Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

Last night I was watching TV and caught a bit of the end of Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino's debut film from 1992 about the violent aftermath of a botched jewellery store heist. When it was released in the US it was pretty successful for a moderately low budget gangster movie, but in Europe and the UK it was a massive hit. In Britain especially it was hugely controversial and there was a lot of attention given to the level of violence in the film, although it was released during one of the periodic media panics in Britain about violence in movies. It played constantly in some cinemas for about two years, because it was unavailable on video until 1995. I only saw about quarter of an hour of it last night, but I have seen it before countless times and it really brought me back in my mind to 1995 when Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction were the ultimate in cool, must-see movies, and I was 16 and was just finishing my hated high-school time. That was also the year that I was really getting into movies and I saw a lot of different types of films in that year because 1995 was the year they marked the "Century of Cinema". I've often thought if I could go back to any period in my life it would probably be 1999 when I was in 20 years old, in college, I'd really started writing poetry for the first time and I felt genuinely optimistic about the future for probably the first time in my life. It didn't last.

Later on I was watching a Japanese animated movie from 2004 called Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, written and directed by Mamoru Oshii, and based on the "manga" (comic-book) by Shirow Masamune. The film is set in the year 2032 where the few remaining humans co-exist uneasily with robots, androids and cyborgs. When a series of "gynoids" (female androids), who are being used for sex, kill eight people and then destroy themselves, a cyborg detective and his human partner are assigned to investigate. Visually the movie is spectacular, mixing 2D and 3D computer animation. It's a pretty good movie, blending action, spectacle and philosophy pretty well.

It was my last day on the training course today, but I managed to leave early and got a kebab on my way home.