Bill Maher: Victory Begins at Home & Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

Bill Maher: Victory Begins at Home was watched because yesterday sucked. For a lot of reasons. So I decided to watch a three year old Bill Maher special to remind myself of just how much I hate Bush, and why the hell he should never have been reelected. It was funny, but really, it's three year old material.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence made no sense. I really don't know what was going on in it at all. I mean, I almost thought the DVD skipped for a while there. Plus, the CGI looked very good. The handdrawn animation looked good. But putting them both on the screen just made it abundantly clear what was CGI and what was handdrawn. Especially when there was a simulated camera movement. Geez, you'd think that a large budget film could merge the two better than a TV show like Futurama, but the CGI, while pretty clear in Futurama, never just screamed CGI nearly as much as it did here. It's because the CGI isn't trying to be hyperrealistic, it's trying to ape the handdrawn. In GITS2:I, it's just trying to be as realistic as possible, meaning it really doesn't fit the handdrawn style at all. And whenever there's movement in front of a CGI background, it just was too freakin' obvious. At some point, someone besides Studio Ghibli is going to make an anime film that I actually like, right? It's not like I don't like sci-fi or action films, so why can't they make one that actually makes any sense?