Movies, Myself

Over and over

Christmas Eve last year promised to be a sedate affair. I was recuperating from my (nearly) month-long trip, and all I had on my mind was an evening of peace and quiet, alone with three cats in the house. But Bryan Lee O’Malley, he of Scott Pilgrim fame, tweeted about the movie Battle Royale being screened at the Silent Movie theater. That’s a quaint-looking location on Fairfax I remembered passing by and wondering about quite a few times on the way to Hollywood. Battle Royale being one of the few movies that fall in the viewed-5-times-and-above category for me, I was tempted. Despite having owned and seen multiple DVD versions – The Regular version, the Extended Director’s Cut and the Uncut Edition had all appeared in National Market, I had never seen it in a theater. Further investigation revealed that the film had never seen a theatrical release in the US, thanks to the Columbine incident occurring the  same year it released in Japan. So this screening would be the first official screening, based on a high definition conversion of the upcoming Blu-ray release by Anchor Bay. All of the above reasons were enough for me to drop my plans of lying back on my couch with a purring cat on my belly and sipping on metaphorical pennyroyal tea. Off I went.

Needless to say, I had an amazing time, and even met O’Malley at the popcorn stand.

Cheesy and show-off-y picture proof

The last time I saw Battle Royale was in 2007. None of my love for the movie had waned in five years, but there was a strange outsider-level objectivity that crept in this time. I never realized, for example, how annoyingly earnest the two lead characters were. Both Shuya and Noriko were too sugary, too good to be true. Maybe it was the Hunger Games experience from a few weeks ago that had supplanted my blind devotion to this movie. Or maybe it was the manga I read a few years ago, which made the characters of Mitsuko and Kiriyama so much more engaging than the one-note killing machines they turn out in the movie. I also found myself chuckling along at some of the over-the-top acting – Nobu’s death, the dramatic gestures some of the students make when they exit the classroom at the beginning, Kitano’s star-tinted turn.

I like re-watching movies with different people. Primarily because of the fresh perspective such a viewing brings. The odd little reactions you happen to notice in others at scenes that you reacted to differently. Or because you are focusing on a something other than the primary plot and pay more attention to the details that passed you by the first time. Maybe a snatch of a soundtrack, an in-joke that you did not get the first time. Something that resonates from an article you read about the movie, maybe.

But real life has been catching up. I did not watch too many films the past couple of months, barring the occasional Laemmle marathon and the quickies at the Rave theaters next door to my office. I cannot seem to sit down before the laptop/TV and watch anything at a stretch. Terabytes of old movie dumps have been “liberated” on random whims, because I know I will never get around to watching them.

Yesterday, I went and watched Lagaan – this time with a group of people of which I knew only one. We made a proper movie evening out of it, with bhelpuri, samosas and popcorn aplenty and a generous smattering of enthusiasm in the audience, most of whom had seen it already. It was my 20th viewing of Lagaan, my obsession with that movie having lasted through multiple cities, different levels of Aamir-Khan-reaction and Rahman-adulation, and a constant loathing of cricket. (And yes, I started keeping count after the 8th viewing) I enjoyed it thoroughly. It still makes me laugh at the right story and character moments. Paul Blackthorne as Captain Russell and Chris England as Yardley fill me with fanboy glee, and I am tempted to reread England’s book as soon as I can (it’s called From Balham to Bollywood, and it was a great read the first time).

There is a peculiar happiness also to noticing the same somewhat-bloopers – like Bhuvan saying Radha’s husband is Anay, instead of the correct Ayan, or the presence of two cricketers named Smith and Wesson in the English XI, especially the fact that Elizabeth dances with just the two of them at the ball.  Thanks to the DVD being an American release, the scenes with the British characters alone had English dialogues, instead of Amitabh Bachchan’s baritone explaining the proceedings. We did skip over the ‘O Paalanhare’ song, which to me is the nadir of the movie, an unnecessary face-palm of a sequence rendered even more painful by Lata Mangeshkar’s voice. [ref]Earlier musings on Lagaan here and here. [/ref]

I spent a total of 4 hours on the bus, both ways. But totally worth it.

A two-week-long retrospective of Studio Ghibli films begins this Thursday. They include fifteen classic Miyazaki and Takahata films being screened at the Egyptian theater in Hollywood and the Aero theater in Santa Monica. I have made up my mind to attend every one of them. Sure, I own all the DVDs, and have seen the films multiple times, but the joy of the rewatch compells me. Besides, I’ve heard enough shit from pal Jussi about how he saw them screened in theaters in Helsinki and it’s high time I get back at him.

The only ones not being screened are EarthSea, Ponyo, Arrietty and Grave of the Fireflies. I can understand the absence of the fourth film, but not the first three. Oh well.

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Comics, Manga, Reviews

Great Teacher Onizuka: A Review

This was originally published in Rolling Stone India, November 2009. Dusted and put up here because I plan to do a mega-reread of the series in the next few days.

Writer/Artist: Tohru Fujisawa
Publisher: Tokyopop
Rating: Four and a half stars

Meet Eikichi Onizuka, a bottom-rung university graduate (barely), whose primary interests are peering up girls’ skirts at local malls and getting into trouble – not mutually exclusive activities, those two. But fate has different plans in store for virginity-challenged young Eikichi – circumstance makes him leave his delinquence behind him and opt for a new career, that of an educator. Eikichi Onizuka, 22 years old, sets out to become Great Teacher Onizuka, the greatest sensei in Japan. His mission: to make school fun again. His secondary mission – getting to fourth base with someone. Anyone.

That is the premise behind this beloved shonen manga series, that traces Onizuka’s explosive – and often ludicrous – adventures in teaching. At first glance, it seems humanly impossible for a man of his calibre to really do much with his career choice. He cheated his way through his own academic career, seemingly has an IQ of 50, and the only legitimate qualification on his misspelled resume is that he has secured a second dan black belt in karate. He is perverted, being more than a little obsessed with young girls and their underwear. And he lets his fists do the talking most of the time. The first arc of the series establishes how Onizuka, beating all these odds, manages to get through a teacher training course at a public school and becomes a temporary teacher in the Holy Forest Academy, a prestigious private institute. He is put in charge of Class 3-4, whose students have terrorized the previous three home-room teachers into ending their careers – one committed suicide, another developed an eating disorder. It would take a very foolhardy, or a very determined educator to take up the responsibility of cleaning the school’s Augean stables.

But determination is what Onizuka has in spades. “You are a cockroach”, one of his students shrieks at him with disgust, right after the would-be teacher pops up where he wasn’t really supposed to. This analogy echoes throughout the series. Like a cockroach, Onizuka wiggles himself into his students’ lives even as they hurl expletives at him and threaten (and often perpetrate) violence against his self. Just as a cockroach skitters away from all attempts to stomp it out, our hero manages to best all the traps his devilish students cook up – from publishing morphed porno pictures of Onizuka to having him framed for embezzling money from student funds. And slowly, one by one, our hero wins them over using a combination of his perversely inappropriate world-view and his incredible physical prowess.

All long-running series by single creators run into similar teething issues – an initial rush of heady ideas that slowly slides into a predictable graph of highs and lows, where the creator struggles not only to find the voice, but to etch out a character’s life-story in a way that builds on its premise, instead of stagnating into repetitive cliche. Maintaining the momentum of a series, without over-stretching a story-line is a tough call. It would have been very easy for writer/artist Tohru Fujisawa to stumble. The second arc, that of the students being set straight by the teacher, resolutely avoids falling into the trap. Sure, it is long, but there are two aspects in which Fujisawa scores top of the manga-ka class (if you will pardon the school-based metaphor) – the delineation of the individual characters that make up the Onizukaverse. Every student in the class has a unique personality, a standalone voice which makes the reader identify with them. Partly because they are there in every classroom in any school in the world – the quiet, shy video-game-playing geek who is bullied at every turn; the computer whiz who knows more than he lets on; the headstrong yet confused loud-mouth who takes offence at minor quips; a girl whose parents are influential bureaucrats, a fact that she uses to her advantage; another with a dark secret involving a previous teacher. Sure, they are all genre archetypes, but it is Fujisawa’s genius that breathes new, fresh life into them.

The second thing that elevates the series to greatness is the sheer unpredictability of the central character. Eikichi Onizuka is a man of hidden surprises, whose heart of gold is matched only by his complete irreverence and lack of respect for authority. Early on in his career, Onizuka figures out that he really loves teaching, and he takes it on himself to be the kind of teacher that his generation did not have. At the crux of every decision Onizuka makes, however frivolous and played-for-laughs it seems to be, there is an important life-lesson that he imparts to his students. But Onizuka being the way he is, any attempt to take him seriously usually backfires, with hilarious results.

In addition to changing the way his students feel towards school, Onizuka also takes on the strict authoritarians that make up the faculty of Holy Forest Academy. His primary whipping-dog being the perennially grumpy Vice-Principal Uchiyamada – a running gag involves the Vice-Principal’s Toyota Cresta. The third arc of the series, in particular, involves a final stand against a new Principal who ousts the support of Chairman Sakurai, whose tacit approval had made a large part of Onizuka’s brushes with authority seem minor in the past.

Great Teacher Onizuka made me laugh, it had me gasping with incredulity, it made me come up with excuses to avoid work just so I could tear through the twenty-five volumes as soon as I could. It is not without its faults – a great deal of fan-service persists throughout the story, and let’s face it – if you have seen To Sir With Love and Munnabhai MBBS, you realize that the premise of GTO is hardly original. But even with all its over-the-top antics, it’s not just a fine comedy series, but also a drama that’s an indictment of the pettiness that afflicts today’s education system. It’s a scathing denouncement of self-serving, vainglorious modern-day teachers for whom teaching is nothing more than a way to make money, rather than the life-altering position it is meant to be. Hey, it made me want to go back to school, and that’s quite something!

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Books, Comics, Myself

Hard drives, Trilogies and an Omnibus

A few nights ago, a friend and I were Skyping each other. Since it was a little past dinner-time for me, the laptop was on the kitchen counter when I was making myself some healthy cauliflower and carrot curry. I was also Team-viewering my way into his computer, because he had one of my old hard-drives and I wanted to peek into it.

Looking at old files on a forgotten disk is a sort of perverted self-archaeology that is both life-affirming and creepy. Things that used to be seem relevant once upon a time are now distant, embarrassing. The documents folder yielded old resumes, stray downloaded pictures and half-written Rolling Stone reviews. Most of the other folders had been stripped clean before I left, or had backups of backups in other drives that are here with me. There was the dump of comics that I had transferred temporarily from the piles of CDs and DVDs I had lying around, and my friend was a little overwhelmed by the content. I have never been too tidy with my downloaded files.

We talked about Kyle Baker and Army@Love, remembering old comics and new manga and everything else on our pop culture plates right now. Yes, almost all my conversations morph into variants of this, so don’t judge. At some point, my friend mentioned that he wanted to read an old-school horror book, something that would creep him out and be unputdownable at the same time. I thought about Joe Hill, but he had read all of Hill, most of it before I did. Both of us could not think of anything else at the moment.

I finished Chuck Hogan and Guillermo del Toro’s The Strain last night. And this is what we were talking about. It starts with a plane landing in JFK airport with everyone but four people aboard the flight dead. The Center for Disease Control gets involved, and the plot proceeds like a tight medical thriller, only with fantastical elements. You can easily find out for yourself what it’s really about, because the first line of the Wikipedia summary gives it away. But I went in without knowing anything except that it was a horror book, and I loved the conceit of the plot. Halfway through the book, I was fairly sure it could not be a standalone story, and I was right! The first reaction was disappointment  – I had not finished The Passage, a book based on a similar premise, because the second and third books are due to come out 2012 and 2014. Happily, both sequels to The Strain are out already, the third came out this November. I have now begun The Fall, the second book. Things are proceeding swimmingly. The survivors of the first book are doing well. The dead ones – oh dear. I better shut up right now.

But it’s heartening to find out that my distrust of trilogies seems to be going away slowly, thanks to good content.

I should also mention that you should probably go check out this British movie called Cashback. It’s about break-ups, love, nudity, art and freezing time.

In the middle of the day today, there was a knock on the door. Another USPS package had arrived in my name. ‘Drea the Awesome looked up when I bring it in and open it up, knowing already what it’s going to be. The X-Statix Omnibus, by Peter Milligan and Mike Allred, along with a whole bunch of guest artists like Darwyn Cooke, Philip Bond and Paul Pope. It’s 1200 pages long, and when I pass it over to ‘Drea, she nearly keels over with the weight. “This is a comic?”, she asks. She flips through the pages and then looks up at me. “So you’re going to spend time reading this thing?” “I’ve read this before, but I will probably reread it in a bit, yeah”, I reply, grinning. She shakes her head, mumbling about starting a blog on her experiences with living with a nerd, with a special mention of the many packages that arrive every week. It was not a prudent time to mention that she had been playing Plants vs Zombies the last few nights with the TV on, with an obsession that puts my magpie complex to shame. But I did anyway.

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Mixtapes, Music

Mixtape: Morning Snow

waiting for a bus on a cold winter morning, with crunchy snow and sounds of birds stirring in the bare branches above, and it starts snowing gently and quietly, wispy white snowflakes, and one lands right on your extended tongue…

Now here’s something I haven’t done before. I mentioned that I was going to make a mix-tape. Shruti, (who drops in every now and then on the blog, hi Shruti) left the intriguing comment above when I asked her for an idea – a mood or a theme. It did sound like a lovely frame of mind to weave a bunch of songs around. Except –

My familiarity with snow is next to non-existent. Real life snow, that is. I encountered snow for a total of 3 hours in my life, and most of it was – well, that’s a story for another day. What I wanted to say is – my experience of these white fluffy thingies falling out of the sky has been based on December issues of Archie comics, Shammi Kapoor films, Yash Chopra heroines and Christmas movies set in New York. Snow in real life, most friends tell me, is not as mysterious, romantic or human-friendly as all of the above make out to be. Or maybe it is, and my friends are too jaded with life to know better (snicker). Actually no, I totally get it. I am from Assam, a state in India known for a phenomenal amount of annual rainfall – as a result, I cannot stand rain. At all.

So this mix-tape is more of a romanticized view of how an outsider perceives a snowy morning. If this sounds like a half-assed excuse for a poor selection of songs, I apologize. The 13 tracks are about a random winter morning, not a particularly cheery one, but not melancholy either. Just that I feel the cold in my bones, I need to touch my ears every now and then to warm them up, and I hold my iPod very tight in my pocket because clenching my fist over the battery makes it feel a tad warmer. And the snow, when it begins to fall, takes my breath away. There is a very clear story playing out in my mind when I listen to the tracks in order. The lyrics, as with most of my musical choices, are not important.

All cliche, pretentiousness and lack of taste are completely unintentional.

You can download the zip (ID3 stripped) from here.

Also, I intend to do this more frequently. I have a theme for the next one already, thanks to a recent conversation, and that will turn out to be much more upbeat than this.

 

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Myself

Zeroth world problems

USB slots are capricious, fun-loving creatures. They love a good practical joke, and probably have entertaining stories to tell each other, especially with the volume of data that passes through them every day. I am convinced that one of their favorite pranks is to randomly reorient themselves whenever they feel like it. This seems to be the only conclusion that explains why I am never able to plug a USB cable in at the first try. The first attempt meets with resistance, and leaves me confused whether I aligned the cable the right way. I turn the cable over to the other side and push again. That does not work either. Then I sigh, and bend over to see what exactly is going on. By that time, the USB slot has had its fun, and as it turns out, the cable now goes in smoothly.

I’ve found out that I spend about 40 seconds every morning untangling my earphones. This despite the fact that every evening – every single evening, I kid you not – after I get home, I take the little buggers, gently roll the wires and let them retire for the night. But all to no avail, because the next morning, they are back in disarray, like someone tousled them in the middle of the night. I would suspect the USB slots have been talking to them, but then I don’t think they speak the same language.

I figure that this untangling process costs me the time equivalent to about two songs every week. That is most alarming, but to compensate, I make sure that I listen to a few extra songs every evening. All in all, I am about three songs ahead by the time Friday evening comes around.

Last week, our office administrators announced, as part of a go-green drive, that we would no longer use paper cups and plates and disposable cutlery in the kitchen. Which was great news, because I always felt guilty about using a paper cup to drink some water and then having to throw it away. Sometimes I got some coffee in the same cup just to relieve a bit of the guilt, but I always felt that the coffee tasted weaker because of the little water that remained at the bottom. This also meant that I made myself a coffee every time I drank some water.

Things are looking better now, because we use the china cups in the office. Except the quantity of the cappuccino that the vending machine serves is slightly more than the size of an office cup. Which means that the coffee overflows, unless you pay close attention and whisk the cup out just before the tipping point is reached. Two problems with that: you should pay close attention to know the exact moment to pull it out, and the coffee overflows into the bin below anyway. Social responsibility dictates that you wipe the spilled remains, which means more valuable time lost. So instead of downsizing my cup of cappuccino, I have opted to switch to espresso instead. Two shots of espresso fits the cup perfectly.

You may wonder why I don’t just buy myself a large enough coffee mug, but the one that I want to buy is currently out of stock at ThinkGeek.

Goddammit, I don’t even like espresso.

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