Tonight's movie, and Honoo no Mirage
Aug. 2nd, 2004 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaSo: two years late and what must be a good 20$ short, I start reading the Mirage of Blaze novel I've had lying about the house since my last Amazon shipment. (#3, Lullaby of Glass. The start of the continuity that got completely skipped between episodes 6 and 7, so don't expect post-anime spoilers or anything.) Remiel's right, it's not at all a hard read. >_> Simpler prose than Peacemaker Kurogane, all told - though I've always been rather impressed with the language level in PMK - and there's furigana. At a chapter or two a day it won't take me more than a week to finish. The biggest problem so far is @#$% names and ranks, aka Legend of Galactic Heroes Syndrome. Unlike Tania, I never even took any Japanese history at uni; I know names like Oda Nobunaga or Date Masamune but I'll be damned if I know all their relations, generals and adversaries, let alone which relations happen to be generals and/or adversaries. I'll pick it up, mind you, which won't prevent it from dribbling out the other ear as soon as I stop reading the series. The same thing's already happened with various chunks of European and Chinese history. -_-
(The comparison with PMK is quite apposite, as by simple calculation Kuwabara-sensei couldn't have been more than twenty when she started writing HnM. I also remember Remi saying somewhere that it drew from some tabletop(?) RPG, which would totally not surprise me. Doesn't it smack of fangirl slashing of her historical RPG charas? I mean, in a good way? XD)
Uhm... if you want to know what it reads like, it's kind of basic off-the-shelf fantasy-novel type writing. Lots of exposition and narrator infodump. Not to say it's bad, though; it's clean prose that moves the action along at a nice clip, just that there's not much "pretty" style to slow me down. XD For now, anyway. Anyone who's read a long series knows that book 30 is very different from book 3.
***
Tonight was my last movie of the festival: Dark Water. Same director as Ring, adapted from a book by the same author (I think). It's not Ring - you'd have to be pretty slow on the uptake not to have figured out what's going on by the movie's halfpoint, and the after-effect is more sadness than fright - but it's a brilliant film in its own right. For a horror flick it's thematically mature, and the cinematography and direction should be a pleasure to film students, or anyone in general who has an eye for composition and visuals. That is, insofar as one could term "pleasure" a film that renders one a nervous wreck for ninety minutes, and a bawling wreck toward the end. ^^; It really did. The scariest moment in Ring is not so much when Sadako you-know-whats, but a few seconds before - exactly when depends on the viewer - when you suddenly realise what's going to happen and that nothing can stop it. Dark Water had a moment like that too, when the elevator doors slammed shut, but instead of liquefying in abject terror I started crying and couldn't stop. If you garner from this that I'm set off by mother-daughter relationships, you'd be quite right.
The way horror works, I tend to think, is not so much that bad things happen to good people, but that punishment occurs in disproportion to the "crime" - which may itself be something that "everyone does", even ourselves. Hence the horror. The stereotype of 80's "slasher" movies runs that teenagers are punished in them for being sexually active. The recent crop of Asian psychological horror movies are all about failing family, appropriately enough for the thumbnail cultural analysis. Failing your younger siblings, failing your children, and - perhaps most of all - failing the child you yourself once were. These are daily "crimes" that everyone commits, and that are difficult to make up for. Nakata Hideo's work in particular (I suspect him more than the source material, as the divorced mother was not in the original Ring novel) focuses on both the emotional plight of the neglected child, and that of the guilt-ridden mother who may not have a choice about juggling family and work. In this sense Dark Water is an expansion of ideas touched upon in Ring. I don't think he's precisely blaming the single mothers for not keeping their marriages together for the sake of the children, even if neglect is definitely the "crime" in both cases. I mean, in both movies when the Masculine Principle shows up with his decisiveness and logical thinking the viewer has already been reduced to the same gibbering wide-eyed mess as the heroine, and thus is stupidly grateful and relieved to see him no matter how humiliating and anti-feminist it is XD, but in both movies the Masculine Principle turns out to be essentially unhelpful. The woman has to find the inner strength to solve the problem herself, which is as much to say come to terms with her own maternal guilt. If that involves self-sacrifice... well, it's a Japanese movie, ainnit.
To wrap it up, reading Mirage of Blaze gave me the perfect vocabulary word to describe Dark Water: ジメジメ。 --Damp, dank, gloomy, morbid. Dank probably comes closest in its connotations.
(The comparison with PMK is quite apposite, as by simple calculation Kuwabara-sensei couldn't have been more than twenty when she started writing HnM. I also remember Remi saying somewhere that it drew from some tabletop(?) RPG, which would totally not surprise me. Doesn't it smack of fangirl slashing of her historical RPG charas? I mean, in a good way? XD)
Uhm... if you want to know what it reads like, it's kind of basic off-the-shelf fantasy-novel type writing. Lots of exposition and narrator infodump. Not to say it's bad, though; it's clean prose that moves the action along at a nice clip, just that there's not much "pretty" style to slow me down. XD For now, anyway. Anyone who's read a long series knows that book 30 is very different from book 3.
***
Tonight was my last movie of the festival: Dark Water. Same director as Ring, adapted from a book by the same author (I think). It's not Ring - you'd have to be pretty slow on the uptake not to have figured out what's going on by the movie's halfpoint, and the after-effect is more sadness than fright - but it's a brilliant film in its own right. For a horror flick it's thematically mature, and the cinematography and direction should be a pleasure to film students, or anyone in general who has an eye for composition and visuals. That is, insofar as one could term "pleasure" a film that renders one a nervous wreck for ninety minutes, and a bawling wreck toward the end. ^^; It really did. The scariest moment in Ring is not so much when Sadako you-know-whats, but a few seconds before - exactly when depends on the viewer - when you suddenly realise what's going to happen and that nothing can stop it. Dark Water had a moment like that too, when the elevator doors slammed shut, but instead of liquefying in abject terror I started crying and couldn't stop. If you garner from this that I'm set off by mother-daughter relationships, you'd be quite right.
The way horror works, I tend to think, is not so much that bad things happen to good people, but that punishment occurs in disproportion to the "crime" - which may itself be something that "everyone does", even ourselves. Hence the horror. The stereotype of 80's "slasher" movies runs that teenagers are punished in them for being sexually active. The recent crop of Asian psychological horror movies are all about failing family, appropriately enough for the thumbnail cultural analysis. Failing your younger siblings, failing your children, and - perhaps most of all - failing the child you yourself once were. These are daily "crimes" that everyone commits, and that are difficult to make up for. Nakata Hideo's work in particular (I suspect him more than the source material, as the divorced mother was not in the original Ring novel) focuses on both the emotional plight of the neglected child, and that of the guilt-ridden mother who may not have a choice about juggling family and work. In this sense Dark Water is an expansion of ideas touched upon in Ring. I don't think he's precisely blaming the single mothers for not keeping their marriages together for the sake of the children, even if neglect is definitely the "crime" in both cases. I mean, in both movies when the Masculine Principle shows up with his decisiveness and logical thinking the viewer has already been reduced to the same gibbering wide-eyed mess as the heroine, and thus is stupidly grateful and relieved to see him no matter how humiliating and anti-feminist it is XD, but in both movies the Masculine Principle turns out to be essentially unhelpful. The woman has to find the inner strength to solve the problem herself, which is as much to say come to terms with her own maternal guilt. If that involves self-sacrifice... well, it's a Japanese movie, ainnit.
To wrap it up, reading Mirage of Blaze gave me the perfect vocabulary word to describe Dark Water: ジメジメ。 --Damp, dank, gloomy, morbid. Dank probably comes closest in its connotations.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
DVDs, etc.
Date: 2004-08-02 10:13 pm (UTC)-Ced
no subject
Date: 2004-08-02 10:17 pm (UTC)I have the manga as well, but it's different than the movie. I was told that the manga is much more closer to the novel's storyline than the movie. But I guess that's Nakata Hideo for you.
Poor Mitsuko, poor Ikuko, poor Yoshimi. But what a movie. I still love it, even now. ^^
And Mirage of Blaze novel? *staaaares*
Re: DVDs, etc.
Date: 2004-08-03 08:08 am (UTC)(Bah, there's no point in trying so hard. Just buy something you like.)
no subject
Date: 2004-08-03 08:12 am (UTC)