1. Watched Gravity with friends — a beautifully made film about Murphy’s Law and the importance of international UI conventions. Reminded me a lot of the scene from Explorers on the Moon where Captain Haddock gets drunk and starts orbiting a nearby asteroid before he is saved by Tintin and a sturdy rope.

  2. Brave has some of the best Pixar film music since Ratatouille, and an excellent depiction of a lute — placing it alongside Ghibli’s Whisper Of The Heart for interesting (non-tropic) music.

  3. Just finished Laputa, Castle in the Sky again. It may not have the strongest plot out of all the Myazaki films, but it does have, in approximate order of appearance:

    • Crazy awesome airships
    • Mysterious crystals
    • Flying pirates
    • Bad guys who wear dark glasses at night, inside and underground
    • Pseudo-Welsh miners
    • A hermit who talks to rocks and has a beard
    • Robots. Lots and lots of robots. One of them looks after birds nests and picks flowers. Others destroy things with their crazy laser vision.
    • Stylised lightning which looks like dragons
    • And at the end: a flying island which looks like a giant jellyfish, floating gracefully into orbit

    The robots look like this:

    My point being that anyone who demands any more than this from a film probably doesn’t deserve it.