Dave J

Graveyard of Honor

Gymkaaaaaata!

What's that, you say? "The skill of gymnastics, the kill of karate!" Yep, it's about as awesome as it sounds. See, this dude gets sent to a stereotypical fake Middle Eastern country, where he has to kick some ass amid "vaguely anti-American sentiment". And this city is literally crawling with highbars and poles just asking for vaulting and somersaulting! Somehow he also manages to get his hands all chalked and ready in anticipation of the ass-kicking to come.

I was actually going to write about giving props to director Kinji Fukasaku, who I believe is generally incapable of making an inexciting movie. I know Jeff is a big fan of his Yakuza Papers series, since we went through it a year ago, but as I investigate more of his yakuza-based work it becomes clearer that this guy was ridiculously talented at Godfather-style gang epics in a time when the movie industry was on the verge of bankruptcy and trying to transition into flat-out porn (the sheer number of rape sequences in many late-60s to mid-70s Japanese films should make this creepily apparent). I guess what I was trying to get at is that truly great artists are not entirely restricted by the environment of their times, which is why I admire Fukasaku and Seijun Suzuki for creating greatness in a Z-budget hell.

But no, I've been sidetracked by Gymkata. Damn you, Village of the Crazies! Damn you, Parmistan!

Good Graffiti

I always keep my eyes on the walls when I'm out on the streets, because I have a soft spot for good graffiti. Today I was rewarded with a particularly funny/insightful piece, it's just too bad I never carry my digital camera anymore. (Those in the city can spot it at the corner of Union Square on University Place across from... Strawberry...)

Anyway there's a big post yo' bills section of like 10 of the same poster glued onto the wall in a tile formation. Selling some brand of jeans with some hunky guy and a hot girl who is topless but carefully concealing her goods with some talented arm folding. And sprawled in the middle of this tiled installation is the simple spray painted question:

"But would she even give me the time of day?"

Maybe if you wore better jeans.

So Kurosawa, Ozu and Naruse walk into a bar...

After sitting on my shelf unread for several years, the combination of a busy work week and no homework to work on compelled me to finally read Akira Kurosawa's autobiography (entitled somewhat unenthusiastically, Something Like An Autobiography). It turned out to be completely worth the time, even if he refuses to go beyond Rashomon into the actually exciting period of international success followed by a nose-dive in popularity and career prospects that lead to a suicide attempt. Instead, he gives many amusing but perhaps alarming anecdotes about his early career. For example, while many fans--including myself--would love to picture him as a genius driven to create masterpiece scripts through some romantically rigorous notion of quality control, he in fact admits to churning out these screenplays in order to pay for his escalating alcoholism. When the bar tab got too high he just reached for his notebook and pen and shit out another classic.

Another amusing anecdote has to do with his relation between himself and fellow master director Yasujiro Ozu. What's the biggest debt Kurosawa owes to his senior? A stylistic or technical understanding, perhaps? Nope--his primary debt to Ozu is that Ozu physically prevented him from throwing a chair at the Board of Censors during a World War II-inspired crackdown on Kurosawa's debut feature. Instead, Ozu convinced Kurosawa that they were better off drowning their sorrows, so they left and got loaded. Same with Kurosawa and Mikio Naruse.

So three of the biggest directors of Japan's classical era now appear in my mind as awesome drunk roughnecks. I will therefore be creating a slapstick sitcom in which they bicker and engage in fisticuffs with all manners of ruffians. I think I will call it Cheers.

On another note, I am now officially The Stupid Kid in German class. There is a clear distinction between how the professor treats The Smart Kid versus how he treats The Stupid Kid. He doesn't call on the smart one when doing the random calling thing, because he knows it's a waste of time since he won't need to correct anything. So instead he calls on The Stupid Kid just about every time. Now two years ago I used to be The Smart Kid, but that may arguably have been because I fastly undershot expectations and took Elementary German I (ich heiBe Dave! ich bin 19 Jahre alt!) despite four years of high school German.

But you need two semesters of language to graduate, and my schedule never fit the sequel very well, so now I'm taking Elementary German II two years later with no studying in between. I'm still trying to remember all the various nouns we learned, not to mention we used a different textbook, and vocab lists tend to be somewhat subjective based on the book. I'm studying the old chapters to play catchup and In the meantime I'm fully embracing the big-dumb-senior role and playing it to a tee.

In actual conclusion: I'll be damned if I ever forget a few random things Frau Sto stuck to awkward and somewhat obnoxious musical melodies, so I think it's best we break up Westside and integrate that potential into the general public school system.

Most Movies Are Stupid

So when I was writing my "Best Of" list for life in 2006, I had a hell of a time picking a movie to place on there. I go to fancy-ass film school, I work at a fancy-ass indie video rental store, and I purchase an almost embarassing amount of DVDs, so it really should not have been that hard. Not that I regret choosing The Proposition at all; I feel like it didn't get as much love as it could, and it certainly blew my mind. It's a great flick I think anyone can enjoy, unless you don't like seeing someone get flayed to a bloody pulp who's not Jesus Christ. (An alternative choice for the less brave would be the incredibly fast and entertaining French action movie Banlieu 13, known here as District B13, even though Banlieu means something like District so that would be like saying District Distric 13...)

But c'mon--two videogames and a videogame system made the list to that one film, and if it really came down to a nerd genre fight for my soul I'm sure cinema would easily defeat videogames to claim the top spot.

So I'll start by taking the easy way out. I did not see many good movies in theaters partially due to simple statistics--I did not see many movies to start with. High ticket prices or busy schedules meant I skipped several that I remain committed to seeing on DVD (Flags of Our Fathers, Letters to Iwo Jima, Children of Men and Volver would be three examples), and quite a few potential award-winning films look like pure dreck to begin with (Blood Diamond).

I'm also not quite sure why my ability to judge seems to occasionally deviate far from the consensus, even among critics I respect. Two examples occured quite recently: Scoop and Miami Vice. Now Monica's roommate opened the dialogue on Scoop this past summer with the quip "It was the worst movie I've seen in my life, and I want my money and time back." Critics didn't seem to be a whole lot nicer, as quite low RottenTomatoes scores and even a mediocre IMDB rating seem to conclude. Everyday Joes and Professional Opinionaters both didn't like it, but I did. So many reviews repeated something like "I didn't expect such a lazy, simple comedy after Match Point," which is pure bollocks. Match Point is every critic's new favorite Woody Allen film precisely because it's so un-Allen, which after a decade of middling (or worse) comedies must seem like a good thing. But it's certainly not a bad thing that Scoop, while initially a thriller like Match Point, ends up being skewed a bit more towards Allen's traditional style of humor, and it also shows his love for terrorizing Scarlett Johansson, which is always entertaining. Because I saw it long after the verdicts were firmly established, Scoop earned the Biggest Movie Surprise of 2006 for how much it didn't suck.

The second surprise, discovered just tonight during a home viewing, is that another critical turd might actually be unacknowledged gold. Michael Mann's Miami Vice got trashed during its initial release, as its Rotten Tomatoes page will attest, despite the love many writers have for Mann's alluring style. I must admit that I have no idea if the initial verdicts were wrong, because I watched the Unrated Director's Cut Premium Edition, which beyond adding one or two tits also restores about eight minutes of plot and motorboat racing. This may explain why I could follow the plot and the New York Times couldn't. Regardless, it played as an extremely stylish and well put together action movie, with all the right twists and turns, good acting/writing, and it never reveled in its destruction (or caused as much to begin with) as the entertainingly juvenile exercises of Michael Bay. The movie's use of DV for a high-budget action movie was also a brave move that was pulled off very well, although the technology also owes its thanks to vivid set designs, wardrobe, etc.

Oh, I didn't much care for Little Miss Sunshine, which fell into many of the same Sundance cliche potholes as Me, You and Everyone We Know, even though Alan Arkin should win some type of award for the grandpa.

What I think I was ultimately trying to get across is two things. A), that 2006 was a disappointing year for movies from what I've seen so far, but b) that nothing is more exhilerating than watching a movie everyone hated and discovering it's actually quite good. I have discovered fewer of these movies than I'd like to, given that I tend to plan what to watch partially around what certain critics have already hinted at, and the fact that 100+ years of existing cinema means there are enough classics out there to mean I shouldn't really be spending my time watching Stay Alive (even if it is Frankie Muniz).

Now THAT was a ramble. Old people could learn a thing or two from me.