Day 502: Friday doings
Jul. 30th, 2021 11:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeToday's main achievement was figuring out what to do in the most challenging section of the paper I'm rewriting, yay. J. survived yesterday's "hackathon," which was basically a 17-hour meeting with a few breaks, and today he had to call his mom about his trip planning, which unfortunately did not go well. We sat outside in the warm, humid air for an hour or two this evening - cloudy all day, which I found refreshing - and eventually we had Thai food delivered and D. returned from work to join us.
Then J. and I watched Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba The Movie: Mugen Train. This is now the highest-grossing anime movie of all time, beating all the Studio Ghibli films, and since we've seen season one of the TV show, we were altogether qualified to watch it and weigh in. J's opinion was that it was fine for a shōnen movie. Mine was that it had some excellent features - the background art, the art for the flame magic, and the dramatic hard rock music accompanying the main fight scene - and that it gets points for making the two irritating sidekicks less irritating than they are in the series, but otherwise it was... not good. They fought and defeated a demon that had taken over a train (and yes, I give them points for the design of the demon, too), and then, out of the blue, with zero connection to anything else that's happened in the movie, a more powerful demon shows up and fights the more skilled demon slayer they've been helping. What sort of narrative structure is that? And the movie ends with everyone crying over something they've given the viewer no particular investment in. Yet this film gets fabulous ratings! I don't mind having watched it (two whole hours!), though, because I'm now qualified to have these opinions.
Then J. and I watched Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba The Movie: Mugen Train. This is now the highest-grossing anime movie of all time, beating all the Studio Ghibli films, and since we've seen season one of the TV show, we were altogether qualified to watch it and weigh in. J's opinion was that it was fine for a shōnen movie. Mine was that it had some excellent features - the background art, the art for the flame magic, and the dramatic hard rock music accompanying the main fight scene - and that it gets points for making the two irritating sidekicks less irritating than they are in the series, but otherwise it was... not good. They fought and defeated a demon that had taken over a train (and yes, I give them points for the design of the demon, too), and then, out of the blue, with zero connection to anything else that's happened in the movie, a more powerful demon shows up and fights the more skilled demon slayer they've been helping. What sort of narrative structure is that? And the movie ends with everyone crying over something they've given the viewer no particular investment in. Yet this film gets fabulous ratings! I don't mind having watched it (two whole hours!), though, because I'm now qualified to have these opinions.