Makin' my own "long weekend" (which means "watch watch watch"!)

I needed a break from work, so I'm taking an extra-long weekend. So besides wrapping up "Avenger" again last night, I watched a couple of more out of the GreenCine queue.

First, "Voices of a Distant Star" -- a very interesting, short (25-minute) film and a fine piece of storytelling. It had a vibe very reminiscent of the independent shorts I used to watch a lot back in film school. Though it had all the usual anime trappings like summertime cicadas and cel phones and mecha fights. But all the little details were very imaginative and engrossing, and were little windows on something deeper than just what the narrative was taking you through. The little dancing particles when the ships went to hyperspace. The crags in the alien herbivores' antlers and how they matched the alien ships' "net". Or that they maybe weren't exactly "ships"... All of that was a subtext to a very nice, poetic little story of two almost-in-love teenagers growing apart in both space and time.

As an extra on the disc there's an earlier short that's just as poetic, and worth seeking out as well.

Second, not quite so artsy though, I continued "Wild Arms" with disc 4. The "plot" makes itself known in full force now, and with the characters still being rather lively and the overall cinematics being rather entertaining, it's still worth watching after a few pints. An interesting factoid, though -- the director of these episodes, Itsuro Kawasaki, besides having worked for Bee Train on a few projects like "Arc the Lad", is directing the "Tsubasa Chronicle" movie for Production I.G. (which, as you may recall, is the parent company for Bee Train). So my earlier comment about "Tsubasa" seeming like a cross between "Wild Arms" and ".hack//SIGN"... Well, draw your own conclusions! *wink*