Big Cultural Blog installment 2

Barb and I went out to rent Hitchhiker’s but it was totally out for quite a while. I don’t think it was such a big hit… I think geeks just can’t get enough of it. This is Austin after all. But we finally saw it... disappointing. Good 45 mins, then got off-track and off and away from the book, and it didn't work well enough. Too Hollywood for what it should have been, too clever for Hollywood.

Well, it’s time for another Big Cultural Blog. I have sort of finished my blog… sometimes a whole week will pass where I won’t say anything any more, or longer. I wanted to devote my time to other stuff. But I can still turn some interesting bits into a column…

I suppose I don’t really need to explain how Barb and I watched an Inu-Yasha OAV (#2) and were not impressed… the problem with Inu-Yasha is they’ll never defeat the bad guy, and trying to has gone on for much too long now.

Got a rather definitive Barb book, The Rock Snob's Dictionary : An Essential Lexicon of Rockological Knowledge, by David Kamp. This is stuff Barb and I talk about all the time.

We watched the Japanese movie VERSUS. Starts out really great. Then about 50 minutes into it, it gets a little more cosmic good/evil cliche, like Star Wars crosses BACK across the Pacific and becomes just a cheesy samurai movie again. That part had too much posing, you stopped caring, it was much weaker. Still, the first 50 mins or so was great. But they should have stuck to it being 90 mins instead of 120 mins.

We listened to Brian Wilson’s SMILE album, finally released. It’s genius, and the world finally recognizes it.

I wasn’t delighted with Hans Rodionoff’s Vertigo graphic novel Lovecraft, below, adapted from someone's didn't-make-it-to-the-screen screenplay, but I think Keith Giffen does a good job of adapting it. …Anyone remember the movie KAFKA, where Galerians-like madmen chase the guy into The Castle?

We watched the movie MURDER BY DECREE, by decree of our friend Drew Edwards, writer of the comic Halloween Man. MURDER BY DECREE drove nothing home so much as that FROM HELL maybe wasn't as amazingly unexplored territory as some might have thought. Hard to believe the same director did what's essentially HOLMES VS. THE RIPPER, as directed PORKY'S, CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS, and A CHRISTMAS STORY. What a freaky career. Anyway, I had trouble with Plummer as Holmes, but was fine with it by the end, as I am with each new Holmes movie I see...

Read the book _The Hidden Messages in Water_. Water crystallizes in different ways depending on what you do to it. Dr. Masaru Emoto proved it. Like, this lake makes ugly crystal structures like a face screaming. He gets a Shinto priest to chant at the lake for an hour and 15 mins after he's done, the lake's water starts getting less muddy while they watch. And afterwards, the crystals that form are pretty. And then like a week later, they found that there was the body of a dead woman in that lake. Well no wonder. They say nice things to water and get pretty crystals. They say MEAN things to water and get ugly crystals or no crystals. They SHOW MEAN WORDS to water and get the same stuff. They show NICE words to water and it makes pretty crystals. Water really is like that mood slime from Ghostbusters II. Everything is, Dr. Emoto just found a way to prove it with water. And while Dr. Emoto sounds like he’s a guy from a comic book… He’s not. His research is legitimate.

Saw a DVD with Barb, THE STUNT MAN, with Peter O'Toole as half-crazy, God-complex director Eli Cross (related to CHINATOWN's Noah Cross??). Boy, they don't make 'em like this anymore... 1980 and yet they're still being filthy just for the sake of being filthy... a strange, strange movie. I liked it, but the world'll never see its like again. You can tell they thought a stunt man as a main character was neat so they started the comparatively weak TV show THE FALL GUY.

There was this quasi-magical moment when the main character works out that his life has become a movie, and so to keep Eli from sticking him in increasingly dangerous stunts that'll soon surely kill him, that he has to sort of grab his new reality and reshape it, causing a destiny rewrite. Magical thinking. But, since you can't outsmart God, the dumb stuntman character has to drive his car off a bridge anyway. Does he live? Watch and find out. Everyone says this movie is too long, but I hardly ever used the fast-forward button. You know what movie is too damn long? AMERICAN GIGALO. It's a crime how much Gere gets in his car and drives around aimlessly, no dialogue, no thought caption voiceovers, just soundtrack. He must do that for 1/5th of the movie.

I will say, though, that while I thought the writing was often quite good in STUNT MAN, that they didn't know how to use the soundtrack... they overused it. [Jon Stuart voice] DAMN YOU, NINETEEN-EIGHTY!

Watched Children of the Damned with Barb. Never seen it. Quite the downer. Not as good as the first one but not as bad as most reviewers make it sound. But a sad ending.

Saw a GREAT movie with Barb-- SHADOW MAGIC. Seriously. 5 stars out of 5. In 1902, a British guy brings moving pictures to China. A young photographer can't help but get involved. This movie has a lot of good lessons about the power of creating entertainment and adding to culture and why it's all important; why it all matters. Everyone should see it.

Still waiting for the next installment of HIKARU NO GO, the manga about a boy who learns to play the game of Go (which English speakers sometimes know as Othello) with the ghost of a dead Go champion from the old Imperial era… it’s much more exciting than you’d think.

Not to be confused with the entertaining little manga which actually is titled (over here) OTHELLO, about a girl with a dual personality, one shy and sweet, one bold and brash… It’s not a masterpiece of complexity or plot weaving, but it’s still very entertaining…

No, HIKARU NO GO is still a sports manga, like my beloved SLAM DUNK/REBOUND or the newer, also-excellent soccer manga WHISTLE… there’s only one important thing in all sports manga, and that’s the love of the game, and how playing the game with that love in your heart makes you feel…

Speaking of manga, Barb and I are slightly at loose ends while we mourn (slightly -- it was time, really) the end of the long-running anime series YU YU HAKUSHO. Sigh… good memories. Anyone want to recommend a new series to me? We just haven’t been bold enough to try GANTZ yet… Dunno if we ever will or not…

I played all three Onimusha games… They were pretty great. The end game was too hard on 1 and 3, though. And I had to play on the easiest level sometimes… dunno how anyone ever beats them on the hardest level…

We also watched all of the first season of Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Good… The noble sacrifice of the little minitanks shall never be forgotten… We watched Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence from Netflix, and it was just terrible. Sometimes I don't know what certain other geek reviewers were thinking. More of everything I didn't like in the first movie, less of everything I did...

Okay, that's it for now... next time... I don't know what. My life has been a nightmare lately. Any of my friends want to do a guest column?

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