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Mind of Mencia (2005)
Mencia's "Mind" = full of jokes, full of crap
I absolutely love stand-up comedy. I love to hear the raw thoughts of the stand-up on stage, as they are appealing to an audience of their peers different life experiences they have had, or things they have thought up or seen that they just thought were so ****ing stupid that they had to share it with someone.
There used to be stand-ups who took on a persona that everyone could relate to (Rodney Dangerfield comes to mind) or were just so damn crazy that you couldn't help but laugh with them as they laughed at others (Richard Pryor). And then, there were the thought-provoking comics like George Carlin, who, despite pretending to be a loon, was the smartest guy in the room, who appealed to people to rethink things they saw when they walked around, and realize just how screwed up things were, and how easily they could change things.
Now, this might seem to not have anything to do with "Mind Of Mencia," which, as I agree with most commentators here, is Comedy Central's horrid solution to the loss of "Chappelle's Show," but it does. Carlos Mencia spends half of the show doing stand-up bits for his audience, sometimes on popular topics, most of the time on just racism and racial stereotypes. He tries to be all three of the above types of stand-ups. He makes a stage character, an every-day Mexican named Carlos who, despite stereotypes, is just your run-of-the-mill normal guy. He then proceeds to try to laugh at others, people he calls racist or just those that disagree with his opinion. And then, finally, he presents skits to the studio audience and the viewer, telling them that it will help them see his point of view.
Carlos Mencia always says he's showing a point of view that people don't see, yet what he is really doing is not only promoting racist stereotypes that already exist and have been joked about to death, but he stupidly encourages people to hear them and do the one thing that helps keep them around:laugh.
Promoting stereotypes is usually the lowest, yet easiest, way to get laughs in stand-up. The best comedians, which, I fear, Carlos Mencia feels he is in good company with, don't have to resort to them. They talk universally, and ask you to laugh AT absurdity, rather than with it, like Mencia encourages. As he creates more skits or "real-life" situations that call for racism or the bashing of others with the use of it, he tells us, rather than asks us, to laugh, and actually presents these absurdities as truth, rather than just extremes of it.
His show is an insult to the minds of those who watch it. Mencia doesn't give us comedy and ask us to digest it and take from it what we want (something that, as much as I hate to compare the two, was "Chappelle's Show's" finest quality) he tells us exactly how we should view it and react to it---which, according to him, is to make a stupid face and say "Dee Dee Dee!" This show is appropriately named. It is indeed a show about "The Mind of Mencia." It's Mencia's mind, through and through, and, as such, is nothing more than dumb entertainment. The show is tailor-made to give life lessons to its core audience, 14-24 year olds, about how stereotypes are bad, but that racial bashing is alright to Carlos Mencia, and therefore should be alright to you!
Rupan sansei: Kariosutoro no shiro (1979)
One of those few Japanese animations that ANYONE can enjoy
Lupin the 3rd is definitely not one of the most...well known franchises in America. It's a shame really, because the only real public exposure to the franchise was with 20 somead episodes they showed on Cartoon Network for a year or so. However, this is the real Lupin. The best in the franchise, and why, therein, it BECAME a franchise.
The movie's plot is...sparce. Frankly, how it ends is pretty predictable, and you know that the heros will win. That's not the fun in the movie though. This shows the old euphanism that "its not the end that matters, but the journey that it took to get there". The movie basically starts out with Lupin and his gun-ho buddy Jigen in a car chase from a very nice bank that they just robbed. They finally get away from the police, but to their shock, they realize that the money they stole was fake bills. So, in real Lupin humor, they just chuck it all out of the car and are done with it, as though the whole thing didn't happen. They then run into a girl being chased by suited men and well....thats pretty much all the spoilers I will give. The name of the day in this film is comedy. You will be hardpressed to find a serious moment in this film that doesn't have a sly, comedy edge to it. This film doesn't take its story too seriously, but instead lets its characters create the atmosphere, and the real reason to watch it. Whether it's Lupin doing the craziest stuff imaginable to save some girl he only slightly knows, Fujiko, the commonplace vixen who is trying to make a quick buck in this whole thing, seducing the villain only to find herself on the wrong end of a gun, or Goemon, Lupin's samurai buddy, blushing at the sight of a pretty girl at the flick of a wrist, you will laugh.
This movie is heavily based on sight gags, and just setting up characters in the right place at the right time to generate something hilarious. But don't let that make you think that it is ever forced, it isn't. It's as fluent as the pace in this movie, which has no wasted moments, just nonstop action and fun. If there is one thing that this movie might fail in, and it is really hard to do that with something like this, it is with the animation. Granted, this movie is, at this writing, approximately 26 years old. And, trust me, the age shows. But really, when you get engrossed enough into the movie, that fact becomes a null factor with all the fun this movie has to offer, and pretty soon you will not even notice that it is animated at all, if not for the superhuman stunts Lupin is able to pull off with his gadgetry.
At the end of this movie, it's hard to say that it wasn't enjoyable. Sure, the movie isn't everyones cup of tea. But, if you have a funny bone that needs tickling, this is definitely something to consider. Even if your not a fan of Japanese anime, this is worthy of a viewing. If "Grave of the Fireflies" is the king of anime, then "Lupin the 3rd-Castle of Caligostro" is the joker.
Hotaru no haka (1988)
A gem in every right, and one of the best things ever put to film, animated or not
This is one of the movies that is as stunning and brilliant as a cartoon as it could halfway be if it was a live-action movie. This is because, as an anime in itself, it gains so much more than it would in any other medium. The layers upon layers of hidden details in the art and symbolism used time and again in so many ways that just aren't possible in live-action movies are showcased in such subtlety in this movie that its mind-blowing. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I rated this a 10 and I haven't even gone past how great the art is yet.
This movie is about two children who live during World War II. The main point of the movie is that their town has been bombed and their mother is seriously injured and eventually dies. From there, the horrors of the war and its effect on Japan are just one of the many backdrops that the two siblings must endure as they try to live on through harsh conditions. The whole world is against them. There is no light-heartedness in this movie. You would be hard-pressed to find even a funny moment in the show. This movie is as rough and vibrant as you can get. In one scene in particular is this fact shown. The two kids have just sold one of their mother's most precious possessions in order to get some white rice in order to eat. They have since been living at their aunt's house and been taken care of by her family since they have nowhere else to go. When they arrive back with the rice, the aunt takes a good chunk of it and tells them that her family needs it more than them, that they work and make it so they have a house to leech of them from, in a sense. And, of course, there is the infamous scene in which the movie gets its name, in which the two are living in a cave on the outskirts of a town and are hiding under a little netting to sleep. She is watching the butterflies and watching them create pictures in the netting. The older brother recalls how his father, a naval commander, had been on large ships from his childhood. The next morning, he finds his little sister burying the fireflies in the dirt in front of the cave, muttering to him "Why do fireflies die so quickly?" This is just an example of the strong symbolism used in the movie, but the scene in particular rings so strongly that you will probably watch it more than once in order to take it all in. This movie is incredibly depressing, as I have been saying. It goes beyond the tear-jerking finale, because you will know it's coming since the opening of the movie tells you that both of the siblings die. Rather, its the wholesome emotions being displayed, the raw humanity that is being displayed in every cell, in every scene of this classic that make it just that, a classic.
The animation, even for a movie made all the way back in 1988, is still as fantastic as it was back then. This is just icing on the cake for an already wonderful movie. The voice acting on both fronts, Japanese and American, are fine in their own right, but I would recommend all who would be willing to take a chance on this gem to try the original soundtrack with the subtitles. Granted, there isn't a ton of dialogue to be had in this movie (not that it needed much to begin with), but the Japanese one just adds so much more authenticity to it that it is hard to recommend the American one over it.
But enough of my rambling, I'll end by just saying that it is highly recommended that you watch this movie. It doesn't matter an inch that it is animated or not, because the movie is so engrossing that soon you will forget that your watching something dubbed anime. It is art at its finest, one of the best works of cinema production, animated or not, ever created. And be sure to watch it more than once. Multiple screenings are practically a must in order to truly appreciate everything this film has to offer.