The Thin Wall

The mind compulsively invests meaning and identity in silence, darkness, or blankness. This begins with, or extends to, the self, a foundation for the crisis explored in Ingmar Bergman's 1966 film Persona. It's a film of ghostly, black and white beauty and an examination of human nature with extraordinary depth featuring performances by two brilliant actresses.

Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann play a nurse, Alma, and an actress, Elisabet, respectively, and the bulk of the movie takes place at a seaside summer home where the two have been sent by the doctor under whom Alma is employed. The purpose is Elisabet's convalescence--the actress having suddenly become silent for several minutes during the performance of a play where she played Elektra before bursting into laughter. Since then, Elisabet, despite having no discernable physical or mental affliction, has entirely refrained from speaking.

Alma expresses to the doctor some trepidation in taking the assignment, as she perceives Elisabet as having a strong personality and herself as delicate and inexperienced, in danger of being overwhelmed by the subject of treatment.

The doctor confronts Elisabet before she sends the two younger women to her summer house, telling the unresponsive actress that she recognises and admires the commitment to her non-participatory role, and encourages her to maintain it as long as it works for her.

Persona is one of those wonderful movies that is very simply itself, contained very precisely in its execution, and yet which can have millions of valid interpretations from viewers. The reason for Elisabet's silence can be interpreted by the viewer as well as by the other characters in the movie. And like the interpretations of those other characters, the viewer's interpretation may say more about the viewer.

In my view, Elisabet's laughter followed by silence indicates an epiphany she's had regarding the nature of personae; she sees them for the meaningless, absurd masks that they are and so she refuses to participate any further and so effects silence. This is the reason, I think, she reacts in horror to footage of a self-immolating Vietnam War protester--the idea of destroying the physical body for a complex set of abstract ideas and beliefs seems monstrous. She's fascinated and horrified by a photograph from the holocaust for the same reason.

In this picture, the only person whose face shows recognition of what's about to happen is the little boy, and it's the boy whom Elisabet focuses on.

It's like a cruel version of "The Emperor's New Clothes". The others may know what's going to happen, but outwardly, and probably on the surface levels of their consciousness, they're not acknowledging it, too caught up in their identities and the reality those identities were crafted to exist in, even though that reality is no longer relevant. Only the kid is able to abandon his ego for truth because his ego is as yet undeveloped and not firmly rooted in his psyche.

The time the two women spend together is initially pleasant. Alma responds to Elisabet's silence as a perpetual demureness, an almost holy humility. Alma is as unguarded with Elisabet as one is with a pet, except Elisabet understands Swedish, and seems to implicitly absolve Alma or forgive her. Alma says she's considered a good listener and has rarely had opportunity to talk about herself before this and seems exhilarated by the circumstance.

She vividly describes to Elisabet an impromptu orgy she took part in on the beach a few years earlier, when a couple boys had found her and her friend Katarina sunbathing nude. In his essay on the film, Roger Ebert says, "The imagery of this monologue is so powerful that I have heard people describe the scene as if they actually saw it in the film." It is extraordinarily vivid and more effectively erotic than any pornography I've seen. Somehow by describing orgasm under the implicitly fictional context of a dramatic movie, Bibi Andersson and the screenplay create a more satisfying rendering than the screaming fits of even the best porn stars. Oddly enough for a piece of cinema, I think this is evidence of the unique power of prose.

But the orgy is at the centre of an existential crisis for Alma. Although she describes the encounter with pleasure reflecting the extraordinary pleasure she must have felt during the experience, it turns to pain as she recounts the abortion she'd had to undergo and the acknowledgement of how the experience of that day had conflicted with her self-conception. Her cries of dismay to Elisabet are deeper than moral shame, although she feels this too. The greater horror she feels is expressed when she asks if beliefs have any reason for being at all. The horror is in the realisation that she could experience pleasure and a sense of self-affirmation by engaging in activities contrary to what her persona dictates ought to give her pleasure. So what is the point of this persona, this collection of ideals?

Driving into town to deliver hers and Elisabet's mail, she opens a letter Elisabet had written to the doctor, and finds in it, in addition to expressions of affection for Alma, also a description of the orgy Alma had confided in her about.

Alma's retaliation is to leave a piece of broken glass on the ground where Elisabet might walk barefoot. When Elisabet indeed wounds herself this way, Bergman cuts to Bibi Andersson coldly watching before looking directly at the camera while scratches appear on the film, as though it's breaking. This neatly conveys an idea of violent, painful tears forming in the intimacy between Alma and Elisabet, at the same time that it conveys the extent of that intimacy. Bergman uses a variety of techniques to convey the idea of the two women merging, often shooting their faces overlapping, concluding at the end of the film with a monologue repeated twice, first showing Elisabet's silent reaction to it, then showing Alma's delivery of it. The monologue is Alma's theory as to the reason for Elisabet's silence, having to do with the shame Elisabet feels about not loving her child. The point in the repetition is to show how each woman exists in the other, the mirror of reaction being a reality. At the end, Alma feels horror because the idea of Elisabet's disgust for motherhood is so contrary to the self-loathing Alma has nurtured regarding her abortion.

Earlier in the film, Alma talks about Elisabet's strength for being an actress, as though Elisabet is bullying Alma in some way through her more sophisticated perspective on personae. Alma's anger is only slackened when she threatens to cast a pot of boiling water at Elisabet, which finally causes Elisabet to speak, to scream, "No, don't!" satisfying Alma that Elisabet can, too, lower herself to self-preservation. The fear is that beneath the clothing of identity there is nothing more than an animal, and the concept of identity is protected with animalistic ferocity.

A Face for Massacres

Familiar aspects of the self are a catalyst for a chain of dream logic terrors in Tobe Hooper's 1974 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The self, both physical and mental; an unexamined every day intimacy with flesh and blood is teased out into a cunning, gleefully beautiful and grotesque nightmare. Even the extraordinary skill and talent for filmmaking on display aren't enough to account for the singular brilliance this movie achieves.

A group of two young women and three young men are on a road trip, travelling in a large green van, when they pick up a strange hitchhiker despite the misgivings of the more superstitious of the two women.

Maybe the guy isn't so strange, because despite the unaddressed red stain on his face and his jittery mannerisms, he and the paraplegic Franklin initially bond over knowledge and love of the slaughter house, taking turns admiring each other's knives before the hitchhiker shows his interest in slaughter extends not only to human flesh but to his own as he ecstatically slices his palm for them, apparently surprised and confused the action only produces horror in his audience.

And yet, later, after they've kicked out the hitchhiker and are alone, Franklin can't disguise the admiration he feels for what he saw, examining his knife with the barely concealed morbid hope he'll find a trace of the man's blood on it.

Franklin is the most developed character of the group of young travellers, the others existing as little more than types, adequate sketches to serve as point of view vessels. The bodies of the young women are emphasised, not only for their vulnerability but in order to connect sexuality to cannibalism, to show a lust for meat and bone that eclipses libido.

One of the young women, Pam, wears a halter that leaves her back totally bare. Hooper must have known this would draw the eye, and he exploits it when he has Leatherface mount her on a meat hook through her back. The connexion drawn early on between the desires of the cannibals and the normal practice of eating meat makes this peculiar imbalance of lusts seem not altogether alien, rendering it the more horrifying for it.

Visually, the film is absolutely amazing, especially considering its low budget. It was shot, by necessity, with low grain 16 mm film that required a great deal of light, creating intense contrasts for a look that was frequently replicated intentionally in films afterwards.

The effects in lighting that Hooper and cinematographer Daniel Pearl create with this look both naturalistic and fascinatingly expressionistic.

The apparently natural darkness, which must have actually been accompanied by a great deal of light so that anything would be visible at all, highlight the vulnerability of a young woman pushing a fat guy in a wheelchair through wilderness.

The entryway of the cannibals' house is really nicely conceived, looking like an open wound with pale walls leading to an off-centre room of bright red and bone.

The sudden first appearance of the piggish Leatherface makes me jump every time.

The bone sculptures of the cannibals are strangely beautiful, too, and nicely enforce the theme. But my favourite shot is Pam and Kirk approaching the cannibals' property, the foregrounded wild daisies not so much providing a contrast from the gory colouring of metal structures and equipment, but complimenting them.

Snow Falling on Stillness

One might be tempted to describe the exquisite, mysterious atmosphere of compulsive preoccupation with the deceased in James Joyce's "The Dead" as haunting and yet part of the brilliance of the work is in how it illustrates the profound impact of ultimate absence, whereas the term "haunting" is generally conceived of as indicating a presence. Joyce's work illustrates, perhaps, a truer and finer definition of the word in that it shows the peculiar, solid blank the soul compulsively gnaws at until it seems to become something solid for its lack of solidity. To the point where Gabriel found his "identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling."

The last few pages of "The Dead" are a breathtaking work of prose, it's impossible to read them without some awe. It's no wonder that in John Huston's 1987 film adaptation he chose to have Gabriel simply deliver a rephrasing of the words in narration over footage of various parts of Ireland under falling snow. It's the best part of the movie, but it's hardly cinematic. It's really, simply a good reading of the text. Huston wisely decided he couldn't do better.

The story is about a gathering of family and friends late in the old Christmas season, the first week of January, in the home of Julia and Kate Morkan, aunts of Gabriel Conroy, from whose perspective the story is told. Gabriel visits with his wife, Gretta, and the bulk of the story is taken up by the party--no particularly dramatic events occur and most of the time the dead, as a subject, isn't at the fore, which ultimately contributes to the weight of that subject. It is brought up, subtly, in moments like a discussion on singers and how some people at the dinner table remember great singers who can't be heard by the younger people present because those singers are dead. The title of the story, though, leads one to pluck at threads throughout to see how they relate to the subject, how the vividness of personalities like the drunkard Freddy Malins contrast with absence. Setting the story at the end of Christmas contributes to the sense of observing and celebrating things that are gone or are passing.

Huston's film isn't really bad. It might be called superfluous. But the actors, Anjelica Huston (the director's daughter), Donal McCann, among others, give a fine enough dramatic interpretation of the material. The screenplay by John Huston's son, Tony Huston, mostly stays faithful to the dialogue of the book, every deviation feeling distinctly unnecessary. An expansion on the political tensions between Gabriel and Ms. Ivors is elaborated on for modern audiences who might not understand the term "West Briton" but it seems hardly necessary, not really contributing as it does to any of the central themes and it dates the film. Worse, I'd say, is dialogue designed to illustrate Gabriel's nervousness about his speech, which had been conveyed through Gabriel's thoughts in the prose. It winds up changing somewhat the relationship Gabriel has with his aunts. There's even a whole extra character, Mr. Grace, who is tolerable in a deviation where he recites the poem "Donal Og", but, again, unnecessary.

What the film does give to the experience is the opportunity to take a slightly different perspective on the material, for example the camera's focus on Aunt Julia during Gabriel's speech praising the work she's done invites one to contemplate the impact of the speech rather than as simply a focus for Gabriel's insecurities about his writing ability, or rather his sense of his own presumptuousness.

Though it's his imperfection, the smallness of his existence beside the combined weight of the silent dead that is so much a part of the story's final impact. It's what makes the story an example of mono no aware. It helps to create the impression of the inadequacy of life.

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Empty soup might not even be water.
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Borscht or Death

You know I hate to agree with Joseph Goebbels on anything, but in his statement about 1925's Battleship Potemkin; "anyone who had no firm political conviction could become a Bolshevik after seeing the film," I can't say I think he's wrong. A film by Sergei Eisenstein, revolutionary both in political temperament and in terms of the history of cinema, it tells the true story of a 1905 mutiny aboard a Russian battleship through the perspective of Soviet propaganda, with broad, starkly simplistic moral divisions between factions shown. Eisenstein's ability as a filmmaker, though, contributes enormous force to the argument.

As Roger Ebert says in his essay on the film, a lot of the impact comes from cutting--noting Eisenstein "was a student and advocate of Soviet theories of film montage, which argued that film has its greatest impact not by the smooth unrolling of images, but by their juxtaposition." Soldiers and officers loyal to the Tsar are presented either as snarling, cartoonish villains or as faceless killing machines, but the rhythm of Eisenstein's images is more naturalistic, more objective and helps us to see the cold marching of soldiers down the steps in Odessa as they slaughter civilians as a powerfully, uncontrollable evil.

The same technique earlier in the film helps humanise the sailors as we view them eating and sleeping, chatting with one another and protesting from the perspective of a seemingly candid succession of cuts that are really of carefully composed images.

One sympathises with the common people portrayed and is repelled by the senseless evil of the Tsar's forces and there's a genuine feeling of triumph when brothers in the cause appear miraculously, and a sense that this revolution is a groundswell of true human compassion and camaraderie in the face of the cold, unnatural hatred and greed of the Tsar.

It presents an extremely biased perspective and almost makes one buy it as impartial. Even the horrific hyperbole of the Odessa Staircase massacre comes off as simply horrific and enraging.

Gender Transmissions

What is the line between gender dysphoria and a fixation on the opposite sex that manifests in an attempt to remake oneself in the image of that sex? Is there a line? Is it the same thing? Are the two states simply two forms of transgender? Perhaps unintentionally, David Cronenberg's 1993 film M. Butterfly poses these questions. With a screenplay by David Henry Hwang, who wrote the stage play upon which the film was based, which in turn was based on real life events, the film seems intent mainly on discussing the nature of idealised femininity and how much it's actually related to womanhood and how much it's related to heterosexual male perspective. It's the weakest Cronenberg movie I've seen, but there are plenty of interesting things about it.

A French diplomat named Rene Gallimard, played by Jeremy Irons, is seduced in early 1960s Beijing by an opera singer named Song Liling, played by John Lone. In the real life events, as in the movie, the diplomat was never aware the opera singer he fell in love with was not biologically female until it was revealed to him by the French court decades later, when it was also revealed that the singer had been a spy, using the diplomat to gain sensitive information. The deception was so total that the diplomat believed he'd had vaginal intercourse with the singer who had then given birth to his child. Cronenberg shows the two having sex doggy style to show how Gallimard may have mistaken an anus for a vagina.

John Lone has a distinctively masculine physique and it requires some suspension of disbelief to assume Gallimard wouldn't immediately realise Liling was biologically male. The real life singer, Shi Pei Pu, was less sexually distinctive physically, but on the other hand, the real diplomat, Bernard Boursicot, apparently had exclusively had sex with men before he met Shi Pei Pu, and came to accept himself as homosexual after his relationship with Shi Pei Pu, though interestingly with another man.

In Cronenberg's movie, Gallimard is married to a woman at the beginning and there's no evidence he was ever interested in men. Instead, he seems to be a man obsessed with femininity.

He first meets Liling after he's performed a portion of Puccini's Madame Butterfly--I'm calling Liling "he" because the character seems to identify himself as male, insofar as he seems to consider what he's doing with Gallimard to be a deception. And yet, there is ambiguity on the subject. The strongest argument that Liling ultimately considers himself male is in one of the most important lines of the film, when Liling opines that the reason female characters are traditionally played by men in Beijing Opera is that only men know how women are supposed to act.

This is borne out at the end of the movie, when Gallimard feels no affection for Liling when Liling stands naked before him, stating that what he loved was the perfect woman, a woman he acknowledges was created by a man.

When the two first meet, ironically enough, Liling warns Gallimard against a male created fantasy woman concept by criticising Puccini's opera and the western stereotype of Asian women it exhibits, the reserved and graceful, completely devoted woman willing to sacrifice everything for her white man. And then Liling proceeds to embody this fantasy for Gallimard, who falls for it hook line and sinker. Gallimard is made to be a bit of a buffoon in the movie, which goes so far as to show him encouraging the American military action in Vietnam on the premise that China will outwardly condemn the behaviour while secretly swooning at the display of power--much like the character Liling presents to him.

The movie also undermines itself in its presentation of a woman meant to exemplify how women don't know how a woman "should" behave. In what Gallimard cutely calls his first "extra-extramarital affair", he gets a hotel room with a German diplomat named Baden. When he steps out of the bathroom, he sees Baden has undressed, is sitting matter-of-factly on the bed, and she says, with barely more evident excitement than a lunch lady, "Come and get it."

This is, pardon the pun, a little broad. There are some subtler things the movie might have done--I think most women not only take care in but have a genuine desire to present themselves attractively. The movie may have gone for things that many women consider to be sexually appealing to the opposite sex but which heterosexual men are generally left cold by--Cher, for example.

There are other holes in the argument, though. For example, if a person attracted to women inevitably knows how best to present women, then all lesbians would be lipstick lesbians. But, then, one could argue that a butch lesbian is the true epitome of femininity and we'd go down the futile rabbit hole of subjectivity.

One could say it is all futile and subjective, yet there is a certain compelling logic to it, that the sex not attracted to itself would not be quite as inspired in dressing itself. Which leads us back to the question of whether Liling presents a better woman because Liling is transgender or because Liling is cisgender. One finds oneself contemplating this question more than the question the movie actually seeks to pose.

Maybe the best indication that the movie doesn't succeed at what it intends to do is that Gallimard has to literally state it at the end. For a movie that more effectively explores the subject, I'd like to recommend a little Alfred Hitchcock movie called Vertigo. Which isn't so much about the appeal of women created by men but the appeal of women created by men and/or women, the value of a kind of dream, really, the more interesting version of the same question.

性的物語

I've said before I don't buy into paranoid, reactionary concepts like the male gaze. Saying that media portrayals reflect an inequitable position in society for women, motivated by men content to objectify women and taking pleasure in demeaning them is not the same thing as saying camera point of view mannerisms influenced by the libidos of heterosexual men are inherently destructive or oppressive, which is what the concept of male gaze is meant to imply. I can recognise the reality of the former while dismissing the latter as bullshit.

So I like the fanservice in Nekomonogatari. It makes sense internally since the show mainly comes from the POV of a heterosexual teenage male and part of the point of the story is that he's trying to separate his sexual attraction to Hanekawa from his affection for her. But I have to say, I do kind of miss the outright anti-moé quality of the original Bakemonogatari series.

The sort of wallowing in moé exhibited by Nisemonogatari and, to a lesser extent, Nekomonogatari has a brain dead quality, probably meant to make the shows appeal to otaku who made Bakemonogatari such an enormous financial success, supposedly largely due to character design, while they were put off by the intellectualism and cultural commentary of the show.

As Wikipedia explains, moé is an aesthetic concept that has posed some difficulty in defining. It's not objectification because aspects of personality are an integral part of it. It's not even necessarily an entirely superficial personality--at least, it doesn't seem to exclude complex characterisations, but it can exist without them which, since it's easier, it often does. The word I like to use when describing it is "fetishisation". It's not merely fetishising a woman's body or a woman's body in a particular dress, but also character types. As, in Nekomonogatari, we have the nekomimi type, the younger sister type, and the lolicon type in the young, to appearances, vampire girl.

It's exactly the same moé exploited in Shaft's previous series, Dance in the Vampire Bund, and provides insight into the whole lolicon phenomenon. It's not necessarily about lusting after children, but a child aesthetic, idealised by the ancient child vampire character type, which requires a sort of post-modern, self-aware adult in the role.

Shinobu, the child vampire in this case, never spoke throughout Bakemonogatari and there weren't really any moé shots of her. She was a thematically intriguing character, literally presented in the end as Araragi's shadow, not only as a relation to his own vampiric nature, but as a manifestation of the shame and confusion of his earliest sexual experience, translated by the show into a supernatural encounter.

In Nisemonogatari and Nekomonogatari, she's a full blown lolicon character, which in a way makes sense since she'd already played out thematically in Bakemonogatari and there otherwise wasn't much of interest to do with her. To continue focusing on her as a character required some grist for the mill, but I found this a dull route, particularly in comparison to what came before, or rather between.

Nekomonogatari is a prequel to Bakemonogatari, actually based on a book written before the material upon which Bakemonogatari was based on, which means Studio Shaft decided that this middle portion, the material for Bakemonogatari, was the best way to begin, not knowing if more would be made. It's difficult to surmise the exact nature of the source material based on the anime when, as I suspect, so much fanservice has been injected, but I can see why the decision to begin with Bakemonogatari was made. It seems to me author Nisio Isin was just hitting his stride at the end of Nekomonogatari and struck gold in Bakemonogatari.

I liked the supernatural possession story of Nekomonogatari and how it reflects the kind of psychological troubles Hanekawa has. I like that the cat demon takes possession after the victim has taken pity on the demon in the form of a dead, tailless cat, which the victim then buries. It nicely reflects the idea of the sufferer inflicting their pain on others. I liked, too, Araragi's angry rebuke to Oshino's expression of disgust for Hanekawa, and the uncertainty of how much Araragi's defensiveness is based on his sexual attraction to Hanekawa. That's some real touchy subject matter for an anime to deal with.

Though I can see how it leads to the somewhat less interesting supernatural story of Bakemonogatari's first storyline, the somewhat cliche idea of a girl's defence mechanisms borne of a history of physical abuse. But the bulk of that "Hitagi Crab" storyline is superior to Nekomonogatari because Senjogahara's established so well as a character apart from her back story, particularly in her exciting challenging of and confrontation of Araragi's sexual impulses.

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Multiple cells still condemn the mammal.
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A sixth of a biscuit muddles censers.
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Eight elements eliminate the ninth.
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The Right Animals

Last night's dream involved deciding whether to let a bunch of animals inside who were showing up. What would look like an innocent dog outside would turn into a bear, but I did let in some tiny kittens and a miniature adult gazelle.

I finally managed to get myself to bed at 1:30 and wake up at 9:30. Though it took me from 9:45 to 11:45 to eat breakfast. Well, I guess it's Saturday. The first thing I thought, actually, when I woke up was, "I can watch Saturday morning cartoons!" Weirdly, that always comes to me on the rare occasions I wake up early on Saturday. There aren't any cartoons I particularly want to watch on Saturday mornings anymore, I just seem to have some residual excitement about it from when I was a kid. I probably ought to have watched Duck Tales or The Real Ghostbusters or something but I just watched the third episode of Nekomonogatari Kuro--apparently all four were released in a bundle.

Last night, I watched "Long Term Parking", the penultimate episode of The Sopranos' fifth season, which I'd heard was widely considered one of the best, if not the best, episode of the series, and I'd have to agree, it is really good. Poor Adriana. They really piled on the poor girl--Her mobster boyfriend Christopher either abuses her unloads on her about his problems, she's got a nasty case of irritable bowel syndrome, the FBI are forcing her to betray her friends and family by threatening her with jail time, she had to clean up someone else's killing--in self-defence--only to have the FBI hold that over head too. The whole time, she comes off as kind of a good hearted dummy. I love how The Sopranos allows its protagonists to be really, truly despicable sometimes, especially since they're likeable in a lot of ways. I do sometimes wish the show would treat itself as more of a fantasy, but I loved the unrestrained grimness of this particular episode. It had a lot of terrible, unanswerable logic.

He's an Asshole but He's a Douchebag

I tend to find myself bored by persons whose every word and action is selfish, destructive and belligerent. This doesn't seem like it ought to be an unusual point of view, yet there bafflingly do seem to be people, despite freedom to do otherwise, who not only put up with such individuals but even love them. 2009's Dev D is about such a man and the beautiful women who are drawn to him for no discernable reason. An Indian film that very self-consciously imitates western cinema, it's an occasionally beautiful film with some really great performances, but mostly it's an awkward, naive slog.

After the obnoxious performance of the wildly popular star Shahrukh Khan in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, the fundamental societal sexism criticised in Kahaani, and hearing recently that the problem with the mostly male protesters against the possibility of light for punishment for perpetrators of a gang rape is that the male protesters have been groping the female protesters, I'm not getting the rosiest picture of gender relations in India. Dev D, a contemporary update for a novel written in the early twentieth century, did little to diminish this unfavourable impression, being about a young man who beats and insults a woman he's supposedly been in love with his whole life because he heard she had sex with someone else. This doesn't dim the flames of her passion for him, and of course he's the one who has to push her into the arms of another man before we watch him in a derivative, self-destructive spiral of drug and alcohol abuse.

The first thing you see, before the title or any of the credits, is a Special Thanks for Danny Boyle. Why? According to Wikipedia, "For the scenes where Dev is high, British director Danny Boyle suggested the use of a still camera as [director] Kashyap did not have the budget for special effects." I can only imagine Boyle wanting to disappear into his shirt if he saw that Special Thanks.

The colour filtered shaky shots of Dev's wandering in the Dehli underworld couldn't be more lifeless and it's sad seeing an Indian director, a country that has such an extraordinarily distinct cinematic language, bending over backwards to be so conventionally western.

Abhay Deol does a fine job playing the asshole, and Mahi Gill is incredibly radiant as the first woman he's a dick to, Paro.

The second woman he doesn't deserve who inexplicably falls for him is a French prostitute named Leni, played very effectively by Kalki Koechlin, a young actress who displays a phenomenal skill with languages.

She's had a hard life, again presenting the double standard shown earlier in the film where Dev feels justified in abusing and casting aside Paro for the slightest suggestion that she had sex at some point, Leni is ostracised by her parents and her father commits suicide because a sex tape of her and her boyfriend emerges. She's sent to live with hateful grandparents before she runs away and finds a home--as well as money for college--in a brothel.

There's certainly a criticism here of the unfair attitudes Indian society holds towards women and their sexuality, but the movie's indulgence in the dull blackguard Dev's behaviour is a little over the top, even though I understand it might be trying to change some minds. It wouldn't hurt to show some evidence that a guy like Dev is worth anyone's time, particularly the audience's. I don't believe a lead character has to be sympathetic, but if the move's about him, he ought to be interesting in some way.

Sleep in the Sky

So I decided to-day was the day I was going to start getting up earlier to be ready for when school starts at the end of the month. Because none of the classes I need were offered at night. Well, at least I'll be ready for Comic-Con.

I've started my compulsive checking of the Comic-Con web site that usually slackens about two weeks before I miss the day the passes start going on sale. And I just know the one e-mail from Comic-Con that goes to my spam folder will be the one announcing pass availability. At least I'm doing the professional badge now, those seem to get snatched up a lot slower than the regular passes.

I'm pretty much too zombified to-day to talk about much else, so here are some pictures I've taken over the past couple months;

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Bottomless bottles open the carrot.
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Zeppelin lemons slide down twenty twelve's knees.
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Confetti coalesces into a ship.
Baby cruise liner sinks in apple dip.

Dictated but Not Eaten

It's a visually wonderful story of a young girl dealing with personal issues with the assistance of, or mostly just with the accompaniment of, traditional Japanese supernatural entities. And it's not a Studio Ghibli film--it's A Letter to Momo (ももへの手紙) from Production I.G., written and directed by Hiroyuki Okiura. There's a self-consciousness about its emulation of Ghibli, and an insubstantiality to elements in the film that Okiura seems to have borrowed from Ghibli without really understanding. But there's something inevitably fascinating about good hand drawn animation, which creates a character of Momo almost in spite of the writing and direction, and the three supernatural entities she's forced to live with are very entertaining. There's a sweetness in the movie's main plot, but mostly what succeeds about this film are the things that seem to be second nature to the filmmakers, and are what make the movie worth watching.

Momo's an eleven year old girl recently moved with her mother to a small island community, where Momo's grandparents also live. Momo's father's recently died, and at the beginning of the film she listens to her grandfather's stories of him, from which her grandfather drifts into stories of his own father, telling Momo about some nineteenth century manga in the attic that his father collected.

Unbeknownst to Momo, three sentient water droplets have fallen from heaven, soon to take possession of characters in the book, shown to us in the first of several distinctly non-Ghibli digressively voyeuristic shots of Momo's body, in this case her feet.

There's nothing really gained by having a trio of supernatural beings pretending to be another trio of supernatural beings, it seems more like a disappointing lack of faith on Okiura's part that audiences would accept the reality of their more entertaining form.

Momo, essentially the only one who can see the three "guardians", finds herself put upon by them, having to cover for their penchant for stealing from nearby crop fields along with pinching various valuables from people's rooms.

They're all entertainingly animated and written, my favourite probably being the good natured and forgetful little Nosferatu looking guy, who offers to break one of heaven's rules for Momo, rationalising it'll be okay because he's forgotten the rules.

The title of the film concerns a letter Momo would like the guardians to deliver to her father in heaven, apologising for insulting him just before he died. It's a sentimental bit of plot business standing in for the grief and sense of loss in Momo and her mother the film can't effectively convey. It winds up not being half as effective as the scene where two of the guardians attempt to steal and eat a couple of boar piglets.

Another 年, Another 物語

Happy New Year or 正月, even--here are the New Year's decorations I put up at Chess Garden. I assembled the kadomatsu myself from different things--some pine branches I took off an outfit by Vita's Boudoir, some bamboo from Arctic Green House, and some freebie fans from Bare Rose.

I wanted some mochibana really bad--willow branches with white and pink balls of rice stuck on them to look like blossoms--but couldn't find any good ones for sale or make any myself to my satisfaction.

I guess we all have our weaknesses when it comes to art and entertainment media. For me, it's nekomimi. If your movie or television show or comic (like my own) has female nekomimi in it, it doesn't have to work very hard otherwise for me to enjoy it. That's why I was excited by news of the new Monogatari series, Nekomonogatari (Kuro) (猫物語[黒], "Cat Story (Black)") which premiered yesterday. This is a prequel to Bakemonogatari which is to recount the Golden Week adventure alluded to often in the series when Hanegawa first took cat form.

The first episode is already better than Nisomonogatari, though not as cerebral as Bakemonogatari. At this point it's just a nice young person's story, dealing with confusing sexual attraction with affection, and how much the two are related. The episode disappointingly features a lot of Araragi's sisters, including some sibling breast fondling, something I'd hoped would be left behind with Nisemonogatari, but apparently, according to Tim, who watches a lot more anime than I do, sibling romance is a big thing in anime right now. It is nice to see GAINAX is involved with this series, though I've kind of forgotten about watching new episodes of Medaka Box out of disinterest in the Fight of the Week format the show adopted in the new season.

The opening for Nekomonogatari is pretty good. They seem to be building up to the cat stuff slowly;

I know I said I'd write a review for A Letter to Momo, but I felt like it was a good time to take a break from movie reviews for a few minutes, if only I can stop my brain spewing opinions for that long.