Spent the afternoon watching Valkyrie and Gran Torino. The former was a pretty solid movie, I think. It was very straightforward and no-nonsense in how the story was told. The only emotion this movie evokes in the viewer is suspense, but in this case, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. It told the story it wanted to tell, and I think that's enough for this movie. Plus, it was pretty educational for me, since I hardly knew anything about the July 20 Plot before watching this. ^^;;
Gran Torino was different from what I expected... Surprisingly, it's a lot like the Pixar movie Up, except with more violence, racism, and thick Asian accents. :P
But seriously, the themes of both movies are pretty similar, though they're presented in different ways. Both deal with death, old age, and finding new meaning in one's life through others. Both also balance drama evenly with humor, though Gran Torino's is definitely dark humor. (Most of the funny scenes involve either Eastwood talking Disgruntled Old Man smack or ghetto ethnic hoodlums calling each other names such as, "rice paddy n***as." Which was actually funny to me. xD) It was a pretty interesting movie, though not for the faint of heart... it gets pretty brutal towards the end.
As you can plainly see above, I've been watching a very wide range of anime series the past few days. :P
I was planning to give the Initial D marathoning a rest after third stage and move on to Kanon or something, but of course third stage was RIGHT when the series started getting good again. And boy am I glad I stuck with it. Fourth stage has been SO boss. It's so boss that I'm writing like a fucking fanboy. It's such an improvement over everything that came before it; they basically took everything good about the series, mixed all of it in a blender to make an AWESOME smoothie, while simultaneously having trimmed off the extraneous shit that the series didn't really need anymore. During the first five or so episodes, I would tear up from how good the series had suddenly become, that is how impressed I was with all the changes made. Even the opening theme songs are better in this season!
To go into greater detail would be kind of a spoiler, so I'll just say that Project D is such a great, but simple way to propel, or better yet, cannonball the series further while also revamping a lot of aspects of the show. That, and the Takahashi brothers, who were already interesting before, are finally being used to their full potential as characters here; they're about 75% of the reason why fourth stage is SO good. That, and Keisuke Takahashi + Takumi make THE pimpest racing rivals of the series.
Don't know if I ever mentioned this, but I attended a concert at this year's ACen, and it turns out that that particular musical group contributed a LOT of music to Initial D. (Which makes me wish I had watched this anime before seeing the concert, but at least now I appreciate having seen them at all.)
This is probably my favorite song of theirs from the series. I don't think they performed it at ACen, though...
