Serdar | Genji Press

My loss is your gain! I'm selling at a discount all my remaining in-house copies of Summerworld, signed by me, for $15 -- that's $5 off the usual price for a signed copy! I needed to do some winter cleaning anyway, and the next edition of the book will most likely sport a bar code and be available through major distributors -- so it's time to sweep the decks!

Go ahead and pick up a copy as a gift for that special someone (or for yourself)! It sure beats yet another dreary entry in the latest overblown fantasy mega-epic-cycle -- and you're supporting the author directly!

Simply use this PayPal button to order the book for $15 including shipping:

That's it! I try to fulfill all orders within 1-2 days. If you want me to supply a special gift note or other goodie to go with the package, simply let me know in the "Notes" section of the order.

At first, Asa Nonami’s Now You’re One of Us ambles along like one of Yasujiro Ozu’s movies about Japanese home life, a drama of manners about marriage and extended families. Then it reveals its real subject by degrees—how a cult mind-set works to seduce outsiders and break their resistance—and it goes from Ozu coziness to full-blown Takashi Miike madness. In a good way, that is.

Time is the latest film from Korea’s Ki-duk Kim, he of several genuinely great movies (The Isle and 3-Iron) and a few that aim for something that we can’t even see from here and miss completely (The Coast Guard and Address Unknown). I am not sure if other people will accept Time as completely as I did, since it traffics in the deeper and murkier recesses of people’s ids and makes no apologies for going off the deep end not just once but several times. Then again, this isn’t a movie about rational people, and Kim’s forte is compulsive, obsessive people, so perhaps we can’t demand that the movie be wholly rational either. I’d rather see Kim take chances, as he is wont to do, instead of watching someone else with smaller ambition play it safe.

Time gives us a young, slightly Yuppie-esque Korean couple, Si-hee and Ji-woo. He edits movies on his Macintosh for a film company, and has a passing eye for the ladies. Si-hee (whose job is never defined) burns with jealousy whenever Ji-woo so much as looks at another woman, and the depth of her jealousy is cemented in an early scene where she screams at a couple of women who traded phone numbers with Ji-woo when they hit his car by mistake. She’s disturbed that she should be this obsessive. So’s he, and what sane man wouldn’t be? But the movie does its best to make Si-hee’s obsession tangible, not just a given, and it does this by showing her thinking at work: If I looked like another woman, would he want me all the more?

Most people would probably find an unintentional laugh in me saying that some Merzbow albums are nowhere nearly as interesting as others. It does have the makings of a comedy sketch: you have someone listening to one long blur of noise and gushing “Exquisite!” and then listening to another long, equally indistinguishable blur of noise and wrinkling his nose in distate. The joke isn’t lost on me, believe me.

I write these reviews not just for other fans but for people who don’t know anything about whatever subject I’ve tackled, and so I owe them at least one discussion of what to me is a lesser Merzbow album and why. The great ones, like Merzbuddha or Amlux, seem able to pull endless amounts of invention out of thin air, and have a focus to them from start to finish. The lesser ones sound like the kindling is there but not the spark that will touch them off.

Dharma is in that spirit: it sounds like bits and pieces for another, more powerfully defined album that wasn’t recorded. The title hints at it being something of a cousin to Merzbuddha, but the grab-bag of track names on the record don’t quite up hold that end of the bargain. Not that such a thing is required: most Merzbow song titles have been for flavor rather than as some kind of explicit descriptor. It’s when compared to other and more conceptually coherent work he’s done that the shortcomings become clear.

You could do a lot worse than DOA: Dead or Alive, believe me. Is it any good? No, not really. Is it fun? Yeah, sort of, in the splashy, stupid way the videogame it’s based on is also fun, and at least it has the sense to recognize it’s not meant to be taken the slightest bit seriously. Fine by me. Not every movie has to be The Accidental Tourist.

There was a time when I was something of a Bad Movie celebrant. Then over time I lost my taste for seeking out entertaining crap simply because a) it was, after all, crap and b) with the sheer number of genuinely good and criminally underappreciated movies out there that can now find the audiences they deserve, thanks to DVD, why bother with the bottom of the barrel? But every now and then you just got to see what sinks to the bottom, if only to have some idea of how bad it can truly get.