Memories

113 minutes
Japanese
English Subtitles
Released: 02/24/2004
Reviewed: 02/01/2005

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If you're a longtime reader of this site you'll notice that sometime in mid-January every year there's an absolute explosion of reviews. It goes from two reviews every month, maybe, to like seven in a week. There's a reason for this that I will dilvulge to you now: Every January I go to Florida to visit my "gammy" and there's only so many hourrs a day you can spend talking to old people and walking around a place exclusively populated by old people. Thus, every year I bring about ten DVDs with me and try to see how far I can get through them while I spend the week in this geriatric hellhole. It's sort of my secret shame, but hey, someone's making out on it!

You've heard me talk about the "OVA complex" before, but I'm going to need to define it if I'm to continue talking to you. The basic idea is this: One shot OVAs of two or three episodes more often than not assume that a person watching them knows more about the universe in which they reside in than any mortal man possibly could. Characters will refer to other characters, laws, and events like this things are absolutely commonplace. This irritates me to no end, as you might've gleaned from reading my prior thoughts on it. It's like finding a worm in your apple, but... your apple was already rotten! It's a serious addition of insult to injury. As if watching a show about bickering teenage girls from space trying to protect "protozoan lifeforms" from giant earthworms wasn't painful enough.

Memories, while not an OVA, shares some of its qualities. The movie is divided into three stand alone portions, each a little less good than the one that came before it, but they still form a pretty good base for two hours of entertainment. The stories are all about as divergent as possible. There's a space drama, a sort of comedy about an unlucky chemical researcher and the last one that's like... I don't know, this weird post-modern story about a city whose sole purpose is to fire cannons at an enemy they can't see. It's a little crazy, I know.

I'll make my focus on the first segment, Magnetic Rose, the tale of four salvage workers in space who receive a distress call from someone in a highly dangerous section of space. This is exactly where the OVA complex comes in. The crew members mention a mag-field and normally this would be an absolute violation of my principles, but directly beforehand they mentioned that the place this high density magnetic field was situated in was a shipgraveyard, like our Bermuda Triangle. There! That's it! That's all you need to do! Now I have all the information I need. The mag field is something dangerous to ships.

Obviously Katsuhiro Otomo, Satoshi Kon (who has a writing credit and is also my secret man-crush) and everyone else involved just plain "gets it". There are ways to tell people things about your universe without actually telling them anything. This is what I want, because I don't have twenty four episodes of backstory to fill in the gaps. If nothing else, Magnetic Rose is really amazing because it manages to tell a coherent story in only about 45 minutes. The actual plot could be explained as a cross between legend of the Sirens and Madame Butterfly, which the movie mentions so many times it almost becomes a masturbatory fetish. But that's okay, because Madame Butterfly rocks your momma's socks off anyway. When the segment finally ends, without a single scrap of resolution, it was all good. I considered that maybe its lack of resolution was the resolution. When something takes place it doesn't have to work all that hard at hooking me, but I say this without bias, Magnetic Rose is amazing.

What is provided in Magnetic Rose is so solid and so beautiful that the other two "episodes" could be 70-some minutes of a still frame of cattle poop and I'd probably deal with it. As it is, the subsequent vignettes don't provide the same punch as Magnetic Rose does, but they're both entertaining it their own ways.

I won't go too deep into Stink Bomb, though I think it's better than the final segment. Suffice it to say seeing Roujin Z is seeing Stink Bomb. Instead of an old man with a crazy wheelchair it's a young man with a crazy smell. That's a bit oversimplified, but it's the gist of it. It has a giant black man that speaks in this combination of English and Japanese (as all black people do, obviously). I think that's pretty funny.

Cannonfodder is a bit like the Florida Keys. It sounds like a paradise on the outside. There's warm weather and nice beaches, hot tubs. Bizarre, esoteric concepts like the one this segment is built upon are gravy to me. I could scoop them up with a spoon. But this stuff is too esoteric even for me and I like Super Milk-Chan. The Florida Keys has its 80 year old population and lack of any sort of reasonable bar for nearly forty miles at some stretches. Cannonfodder has this bizarre art direction and these crazy transitions that I just can't get into. I enjoy the absurd, this is true, but this goes beyond the realm of absurd. It's easily as insane as spending a week in a town where the youngest person is only three times my age.

So why am I here, again? It doesn't matter. At least Magnetic Rose is hanging out to pull me through.