Tag Archives: Hope Madden

New In Theaters

Miyazaki’s Final Film?

Leave a comment

The Wind Rises

by Hope Madden

The Wind Rises – the Oscar nominated, animated, fantastical biopic of Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi – may be genius filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki’s final film.

A body of work like his – Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Ponyo, Princess Mononoke and so many more – deserves a unique capstone, and The Wind Rises is certainly unique. This film is not only unlike anything else Miyazaki has crafted, but unlike anything else period.

Set in Japan in the early 1920s, the film offers a fictionalized account of a nearsighted boy who dreams – literally – of aircraft. In Jiro’s dreams, Italian aeronautical pioneer Gianni Caproni enlightens the boy to the elegant, creative possibilities of airplanes. Unable to become a pilot because of his eyesight, Jiro determines to design planes.

Like everything Miyazaki does, Wind is a visual glory. Whether crowded city streets, mountainside locales, or cloud-speckled heavens, the scenery in this film is breathtaking. Touching, intimate moments and catastrophic acts of God or of war, Miyazaki treats them with the same poetic brushstroke.

The subject matter here proves more adult than his previous efforts, though, and he limits the fantastical elements because of it. Though the dream sequences are a joy, don’t expect to find unusual creatures or outright feats of magic in this one.

Rather, Miyazaki attends to some of Japan’s most epic historic moments, contextualized behind the journey of one quiet, delicate young man’s voyage through life. The result is less giddily entertaining than what you might expect from the filmmaker, but no less captivating.

Maybe we can hope for just one more?

So that happened...

So That Happened…Meet the Chirpers!

2 Comments

 

By Hope Madden

 

I edit college textbooks for a living, with all the associated hoopla, madness and zaniness you might expect to go along with that job. Exactly that much zaniness. My wing of the building is routinely referred to by our sales reps as The Mausoleum.

Yes, we’re quiet, we’re boring, we’re nerdy. We’re also under attack, forever harassed by the encroachment of the sales force. When I first started working here, our sales group’s wing ended about ten feet to the left of my office door.

But they constantly hire more sales people, and so began the cubical creep.

First, new cubicles lined the short wall across from my office.

Then they mushroomed in what was once the free space just beyond that wall.

Now they sit butt-up against the editorial assistants’ cubes.

If you look out my door, sales cubes are to my left, directly across from me, and to my right. I am surrounded.

With the sales force comes a different vibe than the one you find in editorial. There are a lot of happy hours, a lot of games, decorations and confetti and sometimes costumes. But mainly, with those cubicles comes sales people.

Like that one pod of cubes very near my door, and the new neighbors who work there: a revolving set of eager, young, shiny, chatty women. Very chatty. Chirpy, even.

And try as I might to ignore their constant chirping, sometimes it seeps through.

Like yesterday:

Chirper #1: Selena Gomez and the Bieb are back together

Chirper #2: Nuh-uh

Chirper #1: How do you spell ‘combination’

Chirper #2: C-O-M-B

Chirper #1: Is it C-O-M-B-O?

Chirper #2: No.

 

Aaah, Chripers. The adventure begins.