This was actually much better than I had expected, but then, I went in with really, really low expectations, given people's warnings and my general experience with movies made after anime series.

( GIANT SPOILERS for FMA the series and the movie! )

OMG THE GAY!

And it's femslashy!! Joy! This is maybe the second bit of anime I've seen with femslash.

I haven't watched anime in so long that I've forgotten just how weird some of it is (I shall take over the world by using the DNA of famous dead people to clone them!).

The first scene of Yomiko's apartment (ok, the mountains of books in her apartment) had me ogling in jealousy.

Me: *ogle*
The Boy: *ogle*
Me: Ooooooo, can I have her apartment?
The Boy: No.

The Boy only watched the first ep with me (he's in Dallas now and I watched the rest without him), and I swear, he had more fun watching me ogle at Yomiko's book habits than watching the anime itself.

I want Yomiko's lifestyle.

( Spoilers )

ETA: YOmiko, not YUmiko. Stupid me.

We went to watch Tokyo Godfathers in Berkeley on Sunday, the newest movie from Satoshi Kon (Kon Satoshi? I think Kon is the surname, but I'm not sure). He also did Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress (Sennen Joyuu), but I've only seen Perfect Blue. I had to kind of check around online to see if I wanted to watch it, because I was sad and homesick and Perfect Blue isn't exactly the most happy or optimistic or even sanest movie around. Haven't seen Millennium Actress either, but anyhow, the summary of Tokyo Godfathers looked pretty safe.

Anyhow, it was a really fun movie. ( Tokyo Godfathers )

Tonight the boy and I watched Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou. I have to look up what he did -- I keep getting him mixed up with Chen Kaige since they came from the same class of directors in the seventies. Ok, courtesy of IMDB: he did Red Sorghum and Raise the Red Lantern and To Live, all with Gong Li. Anyhow, Hero is an absolutely gorgeous movie. I swear, it should have won some sort of award in cinematography at least, and it could have had the stupidest plot in the world and I probably would have watched it several times just for the visuals. I like to pretend that Zhang Yimou made it because Ang Lee was getting so many kudos for Crouching Tiger and Zhang Yimou wanted to make a really Chinese martial arts movie. Well, the story for Crouching Tiger is more typically martial arts, seeing how it was taken from the most famous writer of martial arts stories' book. But Hero has got the whole historical background, cool politics going for it.

( More on Hero )

( Little quibble, with spoilers )

Lovely article on Spirited Away.