Odds and Ends 003

JockRothko: No.

After catching up on this in time for tomorrow's post I have two quick and important questions:

 whose movies I find eye-rollingly ridiculous.  

In a 1,000 years will they all be calling Play a summit of human civilization? Busts of Moby available for your mantle, latin inscriptions--"The Man Who Made The Record That Kept On Getting Better"--and a wryness to the smile.

Was plunging through my blog, looking at old posts from back when I started writing.  I'm cleaning up my Wordpress for some stuff I have planned, and I found this line.  I hope you like it.

Raditude is a lot like junior high.  You’re tolerable for about three minutes, your stupidity is annoying no matter how little you try to make that matter, and all of your music sucks.

I wish that you guys could see these scores update as I count each ballot.  It's going up and down like last week's Iowa caucuses, except the top four are all totally in this race.

Since Raul is here and coming around to my sixth favorite album of the year, let me say that I'm counting his ballot and I think he might be the only one to not vote for any of the top four.  Me, I voted for three of the top four (them making up my top three, with the other one at my number eleven), so I'm not saying he's right to have done so, but I'm one to commend individualism.  Fun ballot to tally.

I have now counted ten ballots, so all but one that I received through January third.  Some facts you guys might be interested in.

It makes me sad to hear that the Castro may not be showing movies any more. When I lived in SF in the 70s and 80s there were some half dozen repertory movie theaters, not to mention the art-house Surf chain, of which the Castro was a member at one point. I practically lived in those theaters. The thing is, even here in Tokyo the trend is toward total homogenization of the movie-going experience. Ten years ago, Tokyo was the equal of NY, LA and Paris in the diversity of movies that you could actually see in a real theater. There were dozens of small distributors who, among them, managed to make available every major film that was being released somewhere in the world, but that's all gone. Part of the problem, of course, is the economy; but mainly it's that the generation of moviegoers who made such diversity of taste possible before the turn of the millennium have grown older and there's no one to replace them. Young Japanese people only see Japanese movies, which in itself isn't a bad thing except that, like Hollywood, Japanese cinema now is dominated by a commercial mindset that reduces everything to formula, and I don't just mean plot formula. The business is controlled by large media corporations and talent agencies who are into synergy: TV series are adapted from manga and then re-adapted as movies with the latest "idol" stars. Of course, there's an "indie" cinema in Japan, too, but except for anime, most of the low-budget art films being made in Japan are still affected by the commercial exigencies of the large media companies, meaning they tend to use talent with "name value" that has nothing to do with actual "talent." The result is that even movies with aspirations toward something more meaningful than entertaining 13-year-olds seem overly contrived and lacking in originality. Part of the reason is the paucity of a critical culture. In Japan, all film critics are either pundits or PR flacks, so there's no discussion about the relative worth of movies as works of art or viewing experiences. No one wants to risk offending anyone else, which is how you get a superstar art film director like Sion Sono, whose movies I find eye-rollingly ridiculous. 

Well, Jason, I certainly wouldn't call these times a 'Golden Age' of cinema--I didn't call anything a Golden Age, actually, just quoting the buzzword for that decade.