Sack o’ Monkeys in My Pocket

I was wandering around the internet last night and ended up spending at least an hour looking at MST3K clips on YouTube. It really was the best television series ever. There’s the Idiot Control Now song from Pod People:

(You can see the bit they’re making fun of as well).

And the Fugitive Alien Medley. And the “Big McLargeHuge” running gag from Space Mutiny. And possibly best of all, The Jet Jaguar Fight Song from Godzilla vs. Megalon:

Now I’ve got to see how many episodes I can fit on an iPhone for watching on the plane…

Lepton of Disappointment

quantumofsolacestill.jpgThe worst thing about Quantum of Solace is that it has to follow Casino Royale. That’s the capsule review I’ve been hearing in the past few weeks: “It’s not as good as the first one, but still okay.” And that’s a shame, because it’s not a bad movie; in fact, it’s still in the top six or seven of the Bond movies (unless you count the Bourne movies as Bond movies). But it’s frustratingly not there. It’s got all the ingredients of a phenomenal Bond movie, but they never quite congeal into something great.

What’s good:

  1. Daniel Craig is still a total bad-ass.
  2. M gets out of the office and does stuff, and the movie wisely builds the relationship between Bond and M.
  3. The Tosca sequence is great from start to finish; exactly the kind of balance of espionage and spectacle you want to see in an updated Bond movie.
  4. The giant computer screen at headquarters actually looks cool and somewhat functional. How it functions is still every bit as ridiculous as it is in any other movie or TV show, but the interface looked like it was designed by someone who’s actually used a computer before, and I didn’t spend the entire sequence smacking my forehead.
  5. Great choice of locations, and they were all shot very well. The franchise-holders get just the right balance between the new, more realistic reboot and the obscene displays of excessive wealth we expect from these movies.
  6. There’s nothing as clever as Bond and Vesper’s conversation on the train in Casino Royale, but there are still some great snatches of dialogue.
  7. Nobody in the cast gives a bad performance. American mustache guy comes closest, but he’s supposed to be annoying. I think we’ve been blinded by nostalgia and have forgotten that Bond movies in the past have traditionally had awful acting.

What’s not good:

  1. The villain’s pretty dull. He’s basically just Roman Polanski with more interest in real estate.
  2. The action sequences were all basically five minutes of 3-second cuts followed by one long shot in slow motion that let you know something dramatic just happened. I still don’t know what made half those cars or boats flip over.
  3. “Strawberry Fields” is a decent Bond girl name, and I still haven’t decided whether I like or dislike that they never actually say her name in the movie.
  4. The death-by-oil slick is fine as a nod to Goldfinger, but not more than that. It just kind of happened, it didn’t really fit in with the story or characters, and it wasn’t even filmed particularly well.
  5. Usually I prefer it when a movie doesn’t talk down to me, but this movie was withholding information. I’m still not clear on exactly how Vesper was tied in with the main bad guy, how they found the main bad guy, Bond’s whole revenge plot, or — well, basically everything of significance except for the girl’s revenge story.
  6. The villain’s ultimate motivation, assuming I understood it correctly, was inexcusably lame and non-threatening.
  7. Considering the above, the whole “the world has lost its moral center” theme didn’t ring true at all. Plus, they kept pounding on that message a little too clumsily.
  8. The theme song sucks hard. It ruined all the momentum that confusing car chase had built up, and distracted attention away from the sandy naked ladies.

Still, it’s a net win, and it did a decent job at keeping the franchise reboot going. As long as they keep Daniel Craig and Judi Dench, and probably Paul Haggis, they can churn out a dozen more of these things and I’ll gladly pay for each one in the theater and on disc.

Forty Years of Banging the Crap Out of Things

Taiko no TetsujinAnother year means another post from me imploring people to see the San Francisco Taiko Dojo’s Concert in Berkeley in November. This year is the 40th Anniversary Show, so it should be a pretty big deal. I’m especially looking forward to it because I missed last year’s concert in Berkeley as well as the past two years’ Cherry Blossom festivals.

The SF Taiko Dojo has a bunch of older videos online to give you a rough idea of what you can expect from the shows. Below is video of a performance from 2002 (this is the younger performers’ “Rising Stars” group, but they’re still excellent and this is the most recent video I can find):

But it’s no exaggeration at all to say you have to be there to appreciate it. It’s only tangentially like a music concert; as you can see in the video, it’s as much about movement and choreography as it is about music, but what you can’t see in the video is that it’s also about having the wind knocked out of you. At the risk of sounding like a Marin County Earth Child: there’s an energy that fills the entire hall and pulls everyone in the audience up into the performance. It’s less like a concert and more like the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark (without actual face-melting).

Those of us who live in the Bay Area are really lucky to have the chance to see regular performances from the SF Taiko Dojo. (And if anybody else out there is planning on seeing the show, let me know!)

Literacy 2008: Book 8: The Graveyard Book

graveyardbookcover.JPGBook
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Synopsis
The Jungle Book for goth kids.

No, the Real Synopsis
After his family is killed, a toddler wanders into the neighboring graveyard. He’s taken in by the residents, raised as one of their own, and taught the ways of the dead.

Pros
Genius concept, interesting and endearing characters, great pacing. Crammed full of clever touches and imagination. Occasional passages that are just perfect, such as a stranger describing the boy: “He smelled like a shed. His hair was long and shaggy, and he seemed extremely grave.”

Cons
Occasionally reminds the reader that this is a young adult book — the villain revealing the entire back story at the climax, deus ex machinas coming right after the young hero has proven himself and learned a valuable lesson, etc. A climactic point in one of the stories is the hero re-enacting the oldest adventure game puzzle there is, which kind of ruined the story. The ending is tough to take if you’re feeling childless or if you’re separated from your family, and especially tough if you’re both.

Verdict
My favorite non-Sandman Neil Gaiman story; I think he might be at his best when he’s reinventing.

Sequential Images

I wasn’t aware of The Criterion Contraption blog until the author started commenting on here, and I wish I’d found it years ago. It’s exactly the thing I’ve been looking for.

The premise is that the aforementioned author, Matthew Dessem, is watching the movies of The Criterion Collection in order by spine number, and writing about each one. At the time I’m writing this, he’s finished 88 entries, so there’s only 367 to go! God speed! (Another lesson learned: I had had no idea how many Criterion movies there were.)

So that’s the premise, but the appeal is that the entries are so well-written. There’s no shortage of writing about movies on the internet, but it all tends to fall into one of two categories: shallow reviews of recent movies that say nothing more than “should I see it or not?” or tiresome, over-long, pseudo-academic wankery that says nothing more than “my cinema studies major was not a waste of time, dammit!” (A third category, the tiresome, over-long, shallow synopsis of dated movies no one cares about remains relatively rare but is gaining traction). Basically, I’ve been looking for something in between “thumbs up!” and exegesis.

The entries on Criterion Contraption are perfect examples of how to write about movies on the internet: accessible, comprehensible, intelligent, perceptive, with the right balance of subjectivity and objectivity, well-researched without being mired in obsessive over-interpretation of symbolism, and genuinely funny. Plus, he understands how and when to use a still frame from the movie, or an excerpt from the script, instead of a paragraph to make the point. And best of all: I’m 15 entries in (in reverse order) and I have yet to encounter the phrase mise en scène.

I’d recommend it for anybody who likes movies. Even for movies I’ve seen dozens of times and read about extensively, I’ve seen stuff on that blog I hadn’t noticed before.

And the preamble goes like this

Since I’ve been confronted with my age (thirty-seven) a lot lately, I’ve been wondering:

1) If you’re around my age (thirty-seven), can you recite the Preamble to the US Constitution? If so, can you do it without singing it?

2) If you’re significantly below my age, can you recite the Preamble to the US Constitution? And were you guys subjected to Schoolhouse Rock as much as we were?

3) Did they ever make a Schoolhouse Rock song about the role of the Vice President and how we can work together to give that position more power?

Okay, what ELSE you got?

brandowildone.jpgA few years ago, my friend Alex recommended I read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I filed away the suggestion but never acted on it, for any one of a dozen stupid reasons. I wouldn’t have the attention span to read a 1000-page book I liked, much less one without spaceships. I wasn’t that interested in tennis or drug addicts. And most of all, I immediately dismissed it as yet another of the pop culture-influenced “great novels” of the 90s (most of which I haven’t read either, but still feel entitled to judge): an over-educated and under-experienced man vacillating between too earnest and too self-consciously ironic in pre-emptive defense against seeming too earnest.

Wallace’s death shocked me into reading some of his stuff, especially after seeing one reviewer after another mention exactly that play between media influence, irony, self-awareness, sincerity, and cynicism as a recurring theme in his work. I’ve started with A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and I had to stop after 80 pages to process it. One of the essays in that book, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” is one of the most insightful things I’ve ever read.

In that one essay, Wallace manages to touch on everything I’ve been trying to figure out for decades about the media, pop culture, and How We Got To This Point. I don’t even like to suggest that they’re ideas that I’ve had; they’re ideas that I’ve been trying to have, but my brain just couldn’t form them. My own attempts at it seem banging-the-rocks-together facile: “Why no people say what them mean? How come reading The Onion A.V. Club make Chuck so sad inside?” And it’s jarring to be reading a series of observations so relevant, and come across a mention of “St. Elsewhere” or “Moonlighting” or “Growing Pains,” reminders that this was written 18 years ago.

Continue reading “Okay, what ELSE you got?”

The Spy Who Didn’t Have Enough Sense to Come In From the Cold

Burn After Reading and the Coen Brothers’ populism

burnafterreadingtheater.jpg
One thing that almost all the Coen Brothers’ movies have in common is stupid people. I’m not exactly breaking new ground in cinema studies here: whether they’re stupid but good-hearted (Raising Arizona), stupid and vain (Intolerable Cruelty), stupid people gone cynical (No Country for Old Men), or just plain stupid (Blood Simple), not since the Bush/Cheney administration have two men accomplished so much by artfully manipulating the ignorant.

Burn After Reading doesn’t do anything to break that trend; like Blood Simple, its whole plot is driven by stupid people in way over their heads. Like Fargo and The Big Lebowski, it shows a horrible string of events escalating from one stupid decision. Like The Man Who Wasn’t There and The Hudsucker Proxy, it’s a pitch-perfect parody of another genre of movie (in this case, the spy thriller). Like O Brother, Where Art Thou?, it gets near-genius performances out of every single person in the cast — in this one, Brad Pitt and George Clooney are the stand-outs, and that’s only because Frances McDormand is so great you never notice how great she is.

You can’t avoid comparing it to other Coen Brothers movies, because it’s like a Coen Brothers sampler. Great soundtrack, brilliant dialogue (they can make a guy saying nothing but “fuck” sound like poetry), familiar plot threads mixed up in surprising ways, and masterful editing; you’ve got to think it’s impossible for these guys to make a bad movie. They’ve even included their “Greek chorus” characters like in Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother, and Big Lebowski, the guys who remind you it’s all just a movie and tell the audience what’s going on (although in this case, they admit they don’t know what’s going on).

And it’s hilarious, with just the right combination of lowbrow and highbrow so you’re never sure where the next joke is coming from. You want subtle? There’s a sequence following a guy walking through the corridors of C.I.A. headquarters, and each hallway has its own unique oppressive rushing-of-air ambient noise. Not-so-subtle? The reveal of the invention George Clooney’s character’s been building in the basement had the entire audience laughing out of shock.

Still, it’s a hard movie to love. I’ve read reviews that call it “slight,” or “a trifle.” One particularly misguided review of the movie comes from Ty Burr of the Boston Globe: he criticizes the movie for having no meaning or art, and just being a smug laugh at the audience’s expense. But my problem with the movie isn’t that it doesn’t say anything. There’s nothing wrong with the Coens’ deciding just to goof off for one movie, especially when they’re so good at doing it. The movie would work fine as a simple parody of spy thrillers, deflating their self importance: the global satellite cameras, discs with sensitive info, shady deals in foreign embassies, and pervasive paranoia.

My problem with it is what it does say. To make yet another comparison: it’s ultimately got the same sense of defeatist cynicism as No Country for Old Men. What makes Burr’s criticism so wrong — and he’s far from being the only person who’s made the same misinterpretation — is that the Coen Brothers’ movies are all about rejecting the smug, elitist mentality he accuses them of.

The Coens love showing us stupid people, but they almost always encourage us to root for them. (Except for Blood Simple, which is based on the characters’ being idiots you can’t feel any sympathy for, but that was more a movie about moviemaking than about characters.) Pretty much all of the movies are resoundingly populist and optimistic. That was the core message of Fargo: there’s plenty of hopelessness, and desperation, and sadness, and just plain evil in the world, but people are basically good. (Or at least they want to be). And most importantly, that there’s nothing naive or foolish about acknowledging that.

I think anybody who dismisses the Coens’ movies as being smug or elitist is doing more than a little bit of projection: the viewer might be looking down on these characters, but the movies aren’t. For the most part, they’re good people doing bad things. And part of the reason the morality of the Coens’ movies works so well is that they acknowledge that real evil exists (more often than not in the form of John Goodman), but they don’t dismiss everyone just for being flawed. When Frances McDormand’s character at the end of Fargo says “I just don’t understand,” she’s not being stupid, she’s being sincere: she doesn’t understand why someone would choose to throw away a world that has such simple beauty.

There’s a little bit of that in Burn After Reading — the only real villains of the movie are John Malkovich and Tilda Swinton’s characters. They’re not just flawed; they’re broken. And Malkovich’s character commits the worst possible crime in a Coen movie: it’s not murder, but being a pompous, self-important asshole. When he delivers his speech about the “league of morons” he’s been forced to deal with, that’s not the Coens talking; it’s the audience’s signal that he’s passed the point of being a flawed but ultimately sympathetic character, and he’s become irredeemable.

But ultimately, that ends up feeling like a holdover, a vestigial characterization tic left over from back when the Coens made positive movies. There’s a real sense of hopelessness and emptiness in Burn After Reading, and a sense that they’re even mocking the concept of optimism. When characters reach their breaking point, they yell at each other for being “negative,” and the naivete of it gets a laugh. Everyone is selfish and deceptive, and the whole descent into murder is caused by our protagonist’s being lonely and sad and looking in the wrong place for self-improvement. The capper is as well-written as anything the Coens have ever done, but it also just confirms that nobody really knows what happened, or how to keep it from happening again. For such a funny movie, it’s pretty bleak.

I’m hoping that the whole shift in tone is just detritus from the cynicism of No Country for Old Men. Even at their worst, the Coens are still geniuses at screenwriting and editing, and at the very least you’re going to see something visually interesting. But when they hit that sweet spot between cynical and naive, arch and sincere, clever and populist, it’s transcendent. I’m hoping they can get it all out of their system and just get back to their happy place. I don’t know. Maybe it’s Utah.

Literacy 2008: Exhibition Round 2: Yokai Attack!

yokaiattackcover.jpgThere’s no way I’m going to finish my resolution to read 26 books by the end of 2008, but even out of desperation I can’t in good conscience include this book to pad out the list. But it’s still neat enough to be worth an exhibition round.

Book
Yokai Attack!: The Japanese Monster Survival Guide by Hiroko Yoda, Matt Alt, and Tatsuya Morino

Synopsis
Like the excellent book The Field Guide to North American Monsters, but with yokai. Contains entries for several monsters of Japanese folklore, with information on their origins, habitat, and what to do in the event of an encounter.

Pros
Great introduction to yokai, making absolutely no assumptions about the reader’s familiarity with Japanese folklore, language, or pop culture. Includes the kanji name for each monster, a translation of the name into English, and notes on the etymology of the names and their use in idioms, which are great for people trying to learn the Japanese language. Each entry includes a full-page illustration of the creature done in the style of Shigeru Mizuki and the original source. Images from the original source material are also included wherever possible. Has an excellent bibliography and reference section, recommending plenty of related books and films. Mentions each creature’s “relevance,” indicating which creatures are the best-known and which are more obscure, or are only part of the folklore of certain regions.

Cons
Because the book is intended as an introduction, it’s pretty shallow. Each entry is limited to 2 and a half pages at the longest, the bulk of it dedicated to the height/weight/habitat information which keeps the “field guide” gag running. The descriptions keep a light “isn’t all this stuff wacky?” attitude, which can deflate the coolness of it all somewhat.

Synopsis
Although I personally prefer SHMorgan’s Obakemono Project website, both for the art style and for the number and depth of the entries, Yokai Attack! is a better general introduction. The book’s format and its use of popular expressions, idioms, and the monsters’ appearance in popular culture give a better sense of how this aspect of Japanese folklore fits into the country as a whole, and how many of them came about. It’s a fun book, highly recommended for anyone interested in this stuff. You should also check out the book’s official website.

Beat Bachs

A post on Boing Boing was the first I’d heard of Omodaka, a collaboration from a Japanese electronic musician putting out some of the most amazing videos I’ve ever seen. (You can read more about the artist on this modern Japanese music guide).

He’s got six videos available on YouTube, and pretty much every one is going to be something you haven’t quite seen before.

Kokiriko Bushi is a fantastic video that sums up everything distinctive about the music: a combination of 8-bit videogame music samples with traditional Japanese folk and pop vocals. (As Boing Boing points out, the track is an electronic version of a Japanese folk song).

I was a little surprised that my favorites were the ones that didn’t play up the retro-videogame angle. The Omodaka version of Bach’s Cantata No. 147 is just wonderful:

But my favorite (possibly my favorite music video ever) is Kyoteizinc. I love this so much I want to make another Voyager probe just so I can put this on the disc:

I’m hoping that a DVD of the videos makes it way to the US sometime, because this stuff is just amazing.

The Beast Must Have a Problem He’s Not Telling Us About

Friday night I imitated a normal person and left work before dark. I just sat at home and watched movies on AMC, so I guess I imitated a depressingly boring normal person, but still, it beats working.

Apparently, AMC runs horror movies on Friday nights, and this week we got: Puppet Master (a reminder of how horrible the 80s were), Magic (not as bad as I’d heard it was, but still not really good), and The Beast Must Die (quite possibly the greatest movie ever made in the history of cinema).

I’m only partly exaggerating about The Beast Must Die; I’m actually a little embarrassed that I’d never heard of it before. It’s everything a late-70s horror movie should be, and then some. It’s like a cross between a Castle horror movie, Enter the Dragon, and a blaxploitation flick, right down to the chicka-chicka-wow-wow on the soundtrack. Best of all is the “Werewolf Break” that’s promised at the beginning of the movie and then delivered 15 minutes before the end — everything stops for 30 seconds to give the audience a chance to piece together the clues and figure out who’s the werewolf. Plus, it’s got Peter Cushing and Michael Gambon, each of whom has this completely inexplicable ability to make a movie seem classier, even though their careers absolutely don’t warrant it.

None of the movies are actually scary, of course; the only disturbing thing about my evening completely and gloriously wasted was the number of commercials. I don’t know if it’s always been like this, and it’s just been too long since I’ve watched TV “live;” or if AMC saves up all their questionable content for Friday nights, but these ads were a non-stop Parade of Sexual Dysfunction. They had male enhancement products in forms I didn’t know (and was happier not knowing) existed — herbal supplements, powders, pills, drinks, and even a delicious shake. (Which kind of make sense, if my own results after a delicious shake are any indication).

All at varying levels of FDA approval, but with one thing in common: the ads are hosted by the smarmiest sons of bitches you’d ever want to see. And the women are all either rolling their eyes and grinning talking about “that certain part of the male anatomy” — I think they’re talkin’ about the penis — or there’s the one that takes the opposite tack and has the moderately-but-not-quite-attractive woman trying to shame guys into calling. “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!?” she demands, and I have to reply, “I’m waiting for you to calm the hell down and see about getting those moles removed, lady.”

And that was before they started bringing out the vibrators and pumps. The vibrator commercial is bad enough, because it’s got women giggling over a magazine ad, unable to come (ha!) right out and say what the heck it is they’re even selling. Then the middle aged woman who’s been listening in the whole time pipes up and tells them where she buys hers. While you’re still desperately trying to get that image out of your head, they start with the ads for the Medicare-and-most-insurance-approved pumps for gentlemen. Those ads are all guys no younger than 50, most of them looking like they just walked off the set of “Hee Haw,” talking about how the vacuum action changed their lives and “if you got a brain in your head, you’ll call right now!”

And it’s moments like those when you think, “Yep, it’s been a good run, but I think it’s time for the human race to just die out now.” But they just won’t let it!