Memorial Day 2011

It feels strangely like the calm before a storm and I’m not talking about the weather.  A feeling of melancholy lingers in the air as I listen to 60’s music while writing this.

While it has been decades since the Vietnam War ended, Memorial Day is reminding me of it and other conflicts, past and present. Names like Bosnia, Gettysburg, Mogadishu, the Ardennes, Bougainville, Restrepo, Fallujah, Normandy, Okinawa, and many more flit through my distracted mind, but Vietnam keeps coming to the fore.  I suppose that is because of my half-brother Steve, who served two tours there.  While he came back unlike those we honor today, he didn’t come back undamaged.

So many have made the ultimate sacrifice for their country and I’m deeply grateful for the lives they led and gave.  In an era of fewer and fewer serving in the military, a price has been paid by the general public.  That price is detachment from the sacrifices made as the burdens have fallen on a shrinking number of families. My prayers and thanks go out to those families.  Let the deaths of those soldiers not just be remembered – let them be not in vain.

Yarg.

Ill again, this time with a spotty rash that started on the face last night after midnight but has spread to the chest and back.  I feel punchy at best and while not having a fever I’m staying put until it clears up.  Hopefully it is an allergic reaction of some kind rather than something communicable.

This is what I get for going out to do things two nights in a row, I suppose.

Thor (2011)

I just got back from seeing Thor in 3D at the Spring Grove Cinema tonight.  It was better than I expected and Kenneth Branagh proved he can handle a big budget action film better than most directors. Clearly his directing got the most from all the actors and nobody acted like they were sleep walking through their part.

The cast was excellent and Chris Hemsworth was perfect as Thor.  But the real scene stealer was Tom Hiddleston as Loki, which is appropriate since Loki is always a scene stealer in the comic books and even the original Norse mythology.  I even like Natalie Portman in it, which is a first for me!  Anyone complaining about Idris Elba playing Heimdall just needs to go see the movie – he captures the gravitas of the character and is a proper guard of the Rainbow Bridge.

While there are plenty of explosions, vicious fights, and effects galore, the main story is very Shakespearean. At the heart of the movie is a classic story about two princes trying to be worthy of their father, Odin the king.  One is fair and foolish, the other dark and cunning, but both crave their father’s love and approval.  A shaky truces between races, old age, and intrigue complicate things enough, but the brash arrogance of Thor starts a tragedy.

Having proven himself to be stupid and vain, Thor gets himself a one way ticket from the realm of Asgard to Midgard, aka Earth, as punishment. Stripped of his powers and rank, he has to prove himself worthy to regain his godhood.  That sets up some of the drama and all of the comedy as we get to see the now mortal god deal with being a mere man. It also is chance for him to gain some humility and find out what really matters through his interaction with Dr. Jane Foster (Portman) and her colleagues.

Effects were excellent, if overwhelming at times.  One scene did annoy me greatly and that was because the humans hit with shattered glass came out of it uncut.  Nice 3D effect, but come on!  The 3D wasn’t that exciting to me and certainly not up to the standards of other films I’ve seen in the format. At least it wasn’t distracting.

Now for some comic book geekery.

The Destroyer was interestingly and well done.  In the comics, it was an engine of destruction capable of taking on gods and it lived up to that. It was a little fragile in this rendition, but it was faithful to the look and menace I remember as a kid.

The art design was a loving tribute to Jack Kirby’s designs and I saw hints of Walter Simonson’s renditions as well. Asgard and Jotunheim were both sufficiently alien to be believable.

The Warriors Three translated well into live action and were the characters I always enjoyed.  The SHIELD agent description of them and Lady Sif cracked me up.

The way Mjolnir was used was faithful in all ways to the comic and we pretty much got to see every variation except one: the ability to transport across dimensions.  Even the twirling was used multiple times.

Hawkeye’s unnamed cameo wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

All in all, Thor was a good movie. Not a great movie, but a good one. Worth seeing and stay after the credits for a very big hint about The Avengers movie it sets up.

What a Tsunami Does to a Nuclear Power Plant

Over at The Mainichi Daily News they have some amazing photos of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant being hit by the tidal wave. The car being throne up into the building is particularly impressive and give an idea of scale.  It truly shows how gigantic the wave was and it was amazing that events weren’t worse at the reactor – even as bad as they were. 

Looking at this and other articles there, I realized that I want to post about such events here and not on Facebook like I did in March. Things get lost there and aren’t easy to find again for posterity, since it is a very superficial place. Events like the devastation of Japan by the tsunami is not something to readily forget, but human memory is what it is and that is limited.

It will be interesting to see if I can divorce the reality of what happened there from the fantasy of Godzilla movies the next time I watch one. Watching the footage and viewing the photographs was surreal, because in a way I’d already seen things like that happen in Japan thanks to the movies.  These photos did not help with that and I wonder if I’ll be able to enjoy those films again.

Good News for the World

The butcher of Srebrenica has finally been arrested after all these years. Ratko Mladic, the rat who commanded the Serbian troops, was captured by Serbian intelligence and will be extradited to face war crimes charges. While the timing is suspect, since Serbia wants to join the European Union and had plenty of opportunity to nab him, it is still glad tidings.  I remember ranting at the Clinton administration to do something about “ethnic cleansing,” which was a brand new phrase at the time and waiting for a small eternity to see action taken.

For people who think modern countries can always peacefully work things out internally, the disintegration of Yugoslavia should be a cautionary example. It is a very fine line between civilized and barbaric behaviors – something that should never be forgotten and carefully monitored.

Mama’s, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Otaku’s–Part 3

Pandering to an otaku audience goes to far when you make them the stars of the show.  Everything becomes too incestuous and closed to outsiders, which eventually leads to both moral and financial decline.

Part 1 can be found here.

Part 2 can be found here.

There is a great danger when any group only “preaches to the choir” whether it be in religion, politics, art, entertainment or business.  One thing that a lot of outsiders to manga/anime notice is how almost everything is currently set in high school or the protagonists are high school age.  It is as if the only valid beings in existence are teenagers.  But there are some reasons for this and it doesn’t have to do with the physical age of the audience the producers are catering to.  It has more to do with their emotional age and the curious attitude that life ends when you become an adult in modern Japan.

While young protagonists have always been part of the genre, they were often university students and you used to see more adult characters in the casts.  That’s what I remember from the 1980’s and 1990’s, so I looked through archives on the Internet to see if I was misremembering things.  It turns out that I wasn’t and that things had started changing around the turn of the century.

Perhaps this is the end result of a declining population and an entertainment driven society, but I also suspect that the pressure to succeed and conform is a major factor. Rather than deal with reality, the plethora of media to distract has become a potent drug, much like Aldous Huxley predicted in Brave New World.  The otaku’s represent this more than the average citizen, I expect.

But back to the changing protagonists.  They are nearly always high school (or sometimes middle school) students and quite often are perverts.  By this, I mean they are into sexually deviant behavior such as peeping, collecting pornography, exhibit sado-maschistic tendencies, and collect harem’s.  This includes both male and female characters in both shounen (boy) and shoujo (girl) stories. 

To make things worse, the shounen leads usually fall into two types:  rude idiots or wimpy whiners.  Sometimes they manage to blend the two, but they are usually outcasts at school.  Gone are the strong good guys out to save the day at the first opportunity; instead they have to be dragged into taking action or doing good at all.

Does that sound like a bunch of emotionally arrested anti-social misfits?  Ah, that would be the main consumer of this dwindling market, wouldn’t it? 

If that wasn’t direct enough pandering, many series are now featuring otaku’s of both genders as leads or main cast members.  Even mangaka’s (comic book creators) have become the focus of series! I’ll give a pass to Bakuman as it has been a great expose on how the industry works while still managing to be entertaining.

So what has happened is that the pandering of the industry to its dwindling customer base has resulted in a self perpetuating limit, since more and more you need to be a die hard otaku to get all the references and in jokes. But a problem with having such closed community is that things get boring fast as only very formulaic stories get purchased, achieve high ratings, or get votes.  Yes, voting is a big factor in manga success.

Because so many stories are printed in weekly magazines such as Shonen Jump, the editors rely on sent in votes from the readers on what titles are succeeding.  At least the comic books in the United States are stand alone titles and sink or swim on their own merits.  In Japan, a tiny amount of readers hold vast sway over what lives or dies.  These are the most motivated and obsessive otaku’s who have been handed immense power over the content published – simply because they bother to vote when most readers don’t.

No wonder things have gotten to such a point.

Getting back to boredom with content being a problem; there are only a few ways to break that.  One is new and innovative stories and ideas, but the otaku’s aren’t really interested in that.  Their behavior is that of a drug addict instead.  What they want is a more intense high, or in other words, the same old tropes but taken to ever greater extremes.  So more sex, more perversion, bigger battles, and anything else that is titillating to break the boredom.

Don’t get me wrong, there are good series of manga’s and anime’s being produced.  But much like the decline in television shows here, it is like panning for gold in a sewage treatment plant.  I don’t foresee things improving at all in the short or long terms.

So parents, check out what your children are watching or reading, especially on the Internet.  A lot of people view comic books and cartoons as innocent fun, but those days are long gone.

Well, after writing this extended rant, I’ll have to be fair and do some writing about some of the nuggets of gold I’ve found in manga and anime.  But that will have to wait for another day.

Follow Up on the La Crosse Tornado

Much to my relief, there were no serious injuries. But there is a lot of property damage as can be seen over at The La Crosse Tribune’s gallery of pictures.  From what I’ve heard back from church members, one had his work trailer crushed by a tree and possible house damage.  I know someone who works at the damaged K-Mart and he wasn’t working that day, but I imagine it will make his job interesting for awhile.  Given what happened to Joplin, which is roughly the same size city, I’m very grateful things turned out the way they did.

La Crosse probably won’t get federal disaster relief but Governor Scott Walker has toured the damage. 

Locally, I still haven’t gotten out to see any of the damage near Caledonia, but might today. 

Meanwhile, the people of North Minneapolis and Joplin need our prayers.

It was a tense night and early morning following from wondering how people I know in the area fared.  Most I contacted didn’t suffer any damage and only a few haven’t gotten back to me yet.  This is one of few times no news being good news is true, I think.