The Fredösphere

We watched Millennium Actress and liked it a lot.  It scored high on my list of recommendations at Movielens.  (You are using Movielens to decide what movies to see, aren't you?)  It's yet another implementation of the collaborative filtering concept, and this particular movie is yet another example of how collaborative filtering finds for me movies that are perfect for me, but which I would have never found any other way.  You bozos certainly were no help.  Did any of you think to tell me about Millennium Actress?  Did any of you even know about it?  I didn't think so.

It's Japanese, it's animated, and it's subtitled, so maybe that explains why it didn't get more attention when it came out.  (Or if it did get attention, then:  I'm American, I'm inanimated, and I'm fat, so maybe that explains why I didn't hear about it.)

Okay, were not talking about a perfect film.  Not quite Ed Wood-levels of flawlessness.  (Relax.  I'm talking about the movie Ed Wood, not an Ed Wood movie.)  Millennium Actress relies on earthquakes as dramatic flourishes a little bit more often than a movie should, and the ending left a faint bitter taste in the mouth.  Nevertheless, it was great, and the complexity of the various layers of the film and the way they were manipulated was simply dazzling.

This is a movie made for the love of a woman, but more than that, it was made for the love of movies.  I think I shouldn't say anything more about it.  See it.

One more thing:  today my nephews Dan and Paul introduced me to a deeply cool game called Carcasonne. You lay down square cards to build medieval cities, connected by roads.  A river runs through it.  Buy it and try it.  Trust me.  It's almost as cool (and about one third as quirky) as Ace of Aces, which I can only describe as a video game implemented with paper and ink.