Naruto

This was going to be a blog about The Wire. I’ve finished watching it, you see. But who doesn’t know how good The Wire is? It’s the only topic of any serious conversation I’ve had in the last six months.

I would just like to correct the common assertion that The Wire is “novellistic”. Sure, you could make a case that it performs some of the same functions as a novel. it has a logical five-season structure, as opposed to other TV dramas, whose plots seem to be dictated by marketing voodoo and actors contracts. But really… when did you last read a novel this good? It’s a safe bet that the last five novels you read had all the depth and resonance of Lost. (I don’t personally like Lost.) There are good novels, but the form is pretty much dead, and when we use the term “novellistic” to praise The Wire, we are guilty of an unhealthy nostalgia, at best. At worst: intellectible snobbism!

Having finished that most uplifting of TV Shows, how can we fill the gap? After The Wire, all other television dramas appeareth as Hollyoaks unto me. One option is to turn off the television and go outside in the spring sunshine.

The other option is to watch Naruto.

Naruto is anime. It’s a rip-off of Harry Potter, but with ninja instead of wizards. The “characters” are revealled through fight scenes in which they overcome physical obstacles in order to grow or learn. Stay with me! It’s good!

It’s got a perfect blend of grisly violence with saccharine victorian sentimentality.  Add a sprinkle of meaningless rhetorical philosophising. I really should hate this show, but I don’t.

An interesting contrast to Harry Potter is the way authority figures work. In HP, some teachers are goodies and some are baddies. In Naruto, The pupils emulate their teachers, so goodies have goody teachers and baddies have baddy teachers. There is markedly less teacher-pupil conflict in Naruto. The conflict is all between rival tribes. Of course this happens in Harry Potter too, but the level of unquestioning conformity to peer values in Naruto will startle you. It’s like Blue Peter.

I lost faith in anime for a while. Miyazake doesn’t count—film critics like him. I’m talking about interminably long television serials like Cities of Gold or weirdo violence shows like Fist of the North Star. One day, I was a teenager, watching Vampire Hunter D and Dominion Tank Police on VHS. Then I took a break for a bit, and when I came back, Anime was suddenly in a glossy baffling hegemony. Everyone’s into anime now. Which, of course, turns me right off, because I am perverse and contrary.

Well, Naruto has worked its magic charms on me. I even like the idea of there being other Naruto fans, which represents a measure of personal growth.

Who’s for cosplay?

Watchmen

Thanks, Tom for spotting this magnificent pastiche. I was holding onto it so I could post it along with a scathing review of the official Watchmen movie adaptation. Then I remembered that I don’t actually have to go and watch the film. In fact, I can still review the movie without watching it. This is the twenty-first century… movies don’t stay in the theatre any more, they sluice out onto the streets and corrode the bottoms of our shoes. In fact, you should only see films after you have reviewed them.

If I want a decent film adaptation of Watchmen, I’ll see The Incredibles. The X-men films were good too (especially the third one!)

I might have even gone to see a really dumb Watchmen movie. At least it would be amusing to see. Remember the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie? Yes it was calamitously bad, but it made the comic better by contrast. From Hell too.

Alan Moore delicately balances his fiction on the edge of a camp abyss. It might even be his secret. He picks ignoble, degraded forms and genres and he wrestles them into the sublime. The V for Vendetta movie was a closer adaptation, but inevitable errors, like the Matrixy fight scene, tip it into the camp abyss and the book gets dragged in too.

In the interests of total disclosure and transparency I should admit that the trailer for Watchmen got me very excited indeed.  But I can remember being similarly excited about all the other trailers too. The prospect of reading the whole book through the eyes of a bunch of Hollywood nerds (and, for once, I’m using that term in the pejorative sense.) I don’t want to do it.

I urge you all. Do yourselves a favour. Read the book. Avoid the film.

Mum & Dad

Mum & Dad is the name of a horror film that I saw this week. I am not reviewing my actual parents. But if I did they would get five stars!

I’m totally out of my depth talking about torture in horror films. Mainly because it’s a subject that, rightly, stirs up strong emotions. I saw Hostel, hoping to get some detached critical angle on the topic, but my art school vocabulary didn’t really cover it. I think it’s a subject on which I will have to develop an actual opinion – something I am reticent to do.

My default reaction on any film being declared ‘controversial’ is to roll my eyes, but that isn’t good enough, really. Mass-media dogma states that if you don’t like a movie…don’t see it, and if you don’t see it…don’t complain about it. We’ve been hearing a lot of people say this since the Russell Brand affair. It’s crap, if you think about it for two seconds. If my enemies held a Richard-smells-themed party, I would have to attend, if only to see who else was there. We are social animals;  always trying to understand each other. The urge towards paranoia is the same as the urge to make friends. We want to know what other humans think and how they understand the world that we have been cruelly forced to share.

Torture offends me. I frantically hope it offends you too. Here’s the lovely Slavoj Žižek on the topic:

In short, every authentic liberal should see these debates, these calls to ‘keep an open mind’, as a sign that the terrorists are winning. And, in a way, essays like Alter’s, which do not openly advocate torture, but just introduce it as a legitimate topic of debate, are even more dangerous than explicit endorsements. At this moment at least, explicitly endorsing it would be rejected as too shocking, but the mere introduction of torture as a legitimate topic allows us to court the idea while retaining a clear conscience. (‘Of course I am against torture, but who is hurt if we just discuss it?’) Admitting torture as a topic of debate changes the entire field, while outright advocacy remains merely idiosyncratic. The idea that, once we let the genie out of the bottle, torture can be kept within ‘reasonable’ bounds, is the worst liberal illusion, if only because the ‘ticking clock’ example is deceptive: in the vast majority of cases torture is not done in order to resolve a ‘ticking clock’ situation, but for quite different reasons (to punish an enemy or to break him down psychologically, to terrorise a population etc). Any consistent ethical stance has to reject such pragmatic-utilitarian reasoning. Here’s a simple thought experiment: imagine an Arab newspaper arguing the case for torturing American prisoners; think of the explosion of comments about fundamentalist barbarism and disrespect for human rights that would cause.

(Full article, here.)

That was a good quote. But do horror films like Mum & Dad inadvertantly legitimise torture? I think Mum & Dad is fine.

It has some graphic grimness early on. Oh no! Not again, I thought. But then the film hooked me (no pun intended). It became witty, funny, charming. Dark as hell, of course.

It helped me to unlock the mystery of why Hostel is upsetting. In Hostel, everything that happens leads towards the torture. The characters are tortured; and then the characters escape, but they will never forget the torture. The bad guys are just random thugs and sadists. The setup is so banal and humourless. It’s a dispassionate film about torture. It’s nicely shot, though!

In Mum & Dad, the violence is symbolic. It treads a dangerous line, and it is frequently graphic. But never literal.

It’s a cheapo film, made for the BBC. It has the look and feel of a made-for-schools drama. The acting is never less than passable. the special effects are good when they need to be. The script is a gem, fuelled by the effective fusion of family drama with survival horror. References to my beloved Mike Leigh abound, but the kitchen-sink dialogue takes on a shocking double-meaning.

I hope you enjoy this film.

http://www.mumanddadthemovie.com/

Protoculture

I had to post this sooner or later. The title of this blog is a reference to the excellent Macross: Do You Remember Love (AKA Macross Clash of the Bionoids). By and large, the geekdom of Macross is expensive and baffling, but this movie is a camp treat. I discovered it on VHS back in the day, when Anime was harder to find. I loathed it at first for its astonishing sexism and overall tediousness. Luscious creepiness and genuine craft won me over.

Watch the whole darn film if you like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dljDivTE9Vk

Sadly, this is the subtitled version, known as Macross: Do You Remember Love. I’ve enjoyed it plenty of times with subtitles. But the Dubbed version, Macross: Clash of the Bionoids, will triple your enjoyment! I heard a rumour that the dub was recorded as a teaching aid for people learning the english language. This might explain why the lines are all enunciated in a strange way, but I prefer to imagine that the actors were deep into some postmodern kind of theory. Okay, so here’s another bit:

Creep Little Baby Don’t You Cry

I saw Cry Baby last night. I’ve just starting watching John Waters’ films. I think Hairspray is the only other film I’ve seen. The films are funnier if you are aware of John Waters’ sculpted personality. You can imagine him behind the camera telling everybody how fabulous they look and explaining whatever outrageous stuff they have to do in the scene. It’s a kind of generosity that I really appreciate. He’s not really putting himself at risk but he’s developed a camp alter-ego that takes all the risks for him. He’s similar to Peter Greenaway. Their films are formal exercises involving a fictional author. But then, what else is fiction? Aaaaah.

The Wire is better than ever in our house. We’ve just hit season 4. It’s a wake up call to culture. If we’re going to mess about making webcomics and zines and daft perfomance art, we have the opportunity to heal the world in some holistic way. If I was smarter I’d heal the world, yes sir! Maybe when I’ve finished learning how to write I’ll knock out a few subversive operettas or something. for now I’ll stick to cartoons about monsters and robots and things like that. It’s just a temporary thing, you understand.

The Fly

Happy new year everybody.

You know, I saw The Fly again last night. What a movie!

I saw it a long time ago, when I was just a kid. Of course, back then I could never have appreciated all the complex metaphysical subtexts. But I do now. Oh yes, now I’m very clever and I can see all of the metaphysical subtexts. All of them!

What happens in the film is that Jeff Golblum has some telepods, which can teleport solid matter like a fax machine. That’s one half of the science-fiction set-up. The other half of the set up is a more fantastical notion: The machine can’t teleport living matter, and Jeff goldblum can’t figure out why.

Jeff Golblum has a breakthrough when he has sex with Geena Davis and she’s telling him she really fancies his flesh. He feeds her some meat that’s been teleported and she doesn’t fancy it as much as the non-teleported meat. So Jeff Goldblum realizes that he has to programme the teleport computer to fancy flesh. This weird-science notion is the crux of the film. We don’t actually see him programming the computer, but we must accept that he somehow manages to teach the computer to recreate living flesh. The teleport computer is a black box of metaphors. Like real computers, almost, except I’m sure there are many gifted individuals who are able to conceive of computer programming as a process of metaphors and a physical process of electricity and switches. In this film the computer is a sublime unknowable gateway. If you pass through it, you will be doomed to turn into a horror monster for ever and ever.

Which Jeff Goldblum does. He tests the teleporter on a baboon. The last baboon got turned inside out, but once he’s taught the computer to mimic a human conception of flesh, it works. The baboon is fine, so he decides to do himself. But There’s a problem. The baboon is a simple creature and as such it has no complex psycho-sexual hang-ups about its own body. Jeff goldblum does, though. He’s haunted and intense and angsty because he’s Jeff Golblum.

When he had sex with Geena Davis, Jeff Golblum gets a circuit-board stuck in his back which leaves a nasty wound. When he teleports, his cyber-wound is invaded by a fly: a hideous alien creature which normally buzzes around outside the body, but sometimes crawls down people’s noses at night and lays eggs in their lungs.

So once again, the scientists who dares to meddle in the sublime mysteries of the flesh comes to a sticky end. Literally!

I love David Cronenberg very much. Here’s my song from a few weeks ago:

http://www.richardpeel.com/music/david_cronenberg.mp3