Rezeptor

End of the Line

2006-05-16T10:33:00.000-07:00

This Blog has been moved. For more current entries, see the new location. Thanks.

Max Färberböck - Aimee and Jaguar (1)

2006-04-24T12:43:00.000-07:00

It is one of the secrets of the creative process that a bunch of people who sound like they haven't the first glimpse of what they are doing, or why, can produce something profound and moving. Comparing, in this case, the cast and crew interviews on the DVD with the movie itself, the dichotomy couldn't be greater. Where the movie is a masterpiece for so many reasons and in so many ways (and in spite of its occasionally stilted acting in the tradition of the German Kleines Fernsehspiel), the comments of the people who made it fall amazingly short. Most telling was Maria Schrade, who in the space of under two minutes mentioned no less than six times that the fact that it was a lesbian lovestory didn't matter at all. Form and function, quite at odds, but thanks for the effort.
When Brokeback Mountain made it big recently, some German critic complained how utterly unthinkable a like movie would be in a German setting - two male blue collar workers in the Ruhrgebiet getting it on - the opposite of cool and moving (I'm transcribing liberally here)(which, funny enough, is just one little typo away from literally, as I just discovered). But Aimee and Jaguar is that movie, and both the fact that it tells a true story, and the backdrop of the apocalyptic insanity of Berlin during the end of the Second World War, heighten the intensity of its message. I don't want to compare Brokeback Mountain and Aimee and Jaguar to each other, both movies are great achievements in their own right, but I do think they should have the right to marry each other and have lots of kids. I'd love to see them.

Oliver Stone - The Doors (2)

2006-04-21T12:37:00.000-07:00

When I get tired while watching one of Oliver Stone's docudramas, is it because my attention span has been lamentably brought down from what would be a decent standard, or because Stone tends to overload his movies with too much information about his ever intriguing subjects? In this case, the effect was exacerbated by Stone wanting to show Morrison's death as a sudden event and an abrupt ending, rather than a conclusion, which means that - unless you knew when he died, in which case the occasional chapter-like caption indicating the time of the action would give you a hint - you'd be well into the third hour until you felt the end approaching. By that time it had become my friend, indeed. Kilmer's acting, however, the amazing script, and, of course, the soundtrack all make this a wonderful treat. The cliche notion of the artist as a messianic figure, burning brightly so the audience doesn't have to, yet gets to enjoy the warmth vicariously I didn't care too much about, but Stone doesn't push it too hard, and Morrison's particular blaze drowns the light of reasoned argument in his great balls of fire anyway. Oops, wrong band.

Robert Towne - Tequila Sunrise (3)

2006-04-20T18:19:00.000-07:00

The plot of this odd movie about the unlikely friendship between a drug enforcer cop and a big time coke dealer doesn't make too much sense, and the love story thrown in doesn't help either. The script at times seems incoherent, as though the writers didn't quite know where to take it. The hairdos and dresscode are a vivid reminder of everything that was bad about the eighties, but the single worst thing about this movie has to be the signature Sexophone that starts whining every time romance lurks in the shadows. Puh-lease. The highlight of the movie is Raul Julia as the mexican druglord Carlos. The plot surrounding him, especially the supposed eight years of covertly working with the DEA, without them knowing that he wasn't a Mexican official, diesn't make any sense, but his acting does.

François Ozon - Swimming Pool (2)

2006-04-17T16:52:00.000-07:00

About halfway through the movie I realized that I was waiting in vain, and that the strong sense of tension probably wasn't going to be relieved by some big event. Turns out I was wrong, but I'd still say that this is a movie about ideas more than about events. An aging, repressed and puritan writer of mystery novels is sent to France to find inspiration, finds her missing psychological counterpart instead, in a young promiscuous and hedonisitic woman, and embraces her worldview, to return to her editor with a book that reflects her maturation. How much of the plot truly happened, and how much of it just reflects the story she writes is anybody's guess, but the cinematography and design is consistently geat and very subtle, and the atmosphere of unresolved tension is almost palpable throughout.

Alex Gibney - Enron (2)

2006-04-17T16:50:00.000-07:00

The biggest corporate scandal of our time, explained. Before I saw this, I feared to see the ruthless and ingenious machinations of evil people would get me agitated without offering a way out. But to see the ruthless machinations of evil people leaves me incredulous for their lack of ingenuity, and the problem turns out not to be a few crooks, but a fundamentally flawed system. None of it should have happened, but scores of investment bankers and brokers fell for the nude emperor, because they had stock in non-clothing. Sure enough, there are a few monstrous moments, as when the Californian energy grid is played for money, but overall, it's just business as usual. How horrible.

David McKean / Neil Gaiman - MirrorMask (2)

2006-04-15T20:32:00.000-07:00

Neil Gaiman's work is a bit of a paradox to me. I like his storytelling and inventiveness - if sometimes reluctantly, for excessive use of pathos -, but visually he consistently seems to be balancing on the fringes of a realm of exuberant quirkyness and fantasy running wild that gives me the creeps for all the wrong reasons. This movie is no exception, with a neat twist on good/evil dichotomies, a likable set of characters, and oodles of visual frills. But several of the ideas here are so enjoyable (the birdmonkeys, sphinx/cats and the pair of giants being just three of the more memorable), that the flaws don't much matter. Maybe I can even bring myself to read the Sandman one of these days. Why? Because it's there.

Kenna - New Sacred Cow (3)

2006-04-15T17:24:00.000-07:00

Talk of this album constitutes almost an entire chapter of Galdwell's Blink. Apparently, many distinguished figures in the music industry heard Kenna's music and were deeply impressed, but when focus group testing was done, the audience was unimpressed, and radio stations were very reluctant to play Kenna's stuff. Gladwell uses this as an illustration of the fact that focus group testings aren't as meaningful as the judgments of experts and can be very misleading, but I beg to differ. Maybe the fact that one of those impressed experts was a member of U2, those toe curling dogooders, should have tipped me off - I am absolutely with the focus group on this one. This is lifeless, uninpsired music and doesn't speak to me at all. Maybe an entirely different argument could be made from this - about how too much expertise can drive you into the obscurity of private passions no non-expert can understand or appreciate. Or maybe U2 is just full of shit. I like that theory.

Malcolm Gladwell - Blink (2)

2006-04-15T17:05:00.000-07:00

With the Tipping Point being so entertaining to read, the momentum just carried me right into Gladwell's newer book on the importance of subconscious snap judgments for all aspects of our lives. Of course there is quite some evidence saying that even when we make seemingly rational decisions, our brains may just be bullshitting us profoundly (in Gazzanigas famous experiments on split brain patients, for example, subjects readily report completely bogus reasons for an action, because the half of their brain speaking, having no clue why the other half did something, makes up a story - without the subject being aware that he's being conned by the gooey stuff in his head. But I digress), so the phenomenon that the resons for our decisions and actions aren't always available to our conscious self might just be the tip of the problem that we actually come up with explanations for our actions after the fact by default, and the only reason it tends to make sense so much is that we have been around ourselves long enough to generally know what we will be doing, and have a fairly good theory of our own minds. The most important part of this book I found to be the notion that we are able to shape how our subconscious makes its decisions, and the chapter on how requiring conscious justifications messes up and changes our judgments - unless we're experts and already know what we're talking about. Next time somebody asks you why you like something, think twice about thinking about it - you suddenly might not like it any more.

Hayao Miyazaki - Hauru no Ugoku Shiro (1)

2006-04-13T12:35:00.000-07:00

I still remember being blown to pieces by Mononoke-hime, and it's hard to imagine anything ever will surpass Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, but Hauro ranks a close (Totoro!) third in the Miyazaki charts. While the plot becomes impenetrable in more than one place, the mysteriousness of what's going on just adds to the dreamlike quality of the story. The fire demon is a delight, the design a visual triumph, and the characters, in their moral murkyness typical for Miyazaki, likable even when they are the closest anyone can come to evil in his universe. I could maybe have done with a little less screentime for his usual themes of the evils of war and industrialism, but since even those looked good, I won't bicker. See it if you haven't, see it again if you have.

Malcolm Gladwell - The Tipping Point (2)

2006-04-11T13:58:00.000-07:00

Friends tell me I've read this book several years ago and liked it, but try as I might, I can't remember it. Upon (re?)reading it now, I have an explanation of why that might be. The general theme - social phenomena are subject to nonlinear mechanisms that mean minimal causes in the right place or time can have enormous effects - is of the variety that is so obvious once you get it, you immediately forget the person who told you. Something that obvious doesn't have an author, or a form, it's just an impresonal truth. The book is an entertaining and insightful read, but I can already feel the particulars fading in my mind. In a few years I'll be ready to read it again.

Sidney Lumet - Network (3)

2006-04-06T15:02:00.000-07:00

A justified message hardly ever gets better, when it is preached instead of told subtly, and Network makes no difference. This drama of a unscrupulous bunch of network executives turning TV news into a quota hungry travesty akin to a televangelism sideshow would have been much stronger if there weren't several droning monologues of the main character about the evils of television. It is somewhat ironic that a movie that accuses audiences of blindly gobbling up sensationalism and following any and every leader, if he shouts loud enough, and the executives of ruthlessly exploiting this lack of maturity, resorts to propaganda to try and get its message across, not trusting its own audience, either. Just who, one wonders, are the writers trying to talk to here, and what do they really want to say? As it stands, the message seems to be that since audiences are dumb sheep, the producers of media need to be responsible shepherds. That message is snobbery so close to the opinions held by the films villains as to make it hard to take its scathing criticism of western society seriously. Network has its nice moments - some of Peter Finch's madman preaching is quite cute, as is the cinematography and the acting -, but overall, it disappoints.

Rockstar Games - Grand Theft Auto San Andreas (2)

2006-04-03T14:30:00.000-07:00

The only reason this excellently designed and written killer game doesn't get a top rating from me, is all the killing. I'm all in favor of frying Doom's demons, hunting evil unreal aliens or shooting down robots in the Descent series, to name just a few of the blow'em'ups I've played over the years, but the stark realism of the environment do make a difference, I think. When you can just jog down a street, whip out the gun and shoot a few people in purple tees, just because they wear purple tees (and would soon start shooting at you, anyway, since you're dressed in green), or jacking weapons from a National Guard depot is accomplished by shooting the protecting soldiers, it all feels a bit too much like real life for complete comfort. That said, the gameplay is terrific and the scenery breathtaking - and I've only seen the quarter or so of the game world that is modeled on Los Angeles so far. The only annoyance concerns saving games, which can only be done at the players home base, and only between missions. With some of the missions having tricky parts that you only get to after sometimes minutes of driving, having to repeatedly do all of one of them just to figure out the tricky bit can be a bit of a drag.

Kathleen Meyer - How to Shit in the Woods (3)

2006-04-03T14:29:00.000-07:00

A subject certainly worthy of discussion, the discussion of how to excavate properly in the great outdoors and the health and environmental hazards connected with it, may be stretched a bit thin over the length of an, albeit short, book. A chapter in a general book on life outdoors would have been more appropriate. Even so, Meyer's tone is refreshingly unconcerned with propriety - she explains about the difficulties getting it right in the introduction - and the stories she has collected can be entertaining. The biggest value for me was to learn about history and mechanism of the diseases - like Giardia - that make drinking unprocessed surface water such a hazard these days. The practical tips seemed nothing common sense wouldn't have you know already, though maybe it's a good thing to see them spelled out.

Battlestar Galactica (2)

2006-03-30T15:16:00.000-08:00

While parts of the second season of the new Galactica drag just as badly as the first - in particular the plot elements concerned with the Cylon masterplan and the impending birth of the child of doom are stretched so thin as to be practically impreceptible. Also, the density of journalists and the political and social structure of the fleet still don't make much sense other than as commentary on the US today. On the plus side, the acting, set design and the general military mood are great, and the writing, which is generally quite good, of the last few episodes of the second season in particular was excellent. Partly because the main plotline, stalled by the arrival of the Pegasus and its semifascist admiral, finally started moving, but also because the usual seriousness was spiced up with some nice humorous elements. A welcome relief from the heavy handedness which some of the political and moral issues were presented with. The explanation for how the humans were detected (the atomic blast was picked up a year later and a light year away) is a nice nod to physics (though you have to wonder where this nebula clad planet is located for there to be something of interest just a lightyear away. Ah, well). I'm looking forward to the next season, which is slated for airing starting October.

John Wyndham - The Kraken Wakes (1)

2006-03-25T23:32:00.001-08:00

How refreshing, after reading a lot of idea driven, gimmicky SF, to discover this. I found it in the bookstore run by the Friends of the Berkeley public library, among pulp paperbacks, and though I'd never heard of Wyndham, was intrigued by the cover art and the fact it had come out on Penguin. The story is a crossover between Capeks wonderful War with the Newts and Well's War of the Worlds, with an extraterrestrial menace, quite possbily flying in from Jupiter, settling in the deeps of earths oceans, and proceeding to exterminate the bothersome land mammals. The story is gripping - though the solutions's alomost perfect parallel to Wells' is a bit disappointing - but the true strength of the book lies in the two main characters, a married couple of radio documentary writers, who witness most of the events from close up, but have hardly any active part in the matters at all. This viewpoint lends the story enormous credibility, based on the one hand in the strong execution of characterization and background, but also in the familiarity of events unfolding on a large scale that one is powerless to stop or alter, yet keeps reflecting upon and discussing as though one did. Finally, the acerbic depiction of cold war diplomacy at the height of madness is the crowning piece on a very nice cake.

Robert Altman - McCabe and Mrs Miller (1)

2006-03-25T23:32:00.000-08:00

The meticulous recreation of buildings and social networks of the little digger town somewhere in the cold American Northwest is enough to make this gem worth watching, but the story of McCabe and Mrs Miller that Altman set against this backdrop is in itself touching and rewarding. A very unusual Western, if you want to call it that, with an uncompromising ending. Very interesting to watch the special features, too. Some documentary on the making of the movie, and a movie trailer, both not badly done, but horribly, horribly dated, to the point of being hilarious, while the movie itself is timeless. must be the difference between art and craft.

The Sopranos - Season 6 (2)

2006-03-24T18:01:00.000-08:00

My favorite family of criminals is back, but so far I'm none too sure about how happy I should be about it. The first episode caused mostly consfusion, for its lack of continuity - for instance how come Tony and Carmela are as harmonious again as we see them, was there any fallout from the horrible murder of Adriana that made last seasons second to last episode so intensely hard to watch - and for its lack of direction. Nothing is happening we haven't seen many times before, no plot is advanced, right up until the moment Tony gets shot by Junior, who seems to be truly demented by now, but also might be scheming again. The second episode then has us all watch Tony linger in limbo, while his spiritual and bodily fate are being decided. The metaphorical, dreamlike sequences are nice to watch, but once again the episode doesn't advance much. Except maybe for AJ's promise of a revenge killing.

Myst IV: Revelation (2)

2006-03-22T15:55:00.000-08:00

The Myst game series has an odd quality about it. Some of the puzzles are frustratingly complex, and hardly make any sense within the stories, which in addition tend to abound with psychological cliches. But of course the strength of Myst lies in the design of the worlds, called Ages, in which it is set, and Revelation is no exception to these rules. The cliched story is accompanied here by some pretty horrific acting efforts, and the difficulty of at least one of the puzzles verges on the ridiculous, with another one being bad enough for a character within the game to suggest that if you get too frustrated, you should go away and try again later. But, oh, the Ages. Tomahna is a cluster of buildings in a sheltered cove that I wouldn't hesitate to move into in an instant, Spire a marvellously desolate and forbidding hovering crystal tower, Haven a lush jungle full of strange creatures, and Serenia a cool looking mix of several stone masonry cultures. Just walking around in these environments would be a pleasure, and the occasional riddle adds to that a nice sense of involvement.

Dan Simmons - The Rise of Endymion (3)

2006-03-22T15:54:00.000-08:00

While certainly better than it's two predecessors, this final installment in the Hyperion story still subtracts from the original book. Why do sequels always fall so badly short of truly adding to a work, and why do creators still have the urge too do them? The Shrike was a mythical force, the future a mysterious place, the present hardly comprehensible when Hyperion ended. Now all that is dissolved in an action feast full of explosions, a quaint patchwork of worlds the size of small villages and populated by caricatures of foreign cultures and a badly contrived plot. While it is challenging for an action driven plot to have a practically omniscient character, his solution of "I know but I won't tell you yet" is infuriating. The fall of the Pax at the end is a complete Deus-ex-machina, and the twist ending makes no sense whatsoever. But the biggest failure of all three sequels lies in the delivery of what Hyperion wisely withheld - answers to the philosophical and ethical questions. Simmons goes on at great length about how utterly and fantastically otherworldly the Ousters are, yet their behavior, thinking, language and mores are indistinguishable from today's middle class America. I also find the revelling in violence, torture and death on an enormous scale slightly disturbing. For someone proposing a culture of empathy and universal love, Simmons shows an odd fascination with intense cruelty and suffering.

Jim Jarmusch - Broken Flowers (3)

2006-03-17T11:53:00.000-08:00

Amazingly, having a wrinkled and depressed Bill Murray in a jumpsuit drive around coloring tress does not a good movie make. Who would have thought? In fairness, I was probably having my expectations too high, since I'm an admirer of both Jarmusch's (Dead Man!) and Murray's previous work. But even after correcting for that, I did not feel a connection with either Murray (who played essentially the same character, only much better, in Lost in Translation) or any of his former girlfriends, and the neighbour gone detective, as a grotesque caricature, doesn't even qualify. Watch About Schmidt instead, it's a much better movie.

Dan Simmons - Endymion (3)

2006-03-15T15:07:00.000-08:00

When I reviewed Fall of Hyperion in this space, I said that I wanted to wait a substantial time before continuing on. Unfortunately I succumbed to the temptation. While I don't really regret having read Endymion, it is yet another step down from Hyperion's brilliance of vision and design. While Simmons world continues to amaze with its complex design and rich tapestry of culture and science - which, once again, becomes thinnest in the attempts of creating a cultural history of the future by combining ficticious future classics with actual ones - his characterization, plot and dialogue are bordering on the horrid. He often falls into the trap of having to tell us justifications and motivations instead of showing them, and the whole book has the wearisome feeling of being but a prequel to the final volume. The adventures of Aenea, Endymion and Bettik on their way to Old Earth seem arbitrary and unconnected, and while the multiple death ordeal of the Pax crew charged with tracking them down is chilling, their near success in the face of incredible odds is silly, and can in the end only be explained by the near omniscience of the dei-ex-machina in the TechnoCore. I'll hold off final judgment until I've read Ride of Endymion, but so far I strongly feel Simmons should have stopped after Hyperion.

Michelangelo Antonioni - L'Avventura (3)

2006-03-15T15:05:00.000-08:00

This was praised and much discussed when it came out in the late sixties for its refreshingly novel cinematic way of storytelling - or so the Netflix cover blurb tells us. The story is that of a bunch of rich people, bored to glassy stares byu their eventless lives, vacationing among the Aeolic Islands. One of the women vanishes, and her best friend and her lover embark on a quest to solve the mystery and find her, and get close in the process. Or the equivalent of closeness in artsy cinema overcharged with undertones and cranked up to a maximum of meaning with a minimum of substance. That might seem unfair, but I find it unfair to have to watch beautiful women and great cinematography without plot or point, so I guess we're even, Mr. Antonioni.

Sergio Leone - Once Upon a Time in America (2)

2006-03-13T15:28:00.000-08:00

This is not to say that there is anything wrong with the story of Noodles, the way it's woven together with prohibition history, and the final plot resolution. But this movie is just way too long. I don't really recall much from seeing the original version, but even that might have been a bit on the tedious side, but this reedit is excruciatingly slow. In addition, the way past and present are intercut doesn't really work all that way in several places. But the biggest problem is that this ultimately fairly simple tale of betrayed friendship doesn't justify taking up almost four hours of my time. I'd much rather watch Once Upon a Time in the West twice.

Andrew Horvat - Japanese Beyond Words (2)

2006-03-11T13:45:00.000-08:00

It's always hard to get a feeling for a foreign culture without being immersed in it, and it's probably even more difficult when the gap is as large as it is sure to be between so called western countries and Japan. I find the insistence of most introductions to stress the quaintness and formality of Japanese customs a bit irritating, for the blind eye it turns on equivalent behaviours in the reader's home culture. Generally, a big deal is made for instance of the different distinct levels of politeness or about set phrases for different social situations, as though neither of these existed in other cultures. While this issue crops up in this book as well, much of the specific information in it is really helpful, and it is a nice read to boot.

Sam Peckinpah - Ride the High Country (3)

2006-03-10T12:50:00.000-08:00

There is a song by Tom Lehrer called Send the Marines with the lines "We'll send them all we've got//John Wayne and Randolph Scott", which I ever only understood half. I had heard of and seen movies with the Duke, but not even the name of Scott sounded familiar. I'm happy to report that this sad state of affairs has changed. Other than that, I liked this early Peckinpah for a nice peek into how life has been not too far from here in both time and space. I remember watching Western movies as fairy tales set in a mythical country with no connection to reality as I knew it - but now that I've seen the Central Valley and the Sierra, suddenly all the little plot details, the solitude of the religious nut and his daughter on their farm, the rough digger camp, make much more sense. Unfortunately, the story itself is none too interesting, a somewhat trite tale of friendship, betrayal and friendship again, complete with a heroic death at the end. Maybe it was novel then to have shades of grey, instead of good/bad guy ensembles, and I can certainly see how breaking with such a convention could have given enormous tension to this plot, but from todays point of view, the moral struggle of the straying friend and his rash yet good hearted sidekick is just not very captivating.

Hongo Mitsuru - Outlaw Star (3)

2006-03-09T18:12:00.000-08:00

Having cute and ferocious female tigers with big boobs might not be generally considered the peak of sophisitication among science fiction afficionados, but the level of plot and design in general is higher than the screaming tiger lady would have you expect. The Japanese on is simple enough to give this apprentice at Japanese occasional thrills of recognition (He said Ikemashoo! He said Ikemashoo!), and that almost seals the deal. But I think I'll still stop watching this after episode three. So much to see, so little time.

Bent Hamer - Salmer fra kjøkkenet (1)

2006-03-08T13:28:00.000-08:00

I can't praise this movie enough. It's premise is utterly absurd, it's characters subtle and lovable, the ending uncompromising, yet uplifting, and the undertones of the political and cultural history of Sweden and Norway masterfully woven in. The movie is about an old Norwegian farmer with a sick horse, who is sick himself. With promises of a new horse a Swedish research team lures him as a subject into a study of kitchen efficiency. The horse he receives is a little wooden one, and the study involves a Swedish researcher sitting in high chair in the subject's kitchen, observing everything he does and taking notes, but forbidden to interfere. After initial hostilities the two become friends, to the chagrin of the study's director, who insists on a positivist approach. A simple message - involvement begets understanding - in a marvellously absurd and laconically poetic setting. Go see it.

Andrei Markovits - Amerika, Dich hasst sichs besser (2)

2006-03-07T15:30:00.000-08:00

To anyone following European public discourse and politics, the anti-American bias should be obvious. It is a curious fact of human psychology that an argument based on correct facts can still be wrong, and this complication afflicts this book as well. There is no way to defend the current American administration against the criticisms leveled against it, nor is there a way to dispel the other prominent myths about American held in Europe, namely that its capitalist forces are out of control and that it's wealth is based on exploitation. But when these criticism are voiced by powers that have no inherent interest in solving the underlying problems, but rather are the competition. As much as I would have liked to think of the European protest against the Iraq war as an outpouring of compassion, and to view the piles of Michael Moore's books in german bookstores as the proof of genuine interest in opposing ruling power they would have been in the US, I know both are at least to a good degree expressions of less pure motives. Reading this book made me question my own approach in my parallel blog, where I collect little stories that seem to me to reflect tendencies of isolation and aggressive competition, somehow equating that with my experience here - as though I weren't appalled by the cold and unfriendly behaviour of many Germans, too, every time I visit.

The 78th Annual Academy Awards Ceremony (2)

2006-03-06T11:36:00.001-08:00

Come Oscar time, I usually display a reasonable level of excitement, and like to watch the ceremony if possible. This year, however, like all his other urban slacker fans - to paraphrase O'Reilly - I absolutely had to, because Jon Stewart hosted, promising more than the usual detached entertainment narrative for a show that is, after all, the biggest self-reflective event for today's dominant art form. And Stewart, while maybe not as hilariously funny as his fans are used to seeing him, did a terrific job of bringing relevance to the self-congratulation. Edgy comments abounded, yet he never got sharp enough to allow easy dismissal. The awards themselves were less exciting, with the winning of Best Picture by Crash and, of course, the Oscar for Best Original Song going to Three 6 Mafia - which you can view either as the victory of black underground culture, or the completion of its sellout, depending - and the endless stream of masturbatory montages being outright painful to watch.

The most interesting thing I learned, however, wasn't directly related to the Oscars at all. We do not have cable, and to see the ceremony I had to cycle through the rain and buy some rabbit ears at RadioShack. And after a full night of ABC, with its utterly stupid society journalists and a barrage of advertising cutting everything into debilitating chunks of fast paced cutting, I fully recall why it is I don't watch TV any more. It's because that shit makes me agressive, bitch. I guess it's finally all right to write stuff like that on a family oriented blog. Big thanks to Three 6 Mafia for that.

Takeshi Kitano - Kikujiro (2)

2006-03-06T11:36:00.000-08:00

Not before I looked the movie up on IMDB did I realize that the reason the main character looked familiar was that I had just seen him in Zatoichi, playing the title blind swordsman. As with Zatoichi, Kitano wrote the script, directed and played the lead in Kikujiro, the odd tale of a summer vacation a young kid spends with Kikujiro, a smalltime crook and loudmouth with a good heart. The movie felt a bit too long, but that might in part have been due to the strangeness of it all. Most of what the main character did didn't make much sense to me emotionally, but not in the sense of it being written badly. Rather, all the relationships and communications here were partially opaque to me - in other words, adhering to strange conventions. Not knowing whether these are Kitano's conventions, or those of Japanese culture in general, I can but try and unravel the mysteries of a character who is very abusive and mean, yet respected and humoured by everybody except the tough criminals he runs into at a fair. Cultural mysteries aside, there are wonderful images and ideas here, and lots of little surprises.

Various Authors - Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy (2)

2006-03-03T14:08:00.000-08:00

An interesting anecdote which maybe doesn't sum up this volume of writing advice, but certainly illuminates it, has Mozart being asked for hints on symphony composition by a young, aspiring composer. He advises to start with small pieces and work up, and when the composer is confused by this and points out that Mozart himself wrote symphonies at quite an early age, Mozart replies "Yes, but I never asked for hints". That doesn't necessarily mean that the advice in this volume only applies to writers of mediocre talent, or that it isn't useful for experts. While the individual essays in this volume vary greatly in quality, with Asimov providing the largest number of essays, and has the least substance to his superficial und uncultered boasts, there are a few pieces that delve deeply into the problems of building entire worlds from scratch. This problem is arguably one of the most important reasons for the gap in literary quality between science fiction and the rest of it - where ordinary narrative can rely on the reader's ability to fill in gaps in background, characterization and psychology, science fiction must often close them, using original material for it. The seams of implausibility that result whenever this goes wrong wreak havoc with characters, plot and world plausibility, requiring the aspiring writer to pay much more attention to minute details and work it all out. Incidentally and as an aside, the other big reason for the quality gap would be the fact that writers genuinely interested in general themes of human existence rather than scientific what-if-narrative will naturally shy away from setting their plots against an artificial background, leaving a large faction of people like Asimov, who openly admit that they care not one bit about subtelties of storytelling and characterization, and that ideas are all that matters. It's too bad, really.

The high points of this collection are the essays by Poul Anderson on world building, Norman Spinrad's somewhat dated sounding advice on how to project current trends using simple cyclical models - it's a funny moment when he reports in awe that the spreadsheet he uses is a file of gargantuan 600 kilobytes. Good old days -, Hal Clements advice on how to create believable psychologies in an unknown world, and Connie Willis treatise on humourour writing - though technically that last one doesn't belong here, since she herself points out that there is nothing peculiar to writing funny SF opposed to funny anything else. Also entertaining is Stanley Schmids list of cliches editors will not ever want the read, though I have to say that if you indeed want to write an Adam and Eve story because you think the idea is highly original, another line of work might be better suited.

Stephen Chow - Kung-Fu Hustle (1)

2006-03-03T14:04:00.001-08:00

The best martial arts movies combine poetry and action into something unique, and boy, does this one ever succeed at it. At once a parody of the genre, and a masterful example of it, humor and inventiveness make this an exhilarating masterpiece. The feeling of sheer delight was heightened considerably by the fact that for some reason I expected a Jackie Chan type comedy, with conventional humorous dialogue and moderately original fighting. I was completely unprepared for the cigarette smoking landlady, the dancing axe gang, the lion's roar megaphone or the toad fighting technique or the numerous other elements of mayhem, and so was entirely without defences. Which is just as well.

John Junkerman - Power and Terror (4)

2006-03-03T14:04:00.000-08:00

Chomsky doesn't deserve the movies made about him. Manufacturing Consent was an adequate representation in both content and style of the man who often appears to be the only sane person in a large room full of fanatics, but Distorted Morality and Power and Terror, both done by Jon Junkerman, are little more than badly edited recordings of public lectures, with no thread or narrative at all. What quality there is, is in Chomsky's arguments, with the few ideas of moviemaking that went into it actually detracting from that. Junkerman opens chapters with a blank screen and a sentence or phrase taken from the lecture or interview segment that is to follow. The the original segment follows without a noticeable gap, making for a logical jump between the two things we hear Chomsky say, and the confusion is intensified when seconds later he repeats word for word what we just heard him say. It's meant to structure the movie, but it's entirely superficial and doesn't work anyway. In the final scene, we see Chomsky on a stage far away, asking us whether we can hear him, clumsily alluding to the fact that he's not very widely listened to and a lone caller in the darkness. It's too bad that bad movies like this one contribute to that.

Robert Altman - The Player (2)

2006-03-01T12:33:00.000-08:00

I knew I had seen and loved it, but as with Shortcuts, I couldn't remember a thing. Now, memory is an odd fellow, and often you'll immediately recognize what you couldn't actively remember - but not me, in this case. Every part of it was just as fresh and new as it was when I first saw it, and that is just as well, for it is a terrific and clever script, and surprises in general work much better when you don't know they're coming. Tom Hanks is wonderful as the lead character, an asshole producer in trouble, there are numerous celebrity cameos, and the opening scene rivals the one in Bertolucci's 1900. In fact, just seeing this long continuous setup made me want to rewatch 1900, and to my dismay I found that it is available neither at Netflix nor Amazon, and the studio doesn't currently offer DVDs of it for sale. A remark oddly fitting for the end a minireview of a satire about the movie business.

XGen Studios - Stick Arena (2)

2006-02-27T14:38:00.000-08:00

I've spent so much time on this thing in recent weeks, I should at least pretend that there is something meaningful that can be said about this timekiller. The concept is ingeniously simple: have a multiplayer shoot'em'up with low level technology, Flash in this case, so you can just play it in your browser. As usually, less fancy technology means purer gameplay. In the fights in Stick Arena, there is a lot of strategic movement, feinting, anticipation of opponents' moves, and trying to be fresh and surprising on one's own, and it all moves so fast, that it makes for quite pleasurable fights. Maybe it can even teach you a thing or two about fighting, but I fear I'm stretching my credibility a bit. And besides, I need to go back now, and sledge a few stick men.

Debbie Stoller - Stitch 'n Bitch - The Knitters Handbook (2)

2006-02-27T14:34:00.000-08:00

I'm not likely to read the whole of it, but I found the basic knitting instructions very satisfying - they got me from zero to 50 (rows) in just a few hours - and I'm very happy with the project I picked and modified from it. A striped scarf (of course), with a subtle pattern created by switching between left and right stitches. I guess that makes me a knitwit now. Yay!

Stanley Kubrick - Paths of Glory (2)

2006-02-26T23:23:00.000-08:00

Just having talked about how Sunset Boulevard is still haunting after all these years, here is an example of the opposite effect. A great and important script, great acting, impeccable direction and photography, indeed the whole things reeks of masterpiece, yet the story and message seem pale to me. Maybe it's the fact that this was followed by so many movies after this one painfully driving home the message of war being hell inflicted by the powerful on the poor. That being said, the final scene, where Douglas' character listens to his soldiers first degrading a german woman, and then sentimentally singing along with her, is very touching, in spite of its kitschy message: War may be hell, but not everyone condemned to it is an unreconcilable sinner.

Billy Wilder - Sunset Boulevard (2)

2006-02-26T12:12:00.000-08:00

It is always risky to watch the classics, because the time that has passed since they wowed the world has changed viewing and storytelling conventions in often profound ways, and what used to be a captivating thrillride can turn out to be boring or emotionally incomprehensible. With Sunset Boulevard, the problem exists on two levels, as the subject of the film itself is the sinking into oblivion of one medium - silent movies - and its stars. The haunting scene where the looming figures of the silent era - Buster Keaton among them -, are playing cards in Norma Desmonds house is doubly spooke, because they are Has-Beens within the movie as well as without. Wilder has applied this eery unity to many of his characters, with Gloria Swanson, who is playing Norman Desmond, herself being a former silent movie star, with Erich von Stroheim playing Max von Meyerling - essentially himself, and with the added twist of Strohheim's having shot the movie that ended Swansons career. This movie is an epitaph on a dead art. And, coming full circle, it works marvellously well today, adding one more layer, as though the person giving a gripping speech at a funeral themself was dead.

John Muir - My First Summer in the Sierra (1)

2006-02-25T12:12:00.000-08:00

A young man goes into the mountains to herd sheep and falls deeply in love, changing the rest of his life? Sound familiar? It took me until I was almost done with this exuberant diary to notice the funny parallels to this years Oscar winner. Since Proulx' story and Lee's movie are a commentary on the myth of rugged wilderness and the lone, heroic men populating it, it's interesting to compare the two on that level. Muir in this trip and the path it set him on for his life, shaped another pervasive myth - that of unspoiled nature being more than a resource waiting to be used, but of value in itself. While the overpowering enthusiasm of his prose (written long after the trip), and his referring to plants and animals alike as "people" sound very quirky, and certainly his habit to talk to the flower people does, they are also part and parcel to his view of nature as a vast society, of which man is but a small part. His awe in the face of everything nature throws his way is a great inspiration, and Dan Simmons' suggestion in the Hyperion novels, that with time Muir he might turn into the patron saint of his own religion seems very convincing. He certainly was crazy enough for the job.

Peter Medawar - The Threat and the Glory (2)

2006-02-22T11:24:00.000-08:00

Some names have a positive aura for reasons we have forgotten since we first encountered them. Maybe it was something we read, someone talking about the person, or quoting them in an interesting context. So it was with me and Medawar, and I'm very happy I bought the book at the yard sale I found it at. Medawar treats his often complex subjects with amazing clarity and levity, yet never compromises in terms of accuracy, and the problems he writes about are as unsolved today as they were thirty years ago. How do we balance the benefits of science with its dangers, to fulfill the inherent promise of progress rather than invoking an army of brooms that will sweep us away? Medawar doesn't have answers, of course, but he does ask the right questions, and that is the bigger achievement anyway.

Box / Park - The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (1)

2006-02-21T15:59:00.000-08:00

This movie is sheer genius, and an impressive feat of diligence and design to boot. The humorous plot devices are incredibly inventive, the rabitt armada is a force of cuteness that has no peer, and the combination of horror movie and vegetable gardening is just delicious. Even the special features on this DVD kick ass, with an awesome bonus short from Aardman studios, and the precious piece of information that Wensleydale, the watery cheese Wallace loves so much, was in deep financial trouble until the films came along and saved the company. Reminds me of the insane effect the movie Sideways and it' main character's criticism of Merlot and praise of Pinot Noir had on the sales of these wines. People are sheep, which is not only bad in itself, but also about ten years behind the vogue. It's rabbits, now, folks, so you better start thinking for yourself. About nice, juicy carrots.

Chadwick / White - Bleak House (2)

2006-02-21T15:58:00.000-08:00

It is probably a bit unfair to review this while I've only seen less than half the episodes, but already it's very obvious that the strength of this series lies in the meticulous presentation of Victorian England. Costumes, sets, acting and direction are masterfully recreating the times of Dickens, and are a pure pleasure to watch. The plot itself, is typical for Dickens, a big, crude soap opera, full of drama and dark secrets, but if it is presented so lusciously - who cares?

Akutagawa Ryunosuke - Kappa (2)

2006-02-21T15:56:00.000-08:00

The cover blurb calls this a satire on Japanese society and its customs, and when I randomly opened at some place, it indeed seemed a very funny and acerbic recasting of the Japanese into the Kappa. While this turned out to be quite misleading, it also turned me onto a book I probably wouldn't have read otherwise. A lucky turn. The story is of a human being suddenly cast into Kappa society, the Kappa being somewhat malevolent mythological creatures of Japanese rivers, scaly amphibians apt to drag children into the water and drown them. The tone and setting is more than a bit reminiscent of Abbott's Flatland, which Ryunosuke well might have read, and the absurdity of the goings on in the land of the Kappa reminded me of Daniil Kharms, but all in all, this is quite a solitary achievement. Born, as Ryunosuke himself said, out of his disgust with everything, especially himself, this story presents a caricature of humanity unlike anything I've read before.

Stephen Hopkins - The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2)

2006-02-17T00:34:00.000-08:00

Peter Sellers was a very funny person, but he was also deeply disturbed and, this movie suggests, refused to become a responsible adult all through his life. This movie is often hilarious, incredibly well acted, especially on the part of Geoffrey Rush, who is as amazing and chameleonlike as Sellers himself used to be, but unfortunately lacks coherence. More a collection of individual snippets than a single story arc, the plot leaves out a lot, and the frequent breaks in the narrative, with Rush taking on the roles of people important in his life, walking literally off the stage of the scenes, while an ingenious device, add confusion to an already meandering tale. Still, very impressive and entertaining.

Paola Cavalieri - The Animal Question (2)

2006-02-13T12:39:00.000-08:00

The caveat first: this is not exactly a book written for a general audience. It is a treatise of ethical philosophy, and the reasoning and phrasing is, I felt, even denses in some places than reverence to the esteemed traditions of academic discourse, let alone the subject matter, should have had it be (Though not having tried to set a thorough study of the intricacies of a system of moral acting in popular prose, I of course might be entirely mistaken and this book the closest anyone can get to simplicity in what is without a doubt an discomfortingly complex matter).

Cavalieri sets out to evaluate what entities are moral entities, in the sense that they figure into moral considerations of the actions of moral agents. A thorough review of opinions of the past reveals that none of them can be made consistent. Cavalieri then suggests that the best possible solution for our current state of knowledge of the cognitive life of other species is to extend the notion of human rights to all mammals and birds. Unfortunately, her case is solid, so this is the rare case of a book that has the potential to change my life. No more burgers. Poor me.

Eugene Jarecki - The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2)

2006-02-10T17:49:00.000-08:00

Most of what this movie reveals about the criminal mastermind Kissinger was already known to me, and while the detached way the material was presented made the movie seem much more objective and unassailable as any movie ever could be, it also produced a feeling of heavy handed redundancy. I think if my choices are polemic hilarity, as in Moore's borderline scenes in Bowling for Columbine, and serene factuality, I'll take the raving fat man any time. The most interesting suggestion came at the very end, when either the author of the book this movie is based on, or the films director, suggested that the reason the US hadn't joined the international court yet was that they were very afraid of public scrutiny of Kissinger's files. It almost makes too much sense.

Dario Argento - Suspiria (4)

2006-02-08T12:49:00.000-08:00

As usual with obscure stuff on our Netflix list, I forget where I came across this or why I ordered it. A quick IMDB and google search reveals that Argento, and this movie in particular, have a devoted fanbase who consider him a visual genius and Suspiria the paragon of horror movies. I beg to differ. While the design is original, and it's always a delight to see Escher's art, even if it's misplaced, the plot, acting, effects and direction suck just too badly to be bearable. The attack of the rubber bat is a comic highlight, in an otherwise overly long C movie, and the tagline "the only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film are the first 92" is awkwardly fitting.

Michael Gazzaniga - The Social Brain (2)

2006-02-06T00:06:00.000-08:00

I was unable to find any image of the cover of this book online - which tells you something about it's age. The Social Brain came out in the 80s, and it proposed, based in Gazzaniga's own groundbreaking research on split brain patients, that the brain was a combined structure of separate and somewhat independent modules, and that the unfied mental life we seem to have is a constructed illusion rather than a controlling entity. The descriptions of the experiments are as amazing today as they must have been when they were first done, the speculative general part seems to vague to be either true or false, and the final chapter, in which Gazzaniga reverently interviews himself, instead of just saying what he wants to say, for no good reason, is slightly embarrasing.

Joseph Sargent - Something the Lord Made (2)

2006-02-06T00:05:00.001-08:00

I have wanted to see this ever since I saw the trailers on HBO when it first came out, firstly because the subject seemed interesting (the invention of heart surgery combined with the story of racial discrimination in the medical establishment), and because Alan Rickman plays one of the main characters. Those were good enough reasons, but as it turns out, Mos Def almost steals the show playing the other lead. The whole way of story delivery is a smidge on the sentimental side, but not enough to spoil a touching historical tale.

David Ovason - The Secret Symbols of the Dollar Bill (3)

2006-02-06T00:05:00.000-08:00

This is a profoundly silly book, about magic symbols and masonic references on the US 1$ bill. Some of them are surprising and interesting (like the etymology of Dollar, the significance of the pyramid, or the source for the $ symbol), but most of the letter and word counting and geometric analysis of what appears where seems more like an unhealthy obsession than an informative analysis. I know Gematria is very honorable quackery, but it obviously is possible to overdo it. Who would have thunk?

Ang Lee - Brokeback Mountain (2)

2006-02-06T00:04:00.000-08:00

I have to admit to being reluctant to go see this, mainly because I thought it would, beyond the taboo breaking gimmick which seemed to have catapulted the two cowboys into the center of the cultural universe, be an inconsequential and boring love story. Now I feel reluctant to point out how wrong I was, because I'm sure you must've heard by now that this is a touchingly real story about failed lifes, magnificently filmed in a beautiful setting.

Dan Simmons - The Fall of Hyperion (2)

2006-02-04T19:07:00.000-08:00

In this sequel to Hyperion, we learn a lot more about what the Shrike is, who built the Time Tombs and why, and what the enigmatic events in the first book meant. In a way, these revelations destroy the sense of mystery that surrounded the time tombs and the Shrike. The necessity to keep a plotline that goes back and forth in time from folding unto itself and creating a know makes this book hard to follow in places, and gives a feeling of contrivance to what seemed a monumentally powerful force. The explanations, on the other hand, work well enough, and the overarching theme of death, suffering and how organic life can keep its dignity in the face of them and strive to be free of them without destroying everything in the process is fascinating to follow. The combination with Keats' romantic poetry, while adding a very unusual touch to this space opera, doesn't work all that well for me, but that might mainly be because I'm not too smitten with romantic literature and find the hyperbole and godlyness of subject matter and language tiring.

I am sufficiently interested in Simmons vision to someday go on to read Endymion and Rise of Endymion, the next two installments in the Hyperion saga, but not very soon. I'm too afraid to find religious mayhem similar to what happened in Herbert's progressively less accessible Dune series.

Takeshi Kitano - Zatoichi (3)

2006-02-03T11:50:00.000-08:00

This could have been a marvelous homage to martial arts movies in general and the Zatoichi series in particular, full of references to details of Japanese culture, and funny little scenes. But unfortunately the plot, which should have been a simple story of evil oppression and the lone swordsman who breaks it, is told in such a fragmented and oblique style, that it gets into the way, rather than providing the frame upon which all the fine details are hung. It's too bad, there is so much to love in here, but it all just doesn't come together.

Tony Scott - True Romance (2)

2006-02-02T14:04:00.000-08:00

With a script by Tarantino, and being directed by the guy responsible for blockbuster mainstream crap like Top Gun, this could have turned out an self referential exercise in explosion and meanness. Instead, this is a gritty and funny roller coaster ride of a movie, with an awesome cast and a wonderfully reckless storyline. Funny how this one went entirely by me when it came out.

Interestingly, this script already raises the issues Tarantino's Kill Bill got criticized for: if violence is an aesthetic component of storytelling, am abstract dance with blood as a costume, rather than a realistic deptiction of its physical and psychological consequences, does that make the movie itself an act of violence? I don't personally think so, but it might be a hard case to make.

Dan Simmons - Hyperion (1)

2006-01-29T12:12:00.000-08:00

An excellent crossover between literary history, theological treatise and captivating worldbuilding science fiction, the only shortcoming of this book is that it ends just when things start to become interesting. Not until the last few pages did I realize that the confrontation with the frightening entity called the Shrike, the opening of the Time Tombs and the outcome of the big conflict between human and AI madness would be subject of the sequel. Still, this collection of the life stories of six people, bound together by a pilgrimage (Hello, Chaucer), weaves a picture of a future, where technology and metaphysics blend into a web of awe.

It's interesting to see Simmons trying to deal with a technical detail problem facing every attempt at Science Fiction with some cultural and historical background: either every reference has to be composed and explained in detail, or all the references come from 19th and 20th century culture, which becomes increasingly improbable the further in the future the plot is set. The fact that his plot contains people from many different epochs makes up for some of that asymmetry. That device almost justifies the pilgrims singing "We're off to see the Wizard" when they go to face the Shrike, and the difference is made up by the creepiness of that very image. But overall, it still doesn't quite come together, the lists of artists that are mentioned in a few places always separate nicely into the ones the reader knows and those unkonown names just plugged in to indicate the passing of time. But if the past is any indication for the future, hardly anybody from our time will still be known 600 years hence. Maybe Simmons is as close as one can get to solving that particular problem here.

Vincenzo Natali - Nothing (3)

2006-01-29T12:03:00.000-08:00

What a strange movie. Reminiscent of the director's earlier "Cube", this has less of the grim deadliness, and more levity, but also a bit too much jumpy goofiness for the sake of its central metaphor. It's the story of two underdog friends living in a derelict house between two freeways in Toronto, who one fateful day wish the world away and find themselves stranded in a white, bouncy Nirvana - in a typical silly twist, the first thing one of the characters throws into the whiteness to see if it can be walked upon is a statue of Buddha. Subsequent fights between the friends lead them to them wish away more and more of what little they have, and it is a surprise that the movie doesn't end with pure whiteness, like Cube did, but with... ah, well, you'll just have to watch it, because I'm not going to tell you.

Rome (2)

2006-01-28T11:54:00.000-08:00

I don't know a whole lot about Roman history, nor about the small details of everyday life in the days when the republic turned empire, but this series does quite a good job of creating a believable backdrop for Caesar's conquests and the adventures of the two soldier goons who carry the show through wit and humor, an echo maybe of the concept behind Asterix and Obelix. The frequent focus on sex as the driving force behind the political upheavals looks suspiciously like an excuse for eyecandy, but the same could probably be said for the whole show. Nothing wrong with that, anyway.

Everyone's Waiting (2/3)

2006-01-24T23:27:00.000-08:00

I lost interest in this overblown, thickly layered soap opera somewhere in season two, but when I heard that the final episode was exceptionally well done, and the bothersome Nate would finally die, I thought it might be nice closure to watch it. Unfortunately, the, err, video supply store, accidentally delivered the final episode of season three, and not until the final minutes of that tedious, overdramatized convolution of plots did that fact dawn on me. What a waste of an hour.

The true final episode then wasn't quite as bad, but somewhat disappointing. Until the moment when Claire drives away from LA, Nate's ghost jogs down in her rear view mirror, and the future of all the characters is revealed, up to their deaths. That this touched me, even though I didn't care for any one of the characters, speaks to the quality of the sequence. But if you're like me, and want to see it, skip the first 40 minutes of the episode. They're just business as usual.

Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon (2)

2006-01-23T13:37:00.000-08:00

This book has it all, geeky and cool facts about cryptology, military, social and technological history, a fairly believable conspiracy plot, insights into high-tech investment politics and an epic breadth and richness of materials that stunds. So why did reading it feel so tedious, and why was I glad when it finally was over? Maybe it's because of the odd feeling of detached interest that perfuses the work. Stephenson describes the human dimension of his adventure with the emotions of a boy watching ants through a magnifying glass on a sunny day, just before he decides to see what happens when he burns them. It's a terrific story, but it felt like someone else was reading it.

Richard Brooks - In Cold Blood (2)

2006-01-23T13:27:00.000-08:00

This is an almost literal translation of Capotes book to the screen, and it compares very favorably both with his writing, and the recent movie "Capote", about his own role in the trial of Hickock and Smith and the role of the book in his life. Some odd choices aside (why did the script change Capote's name?), this is a gripping true murder story, intense, yet never sensational. The central ambiguity of the title, which refers both to the act and the punishment, is made too explicit for my taste in some of the lines toward the end, but the subject is just important enough, that a bit of preaching is forgivable.

Martin Scorsese - Kundun (2)

2006-01-23T13:09:00.000-08:00

This biopic of the Dalai Lama would impress me much more, and be a much more valuable contribution to understanding and solving the plight of Tibet, if it didn't look like Cirque de Soleil on dope. While I can't blame the traditional garments and designs of Tibet for having been appropriated to an updated version of the myth of the noble savage western progressives seem to love so much, I can blame Scorsese for presenting the struggle between what clearly is a feudal society where extreme poverty and lavish palaces stand side by side and the upheavals of the modern age, namely the invasion of technology and the Chinese cultural revolution, in a way so heavily slanted as to lose its trustworthyness. It's too bad, because I suspect even a fully realistic depiction of the Tibetan aristorcracy would make the communist Chinese look quite bad. But cinematography, scope and acting compensate handsomely for these ideological squabbles.

Xan Cassavetes - Z Channel (2)

2006-01-18T11:56:00.000-08:00

This is a very entertaining and cinematically inspiring movie, but oddly that's not due so much to how it tells its tale - which, in fact, drags a bit toward the end, and could have lost a few of the lengthier asides - but to what that tale actually is. The history of LA based Z channel's amazing programming, and the simple fact that it did exist, bringing all of those offbeat und underrated movies to an intelligent audience, essentially counteracting the stupid culture suppressing forces of market and money, is both heartening and disturbing. For if it's possible to do TV without simultaneuously numbing the viewers mind and cranking up their aggression with marketing, why is it not happening anywhere? Give us more programming tailored to that "Uncommon Denominator" Z worked so magnificently toward, you bastards!

Doug Liman - Swingers (2)

2006-01-17T18:37:00.000-08:00

The first part of this felkt like someone had invented a new cipher for social communication and forgot to tell me about it. Nothing anybody said seemed to make any sense not within the plot, not as commentary. But eventually the fog lifted (it might have just been the fog of history, anyway), and everything made sense and dissolved into sweet, sweet nothings. Which turned out to be the movie's point in the first place. Fun, and so, so money.

Robert Clouse - Enter the Dragon (2)

2006-01-16T12:14:00.000-08:00

There is quite a few gaffes in this movie, the plot is nonexistent, the action drags on forever in places, and the acting oscillates between solid and silly. Still, this is one of the finest martial arts movies ever made. Lee's technique is amazing, and the surroundings and characters are just done well enough not to intrude.

Jean-Jacques Annaud - Seven Years in Tibet (3)

2006-01-12T23:57:00.000-08:00

Expecting a filmed version of Harrer's memoir, lending visuals and speed to the somewhat sluggish pace and skeletal outlines of the book, I was annoyed to see many changes in plot and a focus on the superficial events rather than their meaning. I also didn't like the fact that in a movie about foreign places and experiences of strange cultures, everybody speaks english wich an accent to indicate the language used, except for a few places with correct language chunks thrown in. The latter double the problem, because now there's not only an annoying accent, it's also inconsisten. Harrer's trek across the alien planes and up the bureaucracy of an unknown and bewildering country here comes down to lack of food, injured feet and a little brush with robbers; the fascination with the double nature of the wise leader/child is overshadowed by a dubious plotline of paternal guilt, and the overdramatized development of Harrer from cliched asshole to understanding wise man is in itself a chliche that could have done with some development. The chinese invasion in the end adds nothing but an uneasy feeling of activism, and the closeing scene in Austria is confusing. The cinematography is great though, even if it was shot in the Andes, because the Chinese wouldn't allow filming in the Himalaya. I found myself oddly touched to find that Harrer died not a week ago, as though my having watched this movie so close to his death made it more meaningful. Mysteries of the human mind.

Allan Mindel - Milwaukee, Minnesota (3)

2006-01-11T13:44:00.000-08:00

This was supposed to be the heartwarming, quirky and funny, yet profound story of a mentally handicapped prodigy icefisher, who has the fish themselves tell him from under the ice how to catch them, but somehow it didn't come together. Neither the characters nor the acting can convince, and the plot is so thoroughly overconstructed it doesn't interest me for one second. While the final scene of Albert walking off into the white, trailed by his disciple icefishermen, who rather than laugh about him - as his overbearing mother would have him believe - submit to his superior authority, is very poetic, the rest of what this movie wanted to be stays under the ice. Someone should have listened more closely to capture it.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo - Hagakure (2)

2006-01-08T22:36:00.000-08:00

The more I learn about Japanese history, the more I wonder how it is possible that the European captains found anybody alive there at all when they arrived. They should have disembarked, a fearful expression on their faces, and waded in blood, among the guts and remains of the honorable dead, who slashed themselves open to maybe make amends for an ill chosen colour of off-white for the master's new lampshade, or some such. This makes for very fascinating reading, but it is indeed hard to understand how a society, in which disrespect leads to fights to the death, which in turn means seppuku for those who started them, could have functioned, Maybe, then, Yamamoto exaggerates wildly. This is somewhat more plausible for modern readers when they realize that some of his short texts read like they are the direct inspirations for Monty Python's suicide squad lead by Otto in The Life of Brian, and the Black Knight in the Holy Grail - now of course available as a plush doll, which probably would have horrified old Tsunetomo right into killing himself.

Briski/Kauffman - Born into Brothels (2)

2006-01-08T11:40:00.000-08:00

I guess I first have to say how touching this film is, nor how necessary it is to provide an, albeit small, window into a hidden world of hopelessness and despair, and the inspiring quality not only of the movie, but also of the photographers heartfelt need to do something to help save the futures, and indeed probably lives, of the children she taught in Calcutta's red light district. Now that's out of the way - I was actually wondering at several points during the movie, if the portrayal of these kids as very talented artists, while certainly true, does not mislead the audience into separating the victims of social injustice into those whose ruin will be a loss to us connoisseurs of the arts, and those who won't be so sorely missed. Surely, if we could save the precious ones, things would already be much better.
Nobody should have to live in those conditions, whatever the quality of their drawings or their grades at school, and there remains a bitter taste of defeat in the end, when out of the nine kids all but three seem to be falling back into their doom. But in another sense, a single saved child is already a triumph, so maybe I'm quite wrong. It's a great movie either way.

Arthur C. Clarke - The Fountains of Paradise (2)

2006-01-07T13:09:00.000-08:00

This book has won both the Hugo and the Nebula, and while I don't fully agree with quite so much formalized praise, its central character, a geostationary tower 40.000 kilometers high, rising from the slightly shifted island of Sri Lanka, is a fascinating and awe inspiring invention. It's story, intertwined with that of it's engineer, Vannevar Morgan, is nicely contrasted to that of an ancient king, who reached for the stars of his time and found death in the process, just as Morgan does. I think it's this undercurrent of engineering and progress as substitutes for religion, which is painted as their opposite, and seems to include anything not logically deducible, that makes this tiring to read. Not accidentally, the humans in the story are shallow and lifeless, and the final chapter betrays the mix of engineering and Nietzsche that seems to fuel Clarke's world view: at the great noon, the superman will come in a chariot from the stars, to unite with the child and found the future. An engineer's dream of electric sheep.

Robert Lieberman - Legends of Earthsea (5)

2006-01-07T13:00:00.000-08:00

When I realized three minutes into the movie, that the script had swapped Ged/Sparrowhawk's true and public names, I suspected impending doom. It's a minor detail, but it betrays all the reckless disrespect and cluelessness, as well as the love affair with superficial deepness (Sparrowhawk! Doesn't it just sound more magical!) that makes this one of the most horrid adaptations of written material to the screen I've ever seen. So much money and effort, so foolishly and pointlessly wasted, with some of the most subtle storytelling in fiction warped into a crude, martial mockery. The only good thing about this disgrace is that in contrast, Le Guin's books shine all the more. If you think you want to watch this, shoot yourself in the foot instead and moan for three hours. At least that way you'll have learned something.

Neil Diamond - 12 Songs (1)

2006-01-05T17:16:00.000-08:00

Hell Yeah, he's done it again. Though that might refer to Neil Diamond himself, whose work I've always liked a lot, and who has outdone himself on this new collection, the person I'm referring to is Rick Rubin, whose list of productions reads like a good part of my most favorite list. Johnny Cash, Slayer, System of a Down, now Neil Diamond. It's humbling. What great piece of music did I produce recently? On the other hand, I'm wouldn't even know how, so maybe I'm doing all right.

Bruce Lee - Tao of Jeet Kune Do (2)

2006-01-04T12:40:00.000-08:00

This is Lee's posthumously published founding document for his own brand of kickass, Jeet Kune Do, that brought him both fame and severe criticism for boldly breaking with tradition and fusing different styles, taking what he would from each. The book, while roughly structured into chapters, reads more like a collection of small pieces than a unit. In part this reflects the limitations of editing somebody else's work his untimely death put on the editor, his wife Linda, but I suppose to a degree this is a reflection of the inherent notion he expresses multiple times. Go with the flow, do not become rigid in rules, be flexible within your limit. The motto of Jeet Kune Do, set around the unique logo with the Yin/Yang encircled by two chasing arrows, reads 'Using no way as way, having no limitation as limitation'. Which of course is all part of the ancient asian art of making sense through not making sense.

Jeffrey Blitz - Spellbound (2)

2006-01-04T01:00:00.000-08:00

I will refrain from making any spelling jokes in this review, tempting though it may be. The spelling bee, to my still somewhat European eyes, seems a very alien tradition, though I'd be hard pressed to say just what exaclty it is about fidgety bespectacled eleven year old kids with overzealous parents spelling words much harder than "overzealous" or "bespectacled" that is so disturbing. But it is. It is also very funny and fascinating to get a look into a world of success and ambition that couldn't be stranger to me if it were made of cheese and looked like the moon, but I think I said that already.

Rough Guide to Okinawan Music (1)

2006-01-03T11:13:00.000-08:00

Okinawa is located on an strategic spot of ocean real estate, and has been occupied by numerous foreig powers throughout its history. This stormy military past has forged the island's strong martial arts tradition, but a side effect of a multitude of traders and soldiers passing through is a multilayered cultural richness. This compilation collects a broad variety of styles, themes and artists, from the amazing traditional sanshin tune Koko Kuduchi to the joyous modern surf pop of The Surf Champlers. While the variety of material makes sure that there have to be a few songs for everyone they could have done without, overall this is a shining jewel and wonderful to explore.

Sidney Lumet - Serpico (2)

2006-01-03T00:50:00.000-08:00

A gripping real life story of an honest cop in the late 60s in New York, and the breakthrough for Al Pacino as a big movie star (though I was a bit surprised to hear both the producer and director Lumet talk about how the Godfather was truly Brando's movie. While old tissuecheek certainly is a very strong presence in that flick, I've always felt Pacino and Brando as equally strong. But je digresse). The story, and Pacino's character based playing, are very intense, and the fascinating fact from today's point of view is that the movie moves at a quiet pace, yet doesn't seem slow - a bit too long, maybe, but that's probably due to an original script that was double the length and needed to be heavily cut. Other cool piece of trivia: the real Serpico came to rehearsals, and was studied by Al Pacino, then shown the door by Lumet once shooting started, and was - or so Lumet reminisces - crushed, because he felt he become friends with them, while to them he was a object of professional interest. He also once told the producer Martin Bregman, in a movie theater empty except for the two of them, that he couldn't smoke, because it was against the law. Go, Serpico!

Erich Später - Kein Frieden mit Tschechien (2)

2006-01-02T21:04:00.000-08:00

Bei manchen dokumentarischen Büchern fragt man sich unweigerlich, warum man sich die deprimierende Abfolge unheilvoller Tatsachen ins Denkgebäude schraubt. Nun ist es andererseits natürlich Unsinn auf dem Niveau der Erstmal-besser-machen Kritikverneiner, Unschönes nur deshalb abzulehnen, weil es keine konstruktiven Schlüsse anzubieten hat, aber erbaulich hätte ich es doch gefunden, nach der Durchsicht all der Naziwiderlichkeiten rund um Vertriebene und ihre Zentren, Kriegsgeschichte und Schuldausgleich ein paar Vorschläge zu finden, wie man das Pack zum Schweigen und die Geschichte auf einen guten Weg brächte. So ganz ohne das ist das Buch jedenfalls nicht der Diskussionsbeitrag, der es sein möchte, sondern eher die Grundlage für einen. Muss dann eben jemand anders schreiben.

Die für mich interessanteste Detailinformation betrifft das Verbot der Todesstrafe im Deutschen Grundgesetz, das mir angesichts der sonstigen Kontinuitäten von Mordbubenwirtschaft und Gewaltapparat immer ein wenig inkonsistent vorkam. Später schildert, wie ein Vertriebenenfunktionär sich für die Abschaffung verwendet, um seine alten Nazikumpane vor den Galgen der Alliierten zu retten. Das ging schief, weil die Alliierten sich bei den Hinrichtungen ums Grundgesetz der Besiegten nicht recht scheren mochten, und der Plan, die Todesstrafe für gemeine Mörder flugs wieder einzuführen, scheiterte dann ebenfalls. Sie kennen doch unser heiteres Suchspiel? In der Geschichte hat der Weltgeist Sepp Arnemann eine konstruktive Lehre über den Umgang mit repressiven gesellschaftlichen Kräften versteckt. Suchen Sie sie selbst, mir gefällt sie nicht.

Nachtrag: konkret dokumentiert in der aktuellen Ausgabe die Reaktionen Vertriebener auf Späters Buch, und ich nehme einen Teil des oben gesagten zurück. Wer derart die Hunde zum Bellen bringt, hat allerhand richtig gemacht.

Noah Baumbach - The Squid and the Whale (3)

2006-01-02T21:01:00.000-08:00

This is a nice enough movie, I suppose, but it left me with a feeling of emptyness where meaning should have been. It can't possibly want to tell me something about human relations, or the male character's faults wouldn't be so blatant and unsubtle, and it can't be entertainment either, for though there is quite a few funny bits, the overall mood is that of oppression. It must have been liberating for Baumbach, who's personal history this is rumored to reflect, but doesn't do much for me.

Peter Jackson - Lord of the Rings (1)

2006-01-02T20:50:00.000-08:00

Ever since the first of the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out, Middle Earth has been a holiday* staple for me. I liked the original theatrical versions well enough, but it's only in the extended cuts that the story's pacing works and the rich undertones of Tolkiens mythology get a chance to resonate through the plot. Aragorn's singing of the Lay of Luthien is one specific example among many, and not by accident is it in the Fellowship of the Ring, which after this year's repeat watching of the whole trilogy (split over quite a few days - I'm a geek, not a nerd) is still my favorite. It's also the one part that doesn't have cringe inducing dialog in it ("A red sun rises. Blood has been spilled this night" - Yeah, that would be my brain hemorrhaging, you Elf twat), but they're all precious, of course. Go, looks at them.

Kerry Conran - Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2)

2006-01-01T16:04:00.000-08:00

Though the lack of meaning and its pulpy plot development are part of the concept of this highly stylish science fiction comic come alive, it drags a bit toward the end, when even the vestiges of development devolve into a series of ever fancier military gadgetry being deployed. The design is quite nice, but with a bit more reflection on the history and significance of the original artwork it could have also had significance. Ah, well.

Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex (2)

2005-12-30T19:50:00.000-08:00

A fiction so convincing that I needed to remind myself several times that I was not reading an autobiographical account. The story of a hermaphrodite growing up in Detroit, and his/her family's history stretching back into Turkey are told in epic breadth, and with a lot of fascinating historic detail. The narrative holding it all together, that of the girl Callie turning into the man Cal, seems to dissolve to little significance against that background, making me wonder if more focus on the story and main character itself wouldn't have served the overall experience better.

Frederik Pohl - Gateway (2)

2005-12-28T17:41:00.000-08:00

I've been busy checking out the Hugo and Nebula award winners, and this one was a particular delight. An unknown alien species, the Heechee, disappeared a long time ago, but left some artifacts, most notable a space station equipped with hundreds of interstellar ships attached. The ships are mostly operational, but nobody knows how the course setting machine works, what the destinations are, and how long the trip will be. Mortality on these trips is high, with most coming back emptyhanded, so the exploration of the Heechee legacy is run as a kind of lottery, where explorers might die or disappear, but might also come back with incredible new artifacts or knowledge, making them rich for life. This is the background to the story of one man, who struck it rich on one of these trips, but can't cope with what happened, and what he had to do to survive. We witness his therapy sixteen years later, and the original events unfolding in parallel, with documentary material, like classifieds from the station's newspaper, ingeniously strewn in.

Sun Tzu - The Art of War (3)

2005-12-26T18:28:00.000-08:00

When a dog pees on a mountain, does the mountain care? Depends on the size of the dog, you might answer, but in general it won't. In general - what better segway that that to lead into my two cents on Sun Tzu's Art of War, commonly hailed as the essential read for business strategists, soldiers, garbage collectors, and, really, everybody, for war is a metaphor for life, and we all have one of these, after all. In spite of that Master Sun's strategic nuggets of wisdom were a bit lost on me. I don't object to anything said, and the style of the translation, and, I presume, the original, is very concise and poetic in it's condension, but what in this book I find applicable is obvious, and what isn't obvious doesn't seem applicable. On top of that this edition has been translated an edited by Thomas Cleary. Cleary follow every few sentences of Sun's text with serveral different commentaries, and the sequence of Sun's dense, poetic writing, and the commentators clumsy, wordy rephrasing makes this an odd comedic experience.

Johhny Cash (with Patrick Carr) - Cash (3)

2005-12-23T13:44:00.000-08:00

Johnny Cash was an amazing artist, and his recent death has been a great loss. I love the recent American Recordings series of records as well as his older stuff. Sadly, he is not quite as amazing an author, and Carr's co-authoring didn't fix the shortcomings. There are cool stories in this book, but they are often told in a laundry-list fashion, where people, events and facts roll by without much coherence or reflection. Biggest eye-rubber: Cash's admission that he and June avoided shopping in towns that had no Wal-Marts and even graded them by the number of evil moneysucking behemoths ("tomorrow is a two Wal-Marter"). Biggest chuckle: to get out of a contract with a record company in the early nineties, Cash wrote a whole abysmal album, including a song called "Chicken in Black". It worked.

For All Mankind (1)

2005-12-23T13:31:00.000-08:00

The story of lunar exploration, from Apollo 11 in July 1969 to Apollo 17 in Dezember 1972, in a beautiful collage, narrated from the original recordings and additional comments from the people who have been up there. Amazing footage gives you a glimpse of what it might be like to go where now man has gone before. It's a bit unfortunate that they emphasized a seamless narrative over historic accuracy, blending the 7 missions into one long trip to Luna, but in the end, it doesn't matter.

Earth, floating in blackness, yet struck by the intense light from the sun, made me realize for the first time the intuitive oddness of space close to a star: dark and empty, not for lack of light, but for lack of illuminable things. That's got to be an analogy for something.

Robots (5)

2005-12-23T13:15:00.000-08:00

If there's anything meaningful that's not sickeningly cute and mindlessly inspirational in this movie after the first fifteen minutes, feel free to knock up the rating to a solid "4/avoid". We switched off when pabot told sonbot to follow his life's dream, cause pabot never did and now sorely regrets it. Sniff. To think of all the cool gadgets that could have been made from the robot parts if the moviemakers (Two directors! Two writers! Ack!) would have done as father did, not as he says.

Gichin Funakoshi - Karate-do Kyohan (1)

2005-12-22T17:28:00.000-08:00

This is a wonderful and concise introduction to all mayor aspects of karate, from the basics and kata to free sparring. What I found most fascinating - besides the insightfully detailed kata descriptions - was how meaningful those detailed notes become when you don't read them as descriptions or recipes, but as commentaries on something you already know - or, even more interesting, know in a similar shape. Since I've been studying all the Kata's in their Wado form, Funakoshi's reasoning is most intriguing where he describes the rationale for doing something different from how we do it. The dialectics of form become apparent, the fact that one needs to be restricted, to see the unfoundedness of that restriction, and thus overcome it. Which makes me realize that Hegel was a very eastern kind of Swabe.

Chan-wook Park - Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (1)

2005-12-22T17:20:00.000-08:00

A nice coincidence that this movie would be the next on our Netflix-list after Dirty Harry - this is the movie Dirty Harry should have been (of course that's somewhat unfair, considering the time gap, but would Harry want me to be fair? There). Where Eastwoods cop sets out to right wrongs in a very private moral (or lack-of-moral) code, this movie unfolds as a giant tragedy, where we can have empathy with everybody, even as they do things that are wrong to begin with, and turn out even worse. "I know you're a good guy" says the vengeful industrialist in the climactic scene, "so you'll understand why I have to kill you". So do we, caught in the same violent logic, and as unable to escape it as any of the characters. Terrific and terrifying.

Frank Herbert - The Green Brain (3)

2005-12-21T15:28:00.000-08:00

Probably one of the first science fiction novels to have the ecological threat posed by modern humanity at the core of its plot, this 1966 action drama puts all its effort into getting the message through, with very little meaningful plot. It's an unfortunate choice, as the central premise - being under extinction pressure from an Orwellianly named International Ecological Agency, insects adapt by cooperating to form complex and conscious societies, capable of concerted action and motion - would have been fascinating to explore in depth. Instead, the book spends most of its time following a subplot of international politics and intrigue, and its protagonists down a jungle river, and ends when things would become interesting, with what feels like a compromise between a happy ending and gloomy doomsaying. The book leaves the distinct feeling that Herbert wasn't quite happy with his setup, and didn't want to put too much effort into working it through. Maybe that's why he revisited the hive mind a few years later in The Hive.

Don Siegel - Dirty Harry (4)

2005-12-20T15:24:00.000-08:00

It's a classic among vigilante movies, the best of the series it spawned, and it has Clint Eastwood in it, playing a socially disconnected moralizing force of one, dealing revenge and retribution without restraint. That setup works in Leone's Man With No Name series, probably in part because of the cool, detached direction and abstraction of the old west setting, but also because we are never supposed to take Eastwood's side in those. I wanted to rewatch Dirty Harry because it's set in San Francisco, quickly realized I had never seen it before, and found myself distracted from the sweeping views of bay and bridge by the manipulative moralizing message that weaves through the film. Mores are crumbling, and with a weak justice system unable to keep the depravity in check, men like Harry have to clean up, and get dirty in the process, a dark avenger, protecting us all. Feel reactionary today, punk?

Abe's Exoddus (1)

2005-12-20T15:10:00.000-08:00

I just revisited the second installment in the Oddworld series of games, and the last I played - the third and fourth, sadly, are only available for the Xbox. If you like platform games at all, this quirky mix of ironic oddness, fascinating story and character design, tough puzzles and fast paced jump and run episodes will entertain your for many, many hours. And even if you don't, you'll have to appreciate some of the lovely, innocative ideas in game design.

Also pretty cool is the list of influences the game designers list on their website.

Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace (2)

2005-12-19T17:32:00.000-08:00

This is a story of many plots, ranging from the destruction of the universe, or a substantial fraction thereof, by nanotechnology, to modern warfare and social philosophy to moral conundrums of modern life - interracial dating, for example - and it tries to both set up these varying fields as enormous problem zones, and then present realistic solutions. Most of the central ideas and technologies, and the problems caused by them - the social impact of full automation both on the society controlling it and the societies controlled by it, or the psychological and military implications of remotely controlled superwarriors, to name two - are daring and impressive, and the extrapolation of US foreign policy into the year 2048 seems frighteningly believable. But against the tapestry of these towering problems, Haldemans solution falls somewhat short, both within the universe of his novel and our own. Still, with its very gripping, thoughtful and empathic plot, Forever Peace fully deserves the Hugo and Nebula awards it won.

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Farthest Shore (2)

2005-12-19T16:44:00.000-08:00

The final volume of the Earthsea Trilogy, and, to me, the strongest of the three. It's main theme, the struggle caused by the realization that life and death are intricately linked (a thought which is part of the dualist/taoist thinking that weaves like a thread through the whole trilogy, and indeed much of Le Guin's other writing) and one is impossible without the other, unfolds against a backdrop of exciting encounters, and the overall athmosphere of impending doom caused by the widespread refusal to accept mortality still has a very realistic tone today, more than 30 years after it was originally written.

Amanita Design - Samorost (1)

2005-12-16T19:02:00.000-08:00

This game is just brilliant in design, storyboard and execution. Very otherworldly level designs and a brilliantly surreal game logic, paired with cuteness - its only fault is that it is too short.

Samorost | Samorost 2

Joseph Jennings - Winning Karate (3)

2005-12-16T13:50:00.000-08:00

With martial arts training, it's mre about the form, the spirit and the attitude of the student than it is about the actual specific movement or skill that's trained. So a physical description of the basic techniques provides technical rather than spiritual insight - at least when it's read rather than physically studied. On the other hand, the illustrations in this book demonstrating how to deal with an attacker armed with a gun, knife or rifle, are extremely spiritual. And by spiritual I mean funny.

On Humour - Simon Critchley (3)

2005-12-15T15:54:00.000-08:00

It is a very common notion that the study of humour is a dry and boring thing to attempt. While that is true, it is not necessarily a bad thing. We wouldn't expect hydrodynamics to be wet, or neuroscience to be clever, so why should humour theory have to be funny, or even just entertaining? It should, however, have substance, and here most attempts are lacking, this book being no exception. It is little more than a collection of quotes and tidbits from humour theorists over the centuries, with a lot of the name dropping which is so oddly popular in the humanities. "This is what X means, when he says Y" seems to take on the force and role of a stringent logical argument, and rather than being a mepotistic anecdote, it's supposed to illustrate something deep. But I digress.

The main theses the reader is left with in the end are that the highest moral value o slaughter is achieved when it's reflective; when we laugh at ourselves, and that humour is the uniquely human ability to counter the absurdity of physical existence with a psychological distancing movement, and a mocking finger pointed at the physical from afar. Which, of course, is just reactionary balderdash.

Arrested Development (1)

2005-12-15T15:26:00.000-08:00

If you've watched this show at all, it doesn't come as news to you that oftentimes hilarity is caused by it. But recent episode five of season three, titled Mr. F, surpasses anything they've done so far. The whole episode is an elaborate sequence of absurd coincidences that set up a climactic scene, where a group of Japanese investors is shown a miniature city (which they believe to be the real size model homes they are about to help finance) being trashed by Tobias in a mole suit and George Michael with a jet pack. I have not seen anything so funny on TV in quite a long time. Sheerr brilliance.

The Karate Dojo - Peter Urban (3)

2005-12-14T17:59:00.000-08:00

Partly insubstantial ramblings, partly interesting Martial Arts stories, this was a nice and entertaining read. Slightly annyoing that he mixes fact and fiction in his anecdotes, without making clear, which is which. But judging from his website, he's just too great to care.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis / Andrew Adamson (3)

2005-12-14T15:55:00.000-08:00

I should have known. While I enjoyed the charming simplicity of the plotlines in the Narnia series, and appreciated them as the children's books they were intended to be, none of their story elements packs the mythological punch of Tolkien's writing, and the Christian parable feels tired once you've spotted it. Which is hard not to.

To start with the positive, the movie is nicely done, devoid of cringe-inducing lines or badly done characters, wich is saying something for Disney. But it is also quite boring, and at least a half hour too long. To strip a story about an oppressive regime, war and an epic battle for the survival of a whole world of all the nastyness these things should involve, and leave it with decoratively frozen puppets and the frosty looks of Tilda Swinton, is to deny the book its impact. Sure, you shouldn't frighten your underage audience into little whimpering heaps, but surely some sense of the consequence of evil would have been appropriate.

Plus, not surprisingly, seeing the crude metaphor for the New Testament, Aslan's sacrifice for the reinforcing of the "old magic", rather than reading about it, makes it's crude and unsubtle symbolism so painfully apparent, that I change my initial statement above - there is a cringy moment there, but it's all Lewis' fault.

A Wizard of Earthsea / The Tombs of Atuan - Ursula K. Le Guin (2)

2005-12-14T15:44:00.000-08:00

I loved Le Guins The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, so even though I'm not very keen on people in pointy hats throwing speels (unless they're called Gandalf, obviously) I thought I'd give Earthsea a shot, and I'm glad I did. Like with her other books, I found the most interesting element of these books their outright refusal to play by the base rules of the genre. While there are magical gadgets, spells, castles and monsters, it's clearly not those that Le Guin is interested in. Where a Wizard of Earthsea was about one boy's journey to discover and master the evil in himself, the Tombs is about a clash of worldviews and belief systems, one religiously closed and involved in power struggle, the other, though based in magic, rational and open, and striving to find balance. In a nutshell, these stories are driven by psychological archetypes (the dark of the tombs, the faceless evil) than by plot, in fact, so much so that I wondered why there needed to be any magic in them at all - the fantasy elements are, so far at least, quite superficial.