Author Archives: Milo (blogofthenorthstar.com)

I’m going to talk about movies again.

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Before Sunrise 001 Im going to talk about movies again.

I’m looking forward to Before Midnight, Richard Linklater’s latest in a trilogy of films about a man and woman who forge a really contrived intimacy with one another solely on the basis of chance meet-ups that occur every nine years. The first film Before Sunrise is meandering and loose, the characters spilling their guts to each other about life and death and everything in between with the unpracticed tedium of a couple Freshman Seminar students.

The next film, Before Sunset, revisits the original concept with refinement, the characters just as oddly talky but more complicated, an added layer of adult “maturity” disguising the urgency that wills their encounters on. Their lived-in melancholy has aged like wine and the movie ends on an unforgettably ambiguous note.

And now Before Midnight has popped up nine years later still, debuting the same week as motherfucking Fast and Furious 6.

fast6 Im going to talk about movies again.

With Fast Five (2011) the series surrendered to the fact street racing isn’t interesting to people who intellectually outgrew their provisional driving license, instead developing into a steroid-infused action flick where people punch each other and things joyously explode without the willed stupidity (read that as charitably or negatively as you’d prefer) of filmmakers like Michael Bay and Neveldine/Taylor.

Fast Five isn’t a throwback to nineties-era action movies, but it has their pure, entertaining simplicity. And I’m sure Fast and Furious 6 isn’t a condemnation of modern bombastic excess, but it wasn’t shot in 3D nor was it post-converted to such, and that alone should indicate something.

nausicaa Im going to talk about movies again.

For good or bad the advent of high definition Blu-ray technology has become the lens with which I come to an adult appraisal of movies from my past. They become less pieces of video entertainment and more a coordinated menagerie of crisp, clear images to actively process. I don’t use movies as background entertainment or flip through them on the teevee or watch them while I surf Facebook. I make my selections based upon a careful balance of mood and whimsy, bearing witness in a dark room with as much attention as I can afford.

I find myself reading comics and watching anime in much a similar manner. Of course the syntax is different, but this self-appointed duty of being a more thinking and feeling viewer has only increased the enjoyment I get out of these things. It’s steered me in my own eclectic directions. It’s saved me from opinions by way of social cliques.

Im going to talk about movies again.

So, when I watch Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind with these eyes it seems equally exemplative of high quality eighties animated moviemaking and the European tradition. Most visually interesting are the Ohmu, these giant shelled bugs animated with carefully painted layers that shamble against each other like they were cutout pieces animated in René Laloux’ Fantastic Planet.

What really got to me this time around, however, is how damn effective this Nausicaa movie is. If you’re watching an animated movie with environmental themes made by someone who made a lot of those and you already saw it before so you know everything that’s going to happen, it shouldn’t resonate so deeply, but this one did.

Seven Points: One of these weeks I’ll write a good one.

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lightbulb Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

The lightbulb in my room burnt out last week and because I’ve been too lazy to buy a new one I haven’t been reading comics as much. Instead I’ve focused on the tons of digital manga on my computer. When you’re the kind of person who easily falls into routines, the teensiest push can be enough to set you off in a refreshing direction. I’ve learned to be more welcoming of everyday inconveniences as a result.

homunculus Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

This would be more than an everyday inconvenience. Trepanation, the ancient practice of drilling holes into the human skull for medical purposes, is the taking off point in Hideo Yamamoto’s Homunculus. It’s a manga title I avoided for a long time because I knew it as semi-plausible supernatural seinen, and semi-plausible supernatural seinen are very often terrible.

Rather than get into all the fine, concrete details of what this story is about, I want to say up front it’s demonstrable in terms of showing you what kind of things mainstream Japan does with the medium that no other country dares. Homunculus is a comic about the unconscious mind, but it’s not about it in a removed intellectual fashion. It deals with the unconscious mind by combining passionate drama with lots of symbolism.

homunculus2 Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

After the protagonist undergoes trepanation treatment he begins to see people differently. Homunculi, the self-images of people projected by their unconscious minds, are visible in the physical world, reacting to the stimuli around them. The main character essentially engages with people while reading these homunculi and using their behavior to learn more about his “opponents” in real time.

As you might expect, very quickly he learns that not only are homunculi difficult to interpret, but his own biases and unconscious thoughts are shaping the way he perceives them, ie he is both having these symbols presented to him while unconsciously imprinting upon them. Someone else’s face, for example, might shift to resemble a friend from his past, even if the two people don’t know each other. This, combined with the fact homunculi may be figments of his imagination in the first place, works to maintain an almost maddening tone of uncertainty throughout the story and where it’s headed.

homunculus31 Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

I guess it’s a psychological thriller? A really unique, thrilling one, brimming with sexual impulse and competing theories about the psychic apparatus.

shigurui Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

I like Tumblr because it often gives me positive feelings without the use of a single word. For example, this random post reminded me how utterly perfect Shigurui: Death Frenzy is, and how glad I am it exists.

Shigurui was a 2007 anime put out by Madhouse Studios when they were still at the top of their game, creating television shows that struck out unique, adult areas of interest, often adapting noteworthy manga with a budget conscious yet keen visual sense.

There aren’t any places on the web that consistently talk about truly exemplative anime, and so much is focused on what’s happening right this very second, making it easy to forget about the great stuff. Using Tumblr I’ve curated a revolving door of anime awe and wonder, without getting tangled up in any of the silliness the social networking site is most often derided for. And let’s be honest, most of that deriding is done by dudebros afraid of digital spaces where females exert just as much influence as males, if not more.

Maybe it clubs you over the head with its imagery, but I like this Nick Cross cartoon short enough to loop it every once in a while. Cross is a talented animator working on his own feature length movie, but he saw fit to release this little bit of somber emptiness in between that long term project and whatever else he has going on.

damon lindelof horizontal Seven Points: One of these weeks Ill write a good one.

If you’re watching something Star Trek-related and it isn’t named Wrath of Khan why are you even bothering?

Wrath of Khan is the only Star Trek thing anyone should subject themselves to, and the new movies know that, so they naively try to ape it with young actors. So just watch Wrath of Khan on Blu-ray, and watch the new movies if you want big dumb emotive spectacle where the villain is a terrorist analogue. (Because that’s all American big budget action movies are anymore: escapist terrorist analogues. Especially the superhero ones.)

I speak as someone who spent their whole childhood watching Next Generation and Voyager. Trust me, I’m not a better person for it.

But hey, at least I always knew Stargate sucked.

UPSTREAM COLOR

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Upstream color UPSTREAM COLOR

Similar to Shane Carruth’s debut film Primer (2004), much too much of a deal has been made about the alleged impenetrable complexities of his second effort, Upstream Color, which debuted at Sundance in January and lucky for us has already been released on home video this week, less than four full months later.

I remember when Primer first came out it was pitched to me as a really interesting no-budget time travelling movie written, directed by and starring a mathematician. And understood as such it’s fucking great. But very quickly the dialogue shifted to how mind-shatteringly complicated it was, with people going so far as to pass around a diagram someone needlessly created for the movie’s wikipedia page as a kind of decoder ring. This was a movie that made people’s brains hurt. Or something.

It isn’t that you have to be smart to get Primer, it’s that “how does it all work, man… let’s focus on pedantry more than the actual movie” is one of those probably not-at-all constructive but commonly accepted social paradigms for talking about film. Now if you Google Image Search Primer you mostly get stupid nerd charts. Watching the superficial buzz expand and collapse into itself was similar to how in high school my fellow teenagers went apeshit over Donnie Darko for like two weeks. Bleh.

upstream color UPSTREAM COLOR

Upstream Color is a beautiful film to watch. At over 50,000 times the budget of Primer and still less than half a million dollars, it inevitably shames Your Favorite 2013 Summer Blockbuster on a technical level, with a soft, pleasing cinematography and brief authentic moments of horror.

The most joy is to be had in it’s extremely kinetic first thirty minutes, where Carruth surrenders every bit of technical jargon that might have been running through his head (and virtually all dialogue, in fact) to instead present us with a puzzling-and-then-horrifying series of events. Those first thirty minutes, man. They don’t talk down or up to the audience, they’re just absorbing on every level.

Eventually the movie adjusts its pace, and as all the technical details start to come into focus, we watch a relationship develop between two similarly damaged lovers. Now, instead of expressing the how’s and why’s overtly, the movie falls in love with its own inward focused, fable-like conceits. I wasn’t confused by this shift, and I remained interested for the vast majority of it, but maybe the film got too storybooky, maybe the relationship between the two main characters, a mostly opaque Shane Carruth and utterly magnetic Amy Seimetz, became too prototypical, with the trappings I guess lots of independent movies about alienated lovers tend to present us with.

But fuck, the alienation in this story stems from an immortal parasitic science fiction organism, and that does count for something. Watching the characters grapple with their broken nature, which isn’t from psychological trauma or personal history but an even more imperceptible force existing outside of their understanding and control, is a total mind trip to anyone with an introspective nature. It’s genuinely unsettling to watch the characters alternately erode the connection they’ve established with one another and be brought closer through their incongruity with the real world.

So Upstream Color is a unique movie to be enjoyed and celebrated. I can’t wait to see what Shane Carruth does next. He’s making movies the way few others seem to: earnestly focused on plot and narrative, but also brimming with complex, creative ideas expressed in a mostly elliptical fashion.

Seven Points: Search engine optimization might be against my personal belief system.

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deforge1 Seven Points: Search engine optimization might be against my personal belief system.If you’re looking for good comics to read Pendleton Ward saved you some effort by collecting such a talented crew to work on Adventure Time. Guys like Andy Ristaino, Jesse Jacobs, Jesse Moynihan and most resoundingly, Michael DeForge, create their own work which surpasses the hit cartoon show in every qualitative way.

Exploring Michael DeForge’s imagination in comic book format is a real, actual adventure. It has a pervasive otherness to it that’d make Kazuo Umezu blush, but it can’t be drilled down to a single idea or formula. The more you read, the more sense you make of his visual abstractions, their exotic, sprawling vocabulary infecting your own imagination.

And he just keeps making the stuff. A lot of it, like Kid Mafia, Incinerator, and his Eisner-nominated Ant Comic, is freely available to read online without DRM or a kludgy Flash interface.

deforge2 Seven Points: Search engine optimization might be against my personal belief system.Recently Koyama Press put out Very Casual, a 150-page book of DeForge comics. Very Casual collects work from different sources, some more recent than others, and it’s not so much a unified tome but a physical realization of the fact that people need to start collecting these DeForge comics in one place because they’re stunning, great to read, and have already had enormous influence on artists everywhere.

supermag Seven Points: Search engine optimization might be against my personal belief system.

It seems a rule now that when Jim Rugg puts out a book it begs a dialogue that’s as much about its structure as it is about content. You can’t ignore that Supermag looks and feels like a magazine, that it’s very thoroughly and enthusiastically designed, but unlike his previous work on Afrodisiac and Notebook you probably won’t have an account for how it’s all supposed to come together and be one thing.

I think that was intentional. Reading Supermag is a double-barrelled shotgun blast of both pop art and comic art, and the hole it leaves in your wall will be in the shape of the guy who fired the gun. Supermag reflects Rugg’s personal obsessions with everything from comics history to styles of page numbering. It often begins a story with no end and freely dashes from one subject to the next, denying you any sense of continuity or closure.

Supermag exists to be thumbed through, to be picked up and put down multiple times, to sit on your desk as an agreeable object. And for people seduced by Rugg’s design-heavy approach to image making, it’s a must-see item.

Review copy of Supermag provided by AdHouse Books.

Baoh Seven Points: Search engine optimization might be against my personal belief system.

I like how deliberately unattractive Hirohiko Araki designed the protagonist of his early 1984 manga Baoh. The hero has all the visual grace of a rotting corpse. Skin on his face is flaking off in big chunks, some fleshy matter hangs over one of his eyes pendulously, and his lips are dry and cracking. His mutant biology is totally coming undone, not exactly the character design you’d expect from an artist who’d go on to create the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure franchise of revolving dreamboat protagonists.

Similar to those early volumes of Battle Angel Alita, it’s insightful to look at the beginning career of a manga artist, when they’re established enough to be getting stuff published but they’re still discovering their own style. You can see the things that appear to be included by influence or reflex, tendencies that will be cast off in later work as the artist distills exactly what they want to do and what they want their manga to look like. For example, later in the Baoh story this stodgy old man appears:

baoh21 Seven Points: Search engine optimization might be against my personal belief system.

He’s a derivative example of the ojiisan character archetype found in manga from the sixties and seventies, not very congruous with the graceful figure drawing that would mark Araki’s later career. You could paste that ugly face into some old Go Nagai comic and it would be perfectly at home. In fact, speaking of Go Nagai…

baoh3 Seven Points: Search engine optimization might be against my personal belief system.

Hirohiko Araki essentially makes Violence Jack, the giant savage anti-hero from Go Nagai’s seventies manga, the final enemy in Baoh. Every detail, from his wild hair, pointy teeth, outrageous phsyique, and deep-set eyebrows stems from Go Nagai’s original character design.

Araki would have been age ten when Go Nagai’s first runaway success, the controversial erotic-themed Harenchi Gakuen was in the middle of being published in Weekly Shonen Jump. There’s no way he wouldn’t have been aware of his work, and as we see in Baoh, he took a great deal of early inspiration from it.

baohjjba Seven Points: Search engine optimization might be against my personal belief system.

In a stray panel of Baoh (left) you can see Araki exert more effort than usual in rendering the Violence Jack lookalike character’s muscled arm. It’s the only time in the entire manga he really takes the time to do it, but it’s a hint of what’s to become a major Araki pre-occupation for his twenty-six-years-and-counting run on JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: drawing musculature with an incredible attention to detail, emphasizing its rippling texture in ways that are convincing to the eye if not biologically realistic. He’s not the only mangaka to do it, but he’s certainly established a style entirely of his own creation, transcending those early influences we see in Baoh, and the Tetsuo Hara influence we see in early JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (right).

One of the pleasures of reading Hirohiko Araki’s manga is watching him artistically discover himself in the process of making it.

Seven Points: I wish I had more free time to do these but maybe I’d waste it scratching my butt.

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The King of Pigs Seven Points: I wish I had more free time to do these but maybe I’d waste it scratching my butt.

The opportunity to watch The King of Pigs interrupted my plans to watch some Japanese cartoon, as if to say sorry to break it to you anime: junior high school isn’t a quaint milieu for selling escapist fantasy to manchilds. It’s a prison sentence you try your best to survive. In South Korean cinematic fashion The King of Pigs slathers on tragic melodrama upon itself in painting its picture of three middle school students, two of which grow up into losers and reminisce about their time together.

The question isn’t “does it work?” The characters and scenarios are believable even if they’re over-wrought, and anyone with a heart will respond on some level to the trauma these kids experience, as their hope is whittled down by the negligent cultural forces surrounding them. It centrally works with a metaphor, with the idea some people are born dogs and some people are pigs, and the pigs exist only for the subservience to their hungry jackal masters. Class is the primary, resounding factor of this social hierarchy, and the movie hits on that point repeatedly.

Made for $150,000 and looking every bit as if that were the case, with stiff CG character models here and there to shave off expenses, there are visual deficiencies in The King of Pigs you’ll have to overlook to take in the sad, grisly currents flowing through it. I would relate the experience very much to the Ichi the Killer OAV. Remember that thing? Though a completely sincere, visceral story, it gives you every opportunity to relate to it in a ironic self-distancing kind of way by looking cheap and possessing an intensity that outweighs its complexity.

Expect The King of Pigs to hit UK DVD next month with more grammatically correct subtitles than it has now but if you’re feeling adventurous the SK version is intelligible. No idea if we’ll ever see this in Americaland.

buckaroo banzai group end credits Seven Points: I wish I had more free time to do these but maybe I’d waste it scratching my butt.

You know that twilight moment when you first hear about something you know very little about and optimistically augment your lack of information with the most positive attributes possible?

I know, in our current age of ceaseless pop culture consumption that sort of thing doesn’t happen as often as it used to, but I remember seeing the very beginning of the 2005 Doctor Who relaunch and expecting it to be a better kind of science fiction. Less hammy and trite, more ramped up strangeness. Not about people running around while they hold hands, you know?

I was basically expecting it to be the 1984 movie The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. But I’m glad it wasn’t. Because instead I have The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

Your favorite Doctor might be the Jelly Babies guy with the googly eyes or the latest one with no eyebrows. Mine is Peter Weller with jet black hair and a Pee-wee Herman outfit. Mine’s the lead vocalist for a rock band while also being a theoretical physicist who helps his friend, Jeff Goldblum in a cowboy outfit, perform brain surgery in his off time.

I don’t want to let that paragraph sit there. I hate when people do that sort of thing and let the words hang in the air as if they automatically equate to genuine value or insight or not-wasting-your-time. You know, when they say things like “it’s about ninjas and dinosaurs, enough said!” Shut up nerd, enough has not been said.

But I ain’t got the time to go into more detail, a thousand apologies, I play this thing fast and loose.

skull man Seven Points: I wish I had more free time to do these but maybe I’d waste it scratching my butt.

One of the few Tokyopop manga titles I’ve read to completion is Skull Man. Originally created by the “King of Manga” Shotaro Ishinomori to sell TV studios in the seventies, the concept was rejected for being too dark for kids and got scrapped in favor of Kamen Rider, that tokusatsu franchise that’s been running forever alongside Super Sentai (known as Power Rangers in the US).

Shortly before his 1998 death, Ishinomori met up with manga artist and Ishinomori superfan Kazuhiko Shimamoto and invited him to reinvent the story as he saw fit. The result is the seven-volume Skull Man, a story filled with mutant beasts, doomed heroes, and a macabre transcendence of death.

It was a terrible idea to release this manga without including the fifty-page Skull Man oneshot Shotaro Ishinomori first drew in 1970. I don’t know why Tokyopop would choose to do that other than to alienate and confuse the daring few who’d give this a go without knowing much of anything about it. It can be difficult to decipher what’s a flashback and what isn’t if you aren’t familiar with the pilot story, as the fanboys who were reading this in Japan undoubtedly were. But good news! In recent months the Ishinomori Skull Man oneshot became available digitally on the Comixology website.

With it’s darker subject matter and more cinematic presentation Skull Man contrasts with the kind of manga Kazuhiko Shimamoto is most known for. Shimamoto is the living embodiment of intensely hotblooded manga heroes from the sixties and the seventies, as he channels their ceaseless verve into a bunch of rad manga that has only thus far been scanlated into English. But you can see his aesthetic come to life in this nineties Gainax OVA the company pretends they never created, Blazing Transfer Student:

It’s Shimamoto all the way: big sideburns, passionate yelling, giant explosions, and fire. Lots of fire. The sort of thing people rush to label a parody/satire when it’s absolutely not. Shimamoto is having fun with this degree of stylized intensity, but he means every second of it. He’s meant it his whole career.

Like I said, in Skull Man Shimamoto restrains those tendencies to pay solemn tribute to his hero. The result is that the only manga Shimamoto has published in North America is the least Shimamoto-like one he’s ever made. The sample page up there has eleven panels in it, which is a lot for any standard page of manga, but especially for Shimamoto’s rapid-fire style. I think the overall effect puts a greater emphasis on mood and atmosphere, as you may get from the sixteen panels that make up these two pages:

skull man1 Seven Points: I wish I had more free time to do these but maybe I’d waste it scratching my butt.

It looks like a lot of effort, but if you read the comic panel by panel the slinky dark intrigue of this urban tokusatsu story works quite well, and you’re “awarded” with more than a few impressive splash pages along the way.

More on Skull Man later. Maybe.