Benjamin Hourigan

Watanabe Shinichirô, (dir.) Samurai Champloo, subtitled by AnimeForever, 7/10

Watanabe Shinichirô’s new series follows the precedent set by his earlier series, Cowboy Bebop, building a style by merging a historical period with an incongruous musical style. In Bebop, it was the far future and jazz. In Samurai Champloo it’s the Edo period and hip-hop. While Watanabe’s storytelling skills have improved since Bebop, Champloo is still thinly plotted. The pleasure to be had from watching it comes from its technical polish, the novelty of its stylistic premise, and from seeing its intriguing characters participate in strange episodic vignettes.

Champloo follows a motley trio of protagonists. Jin, an undefeatable samurai, and Mugen, a bloodthirsty criminal, meet in a teashop brawl. While they vow to kill each other, Fuu, a serving-girl who saves them from death in the burning shop, makes them promise that they will both go with her on a journey to find the “himawari no samurai” (samurai who smells like sunflowers). While that’s about as deep as the story gets, viewers find out a few details about the trio’s past as they progress through the 26 episodes.

Champloo, like Bebop, doesn’t have an underlying message. It deals with themes of love and betrayal, but not in any detail. Champloo is about style, not substance, and whatever depth it has comes through its characters. Here, they’re drawn more sketchily than even Bebop’s Spike, Jet, and Faye. Because of this, Fuu, Mugen, and Jin all have a charming sense of mystery about them. It is, then, a touching surprise to see Jin fall in love with a woman who’s just been sold to a brothel by her gambling husband, because it’s one of the few times we get to see behind his usual mask of reserve.

Champloo’s soundtrack is another source of its charm. I’m no hip-hop connoisseur, but the OST by Tsutchie, Nujabes and Fat Jon works extremely well, especially in combat and other high-tension scenes. The opening theme, “Battlecry,” is extremely grating, but the fabulous song “Shiki no uta” (song of the four seasons) playing over the end credits more than makes up for it. Charming, too, are some of the settings for the episodes, such as a village hit by a graffiti craze, a baseball match against Americans to decide the fate of Japan, and a tour of Edo with a homosexual Dutchman. The joy of these particular episodes is that, like the mix of samurai and hip-hop, they play with anachronisms.

The presentation here is pure class, and Watanabe demonstrates that his skill at storytelling is growing. To score more points with me, though, he needs to plan ahead and weave his episodes into a coherent story arc with clear direction and climaxes. This is true of anime in general: given that most series are 13 or 26 episodes long, it’s a shame that their creators don’t use that expected length to tell a story across the whole instead of within each episode. Unsatisfying storytelling aside, Samurai Champloo is one of the most compelling anime series I’ve seen recently, and it’s an improvement over Cowboy Bebop, which was a strong base to start from.

A few of London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s words addressing the London bombers and their motivations are worth reprinting here:

Even after your cowardly attacks, people from the rest of Britain, people from around the world will arrive in London to become Londoners and to fulfill their dreams and achieve their potential.

They come to be free, they come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves. They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don’t want that. And however many of us you kill, you will not stop their flight to our cities where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another.

From The Japan Times, 10 July 2005.

Today Microsoft released a new software suite for students. It’s aimed at secondary-school students, and offers them resources to help them complete assignments in standard subject areas like maths, science and so on. Students would probably be best advised to get an Apple computer if they want to be productive, which would stop them running the aptly named Microsoft Student suite. Even so, it looks like a decent product. Just like the Xbox 360 looks like a decent product, and probably will be.

Microsoft’s been criticised recently, though, for not knowing how to do publicity properly. The latest edition of Edge, #151, compares Sony’s savvy launch for PS3 with Microsoft’s try-hard MTV special launching XBox 360. And with Microsoft Student, we see a trend emerging.

Microsoft’s flash-based product tour for Student is terrifyingly condescending. It features a hip dude, probably about 25, who goes on about how well Student helps him prepare reports and do things with “numberage,” in a voice that sounds like a simultaneous parody of both Pauly Shore and Keanu Reeves. (Keanu doesn’t need a link, since he still has a career going.) This relic from the 1990s has, for a side-kick, a girl with visible braces and an awful haircut who looks like a poster-child for unpopularity. Here’s a hint, people: the cool kidz down in the ‘hood are using Macs!

Come on, Microsoft! I’m sure today’s kids don’t need advice from Pauly Shore or Little Miss Dork. The best thing about the product tour is that people might get a few giggles out of it at Microsoft’s expense. Check it out, if you could use a few laughs.

And Microsoft… Someone, in fact probably several people, on your publicity team, need a swift and powerful kick in the ass that sends them flying out your front door and into the crisp Redmond morning. Like, jaa…

Kagemusha, directed by Kurosawa Akira (1980), DVD. 6/10

Kagemusha is set in the 1570s, towards the end of Japan’s Sengoku period (1467—1615). It draws on the uncertainty surrounding the death of the historical Takeda Shingen, one of the great warlords of the period shortly before the unification of Japan and the beginning of the Edo period (1603-1867). The movie imagines a scenario where Shingen died of a bullet wound, but decreed that for three years, his clan should keep his death a secret. The kagemusha (shadow warrior) of the title is a petty criminal whom Shingen’s brother, Takeda Nobukado, saves from crucifixion. The criminal looks exactly like Shingen, and when Shingen dies, he is given the task of appearing in his place to keep up the clan’s morale and to intimidate rival warlords Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who regard Shingen as a fearsome general.

Kurosawa is considered one of the great movie directors of the twentieth century and, since movies are mostly a twentienth century phenomenon, one of the great directors of all time. I think he’s a little overrated, not because he’s not a great filmmaker, but because the reverence accorded to he and his films is too much.

Kagemusha is never really dull, but it’s never really exciting, either. The major battle scenes are grand, and overlaid by an imposing soundtrack, but to me there’s not a lot of human interest in combat. Often combat scenes just seem like showing off, proof that the team can do a great fight scene, and Kagemusha is seldom any different. It’s only in the final scene, which recreates the Battle of Nagashino, that Kurosawa extracts dramatic interest from the fighting. The ere, the conduct of Shingen’s son, Takeda Katusyori, is appalling: he sends hundreds of his warriors to die in charges at an impenetrable barricade through which arquebusiers mow them down with gunfire. The scene reminds me of the “Battle of the Sand Belt” in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.In history, it was raining heavily, which gave Katsuyori reason to believe that his opponents’ guns would fail. In Kagemusha, however, there is no rain, so Katsuyori’s orders seem brutally petulant, with him sending them to die because he cannot bear to admit that he was wrong to attack Nagashino in the first place. The change in historical detail thus allows for some subtle characterisation, and allows the senseless killing to provoke the double, watching secretly, to embark on a final, suicidal charge on the barricades to finish the great destruction that Katusyori has wrought on the Takeda clan’s fortunes.

Part of the pseudo-dullness of Kagemusha is its minimalist aesthetic. There’s a lot of silence, a lot of blank walls, and most of the double’s lines are just wordless grunting.This, of course, is part of Japan’s great cultural legacy, and it is, in its way, calming and inspiring, but it contributes to a sense that, in a film that’s 152 minutes long, not a great deal actually happens, and that we don’t, in all that time, really learn anything about the ostensible main character, that nameless double.

As a technical note, the picture quality on this film is appalling: grainy at times, indistinct at others. I have to remind myself that 25 years ago, back in the 1980s, we didn’t have HD video cameras. The technology of film-making has come a long way.

Today I did a survey that MIT is carrying out. The questions focus on what your blogging practice is like, and on what kinds of people you know personally. If you read this and keep a blog, give it a go. Hell, there sure are stupider internet surveys you could do. Thanks to dogpossum for the link.

Sixteen Candles, written and directed by John Hughes (1984). 8/10

Tomorrow night a friend from high-school is having an 80s-themed birthday party. I had this lying around, and I hadn’t seen it before, so I put it on to rekindle my memory of the fashions of yesteryear. In 1984, apparently, big hair, brightly-coloured t-shirts, knits, and collared shirts were in. That year, I turned three.

I love good teen-angst movies. Despite having few good reasons to be (with the possible exception of being constantly love-lorn), I was a deeply tortured teenager. But it was fun! My angst was self-indulgent and optional enough that I was able to enjoy it. Movies like Sixteen Candles are a great way to revisit the more vibrant emotions of my adolescence (as compared to today), perhaps the moreso because in them, most people actually end up getting what they want, except for the villains if there are any.

The story of Sixteen Candles is simple. Sam (Molly Ringwald) is upset both because her family forgot her birthday and because she’s in love with a guy who doesn’t know she exists (or so she thinks). She spends a day chasing him around while a geek chases her around. Finally, Sam and her beloved, Jake, end up together, while the geek gets Jake’s ex-girlfriend, more than a few years his senior. Sam’s parents, also, finally remember her birthday, while her self-obsessed sister gets her just desserts by marrying a massive sleazebag.

There’s plenty of humorous incidents to punctuate the film, decent dialogue, cool clothes, and a great 80s soundtrack, as well as minor appearances by John and Joan Cusack (why do I always seem to see them together in movies?). As with other great teen movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (another John Hughes classic) and Donnie Darko, there’s a touching sensitivity and sincerity about the main characters that redeems their often immature antics.

Implausible and probably lowbrow as it may be, I enjoyed watching this movie. It’s a story well told.

As a final note, Myst (I think) once asked me, in person, if I ever give anything less than 8–9/10. Well, I did give Japanese Story a dismal 2/10. But generally I’ve given 7—9 here. Why? Well, my undergraduate days are over, and the research for my PhD is done, too. These days I don’t read, watch, play, listen to, or do anything much with, things I expect to hate, and I like it. Hence the high marks.

Just for the record, I give Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, which I once had to read for a Literature class at uni, a grand score of 0/10. Proof that I do hate things now and then.