PBS documentary The Botany of Desire, in which journalist Michael Pollan uses four case studies to showcase how plants have evolved to appeal to a human desire. Pictured above: apples, grown for their sweetness, tulips for their beauty, marijuana for intoxication, and potatoes for control. A very interesting exploration of plant adaptation and botanical control, which has also shown me the appeal of running away to upstate New York to be an apple farmer.

Every time I rewatch Princess Mononoke (Mononoke-Hime), I am reminded of Studio Ghibli’s absolute genius. Ghibli has also rendered life to Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and Howl’s Moving Castle, to name a few, and also produced the upcoming Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (North American theaters August 14, original release date July 19, 2008).

Say what you want: Disney animators have nothing on the skill and handle on detail of the Ghibli animators. Nothing is artificial. Even the stylized characters convey their own sort of realism. And unlike Disney’s traditional portrayal of black-and-white characters, Ghibli villains are often morally ambiguous and less easy to judge.

While I enjoy films such as Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, I favor the more serious attributions of Princess Mononoke, and other features such as Grave of the Fireflies and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, because they touch upon topics only adults can truly understand. While the former latches on a Ghibli staple of environmentalism, the latter two deal with war and its atrocities.

I suppose what I enjoy most about these films is that they use a child-marketed medium to speak to adults, something most animation films do not. They make you think, consider, and learn, and are sometimes much harder to swallow. Following the trend of realism, Ghibli films lack conventional endings; like in life, the protagonists may live happily ever after, part ways, or die. They become more than children’s films, speaking volumes long after the credits roll.

Last night C and I finally watched The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen). We had received it from Netflix weeks before but had held off for fear of an evening ruined by a sad ending. Fortunately, this movie was more than a sad ending, a happy ending, or any ending at all.

The Lives of Others is set in 1984 (only a chilling 25 years ago), when the Stasi, the GRD’s secret police, monitored the lives of East German citizens as if they were bacteria under the microscope. Everything was heard, recorded, and reported. Blacklisting, interrogation, and threats were common. The subjects of the film, a writer living with his leading lady, are scrutinized with ever more pressure by Gerd Wiesler (played impeccably by Ulrich Mühe), who finds himself more and more sympathetic at the couple.

This movie is not really about state rebellion, or great internal conflict, or really even a change of values, though all of these aspects are touched upon. It is about the pressure of survival, of staying true to oneself, when nothing is private and every move is made with paranoia. It raises the question of how one would live in a time like this, as a state informer, considered “good” by the government, with privileges, or as a resistor, eking out an existence that can hardly be called living.

Last night I rewatched Fruit Chan’s short, Dumplings, as one segment of Three… Extremes, which contains three shorts from different directors. I had previously seen the full length version of Dumplings, produced after the short, last year when I was going through my asian horror phase, but hadn’t seen the original until now.

A brief synopsis of the film: Ching, an aging actress desperate to regain her youthful good looks goes to a local chef whose expensive dumplings have anti-aging powers. The secret ingredient in the dumplings are aborted fetuses, which are minced and added to the dumpling fillings. As Ching’s youth returns, she becomes obsessed with looking even younger, even though she is appalled by the secret ingredient.

The idea behind the film is to show the bare selfishness of human character, not to stir controversy on the “recycling” of human parts. It’s a very interesting, somewhat disturbing watch, and I highly suggest it. (For those who have NetFlix, Three… Extremes is currently available for instant watching.)

C showed me this amazing graphic novel today. Maus, by Art Spiegelman, is a graphic novel memoir about his father’s experience during the Holocaust, as well as an autobiographical account of his relationship with the artist and his father. The novel follows various timelines, which are based on his father’s account as told in modern times. What I found most interesting about the series was Spiegalman’s portrayal of various races as animals. The Jews are mice, the Germans cats, Poles pigs, French frogs, etc. The ingenuity of Speigelman’s father, Vladek, was amazing. The series, told in two parts, took 13 years to complete and won a Pulitzer.