All Your Subtitle Are Belong to Us

I got to watch a really good movie with Eleanor last night which I otherwise wouldn't have, except for an odd fuckup on someone's part. Someone who might have been, but wasn't necessarily, me.

Late yesterday, I was just dragging, physically and emotionally. I have a bunch of cases in progress, all of the same basic type, that have been hanging around in my office for at least a couple of years. They've all been fully paid for but they each need completion. One, we'll cleverly call A, has been filed  but with a deadline of today to complete it; the second, B, is virtually complete, printed and ready to be filed; and a third, C, got printed in draft form last week and has been waiting for the client to come in and pick it up. 

I heard from A early enough and we set a time to review and sign yesterday afternoon. B's papers sat here all day until they emailed and said they couldn't make it in until today. So guess who just reprinted a dozen signature pages? C didn't get in touch until five minutes before showing up looking for them- after I'd already left for the day a little early. Fortunately, coworkers found the stash and delivered it.

My main reason for leaving early, other than being up more or less continously since 3 a.m. because of a sweet but attention demanding older cat?? A was for angry, which is what they were at me. Okay, not me so much as mad at the world. By putting it off for so long and only getting it going when things got desperate, it's going to take quite a bit more to resolve this over the next five years than it would have two years ago when we would have been that much further into the deal.  I had no answers; as with many parts of my practice, I wish there was such a thing as a "motion to change the facts," but it really doesn't exist.  So we left it that we will either file something, or not file something, today. I just finished a revision that might make it work. We'll see.

In the meantime, I did see a film I might otherwise not have.

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When I got home, I desperately needed a geezer nap after more than 12 hours up and several of them in stress.  Eleanor was fine with that but asked for help getting Bluetooth set up so she could connect headphones to the tv and watch a Netflix film that's been sitting around the house for three weeks that we just haven't gotten to:

This one.



First, we do still have actual DVDs laying around. Netflix began strictly as a by-mail disk delivery service, and while it has branched into bigger and better things with streaming and production, they still offer it and we've kept the one-disk-at-a-time plan to supplement the online offerings. It's how we're able to find a lot of older, more obscure and branded films that competing services like HBO Max and Disney+ no longer allow them to stream. That's because physical disks, like books, are subject to something called the "first sale rule," which means that once you buy it, you can resell it, rent it out, do anything other than publicly perform it as long as the physical copy holds up. So Disney can stop other services from streaming Marvel and Star Wars movies, but can't stop them from renting out the copies already purchased.

I didn't expect, when we put this film in the physical disk queue, that we'd have any other way to watch it. More about that mistake later, but the bigger booboo that got me out of the rack and into watching this with her was connected to the actual Netflix copy of the film: no subtitles. Five minutes in, she could tell it was beautifully filmed, and with a gorgeous music soundtrack, and nothing but the Japanese audio with no English options for either sound or screen.  While I was still sawing wood, she shot out to the library and grabbed a more functional copy, and that gave me and my exhaustipation time to watch it with her.

You may not recognize the gentlemen on the movie poster, but you likely know their work: Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, and the studio's mascot,  My Neighbor Totoro. As the Netflix page tells it,

For anime lovers, Tokyo's Studio Ghibli is hallowed ground. This engrossing documentary takes viewers inside as it follows three of the studio's guiding lights -- including legendary director Hayao Miyazaki -- over the course of a year.

That's Miya-san, as he's usually referred to, in the apron on the viewer's left of the cover. To his left, Toshio Suzuki, producer of most of the Ghibli films, and on his left, co-founder Isao Takahata, also a longtime director of anime.  The documentary follows mostly Miyazaki through the studio and surroundings, and though the process of both he and his onetime partner and by-then-sortof-rival Takahata as they developed and released films in the year the filmmaker had access.  Miya-san's was called The Wind Rises, Takahata's  The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. The latter would be his final film before his death in 2018; Miyazaki has remained active, although no new work has been formally released since 2013.

In addition to the filming around the studio and of associated travels and events, there's archival footage of the three of them going back to their earliest days in animation.  Their careers began in what must have been a depressing post-war Japan; the country was defeated, conquered, bombed back to the Stone Age and two cities rendered shadows of themselves. One thing Miya-san says at some point is that you can look out at a totally ordinary sight, like a building across from yours, and picture flying through the air or being carried on the back of a giant cat, to get there and make the journey magical. Now their whole country looks more magical than what we've done in the 75 years since we "won."

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As the documentary traced the story of The Wind Rises, Eleanor said she'd like to watch it. I was already a step ahead on that; turns out that it, along virtually the entire Ghibli catalog is streaming on HBO Max. As was the documentary we just finished watching on the second of two DVDs.

I presume it has subtitles.