Ok, Saturday.

Saturday began with an early-morning taxi cab ride to meet some fellow Hoya alums to pick up some stuff for a volunteer event later this month.

In a completely unrelated comment, if your address is in Bethesda, and the address has a street above 50, get exact directions.

Thanks to the cabbie, though.

After that came a Metro ride to the Smithsonian to pick up tickets for the Cherry Blossom Anime Marathon. I had already seen the first movie (My Neighbor Totoro, which is highly recommended as the stuff that Disney did in the first half of the 20th Century, but wanted tickets to the last three.

As with anything anime-related, stuff like this creeps into the conversation, whether you want it there or not. In our case, right behind me was a guy with a sweater vest, shirt and dress pants who seemed to be about forty and who engaged a kid right behind him in conversation for about thirty minutes. He asked the parents of the kid (dad was wearing a dress shirt, khakis and sneakers, was smiling despite something that indicated that he'd much rather be playing golf - he also indicated that he had been to a few anime conventions at the request of his son) if they had seen anything on "the bill of fare", then went right back to talking to the kid, making various recommendations. I was waiting for him to invite the kid back to his apartment. Very creepy. I felt compelled to make conversation with the parents to indicate that not everyone who was there was, well, different.

After that, I had a few hours to kill. While I spent a little time in the Natural History museum (now open on Fridays until 7:30, so I can spend time with actual neanderthals rather than proto-neanderthals wearing Syracuse jerseys at Rhino), most of the time was spent at the National Gallery looking at the Dada exhibit.

You remember how Lisa was worried about calling in to an NPR show to try to win tickets to a film by a Yugoslavian? That's how I felt about the Dada exhibit. It wasn't deserted, but they weren't limiting admission, either.

Anyway. Very cool exhibit, and certainly worth another visit. I can't really explain it, since it was, well a Dada exhibit. But it was thorough, and there were many interesting works.

Now. On to the movies.

• Steamboy: All of the movies were introduced by a guy named Patrick Drazen, who wrote this. The problem is that Drazen is very comfortable with people who are very familiar with anime, and he didn't seem comfortable introducing anime to a broader audience. To be honest, even though he had apparently lectured elsewhere before, he didn't seem comfortable in front of people. I was hoping that there would be questions, so he could answer "A wizard did it", but it was not to be.
  
  The overall mood wasn't helped by the D.C. Anime Club, who dressed up in costume and got up on stage to introduce who their characters were, complete with inside jokes (none of which were funny). If you're trying to open anime to a broader audience, this was not the way to go about it. I'm positive that every single parent who went with their kid went into each movie with a negative impression of the field.
  
  Anyway. Steamboy. Beautiful in its graphics, with a well-constructed fantasy world. But the plot.
  
  Oh, the plot. The basic plot involves defense contractors fihgting each other during an exhibition, and lots of complicated political maneuvering and alliances. It is, in a word, awful. The first third is fine and has lots of potential, the second third devolves into the insipid Lockheed versus Boeing of the 1860s-era plot, and during the last third, they basically abandon all shreds of a plot and just have things blow up. So not worth your time.
  
  Oh, before the movie started, a guy who looked to be about thirty-five who had journeyed out of his parents' basement specifically for this struck up a conversation with a girl in a kimono. As we all filed out, he told her haltingly that she had very pretty eyes. She didn't say another word and left very quickly.
  
  Very, very creepy.
  
  
• Howl's Moving Castle: See above for the introduction. The only addition was that Drazen gave an incoherent anti-war screed that involved headlines from the day of the Academy Awards the year that Spirited Away won Best Animated Feature. Very annoying.
  
  The movie, however, was a total hoot. Hilarious, especially since Billy Crystal did one of the voices and totally knocked it out of the park. Miyazaki films have similar problems - they always amaze at the beginning with a fantastical world, thensort of collapse under the weight of such a beautiful world, and kinda sorta limp to an end that amazingly solves every single problem but that came out of nowhere - but the problems here don't distract too much from the humor (though sitting for so long did start to make my posterior hurt). Heavily recommended.
  
  
• Akira: I skipped out on the George Mason game on the logic that, since I was now rooting for them, they would receive bad luck if I saw them. I met Dave Vacca and gabbed with him before the movie started.
  
  The intros were the same as before (with the exception of the curator warning us that the movie was rated R (there were a fair amount of kids there, which still stuns me) and Drazen doing this long digression that included some USA Today article referencing some quotes that indicated that anime was pretty much violent and degrading (it was obviously designed to get a visceral reaction - I wanted to yell out "hang the blasphemer!", but kept quiet).
  
  Anyway. The movie. I'd seen it before. If you haven't, it's basically every single Blade Runner-esque dystopian future stereotype. Very kinetic, with lots and lots and lots of action, and worth seeing at least once. It's like 2001 in its imagery, except that what's trying to kill people isn't a rogue computer but instead just your traditional psychics who were trained as part of a military conspiracy and whose predecessors caused a massive nuclear explosion that obliterated Tokyo.
  

So, Dada and anime. I love living here.