KUNG FU PANDA [2008] review

I’ll be the first to admit I’m a cinema snob, so to speak, so it’s is extremely rare that I ever watch a movie like KUNG FU PANDA, let alone pay to see it in a theater (especially at Tokyo prices of ¥1,800 {$18}).  However, there is a brand new movie theater in Shinjuku that was supposed to be pretty nice.  And I knew the people I was seeing the movie with would really enjoy it, so I acquiesced.  This is also the first Jack Black movie I’ve ever seen that didn’t have KING KONG in it or a lot of elitist music dialogue.  

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No concept of time [essay]

I have no concept of time.  By that I mean that my mind does not easily accept the accepted ways of perceiving time.  To start, let me list my difficulties with time:

• I always think people are the same age as when I first met them.
• Weeks feel like a constant stream of the exact same moment.
• I have very few memories of my childhood.
• Time can be quantified easier as one gets older.
• I want (or need) to be able to pause time, or step out of it to try and catch up.

In the following I will elaborate on the above points in order to try and express my distresses with time and not being able to stop it, how it is to feel it slip through mental fingers in my mind, and how it all feels like just one long moment, as Vonnegut described in Slaughterhouse-Five.

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3 Imperial Laps in a Haze

• Distance:  15.82 miles
• Time in motion:  1 hour 00 minutes 56 seconds
• Average speed:  15.6 mph
• Max speed:  28.5 mph

I just didn’t have it tonight, and I knew it even before I left my apartment.  A ludicrously late bedtime last night, a late, undigested dinner, and lots of humidity and red lights all added up to a very slow 3-laps around the Imperial Palace tonight.  I felt like my head was in a cloud the whole ride.  The constant red lights just getting out to the palace loop did nothing for my rallying, and I didn’t even make the light for dropping into the loop, which I make like 90% of the time!  

I had no delusions of doing 4-laps tonight as I proudly did last Thursday night.  I just barely finished the 3-laps tonight in the allotted 30-minute time limit.  I had to even clip out of my pedals once the traffic was so bad.  No doubt I have to go riding earlier from now on.  I now believe traffic picks up again after 11pm.  So the best time is between 9:30pm and 10:45pm.

Of note, the level of safety Japanese cyclists find adequate totally baffles me.  I saw these two things tonight:

1. On one of the fastest parts of the palace loop I pass a young j-girl on a Japanese-style bike listening to earphones while checking e-mail on her cell phone with no front or rear lights and wear dark-ish clothes.  
2. A seemingly real cyclist j-dude on a track bike riding in between two lanes of full speed traffic in a very hairy section of Shinjuku-dori without a rear light in dark clothes!  (later I saw he at last had a front light)

I would personally feel totally petrified to ride under either circumstances.  It was really shocking just to see that j-dude ride in the middle of the road with cars zipping by him to his left and to his right, all with no rear light!  This wasn’t just for a second either, it was for several hundred meters.  Shocking.

Skimboarding 2008 – Session #03 – Hiratsuka

The waves were significantly bigger this time at Hiratsuka, which always makes for more fun for the skimboarder, as well as the chance for bigger wipeouts!  But here’s a secret—big wipeouts are fun.  They may look like they hurt, but most of the time you are falling into deep water so it’s just a matter of keeping your mouth closed so as not to drink in any water.

Besides the larger waves, the biggest conditions difference was that the sand was a bit softer, no doubt because of the larger waves crashing on the shore and carrying sand all over the place.  This meant I ran a step slower than in the previous week’s session.  It also meant that my ears ended up being full of black sand!  Usually I get a little, but this time the amount of sand coming out was a bit disconcerting.  Aya hadn’t experienced this before, so I had to reassure that this was normal for skimboarding Shonan area beaches.

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DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS [2001] review

In the past three months I’ve probably watched more documentaries than I have in the past three years.  This streak started with DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS. I’m a big fan of skateboarding and surf culture, and prefer to live the surfer lifestyle myself, which stems from my love of the Sea and need to live by the Sea.  DOGTOWN is a slightly pretentious documentary that sheds light on how skateboarding evolved from just doing handstands on a board with fragile wheels, all the way to the modern skating style.  I found the detail and clear points showing how the Z-Boys aped moves of a surfer to be able to do never-before-done moves on a skateboard to be fascinating.  

The inevitable personal and group crisis segments were tolerable and I guess needed inclusion, but I’d like to have a documentary for once not have to involve this kind of thing.  

The ingenuity and boldness these early skateboarders employed in order to just be able to skate brought out the rebel in me.  Seeing them hop fences in suburban neighborhoods to ride in empty pools at risk of being discovered by the police was something I would have liked to of joined in on.  Describing the hierarchy of these rare, and thus valuable, skating places showed the badass spirit of skateboarding as well.  If you were some punk just joining the group, don’t expect to be allowed entry into the pool!

I think RIDING GIANTS and DOGTOWN make two great companion documentaries on the origins of big wave surfing and California street skating.  I recommend watching them on successive weekends.  Watch DOGTOWN first though.

Yokohama Fireworks Hanabi 2008!

Hanabi is a Japanese word that means fireworks display viewing.  Donning a yukata for the first time, I went to Yamashita Park in Yokohama, Japan with Aya for some mid-summer hanabi action.  Back on Friday, Aya helped me go yukata shopping, selecting a nice navy blue one.  She donned a deep purple yukata hand-sewn by her mother for her.  It is traditional to wear yukata to hanabi and other Japanese summer festivals.  How does it feel to wear a yukata?  A little restricting and a bit hot, but it felt good to have my attire contribute to the overall festive atmosphere.

Getting a choice spot for hanabi would have required arriving at iPhone waiting type times, so all things considered, we thought we had found ourselves a pretty good spot to spread the Big Agnes Seedhouse footprint.  Then we realized a large tree would be obstructing a good part, if not all, of our view.  It turned out to be only a partial obstruction, with low fireworks totally visible.  

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TOUCHING THE VOID [2003] review

I had of course long heard about TOUCHING THE VOID, but only finally watched it tonight.  I didn’t even know if it was a documentary or a feature film until I checked IMDB right before starting it.  I would call VOID a mixture of documentary and feature film since there is so much dramatic and amazing reenactment mixed in with just the right amount of talking head scenes.  

VOID describes the harrowing tale of two young British mountaineers attempting to alpine climb the face of a mountain in the Andes that had never been done before.  Obviously since they made a documentary out of the story, it was not a cakewalk to the summit and back down.  However, as you see the two actual men some 20 years later, you do know they survive right from the get go, but not until the very end do you actually let yourself believe it.  Countless times I thought, “how the F is he going to get out of that?”  Countless times.  This happens in most action movies, and then some gimmick happens making it easy to see how they will survive.  

There are no gimmicks in VOID.

Just pure, ultimate display of the human spirit’s will to survive and what a Man can accomplish if his will is strong enough.  

I found myself relating to the survival techniques used.  Recalling an internal voice mercilessly telling you to keep carrying on, I heard that voice at times in the past when out hiking myself (in particular climbing out of the Kaibab trail in the Grand Canyon).  In my case, it was only for a few hours, not days.  

Truly amazing and truly inspiring story.

And I’ve written this in past movie reviews—watching a movie in HD is an entirely different experience.  I watched a 720p version of VOID and it was stunning and helped me feel totally immersed in the snow, the vistas, the glacier, the crevice, the mind of the two men.

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