Hedgehog's Holiday

Last night's tweets;

Some cats need humans to remain standing.
All dogs and cats are asleep around here.
Woven into roof papers 'til landing
On the bleeding cop Tim Roth bier.

I watched Reservoir Dogs with my sister last night. It was the first time she'd seen it and she seemed to like it. It's strange how comforting all of Quentin Tarantino's movies are--Reservoir Dogs is a film noir, and all good films noir have a sort of relieving "Let's drop the bullshit" quality to them. Reservoir Dogs tends to remind me a lot of The Asphalt Jungle, and both of them seem like ripping the lid off a network of raw, brutal human nature I feel like is always around, carefully coated over. These movies are about people unapologetically trying to address their own needs and compulsions, outside artificial, imposed morality. The Asphalt Jungle has the big speech by the police commissioner, but it's so insubstantial compared to the plight of the characters you know it's only there to please the censors. The guys in Reservoir Dogs aren't good guys, but they're fucking honest, and practical in their way, and seeing it seems to release a great deal of weight off my soul somehow.

With breakfast to-day, I watched the fifth episode of Bakemonogatari, which I think is my favourite episode so far. Some real time was finally spent with Araragi's characterisation, using a "snail" spirit as a reflection of Araragi's own mind, which kind of reminded me of how the characters on Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei seem, to me, to really be aspects of a single mind. Salaman Dream talked to me about how the lolicon theme song for episode four of Bakemonogatari both critiqued and indulged in the genre. Here we get perhaps a comment on lolicon fans--suggesting it was Araragi's unhappy and strange relationship with his sisters and mother that drew him to the lolicon-ish spirit. Since Senjogahara identified herself as the anime/manga character type tsundere, it's possible the intention is for the show to entirely be a critique of otaku culture. Which would explain the shyness that irritates me about Araragi. There's a bit at the end of the fifth episode where Senjogahara expresses her feelings for Araragi and I became annoyed with him again when he couldn't at least be nice to her about it at first. I think the problem is that I've known too many guys with that kind of insensitive tunnel vision. Maybe a show like this will actually help open the eyes of guys like that, but for me, I just want to grab the guy by the shoulders and scream, "You spoiled fucking little brat!" This guy doesn't piss me off nearly as much as the guy in Zero no Tsukaima, though, maybe because everything about Bakemonogatari's more intelligently and carefully constructed.