Serdar | Genji Press

How To Operate With A Blown Mind Dept.

2009-06-30T19:21:14Z

I love Japan.

Twitch - Noboru Iguchi Says ‘Geisha Is Beautiful! Geisha is Robot!’ It’s the ROBOGEISHA Trailer!

... I don't think I've ever said "What the f___" so many times in a row while watching a trailer.

I love Japan.

Iguchi is the madman who gave us Machine Girl.

I think my brains melted out of my nostrils right around the time the geisha transformed into a robot tank, drove up the side of a skyscraper and started shooting missiles at a giant feudal-era samurai castle that had also metamorphed into a city-destroying monster.

Did I mention I love Japan?

Oh Boy Dept.

2009-06-29T14:32:25Z

Some of you might remember how Oldboy (one of my favorite flicks, period) has been the target of at least two attempts to bring it to the big screen in the U.S. The first was in the hands of director Justin Lin, he of Better Luck Tomorrow (and, more recently, Fast and Furious). That went nowhere, but then two other folks with slightly higher profiles picked it up: Steven Spielberg and Will Smith. They're not licensing the movie for a remake, but the manga it was derived from.

This has apparently opened a massive can of legal worms. Not only is it possible that Spielberg and Smith went to the wrong people to license the manga, the Korean movie company that produced Oldboy (Show East) has vanished. (See previous link.)

That has frightening implications for the availability of the movie in any form in the future. Tartan, the distributors for the film in the U.S. and U.K., also went bankrupt, which means any copies you have lying around right now may well be the only ones available for some time.

Maybe Smithberg should have talked to Dark Horse first?

Tokyo Rampage

2009-06-29T05:51:01Z

Tokyo Rampage is an example of a movie that’s not very good but remains interesting despite itself. It’s set in modern-day Tokyo and deals with one of the perennial subjects of filmmakers there: disaffected youth and sociopathic Tokyo criminals. The director in question, Toshiaki Toyoda, has made at least one other truly outstanding movie about that first subject—Blue Spring—but this time around he’s dealing with a story that’s a good deal more arid and far harder to make interesting to an outside audience. He does give it his college best, though, and what he ends up with is enough to hold our attention for its running time but not much more than that.

Rampage opens with Arano (Kôji Chihara), a sullen young man wandering around Tokyo, sunken down in his overcoat and lugging around an airline bag full of weapons. He has some strange, undefined hatred of yakuza, so severe and deeply ingrained that he stabs one to death for the grand crime of scalping theater tickets. The dead gangster’s associate is Kamiju (Onimaru), a long-haired punk only slightly older than Arano himself but with a small crew of hangers-on. Kamiju’s not exactly living large, though: most of his work consists of enforcing collections for his pimp boss, and he spends a good deal of time and effort ducking calls from his mother. Arano is wilder than him or any of his buddies, and they find that downright intimidating where they haven’t found much of anything intimidating before.]]>
Psycho loner Arano drifts into the circles of low-level yakuza thug Kamiju, who realizes
(rather late) that this one man with a knife is more frightening than any of his enemies.

Kamiju, on the other hand, has to deal with the frustration of only being able to rise so high and no higher—he’s a small fry, no matter how much he stomps and threatens, and everyone around him, including his own boys, knows it. Arano becomes a member of his crew, sort of, and tags along with them on a drug deal. When the sellers (a pair of snotty American punks) won’t bring their prices down, he shoots them both. Later, he and one of the girls in Kamiju’s boss’s crew (Rin Ozawa) make off with the dead dealers’ boom box stuffed with LSD—but it’s mostly her idea; like everything else, he just goes along with it because he hardly seems like he has anything better to do.

The only thing that gives Arano any sense of duty is his hatred for gangsters—to them he says, “You’re not needed,” just before he shoots them, or pummels them, or stabs them. There is one such scene, of Arano stabbing of a man in a parking garage, that reminded me of the equally grotesque face-slapping scene in Kitano’s Violent Cop. It’s so improbably prolonged (and difficult to watch) that I wondered if it was not meant to be objective, but subjective: this is what Arano wants to see. “What’s my epitaph going to be?” he asks Kamiju at one point, while they’re in a cemetery—not long after Kamiju has ostensibly buried his father there—and it’s not hard to see how Arano’s obsession with violence and death has shut out everything else in the world, including simple human contact. Even the pretty young girl who wants to hock the drugs for fast cash and do something fun with him gets stiffed.

The movie's cruelty and grimness of tone is so unremitting and unleavened by anything other than
its basic insights that it adds up to one very long, dry slog from a director who has done better.

As potentially interesting as all these elements are, they don’t add up to a more interesting movie, and that’s the real shame of it. Toyoda is a better director than this—he made Blue Spring, and also the outstanding 9 Souls, which was among my choices for the best film of its year. It’s not hard to see how this is a product of the same mind that gave us those other two films. It’s a good looking movie—in fact, there are some downright amazing visual moments, like a shot out of a train window near the beginning that’s a real stunner, and a beautiful scene where Kamiju finds himself in the middle of a rain of knives. But the movie as a whole is a cold and leaden experience, and when it’s all over it doesn’t leave us with much of anything except a sense of relief that it’s finally finished. Maybe that was the idea.

amazon=B000FUF7C6

13 Japanese Birds, Vol. 2: Owl (Merzbow)

2009-06-29T04:46:36Z

I got into music backwards. I started with the excesses of Merzbow and the murderous overkill of the Swans, and then reversed gears into more conventional territory. And even then I was still going backwards: I didn’t start my Coltrane collection with A Love Supreme, but rather Ascension. By the time I’d fallen back into something like normal territory, my ears had already been prepared for most anything they might encounter.

And yet I keep being surprised—especially by Merzbow himself, whose encyclopedic catalog of releases grows by at least thirty or forty discs a year. There are many releases that repeat each other—I’m not sure the lay listener will sense much difference between Noisembryo and Green Wheels (I do, but that’s another story)—but at this stage in his career he’s found ways to challenge himself and explore new territory all the time, even if only incrementally. To that end, 13 Birds is fast shaping up to be the open-ended successor to all the ideas Merzbow only touched on or hinted at with Door Open At 8AM.]]> If the first disc of Merzbow’s 13 Japanese Birds was all about the noise, this one’s all about the beat. Rhythm’s always been part of the Merzbow approach; the early releases (Fuckexercise, etc.) sound more like sloppy prog-rock jams, with Masami Akita himself on drums. With Birds, Akita’s climbed back onto the drum stool but simply used that as one element in his mix. I mentioned last time out how you could barely fit a page of Down Beat Magazine between 13 Birds Pt. 1 and the Elvin Jones drum solos in Coltrane’s Ascension. The results this time are even closer to that sustained, furious discipline.

Cue up the first track (“Gorosukehoukou”) and you might think you’ve put in the wrong CD at first. It’s all drum workout and some synth in the peripheries of the mix, but wait long enough and it’ll eventually turn into the face-shearing overload most Merzbow fans have come to expect. “Variation #1” is all hissing and bubbling with the drums popping in and out, and “Variation #2” sport much louder electronic work, but with a lot of space and some really, really stretched-out drums, each stroke falling like a hammer driving a railroad spike. Then it takes off and turns into what sounds like a rolling wall of drums hemmed in by electrical wiring. The finale, “Noritsukehousei”, cranks up all the effects at once for a prolonged workout.

Back when I first encountered Borbetomagus through their Live At InRoads CD, I kept coming back to the idea that any instrument ultimately works on an emotional level because it reminds us in some manner of the human voice. The shrilling screams that Akita generates with his EMS synth have the same desperate timbre; they cry out (literally and figuratively) to be heard as substitutes for rising and falling voices. That may not be what’s intended—after all, the whole point of music like this isn’t just to make ham-handed one-to-one correspondences (“Hey, this sounds like birdcalls!”), but to expand our powers of imagination through listening.

I also couldn’t help but think of Coltrane’s own words when he described Ascension: “I want time to be more plastic.” This he achieved through giant blocks of sound that weren’t bound by conventional compositional rules (verse / chorus / verse / bridge / chorus / solo / etc.). Jones’s drumming used rhythm without itself imposing conventional rhythm on anything else going on around it—this was music for listening, not dancing. 13 Birds, so far, seems fueled by the same ambitions and obsessive drive.

Kao (Face)

2009-06-29T04:03:47Z

Funny, touching, enthralling, horrifying, and finally heartbreaking, Face is precisely the kind of movie I love most to encounter and then tell others about. No category will encompass it succinctly; it’s an original. One critic called it the greatest Japanese film of the last decade or more, and it’s not hard to see why. It tells a story of great ambition in such a modest, careful, understated—and often hilarious—way that its greatest shocks and most powerful moments sneak up on you from behind and stay with you for a long time.

I wonder if some of Face’s sheer bite and sassy vigor comes from the fact that it’s based, however loosely, on a true story: a bar hostess murdered a co-worker, fled, and hid out for years on end before finally being caught. But that seems unfair to director Junji Sakamoto and his lead performer, a stage actress named Naomi Fujiyama. Sakamoto brings a strange combination of quirky black humor and blunt pathos to this story, and Fujiyama’s performance is so unaffected and natural that we forget a camera is watching.]]>
After Masako's life disintegrates she hits the road, with no plan except to survive.

Fujiyama plays Masako, the secluded, ugly-duckling daughter of a woman who runs a dry-cleaning shop. Her life consists of endless days up in her room, running her pedal-powered sewing machine and doing nothing much else in particular. Her father absconded years ago with another woman, and her sneering sister—who’s as slender and poised as Masako is pudgy and plain—has a rich boyfriend and a classy bar-girl lifestyle. At one point after being taunted, Masako hops a train and vanishes for most of a day. Her mother’s response to this is to admit that it’s good for the girl to get out more.

Then Mom drops dead, and Masako shreds what’s left of her life. She strangles her sister, steals the funerary money, dresses in a suit of clothes lifted from the dry-cleaning rack and disappears into the night. She’s clumsy, scared, fearful, riddled with guilt: she tries turning herself in at a police station, but no one’s around and instead she ends up enduring a sloppy rape at the hands of a frustrated truck driver. A major earthquake (the one that hit Kobe in 1995) gives her a chance to vanish with other refugees.

The movie provides her with both slapstick pratfalls and
genuine human connection as challenges for her to overcome.

She hides out in a love hotel, where the owner (basset-hound-faced Ittoku Kishibe) is up to his neck in mah-jongg debts and doesn’t particularly care if one of the cleaning women is on the lam. In his own brash, adamant little way, he’s kind to her: the job helps her keep a step ahead of the police, and he teaches her (not very elegantly) the basics of riding a bike—that being one of the things she wished her real father had done for her. Then he hangs himself, the police come, and Masako has to run again. She’d kill herself if she had the nerve, but what she fears most is not death or capture but having to face her sister in the big hereafter.

She runs. She finds solace, again, in a little bar where the madam’s brother is an ex-yakuza (or maybe not as ex- as he likes to say he is) and one of the customers (Jun Kunimura) hits on Masako. Running scared has changed her, though, and by this point she’s learned to disguise herself—to be merry and outgoing, to seem to be enjoying life. And maybe she is, for the first time: when the customer’s wife goes ballistic on her for “seducing” her husband, she refuses to apologize. For once she’s gotten something only other people have been able to savor. And people like her now, genuinely like her.

Despite emerging as a completely different human being capable of joy,
Masako's still haunted and riddled by guilt she can only now properly feel.

It only goes so far to stave off the fear inside, though. The true horror is not that she killed her sister and survived, but that she has, in many ways, become her—“reincarnated”, as she puts it. Not just in the fact that she, too, now works as a bar hostess and has a flashy, outgoing demeanor, but that she is willing to do the very things that seemed so repulsive and demeaning to her before because they now mean her continued survival. And one night she flees again, this time to a small island where she works side-by-side with an old woman, doing humble chores, and realizing all too late that there was only so much she could hide from herself or from the world at large.

Sakamoto’s directorial style calls so little attention to itself on the surface, but only so the truly spectacular moments stand out all the more. He shoots ordinary things—a corridor, an empty room—but lights and edits them in ways that make them seem beautiful and strange. Most striking is a moment near the end, when Masako panics and tries to run away; the action is captured and framed through a pole-mounted wide-view mirror, and makes her seem all the more trapped and helpless.

The ending, which should be cut and dried for this sort of story, is anything but.

Many great movies toy with your expectations and emotions. We shouldn’t feel for the sociopathic Alex in A Clockwork Orange, or the odd-couple murderers in The Honeymoon Killers, but we do. Not sympathy, but empathy: we may be on opposite sides of the fence, but that doesn’t keep us from having a moment of human recognition. By the end, Masako has come a long way since her glum days in the cleaners’; she’s become someone we would be proud of, and her sheer will to survive is enthralling even when we know where it all comes from. She killed her sister and there is no escaping that, and the movie knows it. Small wonder one of the songs used throughout the film is “The Great Pretender”, with the oh-so-telling line “You never show me your true face”.

Note: This movie is not to be confused with the Korean horror film of the same name.

amazon=B000AOEPL6

Darker Than Black Vol. #5

2009-06-29T02:19:45Z

Darker Than Black caught my attention from the beginning, held it through each successive installment, and continues to keep me guessing and absorbed. Volume five, the next to last disc in the whole series, does what most penultimate volumes of any series do: it sets things up in preparation for what we anticipate will be their final resolutions. Some of this is by filling in backstory, and some of this is via breaking equilibriums that have held the story together until now.

The first half of the disc revolves around Huang—Li / Hei’s “controller”, a regular human who makes up in nerve and bluntness what he lacks in super-powers. He was once a cop, we learn, who lost a partner of his to a Contractor. That alone would be enough to instill the distrust of (and disgust with) Contractors that we see him evince throughout the series, but there’s more to it than that. It’s also precisely the sort of “more” not served by talking about her in detail, since the details go a long way towards providing the kind of character depth that has made this show a winner.

]]> Huang’s backstory is interleaved with a present-day plot about a religious cult that has sprung up around the Gate, the source of all that is strange and new in the Darker Than Black world. Cults at least this weird exist in real-life Japan right now, and in Japanese fiction they’re often a) fodder for lampooning or b) a common plot device (many a Japanese mystery or thriller story revolves around such a cult). Here, the cult seems to be the base of operations for at least one Contractor—in fact, from the intel Hei and Huang come across, the cult’s own leader may be one herself. Hei’s job is to infiltrate the cult and put a stop to any plans germinating there, but the last thing Huang expects is to find an old flame of his there, too. There isn’t a happy ending here, as you can guess.

The second half pulls several disparate plot threads together into one neat package. The most crucial is a piece of Hei’s own past—something we’ve seen him chasing and closing in on before, only to have his hands wrap around thin air. Here, Hei comes perilously close to learning crucial details about the Heaven’s Gate incident, and in the process learns of a plot to close the Gates and destroy all the Contractors in one fell swoop. That’s probably not the solution to his problems that he had in mind, but if he doesn’t act, it’s going to be the solution that’s imposed on him. We also see the fate of at least one of the major Contractors, and it is rich with both irony and sympathy: even a Contractor has to admit that he can’t cheat death forever, but if you go out in style it’s at least partial compensation. And in “November 11”’s case—he being the MI6 Contractor with his fingers in a few too many pies for his own good—it comes in the form of a bottle of liquor, a roomful of men with guns, and a final cigarette extinguished with his own blood.

Right after watching Darker Than Black I sat down with a completely different sort of production from Japan—a live-action movie named Face. That film featured a pudgy seamstress who strangled her bar-hostess sister, stole her mother’s funeral money, went on the lam, and reinvented herself in her sister’s image, much to her own horror. Because the movie was always about a specific person and not a plot, it remained fascinating all the way through. Darker Than Black’s cast of characters is broad and its plotting thick, but it’s the first part of that equation which has consistently won me over and brought me back in. We are interested in these people, genuinely curious about their situation, and that they surprise us so thoroughly with what they do next is how we are compelled to know about them to the bitter end.

==ext

Wire Protocol Dept.

2009-06-28T03:49:49Z

Since many of the FUNimation DVD titles I've looked at are now available as streaming video from the FUNimation site, I've added links to them within each review. I may add more links of the kind as we go on.

Mushi-shi Vol. #6

2009-06-28T00:29:48Z

A show this good should not have to end.

And yet here we are at the sixth and final disc of Mushi-shi, as beautiful and original an anime as any I could ever dare to ask for, and I feel downright glum knowing there’s no more after this. There is the manga, courtesy of Del Rey, which I’ll be getting around to reviewing before too much longer, but this series works so well as anime, is so lush and evocative, I fear reading the manga is going to feel like a step down.

Don’t expect anything like a real climax, though. The final disc of Mushi-shi does not bring anything to a definitive end, because this series has never been about definitive beginnings and endings in the first place. It’s about the flow of life itself, which doesn’t start or conclude anywhere but is simply something you dip into and out of as your time on earth allows. I was worried the show would devolve into a manufactured conflict with some great enemy—maybe a sinister mushi-master who’s creating an army to do his bidding, etc.—but thankfully, nothing of the kind happens.

]]> Mushi-shi hasn’t been about plot, anyway, but it has been at least incrementally about character—specifically, Ginko, the itinerant “mushi master” who’s the focus of the show. He has made it his life’s business to learn as much as he can about these curious, quasi-supernatural beings called mushi and how they affect and are affected by human life. And one of the biggest things he’s learned is that sometimes there are no easy solutions, no “cures” for what might ail us—not unless the cycle of existence itself is an illness.

The further we go into the show, the more this conceit comes to the fore, along with a fairly strong but never heavy-handed ecological message. Mankind can live in harmony with his world and make good use of it, but only so long as he doesn’t act out of arrogance. The main episode this time around that deals with this idea, “The Journey to the Field of Fire,” shows Ginko meeting with another (female) mushi master and disagreeing with her about the best way to deal with a mushi unsealed from a rock and now infesting an entire patch of farmland. Her approach is to burn it, but Ginko realizes this will only create more problems than it solves—and indeed, it does. The female master’s huge storehouse of mushi-related information doesn’t help her; she’s blinded by her certainty that her solution is best.

(C) Yuki Urushibara / KODANSHA/MUSHI-SHI Partnership.
The "Guardian".
Two other episodes deal with another constant theme, the way mushi change human life. In “The Sound of Rust,” a mushi infects a girl’s voice and causes the sound of her speech to spread a strange fungus-like rot on everything (and everyone) in earshot; in “Eye of Fortune, Eye of Misfortune,” a mushi grants a blind girl sight but at the cost of her being able to see far more than society can deal with. With Ginko’s help she’s able to achieve something like peace, but at the cost of her eyesight once more—although, by then, she’s been living without it for so long that it’s not much of a loss. The very last episode, “The Sound of Footsteps on the Grass,” tracks back in time to Ginko’s youth, but at first has nothing to do with him directly; instead, it gives us a village with a waterfall and a mushi within it—the “Guardian,” as he’s called—that looks like a catfish with grass growing from its gills. Two young boys—one a villager, the other part of a wandering mushi-shi troupe—are divided by circumstance, their lives shaped (and reshaped) by the influence of both mushi and human activity. One of the members of the troupe is a young Ginko, and years later he re-forges a connection, however tentative, between the two of them. No big crashing revelations, because none are needed: there’s just the sense that life will continue, as it always has, and as it always does. It’s probably the most fitting way to end a series this thoughtful and mind-expanding, and it leaves the door open for the possibility of more episodes in the future. One can hope.
Aside from being gorgeous to look at and elegantly unhurried, Mushi-shi is one of the few shows out there that embodies its intentions. It doesn’t try to inject false excitement into what’s going on; it doesn’t manufacture conflicts that don’t really need to be there; it just shows us what we need to see and lets us make up our own minds. The real wonder of it is that it has been like that all the way down the line. This was one of the best releases for all of 2007, and it may well turn out to be one of the best for all of 2008 as well. ==ext

Mushi-shi Vol. #1

2009-06-28T00:19:38Z

Most shows are about stuff like whether or not a given villain will be defeated, or whether or not the guy will get the girl. Mushi-shi takes place on a wholly different plane—it’s not about a hero or a violent competition, but about an entirely new world with its own nature and biology, its own laws of being, its own cycle of living and dying and being reborn. It has the same meditative beauty as Haibane Renmei or Kino’s Journey—shows that are not about fighting or blowing things up, but simply observing things as they are and knowing their true nature. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

The “mushi” (derived from the Japanese word for insect) are like primordial homunculi—large single-celled organisms that only a few people can see, but which interact with the real world in bizarre ways. Sometimes they latch onto people and cause afflictions that have to be dealt with, but they’re not inherently evil: they just have a life cycle of their own, and sometimes we are part of that life cycle whether or not we realize it. The mushi-shi or “mushi master” of the title is Ginko, a young man with a mop of pale hair and a cigarette perpetually dangling from a corner of his mouth, and the ability to detect and work with (or rout out) mushi when they manifest. ]]> Ginko ambles through a world that vaguely resembles medieval or rural Japan, with no cities and no recognizably modern technology. People live off the land, or perform duties that haven’t been seen since the samurai era (like sword-sharpening). Whenever Ginko’s services are needed, he stops for the night and exchanges his skills and expertise for a place to sleep and a meal. It’s not wise for him to stay long in any one place, as mushi-masters are often feared and misunderstood about as much as the creatures they tame and evict. With his quasi-Western clothing and his oddball physical appearance, Ginko’s doubly an outsider—even the outcasts of this world are hesitant to approach him.

Most mushi behave parasitically, like the ones who enter the ear and eat all the sounds that come in and eventually drive their hosts mad. Sometimes their effects are curiously positive—like in the first episode, where a boy’s curious talent for being able to bring drawings to life (as per the Japanese folktale “The Boy Who Drew Cats”) is employed to give peace to his grandmother, stuck in a kind of mushi limbo. Sometimes they are deadly, as when a man discovers his dreams are being brought to life by a mushi and fights back with devastating consequences. In each case Ginko brings his understanding of mushi lore to bear, but he isn’t all-knowing; sometimes he is just as baffled as the people he’s trying to help, and so gradually his wanderings become as much about his own growth as a mushi-master as they are simply a tour of his strange world. The last episode on the disc involves both a mushi of water and a girl who has become its host.

What’s hardest to convey in words is the magical, alien atmosphere of the show—something that manifests in almost every scene. Characters painted on a piece of paper mutate into their primitive hieroglyphic ancestors, peel themselves loose, and fly around the room. A girl walking in the forest finds herself unable to step out of a procession of spirits who pass ceremonial saké back and forth. A flood of silver light gushes from a girl’s unseeing eyes. Swamps drain by themselves and wander off to another part of the countryside. I watch anime to see something new and different, and Mushi-shi is as unlike other anime as anime are unlike other TV shows and movies in the best possible way. ==ext funi=59

Bushido, The Remix Dept.

2009-06-27T21:47:39Z

Samurai Champloo, about which I have raved lovingly, now has its first eight episodes available on the web as a free streaming item courtesy of FUNimation. (Note: English dub only.)

Tick Tick Tick Dept.

2009-06-27T15:19:02Z

The trailer for Roland Emmerich's new apoc-buster 2012 is now online, in QuickTime format. I couldn't watch it more than halfway through without wanting to throw something at the screen -- mainly, my head.

I know that under it all Emmerich is doing nothing more than updating Irwin Allen's disasterpalooza flicks with better hardware and graphics (but not better acting or storylines), but that doesn't make the pandering to the End Is Nigh crowd any less annoying. I know a few too many people who take some form of this garbage seriously -- well, seriously enough to be pests to their co-workers about it, but evidently not serious enough to sell their homes and move to Iceland to wait it out.

It's the compulsive, anything-for-a-good-trailer mindlessness of the whole thing that bugs me, from the re-use of the now very, very tired Mayan calendar nonsense to action-movie heroics that assume people can outrace explosions and natural disasters.

Oh, and in the final money shot, when the tidal wave is causing an aircraft carrier to crash into the White House and everyone probably evacuated days ago, why are the lights still on in the building?

For a contrast, check out a trailer for a movie that actually seems to be well worth catching: Daybreakers.

Scribbler's Delight Dept.

2009-06-27T05:17:51Z

Back at AnimeNext, I mentioned offhandedly to fellow budding writer David S. McCrae "Any writer who wants to call himself one should have a fountain pen." (Paraphrasing from memory, but that was the gist of it.) I wasn't kidding then, and now I think I'm twice as not kidding.

When you write longhand, as opposed to typing, you force yourself to think twice as hard about every word you put down. You make the least do the most. This is not to say that everyone should ditch word processing in favor of longhand for first drafts -- even if J.G. Ballard did that -- but that taking the time every so often to write longhand reminds you, in the most direct way, of what economy of words feels like. I've gone back and edited the last sentence I just typed about three or four times, and I have to ask myself: how much more careful would I have been if I had been writing that out longhand?

Since few of us are keen on the idea of ditching typing entirely, my recommended exercise is either a diary or an idea journal -- in longhand, and with a high-quality pen. I picked up a basic iridium-point and aluminum-barrel fountain pen from Muji in NYC for about $12; the ink cartridges that go into it are a standard-issue variety that cost only a couple of bucks for a pack of five or six. A journal with quality paper will run you about $10-15. Avoid paper of the same gauge that spiral-bound school notebooks use, or paper that is clearly high in pulp content or not far above newsprint. The ink will bleed through and the pen point -- even a good pen -- will snag and skip. Once you get into the habit of writing in a good journal with a quality pen, it starts to feel less like an assignment and more like a luxury.

I know many people who resist writing longhand any chance they get, if only because they admit their handwriting is appalling. (I think penmanship was one of the first things to get dropped, before physical education, in many schools.) If they feel an exercise like this would be tantamount to self-torture, then by all means they should skip it. But for those who savor the contrasts for their own sake....

Clunker Dept.

2009-06-26T13:08:17Z

The toy that does all the playing for/at you - scanners

Why waste spleen on Michael Bay? Because it was 2.5 hours of interminable badness. I'm not being facetious or cute when I say I thought it was much longer than it was. I explained it this way to a friend last night: A critic vents after a bad movie because they feel like they have to retaliate. Imagine you're at a dinner party and you hear some blowhard hold forth on a subject he knows VERY LITTLE about, one you happen to know A LOT about it. Imagine the rising urge to chime in with "Well, actually..." every time the guy says something even more stupid and outrageous than the last thing. Now imagine that guy got the floor for 2.5 hours before you got a chance to speak. THAT'S why critics write angry.

I posted in the same thread, although my comment was a great deal shorter.

Movie critics are most offended by it for reasons I can fathom pretty closely. For the most part, many of them had to sit through it -- it's their job, after all -- and they look at it and say amazing amounts of money and technology thrown away for something that amounts to Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots: Live and In Concert.

So what's the big deal? people say. If someone wants to enjoy a big dumb movie, why not let them? Sure, but there are some of us who feel complicit in a crime against one's imagination whenever we say things like that.

Here's my counter-offer. You want something big and stupid where things blow up? Go see Doomsday. And if someone liked Transformers but took a miss on that one, I'll be scratching my head.

(Update: I've just been informed that bashing Transformers is now officially passé as a blog subject. Next post I return to talking about high school girls who attach automatic weapons to the stumps of severed limbs.)

In Disguise Dept.

2009-06-24T21:46:22Z

I haven't seen the second Transformers movie yet (the first one gave me gout of the soul) but I did think about a couple of things.

1. What would have happened if the Transformers franchise had been brought to the screen by the likes of PIXAR? And I'm not even talking about the animation division; I mean the screenwriters. This is the outfit that gave us a movie (Wall·E) where there wasn't even any dialogue or human characters for more than a third of its running time, and yet I was enthralled and captivated.

2. What would happen if you gave Michael Bay a small budget -- say, $300,000 -- and a digital camera and told him, "Go make the movie you want to make with this money. It doesn't have to have any commercial prospects. It just has to be something you want to make. Funny, beautiful, touching, strange, whatever. Just personal." What kind of movie would you get?

I'd love to try this experiment with any number of directors, but I'm most curious, as odd as this sounds, with applying it to directors of big brainless blockbuster entertainment. It might provide some further fuel for the argument that some bad directors are really good directors at the mercy of stupid material. Or it might prove once and for all that a hack is a hack is a hack.

Off the Deep End Dept.

2009-06-24T03:01:06Z

The official U.S. trailer for Miyazaki's Ponyo on a Cliff is up at the Quicktime site. The unbelievably lame tagline is wince-worthy ("Welcome To A World Where Anything Is Possible" -- thud goes the back of my head against the chair as I doze right off), but after the muddled letdown that was Howl's Moving Castle I'm just grateful he's still making movies.