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Jun. 2nd, 2007 11:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blodeueddI got home the other night only to notice that on the back of my shirt were several odd brown lines, as though someone had drawn on it in brown marker. I have no idea where they came from; I'm sure they weren't there when I put it on, but I can't think of what could have caused them. Unless someone in the subway really did draw on me. If that's the case, I suppose I should be glad I was drawn on and not groped, but still!
Brokeback Mountain: Angsty gay cowboys! :D~ I guess Heath Ledger got the accent right, I could barely understand what he was saying half the time, even with the volume turned way up. And Jake Gyllenhall? You made me bawl and take you seriously even with that stupid mustache, so props to you. Should I be ashamed to admit that more than once, during the course of the movie, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was watching yaoi fanfiction brought to life? Good fanfiction, though, not the kind full of stupid plots (or not!), super-weepy men (god, do I hate those -- not only do they bastardize the original character, but if I ever met anyone that weepy in real life, man or woman, I'd start breaking things) and spelling mistakes*. At any rate, the lesson to take away from this is that homophobia results in miserable cowboys, miserable cowboys' wives and miserable cowboys' children. So knock it off and let the boys have their fun, yo. Seriously, this was a good (sad!) movie.
Kaze to ki no uta (Song of the Wind and Trees): To while away my afternoons between classes, I've been sorting through my VHS tapes, mostly fast-forwarding through them to see if what's on the label (if anything) reflects the actual contents. This was something I had planned to do before moving to Japan, so as not to move a bunch of useless tapes, but you know how it is, I never got around to it. Though I did get rid of lots of old fansubs before leaving. Anyway, a few tapes revealed that I stuck with the American version of Queer As Folk for a lot longer than I thought I had and that I taped an awful lot of stuff off Showcase and YTV, back in the day. And the Gundam Wing English voice actors sound stoned half the time, they're speaking so slowly in order to synch with the lip-flaps. ANYway. I got this fansub way back when the anime club was a weekly outing for me and only watched it once, I believe, which would make it 6 or 7 years ago. And while it screams 1970s! and Angst! and Rose Petals Falling All Over The Place For No Discernable Reason!, it's that distinctly Japanese type of melodrama and raw emotion that I find rather compelling. I remembered the basic story but had either forgotten or not noticed some of Serge's (the main character) remarks that hit home this time 'round. Things that, trite though it may seem, resonate with me now because what I've been through since then. This is one I'll keep, even though I'm not a big fan of the "the purest form of love must not be expressed sexually" school of thought. On the other hand, it makes more sense than that in this context and I'd be curious to see how (if?) it was developed further in the manga. The anime is only an hour long, so there's not much time for it.
Bon Cop Bad Cop: This isn't a ground-breaking movie in any way, but a very funny bilingual buddy-cop flick. A body is found hanging over the sign on the Quebec/Ontario border, so a cop from Toronto (Colm Feore) and a cop from Montreal (Patrick Huard, who also wrote the screenplay) are forced to team up. I'm assuming they're OPP and Sûreté du Québec and not local, because that would make no sense, but the organisations are never mentioned, just as the hockey teams are the "Toronto Loyalists" and the "Patriotes de Montréal". Of course the Québecois is a brawler who has a problem with authority and the Ontarian is a by-the-book straight-laced type and they resent working together at first, but they learn to cooperate to stop a hockey-motivated killer. It's quite a good movie, though it suffers from the audio problem that annoys me so much about Quebec cinema, namely REALLY LOUD MUSIC versus very soft dialogue in a lot of places. Colm Feore and Patrick Huard are both amusing and the scene where they accidentally end up stoned and explaining things to the boss is priceless. And it's worth seeing Colm Feore exclaim "J'm'en crisse!" ^_^ Rick Mercer is hilarious as a hockey commentator. I also liked seeing a movie where the characters switch between English and French, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. The copy I watched had all the English subtitled, but I assume you could watch it with the French subtitled, too.
The Wind Up Bird Chronicles (Murakami Haruki, English translation from Japanese): I started this book over a year ago, picking it up in between month-long intervals. I always have several books on the go (sometimes they last years!) so this was not quite surprising, especially given the... I'm not quite sure how to describe it. The density, perhaps, the depth, the way the surreal atmosphere settled gently in my brain, quietly floating beneath the surface. Each time I went back to it, though I didn't at first remember all the previous events in the story, I had no trouble being pulled back in. It's quite hard to describe it as a "story" as such, though there are plenty of strange events and things going on. I wouldn't recommend this to you if you're at all bothered by things not being explained, because much of the story, such as it is, makes emotional -- visceral -- sense to me, rather than straightforward cause-and-effect sense. The different narratives, though the novel is written in the first person, often seem completely unrelated and I know some people would have a "What the hell did all that crap about the Kano sisters and Manchuria have to do with this?!" reaction to the ending. I would venture to say that if you liked Mullholland Drive (or David Lynch in general, as I do), you'll like this. That said, I found it an absolutely fascinating read, in part because I was trying to figure out the narrator. We may be in his head, but there's always a feeling of distance, as though he's watching himself from a distance as well. And a warning: this book contains what may possibly be the first scene ever that made me close the book and my eyes and breathe deeply because I seriously thought I might throw up or pass out. I don't deal well at all with torture scenes in film (nor WWI, nor the Holocaust, nor mafia brutality, but that's another story); reading about it, I'm usually all right, but this one was beyond disturbing and it took me several days before I felt ready to pick up where I'd left off. I'd really like to read more by this author; his latest looks interesting. The only other book of his that I've read (Les amants du Spoutnik) had the same feel to it and though well-written, it was nowhere near as engrossing and satisfying as this one.
La goutte d'or (Alain Tournier): This was a short subway read, only took a week. The story is about Idriss, a teenager from a tiny village in the Algerian desert, who end up in Paris. The "goutte d'or" itself disappears fairly early on in his voyage, but stays on as a metaphor, coming back full-force at the end, which is one of those extremely symbolic affairs. Not a bad book, but not an incredibly great one.
Fushigi Yuugi vol. 5 (Watase Yuu, original Japanese): This covers the part of the story where Tamahome is in Kutou and ends up brainwashed and Miaka, Chichiri and Tasuki try to get him back, while Amiboshi masquerades as Chiriko. One thing I always wondered about was why the hell Amiboshi helped them out there and whether it was on his own or part of Nakago's master plan. Since Nakago has two different things in motion to stop the Suzaku bunch from completing the summoning (having Tamahome captive and one of his own pretending to be Chiriko), it makes no sense for "Chiriko" to rescue Miaka & Co. from Kutou. He could easily have "tried" and said he wasn't able to do it, after all. Is there some reason Nakago didn't want to end things too quickly? The only one I can think of is that Yui doesn't want Miaka dead. Unless there's something I missed in the Japanese text or something I'm not remembering from the millions of times I watched the anime.
Neverwhere (Neil Gaiman): This was another subway read and a fairly quick one, though the story was not rushed. I liked it quite a bit, though I can't help but feel that as someone who's spent a grand total of fewer than 12 hours in London, I missed out on a lot. I'll have to reread it once I've visited London properly, won't I?
* You know, I never thought about how many damn homophones there are in English until I started reading fanfiction again. I'm not even talking about the usual its/it's or affect/effect; try alter and altar. Or navel and naval. (So he's flicking his tongue in his lover's... fleet of ships? O_O) Another one that bugs me is the peek/peak/pique confusion. One story I read consistently confused "shutter" and "shudder", as in "the house had green shudders" and "he shuttered in the cold wind". Oh, and while we're at it, I must admit to being disturbed by the number of authors who use the words "velvet" and "velvety" while describing penises. Compare it to silk (satin or charmeuse? ^_^) if you must, but velvet? The first thing that pops to (my) mind is "Furry penis! D:" And I just about lost it (laughing) when an otherwise rather hot sex scene was completely ruined by the phrase "velvety flesh carpeting his shaft". That's just... wrong.
Brokeback Mountain: Angsty gay cowboys! :D~ I guess Heath Ledger got the accent right, I could barely understand what he was saying half the time, even with the volume turned way up. And Jake Gyllenhall? You made me bawl and take you seriously even with that stupid mustache, so props to you. Should I be ashamed to admit that more than once, during the course of the movie, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was watching yaoi fanfiction brought to life? Good fanfiction, though, not the kind full of stupid plots (or not!), super-weepy men (god, do I hate those -- not only do they bastardize the original character, but if I ever met anyone that weepy in real life, man or woman, I'd start breaking things) and spelling mistakes*. At any rate, the lesson to take away from this is that homophobia results in miserable cowboys, miserable cowboys' wives and miserable cowboys' children. So knock it off and let the boys have their fun, yo. Seriously, this was a good (sad!) movie.
Kaze to ki no uta (Song of the Wind and Trees): To while away my afternoons between classes, I've been sorting through my VHS tapes, mostly fast-forwarding through them to see if what's on the label (if anything) reflects the actual contents. This was something I had planned to do before moving to Japan, so as not to move a bunch of useless tapes, but you know how it is, I never got around to it. Though I did get rid of lots of old fansubs before leaving. Anyway, a few tapes revealed that I stuck with the American version of Queer As Folk for a lot longer than I thought I had and that I taped an awful lot of stuff off Showcase and YTV, back in the day. And the Gundam Wing English voice actors sound stoned half the time, they're speaking so slowly in order to synch with the lip-flaps. ANYway. I got this fansub way back when the anime club was a weekly outing for me and only watched it once, I believe, which would make it 6 or 7 years ago. And while it screams 1970s! and Angst! and Rose Petals Falling All Over The Place For No Discernable Reason!, it's that distinctly Japanese type of melodrama and raw emotion that I find rather compelling. I remembered the basic story but had either forgotten or not noticed some of Serge's (the main character) remarks that hit home this time 'round. Things that, trite though it may seem, resonate with me now because what I've been through since then. This is one I'll keep, even though I'm not a big fan of the "the purest form of love must not be expressed sexually" school of thought. On the other hand, it makes more sense than that in this context and I'd be curious to see how (if?) it was developed further in the manga. The anime is only an hour long, so there's not much time for it.
Bon Cop Bad Cop: This isn't a ground-breaking movie in any way, but a very funny bilingual buddy-cop flick. A body is found hanging over the sign on the Quebec/Ontario border, so a cop from Toronto (Colm Feore) and a cop from Montreal (Patrick Huard, who also wrote the screenplay) are forced to team up. I'm assuming they're OPP and Sûreté du Québec and not local, because that would make no sense, but the organisations are never mentioned, just as the hockey teams are the "Toronto Loyalists" and the "Patriotes de Montréal". Of course the Québecois is a brawler who has a problem with authority and the Ontarian is a by-the-book straight-laced type and they resent working together at first, but they learn to cooperate to stop a hockey-motivated killer. It's quite a good movie, though it suffers from the audio problem that annoys me so much about Quebec cinema, namely REALLY LOUD MUSIC versus very soft dialogue in a lot of places. Colm Feore and Patrick Huard are both amusing and the scene where they accidentally end up stoned and explaining things to the boss is priceless. And it's worth seeing Colm Feore exclaim "J'm'en crisse!" ^_^ Rick Mercer is hilarious as a hockey commentator. I also liked seeing a movie where the characters switch between English and French, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. The copy I watched had all the English subtitled, but I assume you could watch it with the French subtitled, too.
The Wind Up Bird Chronicles (Murakami Haruki, English translation from Japanese): I started this book over a year ago, picking it up in between month-long intervals. I always have several books on the go (sometimes they last years!) so this was not quite surprising, especially given the... I'm not quite sure how to describe it. The density, perhaps, the depth, the way the surreal atmosphere settled gently in my brain, quietly floating beneath the surface. Each time I went back to it, though I didn't at first remember all the previous events in the story, I had no trouble being pulled back in. It's quite hard to describe it as a "story" as such, though there are plenty of strange events and things going on. I wouldn't recommend this to you if you're at all bothered by things not being explained, because much of the story, such as it is, makes emotional -- visceral -- sense to me, rather than straightforward cause-and-effect sense. The different narratives, though the novel is written in the first person, often seem completely unrelated and I know some people would have a "What the hell did all that crap about the Kano sisters and Manchuria have to do with this?!" reaction to the ending. I would venture to say that if you liked Mullholland Drive (or David Lynch in general, as I do), you'll like this. That said, I found it an absolutely fascinating read, in part because I was trying to figure out the narrator. We may be in his head, but there's always a feeling of distance, as though he's watching himself from a distance as well. And a warning: this book contains what may possibly be the first scene ever that made me close the book and my eyes and breathe deeply because I seriously thought I might throw up or pass out. I don't deal well at all with torture scenes in film (nor WWI, nor the Holocaust, nor mafia brutality, but that's another story); reading about it, I'm usually all right, but this one was beyond disturbing and it took me several days before I felt ready to pick up where I'd left off. I'd really like to read more by this author; his latest looks interesting. The only other book of his that I've read (Les amants du Spoutnik) had the same feel to it and though well-written, it was nowhere near as engrossing and satisfying as this one.
La goutte d'or (Alain Tournier): This was a short subway read, only took a week. The story is about Idriss, a teenager from a tiny village in the Algerian desert, who end up in Paris. The "goutte d'or" itself disappears fairly early on in his voyage, but stays on as a metaphor, coming back full-force at the end, which is one of those extremely symbolic affairs. Not a bad book, but not an incredibly great one.
Fushigi Yuugi vol. 5 (Watase Yuu, original Japanese): This covers the part of the story where Tamahome is in Kutou and ends up brainwashed and Miaka, Chichiri and Tasuki try to get him back, while Amiboshi masquerades as Chiriko. One thing I always wondered about was why the hell Amiboshi helped them out there and whether it was on his own or part of Nakago's master plan. Since Nakago has two different things in motion to stop the Suzaku bunch from completing the summoning (having Tamahome captive and one of his own pretending to be Chiriko), it makes no sense for "Chiriko" to rescue Miaka & Co. from Kutou. He could easily have "tried" and said he wasn't able to do it, after all. Is there some reason Nakago didn't want to end things too quickly? The only one I can think of is that Yui doesn't want Miaka dead. Unless there's something I missed in the Japanese text or something I'm not remembering from the millions of times I watched the anime.
Neverwhere (Neil Gaiman): This was another subway read and a fairly quick one, though the story was not rushed. I liked it quite a bit, though I can't help but feel that as someone who's spent a grand total of fewer than 12 hours in London, I missed out on a lot. I'll have to reread it once I've visited London properly, won't I?
* You know, I never thought about how many damn homophones there are in English until I started reading fanfiction again. I'm not even talking about the usual its/it's or affect/effect; try alter and altar. Or navel and naval. (So he's flicking his tongue in his lover's... fleet of ships? O_O) Another one that bugs me is the peek/peak/pique confusion. One story I read consistently confused "shutter" and "shudder", as in "the house had green shudders" and "he shuttered in the cold wind". Oh, and while we're at it, I must admit to being disturbed by the number of authors who use the words "velvet" and "velvety" while describing penises. Compare it to silk (satin or charmeuse? ^_^) if you must, but velvet? The first thing that pops to (my) mind is "Furry penis! D:" And I just about lost it (laughing) when an otherwise rather hot sex scene was completely ruined by the phrase "velvety flesh carpeting his shaft". That's just... wrong.
