時代の流れに、我らしか漂わない

"In the current of an era, we can only drift along..."

Seems kinda of fitting for both the current political/world view, and the life of a JET ^^; With time comes change.

The long time avatar, DJPANDA (courtesy of Jungle Wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu)

has been retired and replaced with DJNEKO (courtesy of Moon Phase)


Another sweeping change is that I'm back in school again! Though this time from the teacher's point of view. I'm enjoying the start of up this quarter quite a bit as unlike my first quarter I actually no what's going on ;) Even the weather has been nice lately with sunny skies clearing away the snow a tiny tiny bit.

So as the invitation to stay another year here hangs around my neck, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about my future. But since I'm not sure where I stand on that yet, I'll just write up a bit about what's new and good in entertainment over the last month:

Films:

Haven't been to the theaters much. But I did manage to catch the limited showing of 雲のむこう、約束の場所　(Kumo no mukou, yaksoku no basho -The place promised in our early days-). The first full-length film from the one man animator Makoto Shinkai who made a name for himself with 星の声 (Hoshi no koe, voices of a distant star). Unlike Hoshi no Koe which was animated entirely by Shinkai (with a runtime of 30mins), this time Shinkai enlisted in staff members and spent 2-3 years to create a full 1:30min feature film. Like Hoshi no Koe, the art design and backgrounds are gorgeous and Shinkai's use of CG effects to work around a low budget are excellent. The voice acting is pretty good, though the use of some big name voice actors is questionable since it kinda kills the low-budget art house feel. The music done once again by his friend Tenmon is pleasant sounding. Yet overall the movie is a lot weaker than Hoshi no Koe or Kanojo to Kanojo no Neko (his other 5 min short film). The reason is simply that while being an excellent animator, his writing skills are at the level of a high school kid from the poetry club. While this works for short films (Hoshi no Koe took the idea of cell-phone e-mails in future space travel and the time-effect that distance brings), when trying to go for 2 hour films it has problems. Shinkai loves two things: Poetry & Hard-core sci-fi. So the plot comes off as a simplistic yet overly-explained (with all kinds of military/science scenes) story spotted about with random poetic breaks. Still an enjoyable film, but I can't say I didn't come away slightly disappointed. Especially as the trailer for the film was utterly fantastic :\ 3.25/4


In Kung Fu Hustle, the new film by Stephen Chow (Shaolin Soccer, God of Cookery, etc...), Chow once again plays the lead character in this action/comedy. Basically it was a good film with great cinematography, awesome action (though Ong Bak this is not), and some nice parodies. Unlike a lot of his other films that are based around bizarre off the wall humor, KFH relies more on parodies of everything from Gangs of New York to Dragonball. Personally I like his goofier stuff better but KFH was still worth watching even at 1000yen prices. 3/4


Checked out the live-action version of Cutie Honey directed by Evangelion creator/director Hideaki Anno. Anno has shown in his other dips into live-action that he is a very talented and artistic individual. So I was looking forward to what he would do with an anime->live-action film. Unfortunately the answer is "not much". While there are some nice moments from a visual standpoint, and the cinematography is rock solid, the main actress is the worst actress I've seen in film and quite possible the most annoying person ever. Besides that the film is basically just a theatrical ultraman type movie with people in rubber suits fighting. It's very tongue in cheek, and quite funny at times but in the end it's a very forgettable music. PS. The remixes of the main song do rock though ;P 2.5/4


Sekai no chushin de ai wo sakebu was the big Japanese film of 2004. When I first got here in July I noticed posters everywhere, in the winter theaters were doing special 2nd showings of it around here and, As the dvd release grew near I saw endless commercials on tv. So since the Japanese movie-goers usually have at least decent taste and the standard edition of the dvd was cheap, I decided to check it out. Hmmm...it was ok I guess. There wasn't really much that stuck out about the film. It was just your typical depressing "aware" style Japanese melo-drama. Nothing was really bad about it, but nothing was really great either (well I guess the main actress was pretty good). A decent watch 3/4.

Books:
Yep, would you believe it!? I'm actually reading :D

Miyabe Miyuki, a popular Japanese writer, was greatly moved by the 2001 PS2 game ICO (viewed by many as the greatest artistic achievement in the realm of games). So much, that he decided he wanted to flesh out the little bits of story in the game into a full novel, and thus the 600 page epic novel ICO -Castle in the Mist- was born. As a huge fan of the game I decided to pick up the book when I first arrived in Japan only to start reading it recently. I'm about 100 pages in at the moment and so far it reads quite nicely. The descriptive yet kinda of floaty and vague imagery of it mixed with the slower more relaxed pacing gives it a feel that matches the game quite well. At 97 pages in, the book is just getting to the opening of the game so it'll be interesting how it handles the actual game puzzle aspect of exploring the castle in literature form.

entry 1 - end, turn to entry 2