I last made a major revision to the formatting of this website over a year ago. Then, I switched over to using as my basis a combination of Blogger software and the absolutely brilliant PHP script, TinyButStrong. The problem with it was that it coded all my individual posts in a pretty lame way. Automation was nice and all, it was deficient in some aesthetic niceties.
However, in the last hour, I've coded more HTML and dicked around with my FTP clients more than I have in the whole last year. Finally, things are looking about how I want them. Sometimes, I really need to just get off my ass.
Perhaps one of these days I'll actually get around to adding some new content.
The way we acquire knowledge and information is curious in its variety. Some information is simply absorbed. If you asked me about my first encounter with the word "incisive," I couldn't point you to any particular event that helped me to learn the word. It's acontextual. However, the word "scowl" is intrinsically connected to Ramona Quimby, eponymous young star of the Beverly Cleary junior novels. It's the first word I can remember looking up in a dictionary. Every time I write it, say it, read it, hear it, or think it, the face of a young brunette girl pops into my mind, making the most ornery scowl.
There's a similar, but more traumatic, link that was formed on my very first day in third grade. I had been advanced a grade for the reasons young students are advanced. Naturally, this gave me a slight boost of confidence. Third grade, of course, was an awesome enough grade that we could actually do multiplication quizzes in class. A year younger than all my peers, I had taken immediately to showing off my skills. Hell, I knew this shit. Multiplication tables were how I unwound at home. There was a reason my plastic dinosaurs were in the same drawer as my math aides.
"Three times three?"
Emphatically, "Six."
For some reason, I was standing. My teacher informed me I was wrong. In the heat of the moment, I'd made a mistake and couldn't even see it. I reiterated my answer.
I seem to remember my teacher scowling at me. Some other kids laughed. One volunteered the correct answer.
Of course! Nine! I knew that! Really, I did. But it was too late. Everyone already believed I didn't know what three times three was. My shame was public, irreparable, and forever affixed to 3 x 3.
I was fortunate enough to receive a copy of Nobuhiro Yamashita's 2005 film, Linda Linda Linda, a couple weeks ahead of its May 8th, 2007 release date. I'd read some good things about it and was expecting a fun, poppy experience. Certainly nothing too weighty. I hadn't expected a minor masterpiece.
The story starts a couple days before the final culture festival in our protagonists' high school years. They're busy preparing their various functions. A recent hand injury and a falling out between friends has left a band in shambles. Kei, one of the founding members, assembles some friends to form a cover band for eighties Japanese punk act, the Blue Hearts.
None of the three girls in the band are willing to sing, though. So they enlist the help of Son, a Korean exchange student who doesn't fully grasp the language. This isn't played for cheap laughs (not that there isn't some fun had with it). Nor is it making any kind of overt political point. She's just a Korean exchange student. She's played by The Host and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance's Du-na Bae, who -- despite strong performances by the other three leads -- absolutely steals the show.
There's a great deal of subtext in this film. The long, elliptical scenes of the girls on their own and together intimate a lot of history and fill in the gaps the film doesn't show us explicitly. A glance here tells the story of an entire relationship. A lingering shot there reveals that, in this story, we're catching just one moment in a life story all its own.
Every character -- even the numerous minor ones -- painted delicately, warmly, and realistically. They communicate an amazing amount of their story just with a silent reaction. There's a lot going on here.
On its surface, the movie is a good deal of fun. It works on a number of levels.
Oh, and the music pretty much rocks. Check it out.
Mr. Nader pointed out last night that it was the first alternative commencement that he had been invited to speak at. A Google search reveals that it's probably one of just a very small few. It just happened to be at my -- not alma mater; what do you call a school you dropped out of? -- which also remains pretty nearby.
In case you missed the ordeal by either not living in Utah or not paying attention, what happened was that Brigham Young University invited Vice President Dick Cheney to speak at its commencement. Cheney accepted. The difference between this and the Michael Moore debacle a couple years ago was, of course, that this wasn't merely a guest speaker. Cheney was who the University was putting forward as the role model on whose words the graduating class would be released into the world. Considering the fact that many (though, admittedly, probably less per capita in Utah County) consider Cheney a criminal and a key player in everything that's gone wrong in the last few years (which if you haven't been paying attention, is a whole hell of a lot), there were objections raised.
Utah's about as red as any of these United States get, due largely to its immense Mormon majority. However, nowhere in the Church's doctrine does one find a direct endorsement of one political ideology over another. There is the dissenting minority that finds that their religious views sync better with progressive values than conservative. As much of what BYU does is often considered a direct extension of the Church itself (and thereby God), such a divisive, pretty much evil figure was found to be distasteful. Understandable.
So the dissenters took matters into their own hands. And the alternatives were very much alternatives: Ralph Nader, civil rights legend Jack Healey, and Pete Ashdown. Pete Ashdown gave a nice little commencement speech. Jack Healey (who I regret to report I had not heard of till his name came up as a speaker) gave an impassioned and moving speech about moral imperatives.
Ralph Nader was very much into the idea of an alternative commencement. So much so, that he just ran with it. Single-payer health care, election reform, energy conservation, natural energy sources, corporate greed, unchecked consumerism, labor issues, the broken status of the two-party system, et al. Among them, nary a view that would be popular in the likes of Utah County. It felt more like a political rally than a commencement speech. It? Was awesome.
A commencement isn't the sort of thing I'm naturally inclined to go to. Most speeches tend to be what Cheney's apparently was: just hot air. Meaningless clichés and dull inspirational anecdotes. But this was truly an alternative. In every since of the word.
All of this came a few days after my favorite will-never-be-President Presidential candidate, Dennis Kucinich, introduced a resolution to impeach Cheney. And there are rallies nationwide tomorrow for impeachment calls. Let's hope this gets us somewhere*.
*It probably won't. But I try to take my stabs at optimism from time to time.
We're a third of the way into 2007 and I'm still not comfortable enough with the number of 2006 films I've seen to say that this, definitively and forever, is my final top list for 2006. I've come to really appreciate those critics who include films that they saw during a calendar year as opposed to those released in that year. Those lists still annoy me, though. So here it is. My trivial little listing of what I think the best films of 2006 were (I'm going off the dates of theatrical release in each film's native country).
1. Election 2 (Johnnie To, Hong Kong) Genre stylist laureate Johnnie To's gangster epic comprised of this and last year's Election are the best thing he's done. In a career that also includes such films as The Mission and Running on Karma, that's saying something. Blasphemy though it may be, I found the combination of these two films more powerful and potent than The Godfather. It does what few sequels do and what more sequels should do: it builds on the already strong, articulate themes of the first film, imbuing everything with more meaning. To's utter emasculation of his characters despite all their triad posturing stands in stark contrast to such good-times glorification as A Hero Never Dies and Full-Time Killer.
2. Memories of Matsuko (Nakashima Tetsuya, Japan) Over-the-top doesn't begin to describe the breathless, ornate style of Memories of Matsuko, one of the most visually gorgeous and heartrendingly tragic films I've seen. A musical, it is the story of Matsuko, a woman who pursues her happiness in the arms of men who treat her like shit through the decades. The visuals, calling on everything from teeth shining in the dark to animated birds right out of Snow White, serve to underscore the film's celebration of Matsuko's life and her perseverance in light of the awful tragedy of her reality.
3. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, USA) An immaculately crafted film, from its unflinching violence to its imaginative (but not cloying) picture of the future, Children of Men works on a number of levels. It's an intense thriller of the highest class. It's a damning, precautionary political fable for our time. And it has Clive Owen and Michael Caine in it.
4. The Host (Bong Joon-Ho, South Korea) Apparently mad genius Bong Joon-Ho deftly does just about everything in The Host. As Spielberg is often wont to do, he gives us a politically charged story of a catastrophic event (this time, a man-eating mutant from the Han River) from the viewpoint of an unspectacular family. Unlike the laughable War of the Worlds, though, there are no supermen here. And when someone dies, they stay dead. There are scenes that are funny as hell, scary as hell, and poignant as hell, and all these scenes are right next to each other, if not the same.
5. Half Nelson (Ryan Fleck & Anna Boden, USA) Honestly, I avoided this one for a while. I'm wary of the white-teacher-redeems-a-bunch-of-black-kids subgenre of American film. It's been done. To death. And it usually isn't worth the trouble. However, Fleck and Boden's film is pretty much the refutation of the too-pat trappings of these films, and a wonderful, complex, an important allegory about race and class in today's society.
6. Inland Empire (David Lynch, USA) David Lynch's ability to capture the hellish nightmare that is everyday living resonates in every second of the 10,800 seconds (approx.) in this film. It's thrilling, moving, disquieting stuff. And I don't know if I'll ever know exactly what it all means. Not every three-hour film can make me want to revisit it almost instantly. This one did.
7. Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, Mexico) Del Toro's fairy tale was lighter on the fantasy than I'd anticipated. But that was no matter. Ofelia's real world surroundings and the brutal fascism of Franco's Spain was substantive, compelling stuff. Furthermore, it's open to a multitude of interpretations. I've heard a number of theories, most of which compliment the film a nuanced and deep film worth a good deal of consideration. Also? It kicks ass.
8. Volver (Pedro Almodovar, Spain) A fabulous story about strongly drawn characters that allows the viewer to know what's going to happen yet still is fascinating to watch as it unfolds these events. Also, Penelope Cruz is almost distractingly beautiful in this movie. She's superhuman.
9. Brick (Rian Johnson, USA) Juxtaposing the too-serious hallmarks of noir with the too-serious reality that is high school works so well under Johnson's sure hand that it seems perfectly logical.
10. Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood, USA) The film isn't flawless (some of its digressing backstories and barely-there frame story seem a little unnecessary), but by presenting us with the horrors of war in grotesque, unblinking detail from a consistent perspective of soldiers on the ground, Eastwood's admittedly obvious anti-war message is supremely effective.
The Next Seven 11. A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman, USA) 12. Stranger Than Fiction (Marc Forster, USA) 13. Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom, UK) 14. Happy Feet (George Miller, USA) 15. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (Adam McKay, USA) 16. Exiled (Johnnie To, Hong Kong) 17. The Queen (Stephen Frears, UK)
Miscellaneous Notes
I can pretty much guarantee that Kon Satoshi's Paprika would be near the top of this list if it weren't for the fact that I won't see it for another two months. Seriously, I haven't been this excited for a film since Kill Bill, Volume 2.
The Departed was inferior to Infernal Affairs, which did not receive enough credit. And was also from Hong Kong. Not Japan.
While An Inconvenient Truth may be an important movie, it's really not much of a film. If the Academy Awards wanted to award quality, the masterful Iraq in Fragments was much more deserving (though "Oscar-winner Al Gore" brings me some joy).
I haven't seen United 93, The Fountain, and several other likely contenders. And that's not counting the stuff that I haven't even heard of yet. As I said, the requirements for a comprehensive best list will never be fully satisfied.
Doubtlessly you've heard about the shootings at Virginia Tech (I initially saw the news reported as "VT" and thus keep calling it Vermont Tech). There's a veritable uproar. And it's upsetting. People, ideally, should never have to live through (much less die due to) something like that.
So we find ourselves looking at this awful act of violence. Within minutes, the fingers are up and pointing. We're asking ourselves what we've done to allow this to happen. The faculty and local police didn't do their job properly. Cho's family failed him. Gun culture is to blame1. Jack Thompson, naturally, is ready to go within hours with video games. Koreans? To hell with all that
It's looking more and more like he was legitimately insane. Schizophrenic, most likely. It explains a lot and it's a pity that no one picked up on it. However, that really isn't so easy.
People keep harping on about the tell-tale signs that Cho was a danger. His writing was apparently disturbing and unnerving. He was quiet, a loner. He was hospitalized for being a danger to himself and others. So, who should have nipped this in the bud?
You can't. I've known people who exhibited each of the qualities above. Some close friends have shocked me with the kind of rage and violence they can conjure up. My first couple years at college were spent with nary a friend and I'd sit quietly and awkwardly in the farthest corner of the class. Someone very dear to me was once sent to an institution for a few weeks due to violent threats she was making against others and herself. None of these people are going to kill anyone else. They probably won't even kill themselves.
There's very little you can legally do when you suspect someone liable to lose it and go on a killing spree. It's imperative that we keep it this way. If -- in an extremely hypothetical situation -- everyone were to seek the arrest of everyone in America who exhibited these warning signs, hundreds of thousands of people would be turned over to the authorities and have their lives subsequently ruined. The percentage of these cases that would end up damaging others if left unattended would be practically nil.
We need to react to this tragedy rationally before making changes on either a large or a small scale. Last time we got all in a tizzy over a one-time instance and let our emotions take control, some American Muslims got terrorized, the Patriot Act happened, and we wound up in Iraq forever, an unpardonable and irrational extra four years of Bush, the blood of hundreds of thousands on our hands (and so you know, just today, seemingly coordinated car bombings killed 172 people around Baghdad today, making it one of the occupation's bloodiest days).
I've heard a lot of the coverage of this incident so far. Outside of the heart-breaking outpour of sympathy and support for the victims and the community, I don't think I've heard any productive discussion. Blaming people doesn't help and trying to find answers where there aren't any is futile and (because there aren't any) aggravating.
Finally, he was Korean. So what? Stop mentioning it like it matters.
1 Not that I don't have problems with America's gun culture. I just don't see this as a springboard to any effective discussion.
Really, one of the biggest problems and limitations with ice cream varieties is that you can't just throw anything sweet in there. While mixing those ridiculously tasty Girl Scout thin mint cookies into chocolate ice cream sounds good in theory, the cookies are made soggy and lose their essential crispiness. Alack. Alas.
I was fortunate enough to receive a copy of Nobuhiro Yamashita's 2005 film, Linda Linda Linda, a couple weeks ahead of its May 8th, 2007 release date. I'd read some good things about it and was expecting a fun, poppy experience. Certainly nothing too weighty. I hadn't expected a minor masterpiece. 
