Fall 2021 – Week 5 in Review

Hoo boy, we watched some garbage this week, folks. It wasn’t really intentional – my housemates have learned to schedule their hate-watching outside of my hangout hours, and we entered all of these films with the hope of at least being entertained, if not enriched by the experience. But somehow the cards just didn’t fall in our favor, and we ended up watching a half-dozen or so films that peaked at “middling” and bottomed at “how much longer is this, again?” So congrats folks, it looks like I’ll be back on my old bullshit for a moment, as I callously assess and disregard a pile of film productions, and also mention maybe one or two ones. Let’s get to it!

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Ripples and Shadows in Angel’s Egg

Angel’s Egg has a firm reputation as one of the premier “anime art films,” for whatever that’s worth. In anime fandom, it doesn’t really mean much; fans have a tendency to scorn the unfamiliar, and when you get to the kind of visual storytelling or narratively disruptive scene-setting that are often part and parcel with “arthouse film,” people who are into anime for the girls or robots tend to check out. “Pretentious” is the word – a word that in fandom dialect has come to mean anything outside of the familiar, and when your “familiar” is almost strictly genre fiction for teenagers, the Other can be a fairly broad place.

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