Being Erica is a show about a woman who is disappointed with where her life has ended up and as a result ends up seeing this therapist who sends her back in time to reconcile herself with regrets she has about her past. I thought the concept for the show was pretty interesting and I thought that the events of the past she went back to reconcile were relatively universal landmarks that are relatable to the audience. She gets sent back to situations like her bat mitzfah, her first sexual experience, the university group that could have landed her her dream job, event that went both well and not so well with friends and family, and in one episode she was even sent back to before her birth to better understand her parents.
One of the things I liked about this series was that at no point in any of the times Erica goes back in time is she able to alter the chain of events that have happened. She has a list of regrets that the therapist, Tom, sends her back to and she may change her perspective or may do something different from what she did in the past, but the resulting action that happened originally will still happen. The only difference is that she understands the situation for what it is and comes to realize that she is not to blame, or if she is, to own up to her faults and change her perspective or current actions to make things right. So really, even though this sounds sort of like a science fiction with all the time travel, it is more of Erica's rumination of her life and the actions she takes to own her life and make it what she wants it to be.
I thought that the characters were interesting and sufficient attention was paid to each of the minor characters. everyone in the show is given a story (minus Erica's boss, who is discussed more in the second season) and everyone is given a little bit of depth. We learn about Erica more and more with each episode as we see her struggle with her past, so needless to say that Erica grows as a character and who we see at the beginning of the series is somewhat altered from the person who we see at the end. An interesting show to say the least.
I love faeries, and anime, and this is the perfect combination of both. Alright, there are definitely some flaws in the movie. The colours are kind of faded, the bad guy is cheesy, and as is typical of 80's cartoons the girl just whines instead of doing something, among other things. My mind was telling me this as I was watching... but a stronger voice drowned that one out and was wishing I'd seen this movie when I was five years old. I would have loved it then. I still appreciate it now, but there's something about a child's perception that makes magic come alive and this story is full of magic.
It's about the son of the sea king and the daughter of the fire queen. As legend has it, the king and queen are siblings and were very close and always together. The wind saw this, became jealous of their happiness and told lies to each of them making them distrust the other. They quarreled and the fire queen went to live in the sky and the sea god the sea, and the wind was banished to the depths of the sea and his eye was removed. One day the prince of the sea goes to a forbidden place and sees the fire child watching over the eternal flame. He comes back the next day and they fall in love, and from there they try to find a way to make their impossible love work.
One of the things I love about anime is that it's not disnified. Obviously. What I mean by that is that a romanticized ideal is achieved, but not without cost. There isn't a false message that you can have your cake and eat it too. You should strive to achieve your desires, but you have to know that there may be a price to pay. This isn't ominous by any means, don't take it the wrong way, the movie isn't sinister and won't worry a child. The moral isn't that bad will always come from getting something you want, but more that sometimes you have to choose between two things you might like and if you choose one you might mourn the loss of the other, even though the choice you made was the best one and is what will make you the happiest. This isn't always the message in main stream films. Most of the time the idea expressed is that you go through a tough phase, but then by making the right choices all goes well in your life, happily ever after, without regret or pain or thoughts of what if. The story end with the idea that the couple will always be happy in their paradise, but in real life situations life isn't so black and white, and it's refreshing to see films reflect this every now and again, especially films for children.
The fire people are all faeries, and all except for the fire queen have a sprite-like appearance. The prince is human looking, but very lanky, and all of his subjects are fish (so both boys and girls will watch). It was a great film full of fantasy, adventure, whimsy, and romance. Great film.
This is a fun book about a king who likes taking a bath. The story is short and fun to read, but it's the illustrations that make this book noteworthy. They are lush and expressive and whimsical and the attention paid to detail is wonderful. The story is simple and if it was illustrated in another style would be like the endless board books simplistically introducing life skills to toddlers. However, this style makes this story an adventure. The pictures perfectly punctuate the prose in the most flattering way.
The story is about a page who asks the court to get the king out of the bathtub and several people try different things to get him out. A knight tells him there's a battle out side, the queen tells him it's time for lunch, a duke tells him they should go fishing, the entire court tells him to dance at a masquerade, but instead of leaving the tub he makes the person join him in the tub to do whatever they suggest to him! At the end when everyone is at wits end the page pulls the plug and the king finally gets out.
A fun book to read with illustrations that will get their imaginations working. The award on the cover is very much understandable.
Even without knowing what this film was about, knowing that it was James Cameron's new film and that he spent something like 10 years creating this was enough to know that this was going to be something of a hiccup within movie going society. so going into the film only knowing that the graphics would be 'groundbreaking', I of course thought it would suck. however, I was pleasantly surprised.
I've heard and spoken to people who were not very impressed by the plot and pass the film off as a 'Pocahontas in space' kind of story, and it's true, that's an accurate description. Something to keep in mind however is that all stories borrow from that which came before it, and most often the best stories are simply re-imaginings of earlier ideas. It could be said that pride and prejudice is nothing more than a glorified Cinderella story, but that doesn't make it bad. basically, even though this movie is a blockbuster, try to keep an open mind.
The film takes place in the future and focuses on this marine, Jake sully, who lost the use of his legs on the job. he gets called back to duty when his scientist twin brother dies, to take his place as an operator of an organic being grown from his brother's DNA and the DNA of the Na'vi, the people on the planet Pandora. Earth is running out of resources and humans want to farm an ore found on Pandora (which has become the equivalent of gold or diamonds). So the army recruited a team of scientists to create these beings that could be used to communicate with the natives and essentially move them out of their home so that they can mine the ore underneath the tree they live in. Of course the scientists only have a professional interest in Pandora, in the people and the land, but are funded by the government/ military and are therefore at the disposal of the source of the funding. On his first journey to Pandora, Jake gets separated from the other two scientists he's with and is forced to attempt to survive the night in this unknown and deadly jungle. Before an unfortunate 'death by jungle dog' incident, he is found by the chief's daughter, Neytiri, and she saves him. Before she can leave him to fend for himself, the holy being of the Na'vi signifies to her that he is important so she takes him home and he is ultimately given a trial period in the tribe to learn the ways of the people. As he learns more about the na'vi he comes to support their perspective. Pretty standard stuff, but the plot isn't what grabbed me most about this film.
One of the most obvious themes in the movie was the push for environmentalism, or preserving our planet. The reason humans were in Pandora was because their planet was dying, because the people on earth used and wasted almost all of their resources. This of course represents the perspective of mainstream north American society. It's pretty much an accepted philosophy that the economy rules nature, destroying nature in the name of money is logical even if it may rub some people the wrong way. it's logical. But people haven't thought this way forever, not all people and cultures think this way, and an alternative perspective is represented in the Na'vi. For them nature is the economy. to harm or destroy whatever is alive is akin to harming yourself. This of course is reminiscent of a sort of aboriginal ideology that takes time to respect the living aspect of nature and the symbiotic relationship they share with it. This connection to nature is presented in a very literal sense in the movie. the Na'vi literally connect to their environment. They all have a long pony tail hairstyle, and at the end of their hair are these tentacle- like feelers that can wrap around certain things and allow them to 'plug in' to that thing. this allows them to create a bond with animals they ride and with the tree that represents their deity and holds the memories of their people. This was a lot like the way people today are constantly 'plugged in'. Whether it's cellphones, iPods, computers, TV, radio, we are rarely without our technological network to connect us to our world, or the part of our world we care about. It might be harder for the average post-colonial North American to truly appreciate a connection to nature as did pre-colonial societies, so M think the way this was presented helped get that message across.
my favourite scene in the movie, and the reason I enjoyed the movie as much as I did was the scene when Neytiri and the general were fighting near the end of the movie. I loved it because symbolically they were both 'plugged in' to the technology of their own worlds and were using that connection to fight each other. Neytiri was connected to a this wild, jaguar/ jungle dog animal through the 'bond' and the general was sitting in this robot, gundam wing/ escaflowne kind of idea. the two of them had to use where they came from as a means to fight the other, they couldn't just face each other person to person. They were kind of like Jake's Na'vi body, Jake was sitting in some lab somewhere while his intentions were lived out through a body not his own. Basically their ideals and I guess you could say worlds were fighting against each other with the help of the intentions of the people behind the wheel.
It was not the most ground breaking film I've ever seen, nor the best told story, but overall I'd say it was a good movie and worth the watch.
