From Entertainment Weekly’s blog, here’s more proof that the Japanese culture is infinitely superior to our own.

Pan the Chimpanzee can do twice as many sit-ups as I can.

“Watashi wa nihongo ga mada heta desu” means “I’m still bad at Japanese.” And although that’s a demonstrably true statement, the correct response is supposedly 「いいえ、そんなことは ありませんよ」, “No, that’s not true!”

I’ve been taking classes for the past ten weeks at a local school, and last night was the nerve-wracking final. It’s actually a pretty laid-back environment, but seeing as how this is the third time I’ve taken the same class (I had to drop out of the first two before the halfway point, because of various crunch modes at work) and whether I can go on to the next one depends solely on the final exam, it was on the stressful side of pleasant. If I had just had the forethought to go wearing only my underwear, I could’ve relived one of my standard recurring adult nightmares.

It doesn’t help that I have Teflon-coated synapses where Japanese is involved. Proper names are the worst — you can tell me a Japanese family name, then immediately ask me to repeat it back to you, and I just can’t. Except for Akira Kurosawa, Beat Takeshi, and a couple of my friends with Japanese surnames, I’m hopeless. We were given a list of family words (father, grandmother, older brother, etc) to memorize, and that thing’s been the bane of my existence for two months now. I can stare at it, reciting the words over and over, and just can’t retain it.

And it says a lot that one of the key phrases we’re supposed to retain is “My Japanese isn’t very good.” That total lack of optimism extends to the title of our textbook (Basic Functional Japanese). It’s a shade better than the “particles are incomprehensibly confusing” and “you are doomed to failure” attitude surrounding the language, but it’s still hard to be enthusiastic with the mantra “The best you can possibly hope for is the most basic level of competence.”

I really have no idea how I did on the final exam; it seemed straightforward enough, but I know I made tons of little (and likely not-so-little) errors throughout. My key motivator was not having to pay to take the class for a fourth time, but when I started my panic-studying, I was reminded of this long-forgotten fact:

The head of Japanese studies at the University of Georgia is a total dick. (At least, the guy who was in charge in 1992). I was a year from graduating, and I wanted to take beginning-level classes to get a start in the language, and then go on studying on my own. JPN 101 was one of the few courses at UGA that required you to get approval from the department head before you could take it. It seemed odd, but at the time I just assumed it was a way to personalize the classes or something; inconvenient, but no big deal. When I was finally able to meet with the guy, he brusquely told me that unless I was majoring or minoring in the language, I couldn’t take the course at all. Asinine, yes, and a real drag, sure, but still not anything worth remembering 15 years later.

The kicker was this: when I asked why I couldn’t just take a few quarters of classes, he went on to say, “We have a much heavier course load than the other classes at the University. We even have students from Harvard who fail the class.” That smug disdain bugged me for years afterwards; obviously, I’m still holding a grudge. Apparently the desire to voluntarily take on classes for no relevant credit, in a language classified as “superhard” by the state department, isn’t a reliable indicator of intelligence or dedication. What really matters is whether or not my parents had enough money to send me to Harvard. How could a dumb-ass in some public state-run university possibly understand the language of ninja cartoons and videogame RPGs?

So I really want to pass that test, if only to stick it to that guy. And if I don’t, well, I’m very skeptical that I’m going to try to take the class yet again. So I’ll have to pick up what I can from comic books and weekend nights on Channel 26. But I can still say that I would’ve passed, if only I’d gone to Harvard, so it’s still a win-win situation for me. Yatta!

Update: Apparently Windows fonts don’t have the kana characters in them, resulting in a string of question marks on non-Macs for this post. I changed it to romanji and continued my smug condemnation of all things Windows.

Update 2: I got a 99%, which seems to me to be a total lie, but I’m not complaining. Take that, nameless, faceless University of GA pessimistic too-cool-for-public-school guy who for all I know might even be dead at this point! Yatta indeed.

I’ve been negligent in my “Battlestar Galactica”-watching duties for the past month, so I spent the last couple of days getting caught up on the last four episodes.

I’ve got to be vague, here, since there may yet be brothers of man, out there, among the blogosphere, who are waiting for the DVD release to watch the show. I’ll just say that it’s been troubling, and I’m getting really creeped-out by my TV series-destroying powers.

It’s not even the obvious plot events that are bugging me, as much as the general up-and-down nature of the show. People keep acting wildly inconsistently — they’ve got a basic character type that they mostly stay true to, but within that, they’re all over the map. What’s an unforgivable sin one episode becomes standard practice a few weeks later. A guy can commit treason and get a “no harm, no foul” from the Admiral in one episode; a short while later, Adama is threatening to shoot the Chief’s wife to get back at him (and just a couple of weeks before that, he was getting all emotional trying to save her).

One of the strengths of the series, as I understand it, is that it tries to put everything in a moral gray area, and it tries to add contemporary relevance to the events instead of just making it a sci-fi action series. That’s all fine, except that when you don’t have a stronger backbone for the story, and real consistency across episodes, it all comes across as self-contained Ripped From Today’s Headlines stories. I’m glad they have the conscience to tackle real issues, but there are some places where stories about racism and labor disputes and class warfare just don’t fit.

The most recent episode (the one about Baltar’s lawyer) shows signs they might be pulling out of the tailspin. I honestly couldn’t tell you if the writing was actually intelligent, or if it was just obtuse but meant to sound intelligent. Whatever the case, it worked for me. And it looks like they’re finally committed to building up to something big.

This is the only series I can think of where I’ve disliked the individual stand-along episodes so much. Usually I look forward to them; as the “series mythology” stuff is generally tedious, and smaller episodes give writers the chance to experiment and present a fully-fleshed out idea. On “Battlestar Galactica,” they just get in the way.

Update: I guess I should’ve waited until after tonight’s episode to start complaining. Because tonight’s was pretty damn cool. And I can’t remember when I’ve ever watched a TV series and had no clue what was going to happen. I can’t even speculate how things are going to turn out next week.

Before The Host, they ran a promo for Grindhouse. It’s easily the best movie trailer I’ve seen in decades:

I’ve never been this excited to see a movie that I’m probably going to miss half of because my I’ll have to keep my eyes closed. It’s easy to get taken in by cool trailer, dull movie syndrome, but word on the street is that the theatrical release has fake trailers in between the two “features.” I’m sold.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been hearing about The Host. I’ve been deliberately avoiding details about it, to keep from spoiling any potential surprises, so all I could ascertain was that it’s a South Korean movie about a giant river monster attacking a family.

And that I needed to see it. From the near-unanimous praise on Rotten Tomatoes, to breathless reviews like this one, it was described as a rapturous, life-changing experience.

So maybe my expectations were too high. The first twenty or thirty minutes are most definitely excellent. I’m not spoiling anything by saying there’s a monster attack at the beginning, and it’s just great movie-making. The CG effects are good but not exceptional; what’s exceptional is the way they’re used — pacing, staging, dialogue, everything is just dead-on, and you’re never given a chance to believe that what you’re seeing isn’t real.

After the attack, it goes into horror/comedy mode, with the family interactions and incompetent government officials and some of the best “black slapstick” I’ve seen since Cape Fear.

And then… it starts wandering. You’ll frequently see reviews that say it isn’t a traditional monster horror movie, and while that’s correct, it implies a genre mash-up that just isn’t there. The movie doesn’t dip into the big bag o’ cliches; the plot keeps going off on tangents you don’t quite expect. But you quickly discover that there’s a distinction between “surprising” and just “unexpected.” Stuff keeps happening, but it’s not the oh my God he’s been dead all along! level of surprise as much as well, would you look at that, he ordered corned beef instead of ham and cheese.

There’s a consistent theme throughout most of the movie, that of the struggle between an unsympathetic, monolithic, and incompetent government against a barely sympathetic, incompetent, but heartwarming family. But although it’s a recurring theme, it never breaks through into full-fledged satire. It just remains an idea — the value of the individual versus that of society. A nice enough theme, but nothing groundbreaking, and there’s not much new added.

So in the end, it’s a reasonably well-made slice-of-life movie of the type that’s kept Sundance festivals going for decades. But with an amazing opening sequence that hints at so much more potential than the rest of the movie can deliver. It should definitely get points for being neither a stock, by-the-numbers horror movie; or a bland and predictable indie comedy/drama. But I just didn’t think it was cohesive or powerful enough to hold my interest.

It’s a little weird that I’ve been so engrossed in the Final Destination movies lately. I’m not a big fan of horror movies in general, because I don’t usually have the constitution for them. And the movies, frankly, just aren’t that good.

I was initially interested by the TV tie-ins. Ali Larter from “Heroes” is in the first two movies; and two elements of the series: the hit-by-a-bus scene from the first, and the overall concept that once you’re marked for death, you can’t escape, are being “borrowed” by “Lost.”

More than that, I’m just fascinated by how the whole thing works as a franchise. It’s easy to have a dismal view of Commercial Entertainment Product, and the typical laments about art versus product, insipid marketing tie-ins and focus-testing and sequels, and how Hollywood (and big business in general) ruins everything. The Final Destination movies leave me feeling kind of optimistic — I’d point to the third movie as proof that there’s still plenty of room for art and talent in the process.

I’m obliged to point out that warm, fuzzy, pro-Corporate Media Congolmerate feelings aside, Final Destination 3 is not a great movie; in fact, it teeters precariously on the precipice of “good enough”. I don’t want to get carried away here; we’re still definitely in “it’s better to aim low and hit than aim high and miss” territory.

But it takes the basic template of Final Destination 2, a truly awful movie, and shows what’s possible when you put some talent behind it. It’s got the big action sequence at the beginning, a callback to explain the plot of the first movie, then a series of increasingly complicated death sequences interspersed with scenes of your tedious and unlikeable heroes trying to figure out how to save themselves. I’m impressed that the filmmakers didn’t just completely ignore the second movie, but recognized what worked in it and took only the parts they needed — the basic formula (less “X-Files” episode, more teen horror blockbuster), and the increased gore level the kids go crazy for.

The trick, of course, is that unlike the second movie, they took the formula and did it right. The cinematography is way better than a movie like this needs to be. The opening sequence is genuinely creepy. I’ve read some reviews complaining about the CGI in the roller coaster sequence, but I thought it worked well; everything looked hyper-real and unsettling. And throughout the movie, there are interesting shots and set-ups that just have the feel of a bunch of people who know what they’re doing.

Of course, the roller coaster sequence is completely ludicrous — they actually have one of the characters go on about how a coaster is nothing but physics in action, and then still show the coaster stopping at the top of a loop (like in Chris Elliot’s “Get a Life” series). But whether intentional or not, it’s goofy, and funny, and sets the tone for the rest of the movie. The events are ridiculous; the non-action scenes are talky, plodding, and pretty dull; and the characters are tedious and unrelatable.

Which all works, because the movie’s all about the suspense, and again, with the pacing and editing, there are signs all over that the filmmakers know what they’re doing. The characters exist only to get killed, so they’re just relatable enough to distinguish them from a crowd scene. The talking scenes are slow and dull on purpose, to give the audience enough time to calm down after the last death scene. And the ridiculous nature of the deaths keeps you on edge, because although you know that someone’s going to die, you spend agonizing minutes watching, trying to figure out exactly how it’s going to happen.

The sequence in the hardware store, in particular, sets the “murder weapon” up in the very first shot. And then shows you about ten minutes of red herrings, tedious plot development, and fake-outs while you wait for the end to come. That’s how suspense scenes should be done. And again, the way they filmed this scene, and in fact every other scene in the movie, repeats the idea that every single thing around you is dangerous and potentially lethal.

My biggest problem with the first movie, after listening to the commentary, was the frustration that the filmmakers seemed so close to understanding what their movie was about, and then dropped the ball trying to turn it into something it wasn’t. Final Destination 3 addresses all of that; it feels as if everybody involved is on the same page.

In the first movie, the commentary points out that they used “Rocky Mountain High” by John Denver for death scenes, to show a contrast between what you hear and what you’re seeing. Get it? That’s irony! The third movie uses basically the same gimmick, but does it 1000 times more effectively and less clumsily. “Love Rollercoaster” plays during the first death; a little obvious, but still a great choice. Even better is the recurring theme, “Turn Around, Look at Me” by the Lettermen. (The version linked is by The Vogues, which is less creepy than the earlier one, but still the same idea). It suddenly starts playing on the radio whenever Death approaches, and it’s a perfect choice.

And in keeping with the “Hooray for Corporate Entertainment!” theme of this post, there’s the “Choose Their Fate” feature of the DVD release. Before the death scenes, you’re given a choice as to what the characters will do, and then can see how it plays out in the movie. I’ll go ahead and ruin the surprise: it doesn’t make a bit of difference. You get a few extra seconds of footage in a slightly altered scene, and can only really “save” one victim. (The DVD even makes a joke to that effect, asking you, “Was he worth saving?”)

So it’s yet another sign of crass marketing ruining the artistic process, right? I say no! It’s a perfect example of how to exploit the system. According to the extra features and commentary on the first movie, it was plagued by focus-testing, alternate scenes, and the need to re-shoot the entire ending. By the third, they took advantage of the DVD feature to try out all their alternates. For example, the option at the end of the movie changes nothing, but lets you see the original, dull ending, before preview audiences demanded a new ending.

Another case just shows two versions of the exact same death (inside a football workout room), but edited and paced differently; a shorter version was requested by the studio to mimic the hit-by-a-bus scene in the first movie, but the longer, superior version made it into the final movie. The marketing types get a bullet point for the DVD case and the PR surrounding the movie; the filmmakers get to try alternate takes and save the best stuff for the theatrical release. Everybody’s a winner.

So whether or not it’s a Modern Day Classic of Cinema (hint: it’s not), I’m still impressed by it. In videogames, TV, movies, and every commercial entertainment medium, we hear over and over again about how big corporations ruin everything, marketing/publishing/the studio is The Enemy, and art can’t survive under the pressing weight of cold, soulless commerce. Final Destination 2 still sucks all kinds of ways, don’t get me wrong. But the third one shows what can happen when you take a less antagonistic attitude towards the business end — talent can still shine through, and you can end up with something that might not be art, but is a hell of a lot of fun.

Last night ABC aired a new episode of their series “Lost.” Apparently it’s about a bunch of people marooned on an island or something. Watching it, I was reminded of a series that ran two years ago, also coincidentally called “Lost.”

In last night’s episode, though, everyone was acting strangely out of character. Not five minutes in, and Locke is actually chastising someone else for not exchanging information. Later, Kate asks Rousseau a question about something that happened very recently, and, amazingly, she got a complete answer. People made a plan to do something, told each other about the plan, and then actually accomplished it. Not once, but twice!

Charlie and Desmond were, of course, completely annoyingly evasive throughout most of the episode, but that’s to be expected, since Desmond’s still relatively new and Charlie’s still relatively a total dick. But by the end, Claire reveals, “Desmond told me everything.”

The flashback wasn’t just repetition of stuff we already knew (everyone suspected Claire’s parentage, but it wasn’t confirmed), but real character-building stuff that resonated with the theme of the episode; it didn’t just repeat the theme of the episode outright. Nice to see an episode say, “Claire is consumed with guilt and self-doubt, and because of frequent abandonment, has trouble trusting people,” without having Claire say, “I’m consumed with guilt and self-doubt. And also, because of frequent abandonment, I have trouble trusting people!”

All that, some duplicitous behavior on the part of Locke, a pretty creepy death scene (with an explanation!), and a little clever twist of intrigue at the end!

And did you notice how I’m not still bitching and moaning about their quickly killing off a mysterious character that showed so much promise from a Boba Fett-style fleeting glimpse on a security monitor several episodes ago? See, “Lost” guys, it’s easy! Just keep making solid episodes where stuff actually happens — they don’t all have to be show-stoppers — and a lot of your whiny fanbase will stop complaining about all the loose ends and details, and just get back into the action. We’re easily placated by competence.

I rented Onibaba (Demon Woman) because a website recommended it to fans of Yokai Monsters and Kwaidan, two movies about Japanese ghosts and monsters. Plus, it’s got a big demon on the cover!

The truth is that, except for the last twenty minutes or so, it’s not about obakemono at all, and it isn’t what I expected. But it’s one hell of a movie.

It’s unlike any other Japanese movie I’ve seen, contemporary or otherwise. If I had to describe it, I’d say it’s what would happen if you had a Japanese New Wave director take sets and costumes from a samurai movie and make an interpretation of a Tennessee Williams play. With maybe some John Steinbeck and William Faulkner thrown in.

The story is set near Kyoto during the warring states period, and it deals with a woman and her daughter-in-law living in poverty because of the war. The war has ravaged the land and made farming impossible, so they’re forced to murder dying samurai from the battlefields, loot the armor and weapons from the corpses, and sell them for food. Things become even more complicated when a neighboring farmer returns from the war and attempts to take the place of the daughter-in-law’s dead husband.

Onibaba is very much a 60s movie; despite its setting, it’s aggressively modern in its style, editing, music, characterization, and subject matter. There are all kinds of film tricks which come across as tedious and pretentious in other movies, but work perfectly here. Long shots of nothing but flowing grass perfectly convey the idea that civilization has been squeezed out and overtaken by wild nature. Jump-cuts and super-imposed shots give everything a surreal feeling and perfectly capture scenes of people overtaken by passion.

The characters are portrayed as being genuinely destitute and desperate — hairy, filthy, and generally nasty. There’s a lot of breasts and ass to be seen, and even though it’s sexual, it’s not erotic. That’s because they’re living in the most primitive conditions, and also because one third of the breasts belong to an old woman, and most of the ass is that of a dirty, hairy, male war deserter. It was still nice to see a movie showing characters not as “movie-peasants,” carefully arranged to have just the right amount of muck about them, but in true squalor.

Some of my favorite scenes are the ones in which the daughter-in-law runs across the fields at night to meet her lover. Kaneto Shindo filmed the scenes in silence except for the sound of cooing pigeons; in the movie, you can’t quite identify the noise, but get the subliminal impression of surreal urgency and passion. In an interview with the director included on the disc, he points out that he used pigeons because they’re “known for their fecundity,” which adds another layer of meaning to an already effective gimmick.

What impressed me the most is how well the film* conveyed its message, even to those not receptive for it. After watching the interview with Shindo, I realized that I’m a lot more of a prude than he is. Still, I got the message of the film completely, on an almost instinctual level, and I was surprised to hear him describe the process — everything he claims he tried to do with the movie, worked. It’s more like a film you understand than a film you watch.

The movie is about sex. Or more precisely, it’s about people as animals as opposed to products of society. The characters are living in a state of nature at the beginning of the story. Our protagonists are quickly established as murderers, but they’re not the villains. They’re only doing what needs to be done to survive. The war is described several times as a general’s war, a product of the cities — it’s causing the terrible conditions for the peasants, but giving them no benefit. So in the movie’s logic, the protagonists’ actions are justified.

It’s not until the horny newcomer arrives on the scene that the conflict starts. Suddenly, the concerns are societal concerns — jealousy, fear of abandonment, repression, guilt. And it’s only after the mother feels threatened (and unsatisfied in her own lust) that she begins to talk about sin and religion. Not as a means of finding the truth, but as a means of repression and control.

I’ve read some online reviews that describe the movie as showing what happens when people are reduced to their primitive state, but I think that’s just a shade on the simplistic side. It shows societal constructs as just that — man-made constructs, separate from what’s needed for our existence. In Onibaba, the murder of invaders and sex outside of marriage aren’t sinful; the only true sins are jealousy, repression, guilt, and the lust for power and control. I believe a better message to take from the movie is that we’re never completely removed from our “primitive” state, and we should never lose sight of the distinction between what we want and what we need.

* After a year of film school, I resolved never to use the word “film” or “cinema” to describe movies — my token battle against pretension. I’m making an exception in this case, because everything Shindo attempts to do, works, and it works almost like poetry.

Update: One other thing I wanted to mention: I’ve read a few reviews online that translates the title Onibaba as “The Hole,” but that’s incorrect. (It means “Devil Woman” or “Demon Woman” or just “hag”). But the hole, the first thing introduced in the movie and a symbol revisited almost as frequently as the flowing grass, is an important character. In the story, it’s where the two women toss the bodies of their victims. In the movie, it gives an ever-present sense of danger and dread, and also of course represents hell. But hell in a very practical sense — not just a place of punishment for sinners, but the place where everything that’s no longer needed is cast away.