Cowboy Bebop: The Movie Columbia Tristar 116 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles Released: 06/24/2003 Reviewed: 03/01/2005

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Sweet shit. When a girl sings a song about another girl I'm all like "Hot damn". When it's used as very clever music-over-action during a fight scene at some fake Eiffel tower on Mars? I mean, what the hell. Do I even need to say anything more than that? Pushing the Sky, with vocals by the positively unstoppable Mai Yamane, makes me wish I had access to a car that had a bit more performance than a 1998 Ford Taurus. It makes me wish I'd actually paid attention when my brother tried to teach me how to drive stick. Because this is the kind of song you drive to. The lyric "Don't wanna be the one to pop your cherry girl" is permanently ingrained in my brain. Every time I hear it I'm gonna have to pound the accelerator down, because I know those drums and bass are coming in just a moment and the old battlewagon takes more than a few seconds to get up to the ~80 mph speed this song requires. As should be expected, the rest of the soundtrack is pretty good (I'm an easy sell on the jazz/blues/funk tip), but -- and I hate to repeat myself -- but hot damn. I feel that if you need more of a recommendation for this movie than that, well, you can just get the hell off of my website right now.

But I guess I've got all this space left, so I might as well use it, right? Since it's about four years old now, I can imagine that just about everyone in the entire universe knows the story to the Cowboy Bebop movie. Well, everyone except me. It follows a plot not dissimilar from a an episode of the TV series, just four times as long. There's a crazy fellow going around trying to get revenge on some people and he's going to do it by dispersing some rather unfriendly nanomachines into the air during a Halloween party. As per the usual, the crew of the Bebop will make it their mission to stop this calamity (for a low low price!), actually manage to stop it and, by some technicality, not get the bounty for all their hard work.

In a similar way (the exact same way) to the comment I made about Project Eden, the Cowboy Bebop movie feels like a movie. This excites me to no end. The original series was clearly not lacking in budget or technique, but the director, Watanabe, takes it to levels here that practically cause me to got into convulsions. I could not count on my fingers how many cool profile shots there are of people in this movie. It's a LOT. Obviously it's more than ten. Some of them are hot military chicks in red jackets (looking perturbed and off center!) and that's not going to find any complaint from me. Everything, literally everything, has been scaled up. The music is more expressive, the locales are positively gigantic (in that animated way) and the mysteries are big time. You know me, I'm a sucker for this type of detective crap. The action scenes won't take no for an answer. There's a seven minute long jet chase and when Spike breaks out that side kick of his I have these compulsive, sort of "dirty", shivers running up and down my spine. Indeed this movie is something akin to the "new hotness". The dub cast is excellent as always (Beau Billingsleau has an outstanding offer to father my children) and Nicholas Guest absolutely steals the show as the mysterious Rasheed. Seriously, the man inspires feelings in me that I probably shouldn't admit in public. Dave Wittenberg's performance as the jerkish black hacker with the English accent is nothing but a measure of perfectness in this imperfect world. Tied together with ADR from Mellisa Williamson, who already has a secure place in my heart due to her amazing vocals in Silent Hill 3's soundtrack, there's just no way you can lose!

I'm hard pressed to think of even a single complaint. I mean, one of the absolute few that comes to mind is that there's too much of a "calm before the storm" feeling to the end of this thing. The characters are too content considering they're all breaking up in just two episodes' time. This is easily overlooked when you look fondly back on Spike's guide through Space Morocco, Rasheed, who most certainly does have a vase that's perfect for you. Goddamn man, the fact that someone on the creation team decided they needed a SPACE MOROCCO makes me want to slap gold stars and A+s over everything that's ever come in contact with this movie. The only thing even remotely distressing about this is that it took me so freaking long to watch it. I must've bought this movie two years ago and I'm just watching it now? Nuts to that, I'm watching it again when I go home tonight! Cowboy Bebop is like the realization of Plato's perfect triangle. It is the perfect anime, so perfect as to make men question it's sheer existence. This is possibly the best two hours I've ever spent in my entire life. Watching this movie made me realize how much Samurai Champloo sucked. Not because it was bad (it certainly wasn't), but because Bebop is -so- -freakin'- -good-. How can you argue with this perturbed action?