Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (review)
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince (London: Bloomsbury, 2005). 7/10
I’d hotly anticipated this latest in the Harry Potter series. Even though Rowling is a poor prose stylist, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban showed that, possibly with the aid of a good editor, she can be a great storyteller. As the series has unfolded over the past several years, I’ve become attached to Harry and his friends, and was curious to see what happened to them in their sixth year at Hogwarts.
By now, Rowling seems to understand that some parts of the Harry Potter formula are, to put it mildly, boring. So in Half-blood Prince, there’s barely a chapter spent at the Dursley’s before Harry leaves on a mission with Dumbledore, and, as in Order of the Phoenix, Rowling usually thinks of ways to keep Harry away from the Quidditch pitch so we aren’t burdened with dull match-descriptions.
Although she’s now a better judge of what readers are likely to find interesting, the longer format that we saw introduced in Goblet of Fire has not been good for Rowling’s pacing. For most of its 605 pages, Half-blood Prince meanders aimlessly through the school year. A lot of the activity is, granted, merely a backdrop to a series of trips Harry and Dumbledore make into other people’s memories of Voldemort’s past. which are one of the book’s highlights. The subplots that surround these revelations, though, are uninspired: a few underdeveloped romances, Harry’s obsession with what Draco is doing (which turns out not to have been unfounded), and the mystery of the Half-blood Prince’s identity. Though there is, fortunately, scant mention of the power of love, what little there is reminds one of just how trite the justification for Harry’s ability to defeat Voldemort is:
‘So, when the prophecy says that I’ll have “power the Dark Lord knows not”, it just means—love?’ asked Harry, feeling a little let down.
‘Yes—just love,’ said Dumbledore.
It’s disappointing that here, Rowling seems to indicate that she knows just how unsatisfactory it is to rely on the power of love, but fails to come up with another way that good can triumph over evil. Here’s a tip, J. K.: good triumphs only when it’s fought for by badass motherfuckers with their hearts in the right place. You’ll never win by being soft, but rather by being aggressive and ruthless. The difference, I’m afraid, is in the ends rather than the means. Though the good tend to have lines they won’t cross, for the most part when evil fights dirty, the good must be similarly cunning, and ready to lay aside their scruples where necessary.
The culmination of Half-blood Prince is, as always in the Harry Potter books, action-packed and compelling. It is, however, far too short, only around 100 pages in length. Given that so much of the book is aimless, it’s a shame that Rowling devoted so little space to it’s most important and exciting parts. She does, however, deserve credit for some of the decisions she made about the book’s ending.
Discussion including spoilers follows…
When Nietzsche Wept (review)
Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept: A novel of obsession (1992; repr. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1993).
It’s sometimes argued that Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical work demonstrates an interest in psychology, introspection, and relations of power and desire, that in some way prefigures the development of psychoanalysis. As a Nietzsche fan who’s also read a moderate amount on psychoanalysis, I’m not sure that a real connection or affinity exists between the two bodies of ideas. Nevertheless, such an affinity is assumed as the basis of this novel, which imagines what might have happened had Josef Breuer tried to test his “talking cure,†developed in his treatment of Bertha Pappenheim, on Nietzsche in the Viennese winter of 1882.
In the novel, Breuer takes Nietzsche as a patient at the behest of Lou Salomé, who believes that Nietzsche’s obsession with her has driven him to the brink of suicide. Given Nietzsche’s extremely solitary and independent nature, she advises Breuer to keep the treatment a secret even from his patient. Breuer tries a variety of strategies to lure Nietzsche into treatment, eventually trying the subterfuge of exchanging treatments. Breuer will treat, at a private clinic, Nietzsche’s epic attacks of migraine, while Nietzsche tries to develop a philosophical treatment for Breuer’s despair.
Breuer soon finds that his despair, and his obsession with his hysterical patient Bertha, is far more serious than he imagined, and spends less and less time as Nietzsche’s doctor, and more as his patient. Nietzsche’s proto-psychoanalysis of Breuer takes occupies most of the novel, giving Yalom a chance to work much of Nietzsche’s early philosophy into the dialogue. While his evocation of Breuer’s life as a wealthy doctor in late-19th-century Vienna is interesting in itself, it’s Nietzsche’s words (often near-quotations from his books) that make the novel shine. It’s for this reason that while When Nietzsche Wept is an extremely compelling book at times, it’s hard to give Yalom all the credit. What he’s really doing, when not painting historical portraits of Vienna and of famous figures like Nietzsche, Breuer, Salomé and Sigmund Freud, is setting up a stage on which Nietzsche gets to speak.
So, for people who aren’t yet acquainted with Nietzsche’s philosophy, this is a good fictional introduction to the man and his thought. While a better book for finding out about Nietzsche is Thus Spoke Zarathustra, reading it requires stamina and dedication. That book, though, is among the few I have ever read that has truly changed the way I live my life. Nietzsche’s gift to anyone who reads his words is to hand them control over themselves and their destiny.
When Nietzsche Wept is a pleasant introduction to some powerful, possibly life-altering ideas. 6/10
Samurai Champloo (review)
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 (review)
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 (review)
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.
The Amber Spyglass (review)
Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (2000; repr. London: Point, 2001), 549pp. 8/10
This is the last in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, notable because its characters’ main quest is to destroy the god of Abraham. It’s a splendid thing for a book aimed at children to include, and I hope it convinces thousands of people that human life is for humans to live for themselves, and that obeying the laws of a real or imagined god is a foolish waste of precious time.
Aside from this message, the central point of Philip Pullman’s vision, for me, is intention. The final thing that the heroes must do, once a decrepit god and his tyrannical regent, Metatron, are dead, is ensure that all the holes in the universe are closed, so that “Dust” cannot escape. Dust, as it is called in the heroine Lyra’s world, or Shadow Particles, as it is called in ours (in the books), are conscious particles created by the purposeful activity of sentient beings. They animate the world with power and direction, gathering around adults and around tools and other objects that people invest with purpose and meaning.
In Lyra’s multiverse, Dust is the source of everything good, and her enemies, the Authority and his servants (including the Church) seek to destroy it, because it is product of and a conduit for human will, freedom, and desire. In opposition, the heroes’ mission is to ensure that sentient life can continue to saturate the universe with intention: the mission of sentient life is to enliven the world with the energy of consciousness.
It’s disappointing, then, that the story finally brings its heroes up against some very hard realities that intention cannot change. Young lovers Will and Lyra must separate forever after just a few days of romance because they cannot live outside their own worlds, and the openings between them must all be closed (bar one, which allows ghosts to escape from the world of the dead). The angel Xaphania tells them they have no choice but to give in, and their acquiescence in the face of tragedy contradicts the story’s valuing of intention. Their willfulness, surely, must be able to generate enough Dust to counteract the presence of just one more gate between the worlds, for their lifetimes alone… Despite the thematic contradiction, the ending is effective storytelling. It’s terribly sad, and it made me cry all the more because, like Will and Lyra, I will soon have to leave someone whom I love dearly, possibly for ever, but at least for the year or more that I will be away from Australia.
Disappointing, too, is the solution to the book gives to the problem of death. Lyra and Will descend (alive) to the world of the dead, where they free the ghosts of every sentient being that ever lived, held in bondage there without their souls by the Authority. The gateway that Lyra and Will open lets the dead leave their prison, but on returning to a living world, the ghosts dissolve into particles, joyfully reunited with the rest of existence.
For those who must die, such a vision (of dissolving into the universe) might be satisfying. It is very close to what I, in the small part of me that thinks like a Buddhist, expects upon death. However, in this time, when humanity seems poised to put an end to the death of human bodies, Pullman’s version of salvation for the dead is deeply uninspired. Here, again, there seems to be a contradiction: if sentience and intention are the sources of all good, wouldn’t the best outcome for the dead, and for everyone, be for them to retain their consciousness, even in ghostly form? I would prefer anything to oblivion.
The Amber Spyglass is a well-told conclusion to one of the best fantasy series I’ve read in years, but suffers upon comparison with preceding volumes because it fails to tie up some loose ends in the plot, and holds back in its celebration of human intention.
Do rônin dream of electric girls?
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.â€
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 (review)
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?
Spanking Fashion Parade (review)
The Incredible Melk’s Spanking Fashion Parade.
9/10
Last night I overcame a bout of lethargy to go out to the Kitten Club and see a show my friend Mel was putting on. It featured some outrageously stylish catwalking from the models (including at least one who really looked like an actual, perfect ten, model), as well as from the contestants in an audience walk-off, the winner of which sadly couldn’t take the drink offered as a prize, because she was underage, but got a huge bowl of fries instead. Mel punctuated proceedings with her hilarious comic songs. I’m such an old-school, Wired-style (Wired-style!? I’m only 23!) geek that I’m not confident I know what genre Mel’s music belongs to, but she has used the phrases “hip-hop” and “gyno-rap” to describe her work. Guess I don’t spend enough time down in the ‘hood.
I’d give the show 10/10, because I thought it was great, and because I know the star, but I have to take one mark off to save this review from being a sycophantic plug. I’m really looking forward to the Incredible Melk’s upcoming Booty Pageant.
Props to you, Mel.
Before Sunset (review)
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.