Author: Alex Doenau

Hey guys, remember the 11th Japanese Film Festival? Shut up! We’re in Sydney Film Festival 2008! And we start with Japanese movies … Yeah, I’ll get there.

My first movie for this year’s festival was Miike Takashi’s Sukiyaki Western Django, a Japanese Western starring Japanese people, speaking exclusively in English. In Toronto, they got subtitles but we weren’t given this luxury. It’s not too hard to understand, but it can be a struggle – but a struggle that you shouldn’t regret.

A gunman arrives in a town where two rival gangs search for a treasure of legend. Each tries to woo him over to their side, but the gunman is not to be swayed: he plays his own damned side.

This is a genre film. As much of a wank as it seems to say, a good man to appear in a genre film is Quentin Tarantino. He shows up in the first scene, and shoots a snake out of mid-air and cuts out the egg contained within. Then he shoots a bunch of guys … then he eats sukiyaki. When he returns to the movie much, much later, he has redefined steam punk, and his English has worsened. He’s a funny addition to the movie, but the movie is supposed to be funny and he totally fails to steal the limelight from any of the main cast – which includes a multiple personalitied sheriff, an old business lady with a mysterious sharpness about her, a leader who insists on being addressed as Henry, and gangs of what can be best described as walking anachronisms.
It also has a dance scene with accompaniment by a didgeridoo.

Yeah, this is a genre film all right.

Sukiyaki Western Django is weird, but not for weirdness’ sake. It’s the sort of movie that I love but also the sort that others love to dismiss as a bunch of wank. It is a sort of labour of love, dedicated to a mixture of samurai and Western ideals – which we have learned, over the last sixty odd years, are exactly the same thing. If you want to see a bizarre amalgam that really benefits from the inclusion of subtitles (even for Tarantino!), then this is exactly the right thing to go for. Some of the gun work is deliberately stupid, some people can take insane levels of beating and shooting, but it all ends with exactly the sort of song that should end this movie – and that makes it worth anyone’s while.

Today is Kylie Minogue’s 40th birthday! Kylie is one of Australia’s biggest icon, and also quite big in the UK and in wider Europe. She recently tried once again to crack America, but it looks like it ain’t going to happen. The abysmal single they chose to lead with for America can’t have helped at all (one of the two dullest tracks on X? What a novel idea!)

Anyway, I have come to praise Kylie, not to bury her. Still going strong after both having beaten up cancer and featuring in the first live action Street Fighter movie, I continue to wish Kylie all the best. She dang near changed my life at the end of 2006 when I went and saw her with Liz, so my salutations cannot be warm enough.

Kylie is indeed an Australian icon, although she’s also the subject of much derision. If you’re a man and you say you like Kylie, that means you’re gay. I resent the insinuation, although we all know how that worked out for my best friend in high school and myself. I would say that I don’t know any girls who like Kylie, although that would be a blatant lie because so many from my office went and saw her last time she was out. The thing is, “everyone” loves Kylie but it’s hard exactly to see who this “everyone” is because, apart from some gay dudes it’s mostly a guerilla love. Her songs are catchy, her videos are entertaining (Rutger Hauer!), and she is insanely personable. It’s not hard to understand how someone could fall for a woman as simultaneously chameleonic and familiar as Our Kylie. Let the celebrations commence!

We’ll start with some vintage Kylie, in the form of “Better the Devil You Know”:

Then we’ll continue with a tribute from the Japanese duo WINK, with their cover of Kylie’s SAW classic “Turn It Into Love”. The narrative of this video has been the subject of debate amongst academics for all of several months!

Now a detour to her duet with Nick Cave, “Where the Wild Roses Grow”. Cave was attracted to Kylie thanks to “Better the Devil You Know”, which he claimed to have some of the saddest lyrics he’d ever heard. One of these days I’ll find the proper quote: the point is that pop music can sugar coat totally depressing messages, and can lead poppettes into performing songs about their murders at the hands of moustachioed lotharios.

Now we move on to modern Kylie, with one of several singles from her latest album X, “In My Arms”:

Oop, what’s this? Why, it’s Kylie with David Tennant in the Doctor Who 2007 Christmas special, “Voyage of the Damned”!

Here’s to 40 more years singing, Kylie! You can have a little break after that.

Having seen Iron Man again tonight, I have a slightly different opinion of it. When I see movies a second time, I can go either way: the analysis drive can start working overtime, or I stop worrying about what’s happening because I already know what’s going to happen. Knowing the balance of the film, it no longer felt unbalanced, or like I needed something to happen, because I wasn’t waiting for Tony Stark to bust out anything.

The second viewing of Iron Man was therefore a freeing experience, and the post-credits sequence was even more exhilarating in the context of an audience who vocally expressed their excitement over the content suggested. While certainly not on the level of the (new) Batman franchise, I’d probably place Iron Man as my favourite Marvel movie. Not that it would be that hard.

I guess that Tony shouldn’t have peed on Obadiah’s rug.

How did they secure an IMAX release for Speed Racer? Why did they keep the damned monkey in? Whose decision was it to make it not even look vaguely realistic? Who thought to bank roll this travesty? Why was this a movie that needed to be made? Why do I get the feeling that it will be played deadly serious? How did they secure such a not-terrible cast? Speed Racer, what are you thinking?

… Why do I know that I’ll go and see it?

And tangentially, am I the only one not overly impressed by the new The Incredible Hulk?

But is it even possible to be worse than Ang Lee’s Hulk?

I’d just like you to know that I really tried. I got five hundred something pages into Quicksilver and the first three hundred went off like a shot! Good, fun stuff, cutting up dogs for horrid experiments and whatnot, then the King of the Vagabonds came in and my reading ground to a halt. I’ll have to tackle you on my own dime rather than the company dollar, Neal Stephenson, because I feel like I’m getting nowhere fast.

In other approved activities, be sure and see Forgetting Sarah Marshall this weekend. It’s pretty funny, even if you don’t want to see Jason Segel’s penis. (which you do get to see … several times.)

Yeah, a simultaneous release for a movie? I didn’t see it coming either!

It’s a three piece deal: books that did not make me feel good about them or myself! Hooray! In fact, the other books I’ve lined up after this one (I’ve read four since, but I decided not to make an entry run longer than three) aren’t all sunshine and lollipops either.

Take this, Shamus!

You may recall, if you’re one of my three regular readers, what I had to say about Cryptonomicon. In fact, if you’re one of my three regular readers, you’ve already responded to it, either internally or on your own site. Mark bit first, and now Shamus has had a crack at it.

It’s nice to see that not everyone thinks that Cryptonomicon is the greatest book ever, but I never set out to dispel that; what I particularly like about this is that everything I stated is actually in the text proper – and liking it is simply a matter of interpretation. What makes it the best ever to some people makes it unfathomable for others. It’s an interesting examination of opinion, because it ultimately proves that one man’s novel full of digressions is another man’s novel full of digressions – but that Man A might be allergic to that while Man B bathes in it, and Woman C thinks “Dangit, Snow Crash was so compact, what went wrong?”

Which brings me to my next point (wait, I’m making points here?). Twenty Sided Reader dishuiguanyin states the following:

Even Snow Crash, while it has a wonderful racy plot, great ideas, and ancient near-Eastern mythology … also contains terrible dialogue and huge great infodumps from the librarian. So, yeah, tis a pity, but still hugely enjoyable.

The Librarian is great because the internet is reduced to goggles, and Hiro Protagonist can be doing whatever – speeding through the vast blackness of cyberspace, because they didn’t bother putting addresses on those bastards; fighting Raven; raving with avatars that all look alike – and he can still be being fed exposition! Snow Crash is awesome not because it’s got equal opportunity rapist pirates in it, but because it’s the literary equivalent of this comic:

Sometimes all we require in life is goggles and fishnets, rather than eight page treatises on stockings and furniture. Goggles and fishnets delivered at HYPER SPEED while BYPASSING THE COMMON MAN to fight an ALEUT (like you’ve ever heard of them) with MAXIMUM HARDCORENESS. EXTREME!
Perhaps Snow Crash differs from Cryptonomicon in that it’s not afraid to be silly, whereas Cryptonomicon equates graphs with silliness. I think it hinges on Stephenson’s use of “badass”. You can see it in Snow Crash and say “fuck yeah!”, but you get a rather different, more selfconscious vibe from the later work.

Finally, as to XKCD:

I think that says it all! Wait, it doesn’t. I just thought it was funny if you know the original strip.

Graph provided by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
XKCD parody courtesy Nobody Scores