Dedicated Review: Wolf Children

This review is dedicated to my longtime best friend–a lover of wolves, a conservationist, and an anime fan. And, very recently, the birthday girl!

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Director and co-writer Mamoru Hosoda delivers in Wolf Children a gem of an ode to the heartrending challenges and unimaginable joys of parenthood. Hana is a university student who falls in love with a kindhearted man who gives her a daughter and son–and also happens to be a wolf–but is taken from her all too soon. Enduring through her tears, Hana gathers every ounce of her strength and determines to make a life for her unusual family, and to raise her children into wonderful people who would make their father very proud, wherever they may go and whatever they may be.

Dedicated Post: Star Trek (2009)

On tonight’s very special edition of Projected Realities, we salute the passing of Leonard Nimoy, an entertainment icon whose many roles spanned the likes of Dragnet, Bonanza, The Twilight Zone, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible, and of course Gene Roddenberry’s magnum opus.

Director J.J. Abrams’ take on Star Trek is a relentlessly exciting and accessible work that despite a few inside jokes requires no advance knowledge of the series or its ten earlier movies to enjoy. The simple story is given the finest presentation and its own continuity, thoroughly invigorating this long-standing franchise and making for a wonderfully engrossing watch.

Dedicated Review: How to Train Your Dragon 2

Spectacular.

DreamWorks Animation’s latest feature takes nearly everything that was great about the first How to Train Your Dragon film and expands on it. The characters are funnier, and none of them are nearly as annoying as they sometimes used to be. The setting was gorgeous to start with, but its scope now seems to accommodate the viewer’s imagination instead of feeling more restricted to what can reasonably be shown in a movie. Most importantly, regardless of the story’s remaining flaws, it does way too much right for me to call it anything less than excellent.

Movie Review: How to Train Your Dragon (mild spoilers)

Numerous tasks and technical issues have prevented me from being able to cover all of the movies I’d planned to get to, so I am going to end my spotlight on computer-generated films on a high note, with my favorite entry from DreamWorks and one of the best examples of the medium I’ve ever seen. How to Train Your Dragon, despite its narrative issues, is a wondrously crafted movie that is as enjoyable as it is gorgeous.

Movie Review: Short Circuit (mild spoilers)

(I’m dedicating this one to a buddy of mine, who reviews films at his website K986 Terminal and recommended I watch this movie, if I’m not mistaken.)

Short Circuit concerns Number Five, one of several prototype war robots, who develops an appearance of sentience following a power surge and is convinced that he has a life of his own. The main character heavily resembles Pixar’s WALL-E, but that’s where the similarities end. Short Circuit, being neither a romance nor an environmental film, tries to balance the obligations of being a comedy and something of an action movie, with middling results at best on both sides.