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| Biases:
1) Tapes are more poignant than DVDs because watching them wears them down faster. I expect that my DVDs will outlive me but not old tapes.
2) Reading positive reviews of movies I already like.
3) Netflix should not put be allowed to stream movies that I own on DVD. It is some kind of inflation when they do.
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| Lost in Beijing
A result of cheap electronic video: glamorous degeneracy flicks shot in handheld style and contemporaneous with the glamorously degenerate city. Lou Ye is probably the king of this style though did not direct this one.
I like this one in particular because it has a wide range of emotional situations and a torrid plot that relates back to mickle Chinese films. Judging by the evolution of the quasi-rape-you-and-what-about-the-kid genre I would say the PRC has at least returned to the level of Xiaoxiao/Girl from Hunan.
Story I forget: you raped and impregnated my wife and she threw herself in the well.
Xiaoxiao: you raped and impregnated my wife but I'm four years old.
[one two skip a few...]
Red Sorghum: you raped and impregnated my wife. Oh here come the Japanese to flay us.
Lost in Beijing: you raped and impregnated my wife. Let's haggle a la an American law suit and fight a la Jerry Springer. You also gave us both AIDS.
Even with the HIV positive trend much!
Alternate title: au hasard Benz-azar
for the indignities borne by a gray mercedes being used as laoban's pimpmobile
In my heart I like the approach better in "My Father and I" or Taiwanese "Millennium Mambo." Perhaps "degenerate city" flick is really always a "slimeball father figure" flick. The sense of wonder to go with your revulsion.
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| (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n03/wood01_.html)
"
Is there something invidious about the distinctiveness of stories, do
we each get the stories we deserve – or perhaps the stories we cannot
possibly deserve? What do we gain or lose by retaining the idea of age
but abandoning the idea of time? By turning time into space? What sort
of things began with the Great War, and what does it mean not to have
ceased beginning? What happens after such long, or maybe permanent
starts? Are there no middles and ends? And – this is a repetition of
the question about age and time – how are we to think about degrees of
pastness? Are we liberated or frustrated by distance? Is the whispering
conjuror of the imperfect a humble historian or a sheer fabulist? And
most subtle of all, hovering over the whole miniature essay, is a
question about history and consciousness. Did the Great War really
change everything, or is that just one more myth we can’t get out of?
Our smile, if we have one, is an expression of our uncertainty. Maybe
these questions are not even there. Who are we going to ask?" | | |
| They say that the happiest time of life is the spring semester of your sophomore year, or at least when it's easiest to say, "I'm happy!" with no penalty for pinning down such a fleeting motion. If that's so then my favorite band should be Do As Infinity the J-pop trio because they were all I listened to from about March 05 to October 05. I also like them because they were founded in 1999 and I have superstitions that good luck comes from things of 1999, at least to me. Anyway DAI broke up later that Fall. I paid money for their last concert DVD and moved on decisively to the band Every Little Thing which has existed forever (since 96) and never changes. Even when their singer got bronchitis they kept right on.
ELT has a more electronic take to pop music; their usual tour-squad uses two keyboard rigs instead of just one. I've long felt that synthesizers in pop are kind of like vegetarian meat; morally superior but hard to fill up on. ELT doesn't have this problem. Just good songwriting.
I have a personal myth about their founder, this keyboardist named Iggy, who quit a few years later, that the reason he never founded a decent group after Every Little Thing (he tried this american-idol thing and some other groups) is that he succeeded too well the first time. I find that admirable, like he is the silver swan of notoriously mercenary Avex, his label. I imagine:
Iggy: I will take one Mocchi (the singer), one Ikkun, one me. Three key musicians for the album covers. I will write three albums worth of songs - Everlasting ; Time to Destination ; eternity. And I shall give them an everlasting NAME (with three words).
And then Iggy saw that it was good, and he went away, and the pale mists of early retirement did fleck the horizon.
Avex cried, make another group!
And Iggy said no.
And Avex cried, make another group
And Iggy heard and irked thus at Avex, and did fangle a crap group.
And Avex did persists, but did specify make a good group.
But the pacific dark did play behind Iggy's eyes, and thou mayest imagine that all the pop chemistry which once had played in Iggy's eyes and in Iggy's soul verily had gone out of Iggy, and been in Every Little Thing sealed thus forever and ever.
...Which is why Every Little Thing is break up proof. I also have a crush on the singer who looks a lot like Audrey Hepburn and a man-crush on the guitarist who looks somewhat like Luke Skywalker.
~~~
That's just a really long way of saying I feel pissed off that DAI is getting back together, or if not pissed off, weary much. Things ought to stay dead or alive.
But in the end I guess it's just which business model do you prefer.
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| Movie reviews - for some reason I had quit for a while reading these things. They're more tedious than I remember except when they are right on:
http://midnighteye.com/reviews/casshern.shtml
I used to think that stray insights in film reviews were the way to go. Now I think film reviews are trash unless they are right-on in capturing the essence of a single movie from the production to the audience's brain.
So often people go off on one aspect of a whole movie such as acting; or a technique they happen to dislike (oh, flashbacks). But instead of a measured history of this technique they give us polemical like "Against artistic sex scenes" when really they just weren't feeling this flick.
Anyway I am trying to stock up the Netflix queue that I have treated with such indifference.
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