Review of Ryutaro Nakamura’s Kino’s Journey (2003)

I went into this series expecting great things. Being a fan of philosophy, I was looking forward to seeing a series that dealt with real themes in a serious way, in contrast to the conveyer belt of pointless fluff that permeates popular anime right now.

The basic story of Kino’s Journey is a travel log of the various experiences our protagonist (Kino) goes through on her motor bike voyages. Think The Motor Cycle Diaries minus Che Guevera, and set in an imaginary though fairly realistic land. With the exception of one two-parter, most of the episodes fit the stand alone format, with no connections between them. Even in terms of characters, Kino and her talking motor bike Hermes, are the only ones constantly featured. This gives the episodes a slightly disconnected feeling, as they don’t really build on each other, and I felt that every time Kino showed up in an episode I was seeing her for the first time. As such there is no overarching plot in the show in terms of a beginning middle and conclusion. I don’t particular have a problem with this, and feel myself welcoming of anything that tries to be original, as long as there is some real substance underneath it. Kino’s Journey certainly delivers in this respect.

Almost all of the episodes tackle themes and issues, from human solidarity and altruism, to the role of Messianic religion in society. Such variety is certainly welcome, and the content itself definitely encourages you to ponder such issues yourself. However this is by no means a perfect show. One of the down sides of covering a different theme in each episode is that they don’t always feel sufficiently explored within the twenty minutes. In this regard the show did feel slightly cluttered and rushed. The second issue is consistency. The high point for me of the entire series was the second episode. By the end of it I was filled with a transcendental feeling, that I imagine others get when some great human truth is exposed to you, in a powerful and indeed disturbing way. I was at this point very encouraged, and anticipating another eleven superb episodes. Sadly however this did not occur. The rest of the series did not keep with this level of quality. Certainly the episodes were engaging, but not on the same level, and they failed to express their theme with the potency that I described. The two-parter seemed slightly contrived. The means by which it explored its theme appeared to be purely for the purpose of having a huge action scene, rather than for direct and clear expression.

Another aspect I wasn’t entirely satisfied with was the protagonist herself. Kino is clearly meant to be a stoic and disinterested observer of the world she travels through, and I can understand the purpose behind this. As each episode deals with a different place and situation, it makes sense that her character should be disconnected and apathetic, so as she can experience these dilemmas, and yet move away from them at the end. This makes sense, but I would have preferred a more in-depth look at how Kino developed such an apathetic character. We are given some background as to how she started her travels, but no real explanation is given as to her reactions and outlook on life. She is in a sense a tragic character, unable to establish lasting relations with others, but we don’t fully made to realise why this is. I think this would have added an extra layer of variety and made the show much more engaging.

Despite these flaws I would definitely encourage all fans of progressive anime to watch this. At thirteen episodes it isn’t a huge commitment and certainly is superior to many other series of this length.    

(Commentary: It seems clear to me that Hezbollah’s attack against Israel last Summer was intended to act as a demonstration of Iran’s continued influence to the north of the Jewish state. More importantly it was a means to show that the Shi’ite confederacy (Iran, Hezbollah, the Allawite gov of Syria and pro-Iranian elements in Sunni Hamas) was capable of retaliating in the event of an Israeli aerial strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Not only that but Israel would also have to be on guard against retaliation from multiple directions, not just from the wounded Persians to the East. What is not clear is the extent to which Iran can threaten Israel in terms of aerial bombardment and ballistic strikes. I’d doubt Iranian planes will be able to penetrate their air space and long range missles probably won’t be too effective at that distance. Consider that only one Israeli was killed when Saddam hurled 39 SCUDs at Israel in ’91. However any chance of retaliation directly from Iran would certainly serve to widen the affair into a regional issue and so is likely to make the Israelis consider the consequences a little longer )

Ah RahXephon. The little Mecha that couldn’t. Readers will have to excuse any note of sadism in the tone of this review, but I don’t feel capable of talking about this show in any other way. I will say now I literally see nothing good about this cartoon. As an admirer of another pseudo-Mecha show, which will remain nameless I often heard RahXephon being compared to it. Not only that, I also heard it be claimed that RahXephon was in fact a superior version of this nameless show. I was skeptical of this claim, though I expected for people to talk so highly of it there must be some justification it terms of its quality. Sadly it is very possible for the majority to be completely wrong, as I was soon to find out. The premise of RahXephon is fairly typical of newer Mecha shows, tending to mix robot battles with a complicated and mysterious political or science fiction story. Such shows tend to allot the action scenes a fairly small amount of time, in noticeable contrast to their predecessors of the 80′s.  

The plot of RahXephon is quite bizarre even by the standards of science fiction and anime. Ayato Kamina, a young man living in Tokyo, is one day spirited from his home by a mysterious femme fatal, after appearing to witness a battle between strange looking titans in the sky above his city. He subsequently learns that Tokyo is in fact secretly controlled by aliens and surrounded by a giant dome, in which time moves slower to the rest of the world, of which he’d been told had been destroyed. From here he is taken to a secret organization, where he is to pilot a giant robot. Did I mention he and the mysterious girl escaped from Tokyo in a giant robot? Well they did, and now his job is to pilot it and fight giant floating statues that sing. This is where the show abandons any struggle to maintain an illusion of coherency. I won’t describe any more of the plot details so as not to spoil it any more than it spoils itself, however I don’t believe I actually could describe it further.  

The rest of the plot is just a puzzle, with pieces scattered all over the floor, which when assembled form an image of an empty space. Mystery plays a large part in the plot, the problem is that the mysteries are not particularly interesting, nor are the answers to them particularly surprising. That’s not to say I found them predictable, rather that I was left uncaring or apathetic by the results. I believe a large part of this lies with the way character development is handled. There isn’t any. At least not with any of the characters that matter. The one character who did seem to get an adequate amount of attention, turned out not to be that important to the “outcome” of the story. In another instance, one of the early episodes is almost totally devoted to a character who largely remains in the background for the remainder of the series. A prime reason why the character development was so poor I’d wager, was that there were simply too many of them, especially for a twenty-six episode series. There wasn’t enough time for even all the main characters to be developed, though I would have thought they could have at least concentrated on the ones who end up being integral to the conclusion. I couldn’t name half of the MAIN characters by the end and had little understanding of what their intended role was in the story.  It felt as though they were trying to cram as much in as possible. For example the obligatory “flash back” episode was focused on an element of the plot that overall isn’t that important. There were times when I felt that very basic plot points had been left undiscussed. Large parts of it seemed forced especially the romance which I will get to later.    

As there were absolutely no themes explored in this show, I can’t even accuse it of being pretentious. Defenders of it will no doubt protest, claiming it is about the nature of eternal love. Firstly, I’m not sure exactly what “eternal love” means in real life and secondly I’m not buying it. This brings me to the other major problem I have, alongside the lack of character development. The love “story” is absurd, to an extent that I felt personally insulted. To think that the writers of this show believed that there were human beings out there who would buy into this offended me as a human being. Sadly they seem to have been largely right however. Not only is the relationship involved totally ridiculous and unbelievable, it isn’t even handled well. There is barely any build up to it and so some early events even contradict the premise it is built on. It comes almost completely out of nowhere. 

Another problem I had with it is that it tries to be very refined and adult while putting the characters in dilemmas that are totally divorced from reality. This gives it almost a spoof feel at times. For example they managed to force a totally inappropriate “beach” and “Christmas” episode, both of which were blatantly out of place with the supposed dark mood of the story.  The way music is used (both in terms of the score and within the plot) was also a little too over the top for me.  For example the first episode opens with Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in a totally unjustified manner before any mood or context had been established.

In closing I saw absolutely nothing engaging or creative about this show. Large parts of it are boring beyond mercy and the plot is pretty mindless, despite being quite complicated. Unfortunately, I see RahXephon as part of a growing genre of “darkish” romance anime where to up the romance factor they make the context of the love story bizarre and nonsensical. In this genre I’d include Saikano, Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days. However I accept that I am in a minority in this holding this opinion. If you really want to see a newish Mecha anime with a bizarre plot, I personally would recommend Big O. The plot doesn’t make much more sense but the character development is worlds ahead of this money waster.

 http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2169201,00.html

Over the past few decades, many of the ideas of the far left have found new homes on the right. Lenin believed that it was in conditions of catastrophic upheaval that humanity advances most rapidly, and the idea that economic progress can be achieved through the devastation of entire societies has been a key part of the neo-liberal cult of the free market. Soviet-style economies left an inheritance of human and ecological devastation, while neo-liberal policies have had results that are not radically dissimilar in many countries. Yet, while the Marxist faith in central planning is now confined to a few dingy sects, a quasi-religious belief in free markets continues to shape the policies of governments.

Many writers have pointed to the havoc and ruin that have accompanied the imposition of free markets across the world. Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or post-communist Europe, policies of wholesale privatisation and structural adjustment have led to declining economic activity and social dislocation on a massive scale. Anyone who has watched a country lurch from one crisis to another as the bureaucrats of the IMF impose cut after cut in pursuit of the holy grail of stabilisation will recognise the process Naomi Klein describes in her latest and most important book to date. Visiting Argentina not long before the economic collapse of 2002, I found the government struggling to implement an IMF diktat to roll back public spending at a time when the economy was already rapidly contracting. The result was predictable, and the country was plunged into a depression, with calamitous consequences in terms of poverty and social breakdown.

Klein believes that neo-liberalism belongs among “the closed, fundamentalist doctrines that cannot co-exist with other belief-systems … The world as it is must be erased to make way for their purist invention. Rooted in biblical fantasies of great floods and great fires, it is a logic that leads ineluctably towards violence.” As Klein sees it, the social breakdowns that have accompanied neo-liberal economic policies are not the result of incompetence or mismanagement. They are integral to the free-market project, which can only advance against a background of disasters. At times, writing in a populist vein that echoes her first book No Logo, published seven years ago, Klein seems to suggest that these disasters are manufactured as part of a deliberate policy framed by corporations with hidden influence in government. Her more considered view, which is also more plausible, is that disaster is part of the normal functioning of the type of capitalism we have today: “An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the dotcom collapse all demonstrate.”

There are very few books that really help us understand the present. The Shock Doctrine is one of those books. Ranging across the world, Klein exposes the strikingly similar policies that enabled the imposition of free markets in countries as different as Pinochet’s Chile, Yeltsin’s Russia, China and post-Saddam Iraq. Part of the power of this book comes from the parallels she observes in seemingly unrelated developments. In a fascinating and alarming examination of the underside of recent history, she notes the affinities between the policies of shock therapy imposed in the course of neo-liberal market reform and the techniques of torture that have been routinely used by the US in the course of the “war on terror”. Klein begins her first chapter with a moving account of a conversation she had with a victim of a covert programme of mind-control experiments, carried out in Canada in the 1950s, which used people suffering from minor psychiatric ailments to try out techniques of “de-patterning” that aimed to scramble and reshape their personalities.

Employing electroshock therapy, sensory deprivation and drug-induced comas, these experiments helped develop some of the “coercive interrogation techniques” that have been practised in Guantánamo Bay. Klein uses torture as a metaphor, and does not claim any cause-and-effect link between its re-emergence and the rise of neo-liberal shock therapy; but she does point to some disquieting similarities. Individuals and societies have been “de-patterned” with the aim of remaking them on a better, more rational model. In each case, the experiments have failed, while inflicting lasting and often irreparable damage on those who were subjected to them.

But has the free market experiment failed? As Klein sees it, free market shock therapy may actually have succeeded in achieving its true objectives. Post-invasion Iraq may be “a ghoulish dystopia where going to a simple business meeting could get you lynched, burned alive or beheaded”. Even so, Klein points out, Halliburton is making handsome profits – it has built the green zone as a corporate city-state, and taken on many of the traditional functions of the armed forces in Iraq. An entire society has been destroyed, but the corporations that operate in the ruins are doing rather well. Klein’s message, then, seems to be that – at least in its own, profit-centred terms – disaster capitalism works.

There can be no doubt that fortunes have been reaped from the Iraq war as they have been from other experiments in disaster capitalism. Yet I remain unconvinced that the corporations Klein berates throughout the book understand, let alone control, the anarchic global capitalism that has been allowed to develop over the past couple of decades – any more than the neo-liberal ideologues who helped create it foresaw where it would lead. Rightly, Klein insists that free market ideology must bear responsibility for the crimes committed on its behalf – just as Marxist ideology must be held to account for the crimes of communism. But she says remarkably little about the illusions by which neo-liberal ideologues were themselves blinded. Milton Friedman and his disciples believed a western-style free market would spring up spontaneously in post-communist Russia. They were left gawping when central planning was followed by the criminalised free-for-all of the 90s, and were unprepared for the rise of Putin’s resource-based state capitalism. These ideologues were not the sinister, Dr Strangelove-like figures of the anti-capitalist imagination. They were comically deluded bien-pensants, who promoted their utopian schemes with messianic fervour and have been left stranded by history, as the radiant future they confidently predicted has failed to arrive.

The neo-liberal order is already facing intractable problems. The Iraq war may have allowed another experiment in shock therapy, but a failed state has been created as a result of which Gulf oil – which a former chair of the US joint chiefs of staff accurately described as “the jugular vein of global capitalism” – is less secure than before. Faced with defeat in Iraq, the Bush administration seems to be gearing up for an assault on Iran – a desperate move that would magnify the existing catastrophe many times over. At the same time financial crisis has reached into the American heartland as an implosion in speculation-driven credit markets has started to spread throughout the system. It is impossible to know how these crises will develop, but it is hard to resist the suspicion that disaster capitalism is now creating disasters larger than it can handle.

http://www.youtube.com/user/chumfum

Here is his review of Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991)

Part 1 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxXXFcjM9pw&mode=related&search=

Part 2

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2XBTUh0Qt0&mode=related&search=

The good Doctor at his best. 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLwTJxltQx0

The Times, 16 September 2007

 http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article2461237.ece

THE Prince of Wales is in “advanced negotiations” with Hollywood film producers to make a movie in which he will tell us how to lead our lives.

The prince, once an object of fun for talking to his plants, is being wooed to make a documentary film similar to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

The former US vice-president’s plea to save the planet was a surprise box-office success, making the idea of a royal “follow-up” a realistic proposition.

It invites the intriguing possibility of Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall attending parties alongside the likes of Robert Redford and Scarlett Johansson at the Sundance film festival in America.

Insiders at Clarence House insist the idea for the film, which has a working title of The Harmony Project in palace circles, came from Charles himself.

Those who consider him a meddler for his campaigns against genetically modified food, modern architecture, carbon-copy high streets and the British education system may propose the alternative title of The Inconvenient Prince.

The documentary will explore Charles’s concern that there is a worrying imbalance in man’s relationship with nature. Like Gore’s film, it will warn that “we are fast running out of time”.

Charles is in discussions with Stuart Sender, a director and producer whose film Prisoner of Paradise was nominated for an Oscar in 2003. It told the story of a Jewish cabaret star who was forced to make propaganda films for the Nazis before being sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Sender and his wife Julia Bergman, one of the producers of the 1997 film GI Jane starring Demi Moore, run Balcony Films, which claims to make “mainstream popular multi-platform media that inspires people to take action”. They were in London last week to look at locations and meet the prince.

Among Sender’s most recent projects was a film encouraging women to vote. It included contributions from Angie Harmon, the Texas-born actress and former model, and Felicity Huffman, who plays the harassed mother of four in Desperate Housewives.

The Harmony Project is likely to give a more challenging perspective to the problems facing the world than blockbusters such as Flood, which showed the arena, formerly the Millennium Dome, engulfed by the O2 Thames.

Charles wants to find a platform to preach his own message that, in the search for technological advancement, mankind has lost touch with the “wisdom of the past”.

He is likely to be filmed at his country home of Highgrove, Gloucestershire, where he enjoys watching the bees.

Initial ideas for the script, based on a speech Charles gave in Liverpool earlier this year, have him praising bees for the way they work together to produce a “harmonic whole”.

The backdrop is likely to switch to a high street as the prince compares the harmony of the beehive with what he sees as a convenience-based, throw-away consumerist society.

Charles is helping to set up people to be interviewed on camera for the film. They include Vandana Shiva, 54, an Indian physicist and environmental activist. Charles contacted her this summer to ask if she would like to appear in his film and later sent her an e-mail in which he confirmed Sender’s involvement in the project.

Her office said they expected filming to begin in the next eight weeks in the Punjab.

The prince feels the film will help put the record straight. It should be ready in time for his 60th birthday in November next year and will be seen by many as his personal manifesto.

But some of his closest advisers are worried it might still send out the wrong message. One palace insider said: “His advisers are worried that it will accentuate the quirky side of him. You could argue that it displays a certain self-indulgence.”

But a source close to Charles said: “He regards himself as the founding father of the harmony principle and the need for self-growth and he is grateful for the opportunity that these Hollywood producers are giving him to share his views with a wider audience.”

Clarence House said: “We are in discussion on various documentary projects. We are seriously considering three projects, one of which is the US-based documentary.”