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The bridge frog to-day. After he swam away from me, I saw three bird swimming nearby, another new kind, I have no idea what and I didn't manage to get a good picture of them. I almost thought they were large ducklings, but they had dark grey, parrot like blunt, curved beaks. They had white circles around their small black eyes and as I watched, one dove underwater and swam like a penguin before coming up with a fish or a small frog the other two birds immediately tried to get from him.
I also saw some ants to-day.
I don't know what they got, but it's not getting away, that's for sure.
I need to study for my Japanese final exam to-morrow. I've already been going over flash cards--I just took all the flash cards I made for the different tests this year and put them together in one big bundle. I think it's the flash cards more than anything else that have helped me this year. I'd never used flash cards before this year--turns out they work like a charm for me. Before I even look at the study guide, I always just memorise all the chapter's vocabulary words.
Anyway, I'd better get back to it.Current Mood:  busy Current Music: "Le Temps de l'Amour" - April March |
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For a show about a mission to "seek out new life and new civilisations," a persistent problem with Star Trek is its repeated use of alien peoples that, for convoluted reasons, just so happen to not only look human but exactly mirror human cultures. In the second season alone, I've seen a Roman world, a 1920s gangster world, and a Nazi world. These aren't necessarily bad episodes, and I can sort of play along, though it's basically depressing. The episode I watched last night, "The Omega Glory", finally just annoyed the shit out of me.
It starts off well enough--The Enterprise encounters a Federation ship devoid of its crew, though the crew uniforms appear to have been left behind. Eventually they discover that the crew contracted a disease that obliterated all water in the human body, turning the people into just, as McCoy says, "a pile of chemicals."
The only survivor is Captain Ron Tracey, whom Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and a Red Shirt discover living among the natives on the planet in violation of the Prime Directive. The basically medieval culture is comprised of people Asian in appearance, and they're locked in an ongoing struggle with white barbarians. Mainly the story seems to be about how the people were descendents of countries that had engaged in devastating biological warfare centuries before, and the disease is a remnant which the contemporary inhabitants had inherited immunity for, as had the natural food supply, which provides the Enterprise crew with the cure they need (except the Red Shirt, who gets shot).
So far, not so bad. Kind of interesting. Then, in the last act, there's this;
Yeah. Turns out the "Yangs", the barbarians, are descendents of "yankees", Americans, and the Asian culture, the "Kohms", are descended from communists.
There's nothing about how these are descendents of Earth settlers, or how an interfering historian or godlike alien implanted Earth cultural information. It's just the champions of liberty apparently are inevitably white and their flag was inevitably red, white, and blue, stars and stripes.
Kirk has this big, grandstanding, growling, Oscar clip speech when the barbarians take over about how liberty isn't just for the Yangs but ought to be for the Kohms as well. But the damage is done. Yech. This is not Star Trek at its best.
The only good thing about the episode is that Sulu is left temporarily in charge of the Enterprise instead of Mr. Scott for some reason. Maybe in an effort head off accusations the episode is racially and politically motivated as it in fact is. But it's nice to see Sulu again--watching the show in production order, I went through ten episodes where George Takei was away shooting The Green Berets. A film which is also not a sterling example of anthropological wisdom.Current Mood:  hungry Current Music: "Cicely" - Cocteau Twins |
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When I was a kid, I had some tiny novelty six sided dice. They were almost like grains of sand, they were so small. I dreamt last night I was marching with an army across a cold, northern country. There was little flora, just mud for miles and as we passed a lake, I spotted some of the tiny dice in the mud and immediately had to dig for more. In the middle of the lake, on the bottom, was a glass walled pod wherein lived a small group of aristocrats and Audrey Hepburn, who was wearing a bright green wool dress. They couldn't leave the lake.
I found a handful of the dice and I gave them to a tall, important man in our army who was wearing a purple robe and the demon mask from the movie Onibaba. He used the dice to make himself invulnerable when he fought an enemy who remained invisible to me for the duration of the dream--not quite invisible, actually, but like he cast some kind of spell that prevented me from looking at him, like The Shadow.
I think the dream was influenced by my viewing of Revenge of the Sith last night. The past few days, I've been watching the prequel trilogy on Blu-Ray. In spite of their flaws, I think I've come to the point where I have to say I like the prequels. I suspect more people like them than are willing to admit it.
I won't say they don't have some serious problems. Attack of the Clones is really just a bad movie, but even that one has elements I respond to. The Phantom Menace, I think, is the most underrated, the one that gets the most undeserved hatred. The only genuine problem I have with it is Jar Jar. Yes, kid Anakin's story isn't as interesting as the protagonist stories of the other movies, but I don't necessarily think it's bad, especially not if you're watching the movie as a little kid. I sympathise with criticism that the kid stuff doesn't sit well with the complex political story, but I can kind of forgive Lucas for making this mistake. After all, the original trilogy films were considered simultaneously kid films and films for grown ups. Maybe it was in deliberately trying to play to both audiences that caused Lucas to stumble with Phantom Menace.
But there are at least four elements that make Phantom Menace good enough for me; Darth Maul, the visual design of Naboo and Coruscant, the pod race, Qui-Gon, Obi-wan, and, especially in Blu-Ray, Queen Amidala's wardrobe.
Gods, I love all her outfits.
In comparison, Attack of the Clones is a complete mess. Visually, it's mostly the noise of too many digitally created environments with no particular coordination, almost rivalling the BioWare games ugliness. Except Kamino--I like the eerie sterility contrasted with the constant rainstorm outside.
But the screenplay, co-written by Jonathan Hales, a television writer, has the superficiality of a television script. Most of the dialogue doesn't resonate with characterisations. I actually don't mind the infamously bad line Anakin has about how coarse sand is--it is bad, but it's bad in a way a teenage boy talking to a girl he was a hard-on for would be. Is it really worse than "scruffy looking nerf herder?" Too many people seem to want these kids to be more badass and adult, and they seem to forget what makes Empire Strikes Back work so well is the youthful vulnerability of Han, Luke, and Leia. The problem with Attack of the Clones is its lack of consistency in the characterisations, particularly in terms of Padme, who the movies seem reluctant to give any character flaws, even in the otherwise very good Revenge of the Sith. But in sort of wanting to like the movies, I started reading more into her character last night than maybe is actually there.
One of the laughable moments in Attack of the Clones is when Anakin tells her he slaughtered sand people children (sand children?) and her response is to kneel beside him and say, "To be angry is to be human," and basically seem to forget about it afterwards. Yet the big deal breaker for her in Revenge of the Sith is when she finds out he murdered younglings (if the word "younglings" had been replaced with "children" throughout the film it would've worked eight times better). I laughed to myself and thought, "It's like she's racist."
And then . . . I thought . . . what if she is racist? It makes sense, after all--although by the end of Phantom Menace, the humans of Naboo were working with the Gungans, but the two peoples had obviously been segregated a long time. I'm not saying Padme was slobbery Tea Party racist, but instinctively. Think about that line again, "To be angry is to be human." It's not so bad, because it's human, unlike the sand people.
I thought more on this and this points to an explanation for another problem--why she falls for Anakin at all. It's clear why Anakin does--he imprints on her after he loses his mother, she's a child in an adult occupation, and he needs to catch up and posses her. It's mixed in with his ambition.
For her--she didn't have a childhood, she's all ideals, but no grasp of things on a ground level. For this reason, Natalie Portman is right for the role--I've come to the conclusion she's not a bad actress but a boring person, someone whose imagination can only create emotions and reactions for boring characters. That's also why she worked so well in Black Swan.
Padme's probably aware on some level that she's led an isolated, stilted life, and her brain computes giving into passion with Anakin as the way of touching the other side of life. Now I start to see how they both have these tragically flawed motives, it actually heightens the effect of the whole trilogy for me.
Twitter Sonnet #386
Gods deliberate Spanish dial tones.
Oxygen jumps the leather nostril pin.
Fogs of cheap blue cotton beset Bones.
Cartilage jello jams up Castro's gin.
Allocations of lozenges deplete.
Manufactured chicanery checks out.
Computers can't casually compete.
Please imagine what pretzels dream about.
Bulbous Elbow language bends the blotter.
Drowning teeth take one last drink of pink gum.
Insulation dripped with nacho solder.
Haitian sake's sex with Osakan rum.
Chance's sand sinks with cocoanut sprinkles.
Pine-Sol's why the wooden star still twinkles.Current Mood:  rushed Current Music: "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" - The Ramones |
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I haven't been able to get any lizards to sit for me so far this year. Not since that baby one a few months ago, anyway. I guess he didn't know any better. The one above scrambled off his post when I stepped up for a macro shot.
After a day of having had too much sleep, to-day I didn't get enough. But I managed to draw a page of comic anyway. I think it's taken me well over a month to draw six pages, ink three and a half, and colour two. I do so hate inking. The pace'll pick up once I'm done with my Japanese final on Monday.
I currently have a 91% in the class, so I guess I don't have a lot to worry about. The teacher spoke to me after class on Monday to compliment me, and asked if I had Japanese friends who were coaching me. I said no, and that I actually felt like I was really struggling. I guess I'm doing better than I feel. Maybe it's just that I want to be so much further than I am. I still can't watch anime without subtitles, and if I can't do that, I haven't won anything, have I?
I'm three episodes into the new GAINAX series, Medaka Box (めだかボックス). The seventh episode aired in Japan yesterday, so I'm a little behind on this one, but I only just heard about it a week and a half ago. I'm reminded of Dantalian no Shoka, GAINAX's previous series, in that it's a much more typical series than what GAINAX is normally associated with, certainly it's a lot more normal than Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt. But at the same time, its consistently good animation and characterisations that don't neatly snap into moe (萌え) cookie cutter patterns set it apart. In fact, it reminds me a bit of 80s high school comedy anime.
It's actually not a harem series. It's a shonen series not about one guy who has a bunch of girls in love with him. Crazy, I know. It has a cast of boy and girl characters in roughly equal number and so far neither sex acts dumber or hornier than the other. At the centre is Medaka Kurokami, head of the student council, and her childhood friend, a boy named Zenkichi Hitoyoshi. There is plenty of fan service, but in sadly almost totally uniquely GAINAX fashion, the show doesn't treat sexuality like something that should never be directly acknowledged by decent women and Medaka's a bit of an exhibitionist. Which is nice, except they've drawn her with breasts so big they're at the point for me where my brain stops taking them as breasts and starts taking them as tumours.
The show is funny, particularly the second episode where Medaka tries to catch someone's runaway dog by dressing as a dog. I'm definitely looking forward to watching more of this show.Current Mood: busy Current Music: "I Would for You" - Jane's Addiction |
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Never separate Shatner from himself. It's too cruel. It's like in the old south when husbands and wives were sold separately to different plantations.
This is from "Return to To-morrow", a pretty good episode about dead, godlike aliens who ask members of the Enterprise crew to allow them the use of their bodies temporarily while they built new android bodies for themselves. Things go horribly wrong, believe it or not. The alien in Spock's body ends up wanting to keep it and convinces the one in the body of Doctor Mulhall to try to keep hers too. This is Doctor Mulhall, who only appears in this episode.
Kirk meets her in the transporter room for the first time when they're about to beam down to the planet. Her appearance interrupts his pre-beam huddle with Spock and McCoy and she's given a close-up from his POV with Most Beautiful Woman in the Galaxy strings on the soundtrack. And she was a looker, which made me almost throw up when I realised she was played by the same actress who played Doctor Pulaski on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Boy, it feels cruel saying that, but it is what it is. Well, to be fair, Pulaski was very boring and she did have a lot of dumb dialogue.
I'm running pretty late to-day because I forgot to set my alarm clock. Fortunately I don't have a very demanding day. Class to-night is just watching the rest of the presentations we didn't get through on Monday. The assignment was to give a presentation based on some aspect of Japanese culture with some visual aid--I did mine on actress Setsuko Hara and I showed clips from Ozu's Late Spring and Kurosawa's The Idiot. They seemed to go over well--I'd post them here, except studio Toho had YouTube send me an angry e-mail about a clip I posted from one of their moves a little while ago. Frustratingly, it was a movie that's not even available in the U.S. Even under the, to say the least, dubious idea that a free clip on YouTube is going to dissuade people from buying the movie--rather than encouraging them to buy it--it makes absolutely no sense and smacks of just a general blanket of corporate meanness.Current Mood: rushed Current Music: "Ring Dem Bells" - Duke Ellington |
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A lot of people seem to be satisfied by a cleverly constructed plot. Last year's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (no commas, commas frighten people) aspires to do more. It doesn't accomplish anything very extraordinary, but it's a perfectly enjoyable spy thriller.
The movie mainly consists of an incredible cast of British actors trying to get information out of one another with casual conversation--John Hurt, Ciaran Hinds, Tom Hardy, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch and, of course, Gary Oldman in the lead role of George Smiley who, as the film opens, is second only to John Hurt's Controller in British Intelligence.
Smiley's story provides an insightful distillation of the whole international cloak and dagger business. He's a cool customer, rarely raising his voice or cracking a smile--his name apparently being a dry bit of humour. He opens up in one scene to his subordinate, played by Cumberbatch, about how he tried to get his nemesis, spymaster Karla, to defect. He tells Cumberbatch that he asked Karla if it wasn't time to acknowledge that the system he served was as meaningless as the system Smiley served.
It's the most emotional part of the movie, which is appropriate since it addresses the buried heart of the whole affair, which is a bunch of men just playing a big chess game with, in the end, little more significance than an actual game of chess except people sometimes get killed while playing.
We learn Smiley's weak spot is his wife, Ann, with whom he has a difficult relationship and whose face we never see. This helps emphasise for us his isolation for his inability to connect with her and therefore helps convey the lonely, disconnected quality of Smiley's business.
Twitter Son6net #385
The three buttons balance in counterfeit.
Cylinders stack in a noisy jacket.
Bubble wedges divide the alphabet.
Streamers stick in the red rusty bracket.
Joke suits excel at storing backup food.
Sins cue yak rook suns to start Doctor Who.
Corduroy token names lighten the mood.
There's nothing a tomato guy can't do.
Taxes interrogate the Latin text.
Orchards of feather dusters sweep the sky.
Unripe limes pelt Tyrannosaurus Rex.
CAT scans of Thor inevitably fry.
Little men pour albums in a young pond.
Rafters taped the film cat auteurs have conned.
May. 15th, 2012 @ 06:55 pm
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| » The Actress |
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For class to-day, the assignment is to do a presentation on some aspect of Japanese culture, so I've decided to talk about Setsuko Hara (原節子). It's nice to be doing an assignment that really puts me in my element, though the twenty sentences in Japanese I was required to write for the presentation don't cover quite as much ground as I'd have liked. I found myself wishing I knew how to say things like "played against type in" and "was active from the 1930s into the early 1960s". Though I sort of like the enigmatic way my presentation ends with, "In 1963, Yasujiro Ozu died. Also, Setsuko Hara retired. She said it was because she hated her job."
I read the first story in the new Sirenia Digest to-day, "HAUPTPLATTE/GEGENPLATTE", which comes across as a nice conflict between Science Fiction and Fantasy. Instead of simply the broader treatment usually used for the theme, where a young protagonist must deal with the real, adult world eclipsing youthful imagination, Caitlin gives us a story about two people whose perspectives are at war. We never really find out who's right--the girl who says she's a dragon that's been transformed by a sorcerer or the woman who says she's performing surgery and genetic manipulation on a girl to make her into a dragon. And it's perfect that we never find out, because it keeps us in the volatile neutral zone of creation, as each pole deploys new psychological tactics to make its perspective real. It's a very interesting way of using the fundamental differences between Science Fiction and Fantasy to explore the intimate nature of the creative process itself.
May. 14th, 2012 @ 03:19 pm
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| » A Scandalous Affair, Within Reason, Don't Let's Get Carried Away |
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In 1946's Gilda, when asked if she was decent, Rita Hayworth replied with a famous, incredulous, "Me?!" If the same question had been put to her character in 1952's Affair in Trinidad, she may have responded, "Of course I'm decent! How dare you insinuate otherwise! I won't have it!" That's one of the key reasons Affair in Trinidad, while having its good points, isn't half the movie Gilda is.
Comparisons are invited by the fact that Affair in Trinidad paired Hayworth again with her Gilda co-star, Glenn Ford, the story's set south of the border, Hayworth plays a bar singer, and Ford is often shown smouldering with jealousy watching her perform with apparent gleeful abandon.
But while that jealousy and cruel hedonism reflect a truly, wonderfully nasty story of sex and reciprocal psychological torture in Gilda, in Affair in Trinidad it's an infinitely duller story of Hayworth being forced to act interested in her husband's killer by the police so that she can get evidence against him, and she can't, for convoluted reasons, let her husband's brother (Ford) in on it, despite the fact that the two of them have fallen in love.
All the character motives are based on the machinations of the police investigating her husband's death and crimes related to it. Ford's character is sanitised, too--instead of a small time hustler trying to make it big running a casino, he's just some guy who wants to know the truth about his brother. We learn practically nothing about him otherwise.
Hayworth still looked great in 1952, though subtly haggard, perhaps an indication of her private emotional difficulties. She's introduced performing a pretty fantastic number barefoot (she's dubbed with another singer, but the dancing's still good), though its lyrics about men blaming themselves for falling for her are curiously opposite to those from the song used in Gilda, "Put the Blame on Mame", and far less naughty.
May. 13th, 2012 @ 05:03 pm
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| » A Second Rate Mattress |
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My childhood memories have a more favourable impression of 1971's Bedknobs and Broomsticks than I did watching it last night. It's not an altogether bad film, but I remember enjoying it more--or enjoying having it on while eating dinner or something when I was a kid. I remember often seeing it piecemeal; I remember often not getting past the animated segment. Yet it was the end of the movie that I liked most when I watched it last night, though I couldn't blame anyone for getting bored during the very lame, sadly typical example of animation in the 1970s.
Angela Lansbury and David Tomlinson are both well cast and their characters aren't so badly written that these two good actors couldn't make something genuinely interesting out of them. There's something I really love about a woman making genuine magic from a guy thinking he's getting away with a con. Eglantine Price is nicely both practical and casually fantastic (until she casually and bafflingly disavows witchcraft at the very end of the movie), and Emelius Browne is a nervous man with small dreams who inadvertently sets big things into motion which Eglantine barely seems to want to slow down to let him process. It's a very nice dynamic, its full potential not quite exploited.
Too much time is spent with the three cockney orphans with which the film's saddled, who rarely react to things with the effective credibility of the kids in Mary Poppins. The Bedknobs and Broomsticks kids cry or fuss almost at random, never when it seems right for the mood of the moment.
The movie had the same (credited) director and musical composers as Mary Poppins, but perhaps we can see the effect of Walt Disney's absence in the far more limply contrived 1971 film. Disney used to have the composers come up to his office and play "Feed the Birds" for him in his office, just because he loved to hear it. I somehow doubt the Disney studio head in 1971 felt the same way about "Portobello Road". As with so many movies, Walt Disney personally oversaw nearly every aspect of Mary Poppins' production.
But of course Walt's absence is most clearly felt in the animated segment in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. It'd been a while since I'd watched animation from Disney's slump period, and I was amazed not merely by superficial things like terribly obviously recycled frames from other movies, but the general lack of life. The football match is a compilation of static shots that feel very static, containing nothing of the mad energy of the fox hunt in Mary Poppins.
However, following the animated sequence is a surprisingly effective climax to the film where Eglantine uses her spell to animate inanimate objects to raise an army of museum armour to attack a small force of Nazis who've secretly landed in England (the movie's set during World War II).
It's wonderful, creepy, and exciting to see the amassed forces of antique medieval equipment on the hills, ready to defend England while the witch commanding them flies above with a sabre. Which makes it all the more depressing when the payoff is just three or four of the armour sets engaging in slapstick comedy with the Nazi buffoons.
So, it's not something I can say is a wholly bad film, but comparing it to Mary Poppins it's certainly an illuminating illustration of how much of what made the Disney company great was Walt Disney himself.
Twitter Sonnet #384
Most microwaves are never fertilised.
Ice thoughts spread in the unborn burrito.
Yellowed edges make no Hot Pocket eyes.
Radiation space sleeps in utero.
Parentheses candy contains white sod.
Airplane aprons staged a home cooked blitzkrieg.
Olympic jewellers pushed a diamond cod.
Breathing basketballs will soon also beg.
We win with tanning bed unicycles.
Hollow, difficult seats push us all up.
Tears tell of pumpkin terraced icicles.
Tiny thimbles filled the space buttercup.
Shorter buzz saws ramble on lemongrass.
Black rain arrests the too cold coffee class.
May. 12th, 2012 @ 05:05 pm
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| » The Bridge |
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My bullfrog neighbour again. He sure looks happy. He just sits under his bridge watching everyone go by. I feel like one day he's going to present riddles to those seeking to cross.
Here's a better picture I posted on Facebook last week;
I've been in a good mood for a few days now, ever since my professional registration for Comic-Con went through. I guess it's kind of dumb, but it's a huge relief knowing I'll be able to go. I've been going to the Con for more than a decade and it would feel pretty crummy getting left out this year. I don't know why I love it so much, there's just so much going on there that I'm into.
Professional registration is free, and I'm kicking myself for never trying this before. I think it costs 175 dollars now for a four day pass. I see in 2002 I wrote; "Just found out that the Comicon costs actually 25 dollars to get in instead of the 20 dollars that I thought, so, since I'm paying for both Trisa and myself, I need to figure out to-day where to get an extra ten dollars." I wonder if I went for all four days. Gods, my old entries are annoying. I guess it's not weird I feel ten years older than the guy who wrote that entry. I see it was 2006 when I posted my first long Con Report, which began, "I got into the Comic-Con at about 11:30am to-day, and walked into hall H where, to my surprise, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez were onstage, just starting to talk about their new "double feature" movie called Grindhouse." Things have changed. The idea of just waltzing into Hall H to see a big panel in progress is so far fetched. You have great hairballs of Twilight fans clogging the queue filter now. The hairball metaphor works because of all the frizzy hair.
2009 was the first year I went with a camera and got photos and video. I oughta be posting more this year, so stay tuned, this July.
May. 11th, 2012 @ 04:43 pm
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