We had a few hot days back in the middle spring, but the heat has finally hit here with a vengeance. It was unbearable outside for much of this weekend: in the upper 90s and with humidity between 50 and 80 percent. Not a fun time.

But it was clear and sunny and the weekend, so as a result, all the foolish people flocked north or to the beach, leaving the movie theatres and the streets around here more empty than usual. Saturday afternoon we took advantage of this by going to see Batman and arriving only 5 minutes before the previews began — yet we were still able to snag prime seats. Had it been raining, this would have been impossible.

ObBatman: Wow! I was so impressed by this movie. I think we can all agree that the last 2 Batman movies have sucked donkey (Nipples? Smirkboy? These things are best forgotten.) And the previews for this one really didn’t thrill me. In fact, I had been considering giving it a pass entirely until people started talking about how good it had been. At that point I decided to give it a shot, albeit with reservations and lukewarm enthusiasm. But it was good. So very good. I actually bought Bale in the role, something I don’t always do with him, and the supporting cast (even the psycho’s fiancee) was excellent.

Sunday, I went over to mom’s house to help her deal with some paperwork. On the way, at her request, I stopped by Bed Bath & Beyond to purchase some of these for the pool. For most of the ride to her house, the thermometer in my car was reading over 100 (having climbed from the mid-90s when I left the house) and the temperature even with the seabreeze near her house was not much better. So into the pool we went and Oh. My. God. these water hammock things are AMAZING. Unlike your normal floating raft, these don’t attempt to support you flat on the surface of the water, but like a hammock, bend down so that the majority of your body is submerged — and remains cool. They are really comfortable.

After that we looked at her bill for J2’s college, tried to sell her mutual fund but failed due to the fact that J1 had signed her up for Vanguard online access and she failed to tell me this before we got ourselves locked out of the website, and copied the pictures from her digital camera onto the computer. This latter she had never done before, and thus the pictures on the camera’s two memory cards dated back to 2003. I also showed her how to hook it up to the tv so she could view the pictures in a very large format.

Then it thundered, and when I went home, the temperature had gone down about 20 degrees. But it was hot again today.

And you all thought mpreg was just something made up by fangirls.

So they’ve decided on their preferred plan for fixing all of the tunnel leaks at the Big Dig.

Instead of taking out the damaged wall and building a new one, instead of adding a second wall to reinforce the defective first wall, they have chosen a third alternative: duct tape.

Penguins!

The traffic: Got a late start because of need to discuss ticket issue. V. bad traffic on Friday afternoon going north.

The way the world works: Arrived at gym near time graduation due to start. Bleachers already packed; no room for 9 people to shove in. Stood around in blatant violation of fire codes, drawing attention of teachers who attempted to convince us there were still spots in bleachers. Eventually teachers realized we were not tempted by non-existant seats and permitted us to sit in folding chairs in center of room. Thus prime seating attained not by responsible early arrivals but lazy latecomers.

The awesome: Whenever the powers that be began milling around on stage taking too long to move along, from the students would appear beachballs which were batted around much to the principal’s obvious annoyance.

The boys will be boys: At end, caps were thrown into the air. The girls then held their caps and waited for the music to start so they could depart. The boys continued to fling their caps into the air over and over, competing to see who could get theirs the highest. Or perhaps to see if they could get them stuck in the rafters of the gym.

The demographics: # black seniors – 1, # Asian seniors – 2, # seniors w/Middle Eastern or Asian Indian sounding surnames – 3, # Jennifers – 1, # Jessicas – 8.

The incomprehensible: Former English teacher guest speaker blithered incoherently for many minutes about random stuff. V. poor speech.

The random anecdote: When my grandmother was a little girl, she was very fond of snakes. She used to try and keep them as pets, and would wrap them around herself and roll them up in the edge of her sweater.

There are less than six hours now before our family escapes the evil clutches of Winnacunnet High School forever. But before we could do that, the school saw one last opportunity to screw us all, and simply could not resist!

Last night, there was a thunderstorm and a good deal of rain. It ended long before dawn and today has been lovely and sunny with every indication of remaining so. But it was enough of an excuse for the brilliant minds in charge of graduation to decide it must be held indoors. This means that each graduate will only be allotted 6 tickets — and of course, there are more than 6 people already at mom’s house, expecting to go.

Saturday, we went to see Howl in subtitled form, and this will be the last time I see it before the DVD is released. Mad spoilers for the movie follow.

The plot of the film is significantly changed from the book. The book, while its focus is undeniably on Howl and Sophie, does involve interaction with both of Sophie’s sisters and minor romantic subplots for both of them. As a result of the reduction of the roles her sisters play — one appears in one scene, and the other is merely mentioned in passing but remains off camera — the character of the dog is completely rewritten to accomodate a new subplot introduced by Miyazaki. Howl’s origins in the “real world” are removed, replaced by a simpler version that has him as a native of the same land where Sophie is from. Sophie’s magic, her ability to make things happen just by saying them, is severely downplayed. In fact, it’s never really addressed at all, though it does seem to appear in a few scenes.

In the film, Sophie lives in a semi-industrialised country with the sort of strange airships and mechanisms that are so common to the Japanese animation industry (and I include the video game industry when I say that.) She works in a hatshop owned by her mother, who seems to be an absentee owner, off a lot of the time busy with her own interests. Sophie, after a strange encounter with (unbeknownst to her) the wizard Howl, finds herself the target of the dreaded Witch of the Waste and is turned into an old woman. Surprised and worried by her sudden age, she sneaks out of the hat shop in search of — what? It’s not totally clear in the film why she leaves. Presumably it’s to find a cure for her curse. (Comment: In the sub, her mother is portrayed as less selfish than in the dub. When she comes up to see Sophie after being told Sophie is still in bed, in the sub, Sophie says she’s going to stay in bed for the day, and mom departs, making what might be construed as a sympathetic grimace. In the dub, Sophie says she wouldn’t want mom to catch her cold, and mom recoils, looking like she’s going to wash her hands after touching Sophie’s diseased door. The animation is the same, but the feel of the scene is completely different.)

Sophie makes her way into the Waste outside of town, encountering a strangely animate scarecrow along the way. As night draws near, she finds that it’s very cold, and she hasn’t really considered what she’s going to do for shelter. (Comment: her comments here are more amusing in the dub. Overall, the dub script was definitely more humorous. The subs may have lost something in the translation, but it didn’t strike me as being the case.) The scarecrow appears again, this time with the Moving Castle in tow. Sophie, though reluctant, gets herself inside and out of the cold. She quickly establishes herself as the cleaning lady, Howl permitting her to do this without any significant questioning.

Calcifer immediately realizes she’s under a curse (and we’re later to understand that Howl does as well) and tries to strike a deal with her — help him get free of Howl and he’ll help her in return — which she accepts. An interlude follows where we establish that Sophie, Howl, Calcifer and Markl are falling into a cosy domestic routine. We see that the castle not only moves in the physical world, it is also magically connected to several locations at once, and via a mechanism attached to the door, one can exit into any of four places. We also learn that Howl has more than one identity (at least 3), and he is being summoned by the King (just the one king, presumably of Ingary, though that country is never mentioned.) to report for wizarding combat duty. A war is and has been going on, though no one seems to understand why or what its purpose is.

During this time, Sophie visibly grows younger, her back straightening and many of her wrinkles smoothing out. This is the way Miyazaki has chosen to portray the idea that Sophie is the one keeping herself cursed, and if she’d only let herself feel freely/live without fear, she’d break it. As it is, when she feels useful and isn’t denying her feelings, she edges back toward her normal self. Also when she’s asleep.

Eventually her cleaning efforts lead to a conflict with Howl, who finds himself utterly depressed after his blond hair turns black. He languishes in bed, fretting over his looks and his summons from the king, until he has a brainwave: he’ll send Sophie in his place, pretending to be the mother of one of his personas. Sophie agrees, reluctantly, and sets off for the palace. (This is another place where the dub has some funny comments that the sub didn’t manage.)

Sophie arrives to find the Witch of the Waste also heading for the same destination. The two old women are forced to walk up a very long flight of stairs. At the top, Sophie is led off by a dog while the Witch collapses into a chair. While the Witch is being punished for her stupidity in falling into the trap set for her, Sophie meets with Madam Suliman, the royal sorceress. Suliman provides some information that’s been hinted at by Calcifer — Howl has no heart, it’s been taken by a demon, and his selfish use of his magical powers is causing great concern to Suliman. At this point the now much reduced Witch is wheeled in, and Suliman notes to Sophie that if Howl doesn’t get his act together, this will soon be his fate as well.

Howl arrives, and Suliman attempts to scare? Sophie by attacking him, causing him to turn into the bird (demon?) shape he’s often taken. The group manages to escape, Sophie bringing the Witch and Suliman’s dog back with her to the castle. Howl returns and the house is updated to accomodate these new developments, including the connection of the exit doors to two new locations — Sophie’s Hat Shop in Market Chipping, and a field of flowers.

Sophie deduces from this (and from Howl’s comments) that he’s trying to set the group up with a source of income, anticipating their loss of his wizardly services. His own repeated transformations are becoming more difficult to undo, and as Suliman and Calcifer both observe, eventually it won’t be possible to change back into a normal human. Sophie doesn’t like this one bit, but can’t really do anything about it.

The war escalates and Suliman continues to try and track down Howl so he can be dealt with. Howl takes off to try and prevent everyone from being bombed while everyone just sort of sits around and dithers and lets Suliman send Sophie’s mother to try to leave a magical spy in their house.

Eventually Howl returns for a few moments, to assure everyone he’s not dead and to fix Calcifer. Then he leaves again, and Sophie decides she needs to disconnect the castle from all of the various locations so that Howl only needs to try and guard one spot rather than several. (Comment: The dub was very clear on what she was trying to do here. The sub was much less clear on the point, but I can’t say whether it was bad translation or bad script.) She does this, then they all return to the castle, and Calcifer starts it moving again with the aid of Sophie’s braid.

At this point, the Witch realizes that the lump in Calcifer’s butt is actually Howl’s heart, and she grabs it. Sophie, who still hasn’t gotten the clue, simply notes that the Witch has caught on fire after picking up a fire demon, and tries to put them out with a bucket of water. And then she panics thinking she might have killed Howl. In any case, the castle breaks apart, as Calcifer, in his weakened state, is not able to keep it all together. Sophie and the dog are flung out.

She finds herself amongst a lot of debris, and the magic ring given to her by Howl earlier tells her that the way to Calcifer is through a door leaning up against a rock. She passes through what ends up being a door to the past, and sees the moment where Howl made his bargain with Calcifer, and gave the demon his heart so that the demon could live and Howl could have phenomenal cosmic power.

Finally enlightened, Sophie returns to the present, where she finds Giant Bird!Howl waiting for her. He flies her and the dog back to the creaking platform that’s all that remains of the castle. Howl collapses back into human form, and Sophie retrieves Calcifer from the Witch. She gives him back his heart, frees Calcifer (The point that only she could do this was made, but no one ever tried to explain -why-, as again, her own magic was mostly ignored.) and then clings for dear life as the remaining bit of castle promptly collapses.

The scarecrow, who’s been hanging around throughout the film, hops in to save them. Sophie gives him a kiss as his reward, and, surprise! It’s the prince of the neighboring kingdom, saved from his scarecrow form by the kiss of True Love. Or not, since Sophie loves Howl and is busy glomping him instead of the prince. (Note: I know in the dub, the prince was mentioned as missing at the start of the film. I missed, but -assume- this mention was made in the sub also. Otherwise his appearance is just random.) The Prince takes himself off rather than linger so the wrinkly old Witch can hit on him. The war is called off (since no one knew why it was happening in the first place), Calcifer returns, the castle is reconstructed, and everyone lives happily ever after. Howl refuses to share his hair dye with Sophie.

So, again, movie != book. And clearly here, the book has been adapted a lot to fit the vision of the filmmaker. I have to say that as an adaptation of the book, Howl makes a pretty poor showing. Up there with the recent episodes of Mystery! I’ve been watching, both Miss Marple (now with extra lesbians!) and Lynley (now with 50% fewer main characters!). As a Ghibli movie, I think it was pretty good. It joins Mimi o sumaseba and Sen to Chihiro as my favorites.

One final comment about the Markl business. In the Japanese credits, his name was listed as マルクル (Marukuru). So clearly the dubbers got the Markl from the Japanese version, though their romanization choice is… questionable, at best. Now the question becomes: did Ghibli change his name on a whim, or did they get this bizarre version from the Japanese translation of Howl? I don’t have a copy of the latter to check. It seems possible, though personally, I question the translation skills of anyone who comes up with ‘Marukuru’ as the best equivalent to ‘Michael’.

Monday, I got an email from MIT Anime club saying there were free passes to Howl’s Moving Castle on Wed night. So I replied to enter my name into the drawing to get one, and got word very late on Tuesday that my name had been chosen.

So after my adventures at the doctor’s office on Wed, later that afternoon, J and I headed on down toward Cambridge to the Kendall Square Cinema. After a lengthy hike from the T stop, we arrived at the theatre to find the queue already out the door. I got our tickets and we joined it. Luckily, we didn’t have to stand out in the sun for all that long, and we were all seated in the theatre shortly after 6:30. The show began at 7pm.

I’ve already commented on the movie elsewhere, and am going to see the sub later tonight, so I’m going to reserve comment on the plot for that entry, and any remarks on additional dialogue that was added — I have my suspicions about a few lines in the dub, but can’t be certain.

Overall, most of the voices were pretty good. Jean Simmons as the old Sophie’s voice was absolutely wonderful — she spoke naturally, without it feeling stilted in any way, even when the line’s phrasing was awkward due to the dubbers’ moronic insistance on matching the lip movement of the character to the spoken words. I also couldn’t complain about Michael (incomprehensibly named ‘Markl’) or the Witch of the Waste. Billy Crystal as Calcifer was decent, though I felt at times like he was forcibly restraining himself. I wouldn’t have wanted to see a crazed Robin Williams-as-the-genie sort of performance, but there were points where I felt he was spot on and points where it was weak. But those performances and most of the supporting cast were quite good. Not perfect, but decent.

There were still, however, some problems. The opening scene especially was terrible: the two soldiers who try and hit on Sophie were abysmal and both she and Howl turned in a poor performance there. The voice of young Sophie was not all that great throughout the film, though she did improve slightly later on. She was stiff in her speaking, unable, I suppose, to put her entire performance into her voice only. It didn’t come out sounding natural. Howl also had this problem, and it was exacerbated, I’m sure, by the fact that Christian Bale — in spite of the fact that he is Welsh, and Howl in the book is FROM WALES — did the role using an American accent. The British tend to do very flat American accents to begin with, and given that this was a voice acting part, messing around with one’s normal way of speaking when one is not a seasoned voice actor can lead to subpar results. Which this did. Howl is not a stable fellow. He’s narcissistic and prone to wild mood swings. It’s hard to convey that properly in your voice when you’re concentrating on not breaking out into the wrong pronounciation of words. I’m very very disappointed by the decision that was made to use this accent in the film; I think it damaged what could have been an excellent dub and made it only okay.

Last weekend was long and crazy. Saturday morning, mom and Clara and I went down to Boston for an open casting call for a new reality series on NBC. Why? I really couldn’t say. For some reason, mom and Clara have gotten this bug in their systems and are on a neverending quest to be on one of these shows. They’re not interested in being on Survivor, but rather Amazing Race or something else similar.

And they are good, I’ll grant them that. They got to the second round of the AR tryouts — their video was chosen out of however many thousands were sent in, and they were called in for an interview. And this time too, we made it to the second round. After the open call we got notified that we were to be “called back”.

Unfortunately, the call back consisted of making a 10 minute video and sending it directly to the casting girl. So on Sunday I trekked back over to mom’s house and we spent 5 hours hauling ourselves around town and back and forth taking footage that J2 could then edit into a video.

Except that our camera man (not J2) was not really good. He stood too far back; his batteries weren’t fully charged; his camera or his tape was of poor quality and the end result was that later on Sunday night mom and J2 discovered that virtually all of the footage was unusable.

Unfortunately, this presented a problem: I’m still out of work, but mom and C. work opposing shifts, and J2, of course, was still in school this week. So during the week, there’s very little time when all 4 of us could possibly get together to reshoot. And time was of the essence, since they needed the video asap.

So we planned to get together in a very small window of time on Wed and rush around, hopefully to get all of the same shots taken in 2 hours as had taken us 5 on Sunday.

But the best laid plans…

To backtrack a few weeks, Bob had had an infection on his arm — cellulitis — and had been on antibiotics to get rid of it. On Sunday, mom happened to notice that I had a rash, mainly because it was bloody hot out and the heat was making me insanely itchy. She got it into her head that I had caught the cellulitis, and insisted that I call the doctor and make an appointment.

The itching was bugging me enough that I didn’t argue against it too hard, but the first appointment I could get was Wed at 10:30. I had to be in Hampton by 12:30, but I figured this gave me a good window — about 45 minutes from Burlington to Hampton, so that gave the doctor over an hour to play with. Because I’m not a fool: speaking to the doctor was bound to take approximately 5-10 minutes, regardless of what was wrong with me.

I arrived at Lahey to find the place a disaster area. The entire parking lot was dug up, construction vehicles were all over the place, and people were parked on every available scrap of land. I managed to find a spot, and after some wandering around trying to determine the correct waiting area, sat down to wait.

And wait.

And wait some more.

Finally, an hour and 45 minutes AFTER my appointment time, I was called in to see the doctor. At which point she took one look at the rash, declared, “That’s eczema”, and handed me a prescription for a topical steroid I can’t remember how to spell. Grand total of time spent at office: 2 hours. Actual time spent with doctor: 15 minutes. It was 12:30, so I went out into the lobby and called mom to tell her there was no way I was going to be in Hampton on time.

So the filming on Wed was cancelled. I went home.

Yesterday, mom called me to tell me she’d just decided there was no way all three of us were going to manage to get together and do this in time to get the video done and sent out. So she emailed the casting girl and told her we weren’t going to be able to do it.

And thus ended that little adventure. I can’t say I’m disappointed — for all that I do watch a couple of reality shows, I’m not a fan of the genre in general; for the most part I find it horribly horribly boring and stupid. But it is a little frustrating to have wasted all that time running around.

<3 <3 <3