Apple's Big Night!

For Apple fans and the Mac Faithful, tonight (Tokyo time) is the biggest night of the year, MACWORLD EXPO with a keynote by demi-god/rock star Steve Jobs. Watching last year’s keynote gave me the final push to convert to Mac. After much scrambling and suing my former rental agency, I purchased my 15″ Powerbook G4 in April 2005. From “Expose” to the “instant on” sleep mode, there is just no way I’d ever go back to a Windows PC in their current form.

I’m hoping Steve shows off a multi-button bluetooth mouse, but no rumors of that at all. I’d also like to see a remote for all Macs. Now it’s only available for new iMacs.

So tonight will continue the sense of community one gets from being part of the Mac Faithful. My first big experiences with it was with the release of Tiger back in May, lining up in front of the flagship Ginza Apple Store and all the buzz before that.

**UPDATE

Only thing I’ll be getting that was announced in the keynote will be iLife ’06.

Welcome back BSG!

BSG (Battlestar Galactica 2003+) is what’s called a DAMN good show. The 2nd season (for me) resumed tonight. The last episode back in September ended with a cliffhanger, and damn it if those bastards didn’t end this episode with a helluva cliffhanger as well. At least we have new weekly episodes until the end of February.

Frisbee resumed this weekend after a 3-week layoff. It was about as a good a winter day weather-wise as one is likely to get in Tokyo.

HUSTLE & FLOW [2005] review

I have discovered another great back-to-back set of movies to watch. Tonight pairing HUSTLE & FLOW with last night’s CRASH has made for an unintended showcase of Terrance Howard. … From the meek, yuppie character he played in CRASH, to the real, gritty, philosophical, dreaming pimp he plays in H&F. This movie shows the transformations that can happen in a person’s life, and the people around that person, when they find and act on their dream, their “mode” as I believe Djay [Terrance Howard] calls it in the movie.

Ludicras was also in both CRASH and H&F and I was impressed especially by his acting in the former.

The movie’s tagline is, “everybody gotta have a dream,” and unlike so many other movies, the dream in H&F is about being famous, it’s a dream about doing something that inspires you, just for the act of doing it itself. … He doesn’t once talk about moving out of his beat up house and buying a mansion, he doesn’t talk about fame. What he talks about is people hearing his dream, which is expressed in his raps about what life is really like on the street and how it feels to have to do those things. … To me this is what any musical artist should want, there music heard by as many people as possible without concern about getting paid. They complain about their music getting shared on the Internet, but isn’t that what they should be wanting as artists?

Anyway, through the first two acts of the movie I was just going with the flow and rhythm of Djay’s daily life and later his raps. Suddenly toward the end of the third act I found myself suddenly panicking about his fate. The director (& writer) Craig Brewer never asks us to like Djay or approve of what he does for a living. He does this by making pimping seem like a normal job that requires certain managerial skills, and not really much else. He does get support from a hooker on maternity leave, from a back in the day friend producer, a “light-skinned” brother, and his “financial investor.” His dream overflows into all these people’s lives, giving them something shining.

In the end, I couldn’t help myself pulling for him and his dream.

CRASH [2005] review

The first half of this movie is what I call a “makes you NEVER want to live in L.A.” movie, even though I did for 3 months (well, in the valley-ish). COLLATERAL is another such movie that might make you think, “Who the F would ever want to live in L.A.?” But then after all the movies stories have gone through their first run, and the connections and exchange of characters from the other stories starts to unfold, well, then you realize you are watching a special movie, as long as you don’t take this unfolding as a gimmick, which I didn’t.

…Some seem obviously right, some overtly hypocritical and reinforcing of the stereotype they just ranted against! … You can’t predict how a character is going to act in any given situation. The movie’s editing helps with the surprises and making you think you thought something.

…That makes the movie feel real, and that you are seeing REAL people, not characters. Almost every character, if not all, is a sympathetic figure on some level. It makes it very interesting then, as a viewer, when some of these characters come in conflict with each other. … It makes you think how would you have acted in that situation. Not many of those situations had easy outs, yet sometimes the movie did let the character get off “easy.”

During one scene in the movie, I actually gasped out loud when I realized what I thought had happened didn’t and connected to why it didn’t happen to a very brief moment earlier in the movie. If you didn’t make this connection yourself, unfortunately, the movie makes it overtly clear a few minutes later. I’d have preferred the director to reward the careful viewer rather than spell it out.

…This experience has long already made me sympathetic to the difficulties of people not living in their native country. … in the U.S. again, I will try to return the kindness and the favors by the people who have gone out of their way to help me, a foreigner, in their countries. Maybe CRUSH will help people who have never lived abroad, do this as well.

MARCH OF THE PENGUINS review

This movie, documentary rather, did not live up to the hype for me. I heard since the summer about how great MARCH OF THE PENGUINS was. It was a sleeper box office hit in the U.S. For the first 10 minutes, maybe 15, I was totally into the antarctic world. All the facts Morgan Freeman (narrator) spilled out piqued my mind. Then it seemingly became repetitive, or at the least the material was stretched too thin with little dramatic tension edited in. I had virtually zero emotional reaction to it, other than thinking the single life is definitely the way to go if you are a penguin.

Lack of drama is due to the only real enemy being shown, the winter. When a leopard seal is finally shown in “pursuit” of some female penguins, there was no tension. Some unnamed birds, maybe albatrosses, flew right into the middle of the pack of chicks, and walked right up and just grabbed one unlucky chick. It looked as violent as picking a tomato.

Not that there needed to be violence, but there needed to be something. I can appreciate the effort to get this on film. And the close-ups of the penguins are amazing. I just expected more from a theatrically released documentary, much more than I’d get from a 1-hour TV special.

Get on the MAP — join my Frappr group!

Haven’t heard of Frappr? It’s a mapping service somewhat related to Google (I think). What it does is allow you to plot your current location on a world map. I’ve started a map called “Jason in Tokyo.” I hope everyone goes there and plots themselves on the map. There’s also a forum for leaving messages and what not. I know a lot of people know me from specific places (Korea, Florida, Japan, California) so I think this Frappr gimmick is a good idea to show how where all the friends I made around the world know me from, and vice versa.

Plot yourself on my friends map, head here: Jason’s Frappr

CONSTANT GARDENER review

*warning light spoilers*

SYRIANA and the CONSTANT GARDENER have made a helluva 2 nights of movie watching. I highly recommend watching them in close proximity, although it took me quite some time to warm to the latter. CONSTANT GARDENER was made by the same director of the insanely great CITY OF GOD, Fernando Meirelles. His talent as a director is to make you feel like you are IN the location he filmed in. Hence, writing this review shortly after finishing CONSTANT GARDENER, I feel like I have just seen Africa. I have watched many, many animal specials on TV as a kid and adult, but those gave no inkling of what it is like to LIVE in Africa.

As Ralph Fiennes’ character searches and discovers why what happened happened to his vocal & kind-spirited wife, the camera weaves through real Africa, with dust, and grime, and no signs of what you see on the street in Tokyo, Boston, or even Auckland. This is a flashback spy/mystery/romance movie. What drives Fiennes’ character? Proof of his wife’s infidelity, or proof of the truth she was trying to expose? I felt it was the former, but as that became more resolved in his mind, he picked up where she left off in exposing that truth. Fiennes has grown greatly in my mind as an actor, and it certainly helped that he appeared in my beloved Harry Potter franchise. No manicness, no tantrums, but a controlled burning, driving intensity that by the end of the film, is palpable on screen.

SYRIANA showed the corruption of big oil. CONSTANT GARDENER shows the corruption of big pharmaceuticals. Watching these movies on consecutive nights certainly will not make one’s outlook on humanity rosy, but if you want to see things others do not want you to, and think for yourself what may or may not really be happening in the world, these two films will get you thinking, and show you a ground level view of two places on Earth you will probably never go in person.

Marunouchi wandering: CIRCUMNAVIGATING the Imperial Palace

Wanting to get out of the house on a crisp winter weekday, I set out for Marunouchi in search of a supposed wi-fi enabled cafe and to do some sightseeing around the Imperial Palace, which I have never been to before. I had what I thought was the novel idea to circumnavigate the Imperial Palace grounds, walking in a concentric circle around the moat, but as I walked by several people twice, I realized it is rather a popular thing to do. It was a very pleasant time ambling around in the late afternoon sunshine, the at times stiff wind icing my cheeks. I couldn’t help but look for weaknesses in the moat and surrounding walls the whole time I walked around the palace. I thought, “how could these walls be successfully assailed?” Far below there looked to be a patch of thin ice over part of the moat. I wanted to know for sure and thought about throwing a rock down and seeing if it makes a crack or a splash, but thought better as I might be arrested for attacking the palace and summarily deported! These are the things I think about.

The wi-fi enabled cafe was a wash. According to the website listing I found it on, it was supposed to be on the 7th floor of the Marunouchi Bldg, which is inaccessible unless you work on that floor. So instead I came to the EASE Cafe, where I am blogging from now, and sipped some organic ceylon tea. Nice urban semi-yuppie-hipster cafe playing who I think is Jamiroquai.

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