robotech_master | Rising to the challenge: My adventures en route to and from "The Wind Rises"

Well, I promised an account of my adventures yesterday, in which my trip to see The Wind Rises in a theater turned out to be much longer and more adventurous than I had expected, so here it is.

Knowing that yesterday was the last nice day we were going to have for a week (the high was projected to reach 44, but I think it actually got to be 47 or 48) before a major storm, and knowing that The Wind Rises was playing this weekend but having no idea if that would still be true next weekend, I elected to take my bike and the bus up to the movie theater in the Keystone Crossing Mall at the extreme northeast corner of Indianapolis. If I left at 8:45, I could get to the bus stop before the bus left at 9:20. Then I could catch a connecting bus at 10:30 and get to the mall at 11:45. That would give me an hour and forty-five minutes of leeway before the 1:15 movie.

The first sign that things weren't entirely going to go my way came when I reached the bus stop at 9:15, but the bus never showed up. Apparently it was more than 5 minutes early. So there went one hour of my leeway right there. (Though as I was waiting, someone who walked by on the sidewalk told me he liked my shirt—a Woot! shirt I'd bought with various Miyazaki characters depicted as the cast of The Wizard of Oz—so at least that was something. You meet anime fans in the most unlikely places!)

I finally caught the bus into town, ending up right where that big mess of red dots is over the word "Indianapolis." I took advantage of the half hour layover before the next bus to go to the nearby Circle Center Mall and have a pretzel dog at Auntie Anne's, then went back to the stop to wait for bus 18. If I'd caught the right bus, it would have taken me diagonally across the map to the upper right to reach that mall. However, I misread the bus sign and got on 16 instead, which took me down toward the southeast part of town! I soon realized what was going on thanks to my phone's GPS, and caught another 16 back downtown, but by then it was too late to make my movie showing. On the bright side, I had a day pass so no matter how many bus rides I took it wouldn't cost me anything extra.

This left me with a bit of a quandary. The next showing of the movie was at 4 p.m., which meant it would be out at 6:15. The problem was, that was an hour after the last bus that would take me all the way back to Greenwood left. But with a little research, I found there was a bus leaving from the mall at 6:30 that would take me down to the southeast part of town, to within ten miles of home. And since I had my bike with me, what the hey. Ten miles in 38-degree weather might not be fun, but it was certainly feasible in my heavy coat. And this was, as far as I knew, the last day I'd have the chance to see the movie in the theater—the temps were due to drop into the teens with snow the next day. So it was this or nothing.

With that, I caught another bus that took me to the northwest corner of town, and waited twenty minutes for another bus to take me across to the northeast. I got there about 2:30. I wandered around, played a little Ingress, admired the big horse statues in front of a Chinese restaurant, then located the food court and ate at Elevation Burgers. Then I wandered over to a Tesla showroom to rubberneck at the cars a little. I'd never seen one in person. Pretty neat! The dashboard looked like something out of Knight Rider. I only spent about five minutes there, though, because it was getting on toward movie time and I wanted to be sure I found a good seat. (Likewise, there was also a Microsoft Store that under other circumstances I might have poked around for a few minutes—but again, just no time.)

I got to the Keystone Art Cinema (really a nice place, as the reviews on Yelp show) and bought my ticket, then waited around a bit until they started seating. Once we seated, I found some other Miyazaki fans in the theater near me and chatted with them, discussed Cagliostro a little and plugged my commentary track to the girl seated two places down from me. She said she'd look it up later on.

The theater manager came out to present the show, and mentioned that tonight at 8 they'll be having an Oscars viewing party, in which the Oscars are projected on the big screen. And you know, if it weren't that I wouldn't have any way to get back home afterward, I'd actually kind of like to go. It would be fun to watch the Oscars in a theater with a bunch of other people there. Ah well, maybe next year.

And then the movie began. Whoa. I'll admit, I had gone into it with only moderate expectations. Miyazaki's last two movies hadn't really been all that great, and given that Miyazaki is at his most magical in fantasy worlds, how good could a movie about a real-life historical figure be? But even in the dub format, I was completely blown away.

In a way, The Wind Rises is kind of a remix of some of Miyazaki's prior movies. There's a lot of Porco Rosso in there, and a little Kiki's Delivery Service. But there's some interesting new stuff, too. There's also some great voice acting from the American cast, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt (most notable as the cop who helps Batman in The Dark Knight Rises) as the protagonist, Martin Short as his pint-sized martinet boss, and Mae Whitman as his little sister. (I didn't even recognize Short, or for that matter Whitman, who was also Katara in Avatar: The Last Airbender. I want to see the movie again just to reappreciate their voice acting.) If you have the chance to see this movie yourself in the theater before it goes away, do so.

After the movie, I made my way out to the bus stop just outside the theater to await the bus. I still wasn't sure I was in the right place, so I headed down to another stop nearer the entrance to the mall, and found a lot of people there waiting for the same bus. It's nice to have that reassurance when you're waiting for an unfamiliar bus.

I got on the bus, rode it for an hour due south (that's the southbound line on the right-hand side of the map), and ended up getting off in Franklin Township. Then I started bicycling for home, stopping along the way to send my brother a Glympse to let him know where I was.

Annoyingly, my bike's headlight didn't work, even when I stopped at a CVS and bought new batteries. It wasn't too much of a problem—I was wearing a highly visible reflective orange backpack, and most of the streets were well-lit—but it was bothersome. I'll have to order a new one, I guess.

I made it about halfway home in good time, snapped photos and submitted three not-yet-tagged portals for Ingress, and stopped at a Wendy's for a cup-of-chili pick-me-up. Then my brother showed up with his Prius and a bike rack to drive me home. (Handy thing, that Glympse.) I told him I would have been fine with biking the rest of the way, but he said he wanted a Frosty cone anyway.

In the end, The Wind Rises was a movie that would have been worth bicycling the whole ten miles for. I heartily encourage anyone and everyone near a theater playing it to go and see it while you still can. And I have to say that, as much as I enjoyed Frozen, there's really just no comparison in terms of movie greatness. Here's hoping it takes the Oscar tonight!