Benjamin Hourigan

Today, Apple released iTunes 6. This is the most gratuitous major version bump I’ve ever seen.

Sure, new iPods came out today that play video. It’s about time. And the iTunes music store also carries short films and TV shows now. But little has changed in iTunes itself. iTunes has played video for ages, and the store’s been selling music videos for some time.

And let’s not forget that iTunes got a major version bump from 4 to 5 just a week or two ago. To go to six, now, with so few changes in between, is just ridiculous.

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.

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.

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.

CLAMP and Madhouse Production, Chobits, animated series (2002), 26 episodes, subtitled by a4e. 7/10

What if there were cute girl robots who could fall in love?

Such is the question that, no doubt, thousands of male rônin students living in Tôkyô guest houses have asked themselves. Motosuwa Hideki, the protagonist of Chobits, is one such man.

The answer to the question, if you’re unfamiliar with anime, may strike you as surprisingly sensitive. In the near-future that Chobits is set in, there are sexy girl robots, one of whom can fall in love, and it’s bad news for human women and the usual mix of heartache and joy for all concerned.

For the people of Chobits’ Tôkyô, today’s personal computers have been superseded by mostly humanoid androids, which work as computers, personal assistants, and companions for their human masters. Motosuwa, a student who failed his university entrance exam and has come to Tôkyô to study, wants one, but can’t afford it. It’s lucky, then, that he finds a female persocom (as they are called) left out for roadside rubbish collection near the guest house where he lives. Her memory, however, has been wiped, and he names her after the only word she can say: “Chii.”

Most of the anime shows Motosuwa juggling work, study, an apparent romance with his boss’ daughter, and raising Chii from infantile incapacity to charming innocence while gradually uncovering the secrets of her past.

Chobits’ eventual strength lies in the way it subtly teases out the implications of a huge number of men and women spending time with attractive but emotionally vacuous android counterparts. Motosuwa’s classmate, Shinbo, has an affair with their teacher, whose husband became obsessed with his persocom and began to ignore her completely. Yumi, the girl who apparently likes Motosuwa, ran away from a relationship with a man who had been married to a persocom who “died.” Everywhere, men and women are tempted away from human company by androids who look better and behave more pleasingly than the real thing.

Humans are the great losers in Chobits. At first, they fall prey to obsession with unfeeling objects. But when Chii, the only one remaining of two persocom sisters who had the new ability to feel and to love, reveals her true purpose, humans lose their place as the only sentient beings the universe has ever known.

But what is a loss for humans is a victory for sentience. Endowed by her human creator with the purpose of allowing all persocoms to be happy, Chii beams a program out to all the persocoms of the world that gives them her ability to feel emotions and to fall in love. Hideki’s having fallen in love with Chii is justified by her ability to love him, and so Chii’s action validates all future human-persocom infatuations: emotionally, persocoms and humans are brought to equality.

The animation itself is exceptionally well-presented. That may, however, be merely a matter of its newness: it is also the most recent anime series I have watched. The influence of today’s motion graphic techniques are particularly noticeable in the polished opening credits. The end credits are eventually graced by one of the most haunting anime themes I’ve heard, “Ningyo Hime,” sung by Tanaka Rie. The series loses points for an overabundance of mundanity, and for also being less complete and authentic than the manga on which it was based.

Chobits’ unflinching vision of the consequences of android sentience is its most appealing feature.

Donnie Darko. DVD. Written and directed by Richard Kelly, 2001.
9/10

I am bewildered. I do not want to sleep. I do not want to do anything else. I just want to sit and think about it.

I don’t understand this movie, but I love it.

This is some kind of cult movie, as far as I’m aware. Anyone have some sage words about it? I feel like some bits were missing. What’s the director’s cut like?

Before Sunset. DVD. Directed by Richard Linklater. Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2004.
7/10

This movie is the sequel to Linklater’s earlier Before Sunrise (1995), in which Jesse (Ethan Hawke), an American, meets young a young French woman, Celine (Julie Delpy), on a train to Vienna, and spends a night with her before they have to part ways.

At the end of that film, Jesse and Celine made plans to meet each other in Vienna again in six months. As we soon discover, Jesse returned for the meeting, but Celine, though she wanted to, could not. So nearly ten years have passed before they meet again, Celine appearing at a bookshop where Jesse is promoting his bestselling novel, a mostly autobiographical account of their night together.

Like Before Sunrise, this movie is a conversation with a time limit. Jesse now has to catch a plane out of Paris just hours after meeting Celine again, and they have only until then to talk about their lives since they last met, and to deal with what that meeting had meant to them both. For the most part, their conversation is crushingly but realistically banal and evasive. They talk about their jobs, their relationships, and skirt around what is the real issue: how they feel about each other now they have finally met again.

It’s only when their time is running out that they each reveal the extent to which the memory of their one night together has destroyed their ability to love anyone else. Jesse hints repeatedly at the lack of love in his marriage, and how he is only bound to it out of a sense of duty to his young son. Delpy unconvincingly portrays Celine’s sudden burst of anger on the car-ride to her apartment, in which she blames Jesse for her string of superficial relationships with other men. They ascend the stairs to her room, ostensibly so that Celine can play Jesse one the songs she has written, in a silence punctuated by glances that speak of the unacknowledged inevitability of their becoming lovers one more time. Finally, when Celine breaks out her guitar and sings a song about how a man she met one night was everything she ever wanted, Delpy’s sweet, warm voice breaks out of the banality entirely with an elegiac testimony to her love for Jesse that is entirely free of bitterness about never having seen him again.

Finally, a few words passed between them, ending the film, show them both acknowledging Jesse is going to miss his plane: that because of what they have revealed, they are going to leave their relationships for each other. It’s a pleasing change from the similar resolution of the chance meeting in Lost in Translation (2003), where Bob (Bill Murray) goes back to his deadening home-life despite having made an enlivening connection with both Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and Tôkyô.

Before Sunset is not a visually interesting movie, and, as I said, the conversation that drives the movie is mostly banal. The film isn’t meritorious in itself, but rather as a sequel. Those who haven’t seen Before Sunrise are advised to see it first or stay away. For those with the necessary background, though, Before Sunset is a thoughtful and affecting wrap-up of the story that Linklater left unfinished back in 1995.

Sue Brooks (dir.) Japanese Story. 2003.
2/10

I was determined not to like this film, and so, unsurprisingly, I didn’t.

On one level, this is a film about a woman’s being forced to face and accept the reality of death. That part of it, which occupies the last twenty minutes or so, is mildly emotionally affecting. It is not, however, a particularly original theme, and nor is it exceptionally well-executed here.

The rest of the film, which is about an encounter between an East Asian man and an Australian woman, has little to recommend it. My first grievance, which I commonly hold against Australian films, is that it indulges in a view of Australia that is dominated by the outback. Since the majority of our population lives in state capital cities and their suburbs, this prevents such films from accurately representing Australian life even as they use farms or ‘the red centre’ to visually signify their Australian-ness.

Japanese Story also manifestly misrepresents East Asia and the Australian relationship with it. Why, for instance, does this encounter occur between a Japanese man and a white Australian woman? It’s not the 1980s anymore, and Japan is no longer the world-fascinating economic miracle that it once was. China and Southeast Asia are stronger presences in our cities, our culture, and our international political and economic contexts.

Accepting, though, that for whatever reason, scriptwriter Alison Tilson decided to focus on Japan (I would have done the same, Japanophile that I am), the representation of Japanese culture is stereotyped and outdated. Hiromitsu, and later in the film, his wife, are completely alien presences, whom the female protagonist, Sandy Edwards (Toni Collette), evidently struggles to understand or communicate with on all levels but those of primal emotion and desire. The Japanese characters appear, also, to have come out of the distant past, adhering assiduously to the idea prevalent in the West of the 1970s and 1980s that Japan is an unfailingly rule-bound, reserved, formal and traditional culture. To make this impression even clearer, scenes that are meant to be emotional, such as the sex-scene between Hiromitsu and Sandy, are overlaid with traditional Japanese music, rather than the J-Pop that would be more familiar to most Japanese ears (and also to many Australian ones). I get a stronger sense of Japanese contemporaneity from some historical films, such as The Last Samurai (set directly after the Meiji Restoration of 1868) than from Japanese Story.

In addition, this is a story about a gauche, uncosmopolitan Australian’s relatively neat encounter with Asia. Hiromitsu arrives on a business trip, sees some of our iconic landscape, has sex with Sandy twice, dies, and then is taken back in a coffin by his Japanese wife. Hello Asia. Goodbye Asia. This is not the Asia that Australians engaged with it know. This is not the Asia where some of my good friends, who I have known for several years, were born. This is not the Asia whose daughters I have dated. It is not the Asia some of whose values I have learned and adopted, by learning about Zen and about classical Chinese philosophy. It is not the Asia that I buy $6 meals from in the Melbourne CBD. It is not the Asia where I intend to teach English after I finish my PhD.

The director, Brooks, and scriptwriter, Tilson, seem to have no real knowledge about the realities of Asian (in this case, Japanese) life or culture, or about the ‘Australian’ relationship with Asia. For them, Japan is just a novelty, a disposable piece of the exotic.

In conclusion, here’s a list of other things that I found noteworthy about Japanese Story:

• Before Sandy has sex with Hiromitsu for the first time, she gets naked, then puts on Hiromitsu’s pants. She then rides him, cowgirl style, without us seeing her taking off the pants. Why she puts the pants on is unclear. It is also unclear how they were able to have sex, since the pants would have made it difficult, if not impossible.
• There are far too many shots of cars driving down roads, and of other things which do not advance the story or develop the characters. There is also not enough dialogue. This makes the film unneccessarily boring.
• The film was funded by numerous government agencies. This is a disgrace. Even if it had been a good film, it would still be a luxury, and the government has no business taking our money only to give it back as luxuries we did not choose. I propose an immediate end to all government funding for the arts.
• The most valuable lesson Japanese Story has to teach us is this: never dive into a body of water before you check that it is safe to do so.