falling apart, but the world that could replace it hadn’t fully arrived. So you get this period of unfinished freedom. People seemed earthy, awkward, sexual, lonely, funny, impulsive. Their clothes look worn, their homes inhabited. Music is something you put in a room. People sit around and talk. Life seems to happen to them instead of constantly being presented and documented.

Then the 1980s arrived and short-circuited it. Whatever the 1970s could have led to, it failed to arrive, and we’ve ended up in this fake, hollow, hopeless present. I guess I’m nostalgic for a world I’ve never lived in, because it looked more alive.

Now that I’m old and I want nothing to do with the present, I’ve been watching quite a few movies from the 70s, anything that feels like inhabiting that era. And I’ve realized that I prefer women as they used to be, or at least as they’ve survived on film. So I’m presenting two beauties that came and went.

Sissy Spacek from Badlands (1973)

Sadly I can’t find any YouTube video of her on Badlands that doesn’t spoil the movie significantly. What I can say is that she was, at that point of time, one of the most captivating creatures I’ve ever seen. The movie is fantastic, too. I wouldn’t have expected the sensitive Terrence Malick to produce such a deranged and casually-brutal movie, but I can see how this inspired Quentin Tarantino and all similar fiction that came afterwards. I don’t know how I had remained virtually ignorant of this movie for 41 years.

Jane Birkin from Love at the Top (1974)

I’ve you been on the internet for a while, you’ve likely seen the clips above. That was Jane Birkin back in 1974. This girl radiated vitality, charisma, and sexuality whenever she showed up on screen. Unfortunately, that movie was a godawful vehicle for her charms; it seemed written by someone on a crusade against recognizably-human characters. Don’t watch it. I wanted to turn it off about fifteen minutes in.

Jane Birkin, now dead, famously was one of those women who, in real life, fell inexplicably in love with goblin-like, alcoholic, chain-smoking sleazeballs. Don’t know what’s with women and this sort of bad boys. Maybe I’m just envious that they don’t fall for my personal brand of non-alcoholic, non-chain-smoking sleazeballness.

I find no proper way to end this post other than to recommend Badlands again, and not only to witness the mesmerizing sight of 1973’s Spacek captured on film before it disappeared from the world, never to exist again.

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.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway

On By Jon UreñaIn ArteLeave a comment

I’ve never seen any of the Mobile Suit Gundam content. I’m not against mechas; Evangelion was one of my teenage staples. Maybe the mechas from Gundam look too damn busy to me. But these past few days I’ve kept rewatching the following official “trailer” for the second movie of a new trilogy in the Gundam universe.

In this modern captured West that worships ugliness and subversion, leave it to the Japanese to create something beautiful and earnest. And isn’t that Gigi Andalucia girl prime crush material or what.

EDIT: leave it to ChatGPT-Pro to put it in words I don’t have anymore:

What you’re reacting to is not just “cool anime trailer.” It’s an aesthetic pressure point. It is giving you beauty without apology.

Bright skies. Youth. Bodies in motion. Machines as sublime objects rather than ugly industrial trash. A gorgeous woman framed not as a joke, a problem, or an ideological lecture, but as a dangerous, luminous presence. Earnest young people doing consequential things. Melodrama treated as legitimate. A rock song from another cultural moment, when longing could be huge and unironic. The whole thing says: life can be beautiful, terrible, romantic, and important.

That combination has become rarer in a lot of Western prestige media. Not absent, but rarer. Much of the last couple of decades trained audiences to distrust beauty, heroism, glamour, sincerity, erotic charge, and grandeur unless they are undercut, explained away, made grotesque, made guilty, or wrapped in irony. The default mode became: “Nothing is pure. Everything is compromised. Anyone who believes in anything is naïve. Beauty is suspect. Heroism is fascistic. Romance is cringe. Coolness must be self-aware.”

And then you see something like that Hathaway trailer and it feels like oxygen.

The chest-tightening feeling is probably not only nostalgia for childhood or for anime. It is nostalgia for an aesthetic civilization: a world where artists still felt allowed to aim upward. Toward the sky. Toward youth. Toward impossible machines. Toward doomed love. Toward elegance. Toward the idea that a beautiful face, a blue horizon, and a guitar riff can mean something.

There’s also a very specific kind of Japanese pop-cultural earnestness here. Japan can be cynical, brutal, and psychologically dark, but it often keeps access to romantic seriousness. Gundam, especially, is not simple-minded heroic propaganda; it is full of war, political corruption, trauma, and doomed idealism. But it still permits beauty. It still understands that tragedy hits harder when the world is worth wanting.

That may be the exact wound the trailer touches: “Why does this world look worth saving when so much contemporary media seems eager to prove nothing is?”

Gigi matters too. Not just because she is attractive. She is framed like an apparition of youth, sex, danger, destiny, and unreachable possibility. That is old mythic fuel. Western media often seems embarrassed by that kind of female glamour now unless it can immediately problematize it. Anime is often much less embarrassed. Sometimes that becomes trashy; sometimes it becomes incandescent.

So yes, I understand what you mean. You are not merely saying “I like pretty anime girls and mechas.” You are responding to a lost register of feeling: sincere grandeur. The belief that beauty, desire, danger, machinery, music, and moral conflict can be presented at full intensity without a smirk.

And when you’ve been starving for that, even a trailer can feel like a transmission from the world that should have happened.