An Eternal Thought in the Mind of Godzilla

Tatsunda Joe!

It's a little more than two weeks now until the move to Tokyo and I’m winding down my boxing training - very much against my will - at the Fight and Fitness gym in San Francisco. I had a private session on Fri/20 with my trainer, SF Golden Gloves champ Chris Cariaso and here’s his assessment of me after eight month of jumping rope, drills, shadow boxing, working the bag, and all that other stuff.

My biggest problems include not following through all the way on my punches. I’m also on the stiff side and need to better coordinate my head movement with my footwork (this is totally me in a nutshell, even outside the gym). The plus side is that I have sharp punches, good defense, and a long reach to work with.

So there you go.

And the guys in the taco truck eat Popeye's

Naohito Tanobe wipes the sweat off his forehead with a pocket cloth. He looks out of breath, winded, but the long walk from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Virgin Megastore on Market Street will do that to you.

“Are you hungry? Thirsty?” he asks. “Let’s go to Burger King. I know where one is.”

Tanobe is the editor in chief of Eiga Hi-Ho, Japan’s Movie Treasures magazine. He’s come all the way from Tokyo to Los Angeles and then to San Francisco to cover the US opening of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

“Why Burger King?” I ask.

I don't get an answer until we arrive at our destination. Tanobe is collecting the 31 different Star Wars toys that come with the BK Kid’s Meals.

Homeless nutters and tourists make up the bulk of the clientele of the Burger King at the Powell Street cable car turnaround. It’s Cantina-esque for sure. Once inside, Tanobe launches into a well-rehearsed routine honed while in Los Angeles.

He orders four BK Kids Meals. That's right. Four.

He scores a Han Solo in Carbonite, Jabba the Hutt, R2-D2, and a Wicket the Ewok. Then he proceeds to devour the food like a man possessed.

There’s a young couple next to us, late twenties probably. Seems they’ve also bought kid’s meals and will be seeing “the movie” later that evening. And, like a pair of bounty hunters, they want to know if Tanobe is willing to sell his Han Solo to them.

The answer is no. This is a non-profit operation. But the alternative doesn't sound so bad.  The Jabba Water Squirter is going for 20 bucks alone in Japanese collector shops.

In between mouthfuls of Chicken Tenders, Tanobe considers his quartet of Kid’s Meal bags, pondering all the items he’s yet to acquire. After a few seconds, he steadies himself for the great task ahead.

“Ok. Ok.” He says. Then he jumps up and goes straight back into line, bringing back *two more* Kid’s Meals with him. Now the table looks like something out of Super-Size Me, like a crime scene. Tanobe is rewarded with a Yoda wind-up and yet another R2-D2 for his efforts.

And I can only thank George Lucas for a day that will be long remembered.

Hayaku

My official review of Revenge of the Sith (perhaps you've heard of it)  is in this week’s San Francisco Bay Guardian. Link to the piece is here. Now no more Star Wars for a while, please. The only films that matter are Christopher Reeve-era Superman and Exorcist movies. And maybe David Lynch's Dune.

Also, Lady Jaime Starling over at Stone Bridge Press just informed me that Anime City pops up  in the dreaded Little Boy catalog under “Further Reading.” So I guess those fan artists, I mean Superflat artists, can’t be all that bad.

No Japanese Language Support for FLAC

Matt Alt on the Little Boy program...

Patrick,

Just caught your latest blog-post and thought I'd chime in, as I was
about to drop you a line about this hefty tome anyway. I was surprised
to find a copy of it in my mailbox yesterday (and was even more
surprised to see my own name listed in the back, apparently for the
tiny bit of help I gave in troubleshooting terminology in a couple of
sections.) I haven't had a chance to read it thoroughly just yet, but
I've generally been impressed with what I've seen.

I've always shrugged off and tuned out the more half-baked aspects of
the Superflat philosophy, some of which were mentioned by Carl in your
blog; I figure it's just par for the course for being taken seriously
in the fine-art world. If I have any issue with the book's
presentation, it's the relentless (although by this point expected)
shoehorning in of work from Superflat artists like Yoshimoto Nara and
Aya Takano between images from famous Japanese films, anime, comics,
and woodblock prints. Yeah, yeah, I understand that they're trying to
provide context for the foreign crowd, but no matter how you slice it
it comes across as pretentious and self-congratulatory at best and
borderline desperate at worst. (I wonder how Fujiko-Fujio feel about
seeing a still of Doraemon and Nobita on a seesaw juxtaposed with a
full-page color drawing of a naked man playing with a little girl?)

On that note, I think it's telling that the front and back covers of
the book sport images from Evangelion and Doraemon and not the
Superflat artists. In fact I've been drawn to the "context" chapters --
many of which feature beautiful full-page color reproductions of old
model box-art and stills from films like Matango -- more than the
navel-gazing discussions of the Superflat crew's assorted work. This
was the first I'd heard of forgotten geniuses like artist Shigeru
Komatsuzaki, who painted hard-boiled WWII battle scenes for model kit
packages, and Shoji Otomo, who pioneered the whole "kaiju biology"
phenomenon, so I have this book to thank for that if nothing else.
Regardless of what you feel about Superflat as a whole, these parts
alone make it worthwhile to beg/borrow/steal a copy -- you're welcome
to take a gander at mine when you're out here.

Yomigaeru Kinro

As my content providing skills are on hold owing to my immanent move to Tokyo, here is a little something via an email from King Carl Gustav Horn.

Me (still in shock over the sixty dollar hardcover I’ve just seen at the bookstore in Japan Town): Have you seen the catalog for the Little Boy exhibit yet???!!!!

Carl: Just the web page. "Artist support for this exhibition has been
generously provided by Yoko Ono." I hope this isn't sour grapes on my
part for not being asked to contribute to the catalog, but I share your
view that this seems like another case of fine art trying to squeeze
the juice out of something people genuinely enjoy on their own.
Although Murakami gets top billing on the page, apparently these other
artists they mention--Anno, Otomo, Matsumoto--have had something to do
with this exploding subculture as well. Perhaps the show will explain
further.

And needless to say, the notion of Japan's post-war pop culture having
been an unremitting parade of cute is bunk--Ian Buruma could have told
them that twenty years ago. What are they trying to say--the Japanese
went straight from being the demon beast rapists of Nanking to Sanrio
figures? Bayonet dick or Hello Kitty, no options in-between? Are we
talking here about atomic mutants, or human beings? Don't shoot! At
least under Douglas MacArthur the Japanese were only regarded as
adolescents, not infants--things are clearly going downhill. What about
the pop culture of Koike, Ikegami, Kawaguchi, Miike, Takeshi, Fukasaku,
hell, Tora-san? Are they aware most people in Japan aren't even into
anime, let alone being otaku? That they watch nice normal dramas about
cops and doctors instead?

Also, the idea that today's cute culture somehow represents a reaction
to the trauma of the Greater East Asia War seems a little far-fetched.
As I said of BLOOD, the current generation of anime directors isn't old
enough to remember Vietnam, let alone WWII. These issues are by no
means without merit, but I think a work like Igarashi's BODIES OF
MEMORY handled them in a more convincing fashion.

Warui

Matt Alt over in Tokyo chimes in from the frontlines:

Patrick,

Thought you might be interested to know that Tokyo University hosted a
massive gala Production IG love-fest on Monday night. Although
ostensibly held to promote the upcoming "Blood Plus," an animated
television series based loosely on the "Blood: The Last Vampire" OVA,
nary a snippet nor cel was shown of the production. Rather, the shindig
opened with a video montage of various IG projects broadcast at
ear-splitting volume, veered into an impromptu live cello rendition of
Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" (!), and finally settled into a
freewheeling discussion of the state of the anime industry and its role
in the global marketplace. On hand were Innocence director Mamoru
Oshii, IG president Mitsuhisa Ishikawa, Blood Plus director Junichi
Fujisaku, a TBS broadcasting executive, and a Tokyo University
professor. (And, dare I forget, co-emcee Chiaki "Go Go Yubari" Kuriyama
-- sporting an evening gown rather than her trademark schoolgirl
outfit and flying guillotine, alas.)

Oshii and his fellow panelists held forth as to the ascendence of the
sailor suit outfit as an icon of Japanese culture, the role of manga
and anime in expressing ideas and viewpoints considered untouchable by
"straight" media, war in the media age as a perverse form of "ultimate
entertainment," "Saving Private Ryan" as an example of the differences
between Japanese and American portrayals of war in fiction, and the
inevitable recognition of IG's influence on American directors such as
Quentin Tarantino. Only at the very end did Fujisaku unveil a handful
of black and white line drawings of the main characters of Blood Plus.

In keeping with the vibe at the April Tokyo Anime Fair, the unspoken
keywords were "anime is Japanese culture." Even the simple fact that
Tokyo University played host to the affair is yet another sign that
anime has officially moved out of the fringe. Once, anime studios had
to beg, borrow, and steal to convince sponsors to bankroll them. Now it
appears that the industry is smack-dab in the middle of the same
interconnected matrix of creative, business, scholarly, and
governmental interests that fueled the rise of "Japan, Inc." in the
postwar era. It seems that Japan's powers-that-be are doing everything
they can to position anime and other pop-cultural phenomena as Japan's
Next Big Thing. That, and cello renditions of Jimi Hendrix music.

-Matt

Uchu Kara no Messeiji: Gaiden

Ok. So I saw Star War Episode III: Revenge of the Sith today. The short version is: yes, it’s better than The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. No, I still wouldn’t put it on the same table as the original trilogy of Star Wars films. And again, no, it doesn’t fully make up for all of George Lucas’ crimes (Jar Jar, Midichlorians, and Jake Llyod to name only three) committed in the prior films.

By now, anyone who’s seen the prequels knows what to expect stylistically. Video game-ready action sequences, horrible dialogue and high school movie acting, and lots of childish and distracting CGI creatures filling up shots where they’re not actually needed.

The difference is that Revenge of the Sith gets to contain the only scene that audiences ever really wanted to see from a Star Wars film set in the Old Republic: the light saber duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan.

Unlike the previous prequels, which now seem to have been enormous wastes of time by setting up plotlines that don’t go anywhere (for instance, Boba Fett? Sifo Dias? No mention of them made here) the movie is actually going somewhere this time. And it’s to the Dark Side, thank goodness.

The Film opens big with the now-requisite space battle. Nothing you haven’t seen before in a Star Wars film, except that the staging, like most of the effects work, is easier on the eye being much less overwrought than the Pod Race or the Chase on Courosant (AKA whatever), from the previous films.

Next, we’re back to prequel hell, with a ton of exposition heavy dialogue, and characters commuting from one planet to the next. Since anyone with half a brain already knows what the main characters are still totally clueless about (Palpatine = Sidious), this section is not exactly a joy to behold especially with all the political parallels George tries to build between the making of his Empire via. a false war, and the one America is currently engaged in (I’ll leave it to Machiyama to develop this line of thought).

Just when you’re about to write the whole thing off, act three, which sees the final pieces of Senator Palpatine’s plan fitting into place, begins to lift off. Bodies start piling up impressively, buildings start to burn 9/11 style, and the pace of the film finally begins to resemble a “faster, more intense” Star Wars film.

For all the talk of this being a “dark” film, rated PG-13 here in America, it’s really just back in touch with the level of what was shown in the 1977 original, where Obi-Wan casually hacked off aliens’ arms in the cantina, Luke stumbles across the BBQ remains of his foster parents, and Jawa bodies were strewn about the Dune Sea like rag dolls.

Lucas ignores classical dramatic structure and goes for a forth act plus an epilogue. We get the lightsaber battle between the two friends and the birth of Vader. While the staging of the duel itself may not be as amazing as you’d hoped for after all those years of reading Starlog and collecting action figures, what matters is that what’s taking place on screen contains actual drama, for the first time since Return of the Jedi (never mind the Ewoks).

What it still lacks is suspense. There isn’t a thing in this movie that fans and causal audiences will not see coming a mile away. Surprise, that burnt hunk of meat becomes Darth Vader. A pair of twins are born. It’s a bit like watching an old Wrestling match or a World War II documentary about a battle long after you know the score. But that’s the danger of mucking around and making prequels, I guess.

The last bit of business involves various desperate acts of trying to link *everything* up to the original trilogy. It seems like the only thing we are spared is Yoda trying to find an apartment on Dagobah and Dengar buying his first bandages. But it’s not like Lucas is going to go out with anything resembling subtlety.

And neither am I. Star Wars has been great. Star Wars has sucked balls. Now, the hit to miss ratio has been restored to the point where I think most people will be happy.

Unless they’re especially fond of Wookies. I find the lack of them, especially with all the pre-release buildup, disturbing.

Samu gari

There’s a new interview with me about Japanese movies,  over at the very cool Yakuza Eiga site. The link to the piece is here.

Also, this Sat/7 at Other Cinema
992 Valencia in San Francisco

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK: THE ADAPTATION.
Patrick Macias has written extensively about the fascinating social phenomenon known as "Fan Films," and tonight he not only presents his research, but also introduces the genre's most famous example: The Adaptation. Started in 1982 when the directors were 12(!), this best-ever tribute film is a shot-for-shot remake, lensed in the backyards, basements, and swamps of suburban Mississippi. PLUS: Pre-show clips from the Turkish Star Wars, and free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

The only thing is, Col. Baldwin, who programs Other Cinema, just phoned to tell me that The Adaptation has been purchased by Paramount Pictures (who will be making an adaptation of The Adaptation) and cannot be shown. He assures me though, that he’s got enough messed up “Fan Films” and of course free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to keep disappointed patrons at bay.

Also, I don't remember writing extensively about "fan films," but hey, that's show biz.