Movie Review: I'll Follow You Down (2013)

I admit it. I loved The Sixth Sense. I loved that adorable little scamp, Haley Joel, as he muddled through his little life scared shitless of all the ghosts he could see. And though HJ has a TON of work on his resume, I’ve only seen him in 2 movies. Maybe my subconscious could see that he was basically a one-trick pony. 

I’ll Follow You Down is about Gabe, a scientist, with a loving wife, Marika, and an adoring son, Erol. Gabe heads out to Princeton for a conference but doesn’t return after the planned three days. Marika enlists the help of her father, Sal (another scientist), to find Gabe. Sal hacks into Gabe’s computer, investigates a secret research room filled with crates labeled “A. Einstein”, and discovers Gabe’s wallet and phone tucked away in a desk.

Not a good sign.

12 years later, Gabe is still gone. Erol is a young man studying theoretical physics in college and Marika is a fucking wreck. She’s never been able to ‘get over’ Gabe’s disappearance and barely makes it through each day. Sal, in all this time, has been studying Gabe’s notes and discovers something shocking: Gabe was working on time travel and may have actually succeeded in traveling back to 1946.

But what happened to him? Why didn’t he make it back home? After joining his grandfather in cracking the time travel code, Erol realizes he must follow his father back to 1946 and set the time line right. You see, since his father’s disappearance, everyone affected by it has been living in an altered time line. And it’s not all candy canes and Skittles-shitting unicorns.

Movie Review: From Up On Poppy Hill (2011, Studio Gibli, Cinedigm Entertainment)

...this viewer really has to hand it to the skilled writers, directors and animators of the best of contemporary Japanese anime; when skillfully integrated, there's a certain symbiotic relationship between the extraordinary visual splendor of these varied productions, and the engaging & quite compelling storylines, which the striking visuals help to tell. Often, from production to production, the story relies on the visuals, and vice-versa, but also, they complement each other. Without the story, the visuals prove to be merely eye-candy, and without the visuals...well, one might as well merely be reading a book, and imagining the visuals. And some select anime productions are so masterfully written...so visually immersing...so captivating and engaging, with regards to the characters, it makes one genuinely wonder why the filmmakers involved, chose not to conceive and render such an exquisite production, as a live-action feature film, rather than utilizing animation. It is that keen latter observation, which denotes anime filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, as one of the most skillful artists, working in his field. Most anime devotees very much know and lovingly embrace his masterful work, which includes such classics as "Princess Mononoke" (1997), "Kiki's Delivery Service" (1989), "Spirited Away" (2001), and "The Castle of Cagliostro" (1979), amongst others. And proving that the proverbial apple doesn't fall far from the tree, as far as equally skillful filmmaking artistry, in the realm of anime feature-film production, Hayao's son, Goro, has proven himself, his father's equal, carrying on the tradition, with the strikingly beautiful, breathtaking, captivating and compelling coming-of-age drama, 2011's "From Up On Poppy Hill"...