The Wind Rises (2013)

A recent Studio Ghibli/Hayao Miyazaki film, so you know it has to be excellent. It was intended to be his last film, before he changed his mind and made The Boy and the Heron. And thank god he did, because this rambling mess of a historical tribute film doesn't deserve half of the praise it received. I can hardly even believe it, but I gave up a bit over halfway through and skipped to the last ten minutes.

A fictional biography, it's the story of Jiro Horikoshi, a Japanese airplane designer. The first hour is about how Jiro likes airplanes. Like, he really, really likes airplanes. No, you don't understand, he likes airplanes.

He meets a girl on a train during a totally awesome earthquake animation that knocks the entire Tokyo to the ground, I guess the Great Kanto quake of 1923. She serves no purpose in the first half, and the last ten minutes tell me she died of tuberculosis or something, but at least he designed some cool airplanes while sitting with her at her death bed.

He gets a job at Mitsubishi, where they're struggling to design fast fighter planes with Japan's outdated industrial processes, despite their engineering genius. Jiro did not think it was appropriate to drag airplanes to airstrips with a train of oxen.

Jiro goes off to Germany to learn about the crazy Nazi metal planes, and is treated terribly because he's an asian guy in Nazi Germany.

And then it's been 70 minutes and nothing has happened and there's no plot, because it's a bio flick, except people who don't care about airplanes or already know about 1930s Japan don't have much reason to care. He's just going to keep making new airplanes and then watching them fly and saying "wow!" at us for another hour.

It's modern Miyazaki, so the animation is gorgeous. The scenery is gorgeous. The airplanes look totally rad and do totally rad stuff. It just isn't, you know, interesting.