I Let My Fists Do The Talkin’

Your new favorite band…

Pizzicato Five through an Konami filter

http://myspace.com/ymck

Thanks to Subway Cinema’s Asian Film Festival, I have been able to do the impossible—see Sakigake! Cromartie High School on the big screen (fans of this journal will remember by delight at finding the trailer online last year). Basically, the movie is Rock and Roll High School if you took the Ramones out and replaced them with awkward pauses and references/parodies to Japanese shit you’ve never heard of*. The Cromartie anime was basically an “Adult Swim” show—stilted “no-mation” cartoons speaking non-sequitirs, 1/20 which is the most hilarious thing ever, the other 19 shrugged off. I think for American audiences , it’s trapped on the mobius moving sidewalk of a comedy catch 22—to enjoy it, you have to be really fucking stoned, but if you’re stoned, you can’t read the subtitles and follow the plot. So, target audience is Japanese-fluent potheads. Have at it.

typical Cromartie anime episode. Key points: robot juvenile deliquent, excessive swearing, idiocy, Freddie Mercury

If this at all sounds appealing to you, there’s an encore showing on June 23rd.

I’m going to make a point to catch Takeshi Miike’s Yokai War and possibly the girl rock band story Linda Linda Linda before the festival’s out. It fills in the time before the latest Billy Wilder festival at Film Forum (their third in so many years… is there a discount in bulk on these films?).

The festival seems pretty cool, though. They gave away prizes (and made fun of them) before the show started (t-shirts and “girls in bikini with guns poster”) The enthusiastic host (who might be an organizer, I’d wager to guess) enthusiastically listed all of the wrestling-themed shows in the program (3), thanked the many liquor brands sponsoring the fest, and then cheerfully described the sponsoring McDonald’s ad replacing the short film that was supposed to preceed the movie (until somebody locked the DVD in their office) as “racist.”

The biggest downside to the showings of the festival are the unsubtitled trailers before the movies for the other in the fest… most of which seem to feature Old Boystyle torture and gore in lingering closeups. I was surpressing the gag reflex for Art of the Devil 2... I can only imagine what’s going on in the heads of the sick fucks who wanted to see a full 2 hours of skin being peeled off, lizards errupting bloodily from inside the body, iron hooks ripping through hands. Thanks a lot, Thailand. I expect this shit from Korea, but I’m really disappointed in you acting out like this.
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*I was horrified to “get” a 2-line reference to the 1981 pilot episode of Urusei Yatsura. I think this is the information taking up space in my brain that makes it difficult for me to do simple mathematics anymore.

My best discovery on YouTube recently is “Ayaka’s Surprise English Lesson,” which is the Hawaii-born, English-fluent (kinda) member of Morning Musume springing English lessons, conversations, and quizzes on other members of the band. They almost always go badly… and adorably.

Search “Surprise English” and you get 10 pages of the one-minute segments.

I’ve been relatively tired of life lately… out of sorts, listless and sluglish. When I’m feeling down, my mind wanders to thoughts of… j-pop.

Morning Musume is a Japanese pop idol machine, running steadily since the late 90s. It’s kind of a combination of Menudo (girls “graduate” when they get too old) and a paramecium, since the number of members went from 3 to 5 to 7 to 11 to 26 in the span of 2 albums (I read another wag quip that at that rate of growth, by 2010, 90% of the population of Japanese teenage girls would be members of Morning Musume).

Another perimecium like quality that Morning Musume has is the way it often splinters off into “sub-groups,” often around a theme. My favorite (and most people’s favorite, since they have the longest discography, most cartoon incarnations, and the most merch) is Mini Moni—made up of 4 (or 5) of the shortest, youngest, and cutest members of Morning Musume. It totally fulfills my mental image of what Japanese pop music should look and sound like—shrill, robotic and crazy.

MiniMoni also displays the natural Japanese xenophobia/xenophilia in action by having the “American” member of the group (born in Hawaii but otherwise Japanese) always decked out in USA flag bandanas, flag shirts, flag overalls, or at the very least, something that DOESN’T MATCH the other members of the group. They also have her speak random blurts of English in song intros and such.

Another subgroup, in the following clip, is Coconuts Musume—made up of all Hawaiians. Some aren’t even Japanese! Or Asian! Two members of the group don’t even speak the language, so Japanese TV desides to exploit that fact by making them participate in food-based challenges… Let’s Challenge: Japanese Food!

I hear you, Danielle. Japanese food is fucking awful. Even the seeming neutral “beef bowl” will probably give you diarrhea from some hidden fish flakes or agar microbes they smuggle into the rice.

I read a little bit of their history on wikipedia. They said the non-Japanese members both quit after only a couple of years from stress and culture shock. Then the people they replaced them with also quit. I would LOVE to talk to them, I bet they have insane stories.

I Love Egg has been translated into English, but retains the original Korean ridiculousness.

I finally got around to seeing Howl’s Moving Castle, which I’ve had sitting around since the Netflix came last week and with that, I have now seen all the 2005 Oscar “Best Animated Feature” nominees. All three of them.

There are spoilers here, but if you waited longer than me to see these, you deserve spoilers.

Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Wererabbit is very cute in an unexplainable stodgy British way. Much like the bow-tie wearing creators accepting their Oscar, it’s refreshingly unhip and somewhat embarrassing for the fun it seems to be having without consequence.

I love how there are echos of classic (‘30s-’50s) film genres in all the Wallace and Gromit films (Trousers: heist film, Close Shave: suspense/’Rebeccatype thriller, WereRabbit: Universal monster/horror), flavoring them, but the essential feel and nature of W&G is consistant between them. I think The Wrong Trousers, the second W&G short, is pretty much the pinnacle and neither subsequent offering comes close to its action, suspense and humor. I liked Were-Rabbit and it didn’t feel “long” despite it being a feature. I also thought it was interesting, after watching some of the bonus features, that even as it was being animated they were changing the plot and trying to figure out where it was going… there were at least 5 different endings at different points.

The downside, alas, Curse of the Were-rabbit felt a bit predictable at parts and seemed trying to “redo” bits from the shorts in a less effective way—“Hutch” the Rabbit was much less endearing than “Shawn,” the airplane chase at the Manor was very similar to scenes in A Close Shave, and Gromit looked constipated/depressed most of the film.
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Howl’s Moving Castle was certainly interesting, but not nearly as engaging as Spirited Away. I’m pretty lukewarm on the Studio Ghibli output… I love their intentions but if I were to tar all of their output with an overly simplistic slam-brush I’d go for “boring.” Their plots seem to ramble along without any direction for a lot of the time. Despite the very “Japanese” mileu for Spirited Away (matsuri, public bath house, shikigami, dragon-river spirit, ) it seemed to me to have the most ‘Western’ plot structure, falling lockstep in with the model of Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz.

Howl is an adaption of a British fantasy novel, which I’ve never read and know almost nothing about. I’m curious about it actually and might want to pick up a copy (but I went out and bought The Golden Compass at Strand instead… close enough). According to Wikipedia—“Roughly the first third of the plot is similar, after which the movie branches off into original territory, flavored with many of Miyazaki’s familiar themes: airships, redemption, cute non-human sidekicks.”

So, the stuff that I thought was great about the story—the plain but practical girl heroine (such a rarity in most kid flicks, save Miyazaki’s, of course) who becomes an old woman (a crone as the hero of a kid flick! Not since The Peanut Butter Solution!)—were undercut by “airships, redeption, cute non-human sidekicks.” Miyazaki also flopped the gender of the main antagonist to a woman for an unknown reason. Disney seems to do that too… the hero and villian are usually of the same gender. A lot of stuff happens that doesn’t seem to matter (Howl freaking out over his hair turning orange and then melting into green slime, the penultimate villian is vanquished and then invited to live with them for no reason as a senile invalid) and the ending just… happens.

So, I guess the pattern with my reviews is… these were OK, but go see the earlier stuff from the same people. Now, watch me throw a curveball—
The Corpse Bride was almost unwatchable. There’s a great internal balance in film-goers for Tim Burton’s output that waffles between “creative visionary” and “Hot Topic hack” and a 16 ton weight was dropped on the latter, neatly atop Ape-rham Lincoln. It goes without saying that Nightmare Before Christmas is a huge thing to follow in the frame-by-frame animated footsteps of and I fully expected Corpse Bride to be in some areas difficient—crappy story, great visuals – fine; slower pace, more mundane setting—ok; fewer songs, bad ending—I’ll suck it up.

I’m hard-pressed to find one nice thing to say about this stop-motion turkey. The character designs were awkward—buggy “shocked” eyes, tiny un-expressive mouths, unbalanced bodies. The way they moved was jerky and stiff. The background characters were poorly cribbed from the waiting room of scene of Beetlejuice. The mercifully few songs sounded like word-heavy rough-drafts of the “Oogy Boogy” number that managed neither to explain what was happening, be pleasing to the ear, or distract from the crude day-glo “dancing” that accompanied them as the film expected them to do all three simultaneously. One nice thing…. there weren’t any Smashmouth songs.

The worst offender, as is usually the case, was the writing. Aside from not being “funny” when joking, the basic thrust of the plot doesn’t make sense. Victor, a bland simp, has been arranged to marry a girl he’s never met (Victoria) but immediately after meeting her for a five word scene, he’s tricked into marrying The Corpse Bride, who he also has barely said five words to either. So, it’s a love triangle between three strangers. Why do we care?

There is also a green worm doing a bad Peter Lorre impression.

Download a very sweet Katamari desktop for your computer.

I exported a list of every Netflix movie I rented in 2005. With a combination of narcissism and embarrassment I present my list.

This isn’t every movie I watched last year, since I also have a Kim’s membership and went to Film Forum a fair amount this year. It was a good year for movies there—the totally great Harold Lloyd series, the pre-war Paramount series, and Summer of Samurai. (I didn’t see any of the Naruse series (zzzz), and haven’t yet been to the Hitchcock series that goes into February.)

I started and finished a couple of anime teenage girl high school soaps (the fascinatingly misogynist/sadomaschostic Boys over Flowers, cute but bland Fruits Basket) and TV series (the entire Bewitched first season & I, Claudius). Most of this list is either anime or TV series… I tend to see real movies in theatres rather than at home.

The stand-out anime was Paranoia Agent, which was a great Twilight Zone-through-a-JHorror-filter series with a typically Japanese let-down of an ending. The worst one might be a toss-up between Dears (misogynist robot sex comedy/plagiarism of Chobits, a more successful misogynist robot sex comedy), Magical Meow Meow Taruto (a really boring acid trip), and Cyberteam in Akihabara (why?)—but nothing has unseated last years champ Puni Puni Poemy as the worst anime in the universe. I look forward to the rest of Otogi Zoshi, which has been compared to last year’s top series Twelve Kingdoms, but I’ve only just started this month.

On the live action front, I really enjoyed Shaolin Soccer and Hero but liked Kung Fu Hustle and House of Flying Daggers (seen in the theater) far less. Kikujiro was unexpectedly great, proving Beat Takeshi can be a dirtbag even without a gun in his hand. The mid-50s commercials on the Topper TV (written by little Stevie Sondheim!) disk were worth the rental even the show was pretty uninspiring (except for inspiring Will Hines’ impression of Leo G. Carroll)—the vaguest cigarette ads using nonsense statistics delivered my a lisping news anchor. The Bob Newhart Show in its first season was not what I expected… it was pretty unfunny but there was something about it—depressing and engaging at the same time—and the themesong was inappropriately wonderful. And Tabitha, a 70s short-lived Bewitched spin-off, was just putrid.

Next year—more Roman epics! More bad anime! More… of the same.

I finally got around to seeing Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars, which Sam Riegel had me do extra voices on back in, like, 2003. The title had changed since then… it was then called “Muryou” (a contraction of the Japanese title), but there was a disagreement on how to pronounce it and not sound… retarded. Murray-o, Mar-you, Mario. Totally renaming it won out, I guess.

I modified the screen-cap of the “Angle 2 Credit” to indicate the name of importance. I did hear myself say (along with Amy Rhodes) “We Love You, Shun!” in episode 1 as “girls in crowd.” (I haven’t watched the rest of them yet, we only did one session of recording so I imagine we’re only on the first DVD.) I read a review online that called out the “ridiculously fake” names in the credits and cited me in particular. “Gil Ramsee” seems far more fake to me… not to mention “Jack Lingo.” Plus, I’m a goddamned voice extra… who cares if my name is Cockslap McCrotchgrab. No one (except me… and now you, blog reader) pays any attention to “additional voices.”

I still haven’t seen my rainbow of voice extra work on HBO’s “Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child” season 2 that I did back in college. So far Netflix only has a “sampler” of first season episodes available. Those shows are pretty unwatchable, even with my amazing talent saying “Huh?” and “Look Out!” in the background.

Oh, how do I love Takuya Angel...

A FRUiTs- featured fashion line that bears so little resemblance to normal human clothes that the site features a vector-drawn tutorial on how to apply it to the body. The “line” this “season” (quotes, since I have no idea how recent the site is or how often they make additions to their designs) seems to be a combination of Prussian military garb (Sakura Taisen tailcoats), kendo pants with Mononoke/Gloomy Bear shrugs… and fucking genius/crazy Japanese acid-trip lunacy.

The whole site is actually just a mac.com photo album. The future is here!

Seriously, though, I adore these clothes. I’ve never seen any on ebay, though, and I doubt I’ll make it to Osaka to buy any.

Combing several of my favorite things, enjoy some vintage, baffling Japanese commercials for soaps and such:

Cromartie High School the Movie (Live Action)

Thank you, Japan.

http://www.watanabegumi.co.jp/jpculture/howmanyi/jplaugh.html

Hi Hi Hi!

I have competition—
http://www1.odn.ne.jp/~cec50440/

Something that reminds me how glad I am that the internet wasn’t as accessible and I was less ambitious when I was 13. I probably would have made something just like this (minus the malapropism, clunky homoerotica, and wholesale lifted plot elements from other anime).

Prepare to have your eyeballs blown from their sockets

Actually, now I wish the internet was accessible—my web comic would have been awesome.

I was interviewed a year ago during Girl Crush for a Japanese magazine called “Figure King,” which I never got a copy of, and I’m not nearly as driven or resourceful as I should be to track down a copy and see if I indeed made it into “what’s going on in the US” column that month. I also had a sneaking suspicion that it was some kind of pornography. Based on nothing. Just sending my headshot in to a foreign magazine—despite the hour interview about the show—I had a feeling the column was “jerk off on this gaijin.”

This same stereotyping is what keeps me from going to Tokyo (despite claiming THREE Tokyo tourist guides from Will Hines’ book giveaway)—I’ve seen enough Japa-porn and fan service to assume casual rape is waiting on every street corner of Harajuku.

Anyway, when we got back from Toronto on Monday I checked my email to find that my interviewer (an American, now living in Japan) is now working on a book about OTAKU in America (For my cool friends, “otaku” basically means nerd, but the interpretation in the US is specifically “anime nerd”) and wanted to include some Girl Crush pictures and info(?).

I finally got ahold of the guy (after Butterfingers here erased the original email accidentally… what an otaku!) and send off my shots. But, since I’ve got the stimulus-response of a cuttlefish, this tiny amount of attention has made me dwell on the thought of doing another Girl Crush.

I’m going out of town this weekend; back to Washington now that my parents have moved down there full time (instead of commuting between there and Washington).

I’m upholding my recently broken record of getting the hell out of Dodge before the marathon starts. I’ve been talking to other veteran NY improvisers and I’m not alone in finding the pressure of the event a little taxing—late night shows in weird venues, hot BO-and-mold scented back rooms, socializing with drunken strangers—I’m too much of an old person to get into it. I usually fall asleep by 10 PM on Friday most weeks. (This is due to some sort of energy sapping insect or fungus parasite yet detected, I theorize) I don’t think I really enjoy the festival/convention model in any activity… consentrated fun crammed into one continuous weekend… less so in my home city.

I didn’t plan my trip very well. The train is more expensive than I anticipated and I don’t really have any plans once I get there. I looked up a college friend (also known for her old lady schedule) who moved down to study the Cold War at GW. We may meet up for tea or museum-going or doily knitting or something similarly old ladyish.

I panic-bought a couple books at the closest Barnes and Noble for the trip. I burned through that Harry Potter book pretty quickly and Harpo Speaks right before it. I don’t read novels really regularly, but when I do I finish them really quickly. I mean to read more, really. I bought a P.G. Wodehouse novel I haven’t read yet, I think, and a particularly creepy “How to Write Shoujo” Japanese book.

I have a lifelong passion for “how to draw” books. I always seek them out. The boom in manga interest has generated a lot more of them, usually with a sexed-up philosophy (all Japanese how-to-draw books devote inordinate pages to how to draw underpants, bras, shower scenes, general tits and ass tutorials). I was very tempted by a tutorial book on writing sex games (Amuse yourself reading the plot and character summaries of existing
Dating Sims and count the number of times a variation on the explanatory phrase “she’s older, but has huge breasts” is used) that outlined the 6 times of girls that appear in them. Six kinds are all you need and your set.

I’m trying to jump start my interest in writing more Girl Crush stuff.

http://masamania.com/archives/2005/05/fan_of_kishidan.html

Pictures of “Old-Style” Japanese Juvenile Deliquents, who seem to be popping up in a lot of anime I’ve been getting lately… A girl “saved” by the heroine from being in a girl gang is a common trope.

In a future Girl Crush installment I want Urine to have been the leader of a girl gang.

While you’re looking at Sukeban pictures, check out the rest of the site as well. Masamania is hilarious for a number of reasons, only half of which are racist.

I like in his swear-filled slamming of the Tokyo police he calls a well-known brothel “Soupland” and later corrects himself to the real name, Soapland, in a footnote. Soupland is much, much funnier. Whores + Soup = comedy.