Sons of Loki

I think I’ve only been to the Hyde Park Picture House three times, but I really should go more often; it’s cheaper than Vue, closer to my house, and is the most adorable independent cinema you could hope for (and that’s something worth supporting in this day and age), and nearing its centennial.

Tonight we saw Never Let Me Go, based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. It wasn’t my first choice – I was thinking of seeing Black Swan or True Grit, which have better ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, but I’m glad I saw it. It wasn’t a great film, but I think it’s important to watch films that are nearly great to understand what makes the best films really special. Plus, the storyline really interested me more than ballerina battles or Western remakes (though I’m sure they’re great films and I will get round to seeing them when I can).

There’s a school. There are children and teachers and singing. But there is a mystery! The mystery gets explained pretty early on, but it’s the concept, not the twist, which is pretty much central to the film. The idea’s been done before (see Ursula Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas and – oh yeah, of course! – way back in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov¹) but it’s still a really rich concept and the way the film explores it is watchable enough. But it doesn’t quite explore it enough. I was left with questions – why don’t they just run away? Why do people put up with this? Why do they use expensive schools and country estates? How does the system work?

Granted, these aren’t the important things; they’re more a kind of nerdy curiosity that can get in the way of a good story far too often. I think you’re just meant to assume it’s all dealt with, and to suspend disbelief – but how far should a film require you to suspend disbelief? If the outcome was compelling enough, could you make a story that defied all logical sense?

In the end it all comes down to a rather harrowing scene which portrays the film’s main metaphor; mankind brings all his greatest works and arguments to God and asks for just a little more time, and God says no. (Shades of Blade Runner in there, when I think about it.) It’s a powerful idea, and a good story, but I couldn’t get over the central idea the film asks you to swallow. I just don’t believe it could be allowed to happen.

¹from Chapter 4: “Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It’s beyond all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future?  … I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”

So what’s been going down? Not much, I don’t think. Due to my poor long-term memory, I generally have to reconstruct my life from photos I took and mails I received, Memento-style. This will probably be quite rambling.

Last week I seem to have watched Brother, by Takeshi Kitano (currently appearing in ads for some English teaching school), which was a bit pants, to be honest. It’s like Kitano has no idea how to direct Americans, so he asks them to wave their arms around and speak in expository dialogue at all times (it’s painful to watch the talented Omar Epps (of House fame) churn out such stilted dialogue). Nevertheless, the clash of Yakuza with LA is pretty fun to watch, even if it completely loses the plot in the last act.

Then I recorded a commercial for my speech class, where I played an influenza suffer who is cured by the magic of Japanese natto. I haven’t had natto in two years. It hasn’t got any better. I mean, it’s less of a vomit-inducing unpalatableness than I remember, but it’s just … unpleasant to eat.

I went to Shinjuku, where a chugger asked me for some money for charity. Now, don’t get me wrong, I give to charity and I think it’s the duty of everyone to make at least some kind of regular contribution. It’s just that I don’t give to charities I’ve never heard of. This guy, as most Japanese street collectors are, was collecting for places hit by heavy snow in Japan and while I certainly wouldn’t wish natural disasters on anyone, the fact is that I’d rather give my money to third-world nations rather than a first-world country with the second biggest economy in the world.

They obviously only pick on foreigners, because he called out to me in English. I feigned lack of comprehension, so he asked if I was Portuguese. I waved my hands and then gave up and popped a handful of change into his box.

Speaking of charities; you may wish to consider a donation to whistleblowing site Wikileaks, who have found themselves in a spot of financial bother. These guys are fighting for free speech, and not just in an abstract way; this site has brought about a lot of exposure on everything from Guantanamo Bay doctrine to the recent Carter-Ruck super-injuction.

The weekend was fun. Went for karaoke in Kichijoji with Kanako, Katy, Miles and Rob, sang the usual; bit of 80s Japanese punk, 90s Britpop, 00s rap.


Saturday wandered about Shinjuku with Katy and (eventually) went for ramen. I believe Chris wanted to see what people wear in Tokyo, so here we go:



(and isn’t Flickr so much nicer than FB’s ultra-JPEG?)

In the evening, headed to Musashi-Sakai to meet Rob and Miles where we feasted upon Subway sandwiches and bought dairy products from a local combini and ate them on a bench outside a hairdressers for reasons I can no longer remember.

And now it’s today! It snowed last night, so I went to ICU today and we had a little bit of a snowball fight. Then I got the Specials album off iTunes (it makes it so easy to whittle away all your money in tiny chunks, doesn’t it) and am thoroughly enjoying all the tracks I have sort of picked up from cultural osmosis.

I’d withdrawn the last of my JASSO for this month, so I thought I’d have one last jaunt before school starts again on Monday. I thought about a trip to Mount Takao, the first bit of nature you hit when you reach the edge of Tokyo which I’d gone to back in 2007, but then I thought I could go watch Jimmy Cameron’s new movie Avatar and the thought of trekking to Fuchu and watching a flick seemed rather more appealing than spending two hours hiking a mountain in the cold with no breakfast and little sleep, so I booked my tickets online (can you believe there’s no IMAX cinemas in Tokyo?) at Toho Cinema in Fuchu (excellent English support from them, so top marks), got a nice centre-back seat, and headed kino-wards at 12:30.

I’d vaguely heard about Avatar last year as the movie that was supposed to change filmmaking forever or something, but I think everyone assumed it wouldn’t live up to the hype. I was surprised, then, when Mark Kermode enjoyed it, and then I started seeing the results on Twitter and Facebook, people saying how incredible it was, so I thought I’d better catch it.

Now, 3D films have been around for a year or so now, but this is the first one I’d seen (disregarding stuff like IMAX and theme park shows), so I was interested in how the 3D effect worked over a proper, 140 minute feature film. And – well, it’s a gimmick, like everyone says. I think it works well in a blockbuster like Avatar, though, where the focus is mainly visual.

I am, at heart, a SF geek, and Avatar captured me right away with its depiction of how stuff might look in the future; there’s a beautiful opening scene of everyone getting out of their cryostasis pods and floating in zero-g. I thought the facemasks were a nice touch, too; spacesuits are so 20th century. Even the spaceship was better designed than most sci-fi hulks (based on a weird but realistic design, and the geek in me squirmed that the radiator panels were glowing red with dissipated heat, something that real spaceships would do but no one has ever put in a film before).

But Avatar is a movie in two worlds; the action-packed space marines with their cool toys and gunships and grenade launchers, and the peaceful, tree-hugger Na’vi. And the 12-year old WH40K fan in me loved the Marines and all their bombastic splendour, which I know is wrong, but I just can’t help but get excited about giant mecha battlesuits on the big screen. It’s a strange guilt.

It reminded me of Cameron’s Aliens, in fact, right down to the no-nonsense spunky female dropship pilot. (And indeed, who’s to say that the sketchily-defined, morally-dubious Company doesn’t grow up to become Weyland-Yutani, that the Marines don’t become Colonial, and that Sigourney Weaver’s character in the film doesn’t have a oddly-reminiscent granddaughter called Ellen? I smell prequel) And while everyone knows Aliens was all about Vietnam, Avatar is clearly about Iraq. Big business wants a valuable resource that happens to be buried underneath all these hapless villagers. If you provoke them, they’ll start a war, and you can roll in and grab the spoils… One of the characters basically says this half-way through. It’s hardly subtle, but it’s something to chew on.

So? I loved it. It created a world. It looks stunning; some of the best CG ever committed to digital celluloid. It’s got a little more depth than most blockbusters. It’s a fun watch. It’s a classic. Okay, so it’s not great in the sense of Citizen Kane great or Godfather great, but it’s a solidly good movie.

My main problem was the Na’vi. They’re a little lame. The only original aspect of them is that cool brain-link thing, and even that is the old telepathic talks-to-the-animals thing. They’re basically Space Indians, or Noble Savage Aliens, and I thought they were a little lazily thought-out. Why would alien beings use bows and arrows ? Why would they wear bikinis? Why would they kiss to express love? (Hell, many human cultures don’t do that.)

They’re such a big part of the film, it depresses me that we get the same old brave warriors and mighty chief shit. Alien cultures can be fantastically weird; like Niven’s Puppeteers, who have scientifically proven that they have no soul and hence for whom cowardice, not martyrdom, is the noblest virtue; or, I don’t know, a certain alien species Cameron may be familiar with, which reproduces by jumping on your face and laying a foetus in your chest. I mean, just an idea off the top of my head; the moon Pandora is in orbit around a massive Jupiter-like gas giant. Which means that every time a Na’vi looks at the night sky, there is a gigantic broiling sphere of cloud staring down at them and taking up half the sky, and all its children circle around it changing phases. If I were Na’vi, I’d worship the huge thing in the sky, not a tree, but I digress.

Anyway, I promised myself that after this treat I’d finish the damn sakubun, so I found a nearby branch of Starbucks and chilled out (literally – there was no room inside so I had to sit outside in the cold until a seat opened up in the warm). I spoke a little Japanese to the barista, was reminded of Sully’s struggles with the Na’vi tongue, then sat down and ploughed through the sakubun. I put in a few cool phrases I’d noted down from Planetes, and I suddenly realised I was enjoying Japanese again. The simple joy of writing is the same in any language, of stringing together the right words in the right order to get your point across. Strange.

"Let's never come here again, because it would never be as much fun."

I love this film. As I tell everyone, I hated it the first time, loved it the second. I love this film because of Tokyo, and I love Tokyo because of this film. I remember someone in Metropolis once called it (specifically Scarlett Johansson) “the reason why we’re all here in the first place”, which is stretching it as a little, but as a stunning depiction of all the glamour of Tokyo and all the loneliness and alientation and existential angst of actually living there I think it sums things up.

Good morning, Mr. Ben. It’s about six-thirty, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Ah, just laying here in the bed: half awake, half asleep, thinkin’ aboutcha…

It’s about seven o’clock, Norwich, sitting here listening to Johann Johannsson’s “Part 1: IBM 1401 Processing Unit“, a hauntingly beautiful piece of classical music incorporating recordings of electronic tones generated by an old IBM 1401 mainframe, thinking about Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht, or Will to Power, or will to pleasure, or at least some slightly different version. It has occurred to me that everyone is in it for themselves. Politicians want power, obviously. Hedge-fund managers want money. Nuns want everyone to respect them as paragons of virtue. Philanthropists want people to see how kind they are, or (if they donate anonymously) are donating to feel the warm fuzzy feeling of being charitable. People who sacrifice their lives for a cause are doing it because they want to achieve something after death and be remembered as heroes. And so forth: no one ever truly does anything for other people without having something in it for themselves. Depressing? Perhaps not. It’s just the way things are.

I’m sorry, that was a bit sixth-form philosophy-y.

Saw Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds last night – actually the first Tarantino film I’ve seen in the cinema, or been old enough to see in the cinema – and was genuinely (and pleasantly) surprised. I’d heard mixed reviews, about Tarantino having lost his touch and being far too up his own arse to make a good film any more, but – both those things are true, and yet Tarantino is still a wonderful director, and Basterds is as good as Kill Bill, if nothing more. Some of the post-modern trickery he loves to employ is a little hackneyed (an unseen narrator popping in, drawing notations on the screen) but they’re still entertaining, particularly the twist of a certain character and subplot which you expect to rear up later but which gets literally shot to pieces with absolutely no fanfare halfway through and isn’t referred to again. Such genius! Such talent! Etc. And there’s a particularly gorgeously-shot scene with Mélanie Laurent in a red dress leaning next to of a window, with anachronistic David Bowie playing in the background.
True, I nearly groaned at the final line: “You know, I think this might be my masterpiece” – followed by a cut to “INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS” and the credits. It’s not his masterpiece by any means – that’d still be Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction – but in an age of so much shit cinema, it seems desperately unfair to berate Tarantino for not living up to his previous work.

Kinda want to learn German or French now, still.

Before that, yesterday, we were intending to head to the park but for various reasons we ended up at Shaun’s – that’s Seb and Rob and Steve and me – and I’d brought my mandolin. Shaun got down his sister’s guitar, and Steve and I had a tiny jam. I have very rarely had the opportunity to jam with people, but it’s stupendously good fun, and makes me look forward to the time I start a chart-storming electrobluegrass band. Then we wheeled out Shaun’s keyboard and spent an hour or two playing any old crap – not very well, but having a great time nevertheless.

Yes, it’s 19:11 and I’m listening to Ennio Morricone’s “The Surrender” which Tarantino pilfered for the Inglourious soundtrack, sun setting outside, pink notebook before me, PC at Shaun’s so I got the laptop hooked up to the big monitor, thinking about Japan, where practically everyone from my course now is buying things from vending machines and looking at skyscrapers and hanging about in airports and eating sushi and doing all the awesome things I can’t do and now those 32 days seem longer than ever. But I’ll survive. I don’t even know why I can’t abide the wait. Japan isn’t that great. But it is very, very great. I just think back to a moment in Shinjuku or Shibuya or Ikebukuro, dashing through the rain-drizzled, neon-soaked streets from bar to bar at midnight with people I barely knew, where I just felt incredibly, unbelievably happy. Ah, it’ll come soon enough.