Announcement
- I am quite addicted to martial arts movies, which is odd when you consider that I hate violence. But when I declaim my love for these films my offline friends start back in horror and make warding motions with their hands. I am quite, quite alone in my obsession. My goal in joining Alive not Dead is to skulk around the forums and read other people’s pages and pick up some information on my favourite genre of films.
My blog
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Suzanne White writes about Mercury Retrograde
Wednesday, Sep 2, 2009 7:46AM / Standard Entry
Below is some text I have cut and pasted from one of my favourite astrologers Suzanne White. Suzanne has a unique view on astrology in that she is adept at melding and analysing people through both their Western and Oriental astrological signs. You can check out her website or track her down on Facebook if you want to know more. In the meantime, read what she has to say about bastard Mercury retrograde:
Dear Readers, Friends and New Astrology™ App. members,
On September 6th, 2009 the planet Mercury goes retrograde. It will stay that way until September 29 when it starts to go "direct' again. Of course Mercury retrograde doesn't really indicate that the planet is acutally moving backward. But because of various scientific phenomena of which I am utterly ignorant, it appears to be in reverse. We call these times "Mercury Retrograde".
For some reason, we also attribute certain undesirable effects to Mercury's recalcitrant shenanagins.
During Mercury Retrograde, astrologers like to warn us, we should not sign contracts, make promises, take up with new lovers and expect their seductive promises to mean longevity beyond next Tuesday. During Mercury retrograde we should also refrain from expecting electronic equipment to function at full capacity. Computers and the like seem to sense Mercury revving up to back up and begin pulling all manner of tricks a nd engendering glitches and spikes guaranteed to drive us all bats.
During Mercury retrograde, we are also told that unresolved issues from the past tend to crop up. People and conflicts we thought we'd left behind in the past, come ambling in through our kitchen or office door which can raise all sorts of "dead" issues and snarl up the present in a big way. A dodgy parent you left in the dust when you were but a pup, returns to announce he or she is getting married to someone your own age. A child returns from a ten-year absence to ask you for money to climb Mount Everest. Things and events from out of the past, that you might rather would have remained there, suddenly surge from out of nowhereto re-bedevil you. My advice? Snarl and keep smiling.
These not so charming burps from the past can botch an otherwise cloudless September horizon. So, from September 6 through 29 be on the lookout for snafus of all variety. Don't commit to anything life altering. Sign nothing binding. Do not get married, engaged or start a new business during this twisty turny period. Keep all options open.
And if someone insists you commit or sign or promise, just say a polite NO. They can wait (and even sweat a bit) until October 1 when old Mercury recommences her journey frontwards.
Good luck. Fair warning. Next Mercury retrograde starts December 26 and runs through Januray 15, 2010. More about it then.
Happy Horoscopes!
Suzanne White
SuzanneWhite.com
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Why they kill their newborns
Tuesday, Sep 1, 2009 10:47AM / Standard Entry
The below article was retireved from http://www.rightgrrl.com/carolyn/pinker.html
New York Times
November 2, 1997,
Sunday Section: Magazine Desk
Why They Kill Their Newborns
By Steven Pinker
Killing your baby. what could be more depraved? For a woman to destroy the fruit of her womb would seem like an ultimate violation of the natural order. But every year, hundreds of women commit neonaticide: they kill their newborns or let them die. Most neonaticides remain undiscovered, but every once in a while a janitor follows a trail of blood to a tiny body in a trash bin, or a woman faints and doctors find the remains of a placenta inside her.
Two cases have recently riveted the American public. Last November, Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson, 18-year-old college sweethearts, delivered their baby in a motel room and, according to prosecutors, killed him and left his body in a Dumpster. They will go on trial for murder next year and, if convicted, could be sentenced to death. In June, another 18-year-old, Melissa Drexler, arrived at her high-school prom, locked herself in a bathroom stall, gave birth to a boy and left him dead in a garbage can. Everyone knows what happened next: she touched herself up and returned to the dance floor. In September, a grand jury indicted her for murder.
How could they do it? Nothing melts the heart like a helpless baby. Even a biologist's cold calculations tell us that nurturing an offspring that carries our genes is the whole point of our existence. Neonaticide, many think, could be only a product of pathology. The psychiatrists uncover childhood trauma. The defense lawyers argue temporary psychosis. The pundits blame a throwaway society, permissive sex education and, of course, rock lyrics.
But it's hard to maintain that neonaticide is an illness when we learn that it has been practiced and accepted in most cultures throughout history. And that neonaticidal women do not commonly show signs of psychopathology. In a classic 1970 study of statistics of child killing, a psychiatrist, Phillip Resnick, found that mothers who kill their older children are frequently psychotic, depressed or suicidal, but mothers who kill their newborns are usually not. (It was this difference that led Resnick to argue that the category infanticide be split into neonaticide, the killing of a baby on the day of its birth, and filicide, the killing of a child older than one day. )
Killing a baby is an immoral act, and we often express our outrage at the immoral by calling it a sickness. But normal human motives are not always moral, and neonaticide does not have to be a product of malfunctioning neural circuitry or a dysfunctional upbringing. We can try to understand what would lead a mother to kill her newborn, remembering that to understand is not necessarily to forgive.
Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, both psychologists, argue that a capacity for neonaticide is built into the biological design of our parental emotions. Mammals are extreme among animals in the amount of time, energy and food they invest in their young, and humans are extreme among mammals. Parental investment is a limited resource, and mammalian mothers must ''decide'' whether to allot it to their newborn or to their current and future offspring. If a newborn is sickly, or if its survival is not promising, they may cut their losses and favor the healthiest in the litter or try again later on.
In most cultures, neonaticide is a form of this triage. Until very recently in human evolutionary history, mothers nursed their children for two to four years before becoming fertile again. Many children died, especially in the perilous first year. Most women saw no more than two or three of their children survive to adulthood, and many did not see any survive. To become a grandmother, a woman had to make hard choices. In most societies documented by anthropologists, including those of hunter-gatherers (our best glimpse into our ancestors' way of life), a woman lets a newborn die when its prospects for survival to adulthood are poor. The forecast might be based on abnormal signs in the infant, or on bad circumstances for successful motherhood at the time -- she might be burdened with older children, beset by war or famine or without a husband or social support. Moreover, she might be young enough to try again.
We are all descendants of women who made the difficult decisions that allowed them to become grandmothers in that unforgiving world, and we inherited that brain circuitry that led to those decisions. Daly and Wilson have shown that the statistics on neonaticide in contemporary North America parallel those in the anthropological literature. The women who sacrifice their offspring tend to be young, poor, unmarried and socially isolated.
Natural selection cannot push the buttons of behavīor directly; it affects our behavīor by endowing us with emotions that coax us toward adaptive choices. New mothers have always faced a choice between a definite tragedy now and the possibility of an even greater tragedy months or years later, and that choice is not to be taken lightly. Even today, the typical rumination of a depressed new mother -- how will I cope with this burden? -- is a legitimate concern. The emotional response called bonding is also far more complex than the popular view, in which a woman is imprinted with a lifelong attachment to her baby if they interact in a critical period immediately following the baby's birth. A new mother will first coolly assess the infant and her current situation and only in the next few days begin to see it as a unique and wonderful individual. Her love will gradually deepen in ensuing years, in a trajectory that tracks the increasing biological value of a child (the chance that it will live to produce grandchildren) as the child proceeds through the mine field of early development.
Even when a mother in a hunter-gatherer society hardens her heart to sacrifice a newborn, her heart has not turned to stone. Anthropologists who interview these women (or their relatives, since the event is often too painful for the woman to discuss) discover that the women see the death as an unavoidable tragedy, grieve at the time and remember the child with pain all their lives. Even the supposedly callous Melissa Drexler agonized over a name for her dead son and wept at his funeral. (Initial reports that, after giving birth, she requested a Metallica song from the deejay and danced with her boyfriend turned out to be false.)
Many cultural practices are designed to distance people's emotions from a newborn until its survival seems probable. Full personhood is often not automatically granted at birth, as we see in our rituals of christening and the Jewish bris. And yet the recent neonaticides still seem puzzling. These are middle-class girls whose babies would have been kept far from starvation by the girls' parents or by any of thousands of eager adoptive couples. But our emotions, fashioned by the slow hand of natural selection, respond to the signals of the long-vanished tribal environment in which we spent 99 percent of our evolutionary history. Being young and single are two bad omens for successful motherhood, and the girl who conceals her pregnancy and procrastinates over its consequences will soon be disquieted by a third omen. She will give birth in circumstances that are particularly unpromising for a human mother: alone.
In hunter-gatherer societies, births are virtually always assisted because human anatomy makes birth (especially the first one) long, difficult and risky. Older women act as midwives, emotional supports and experienced appraisers who help decide whether the infant should live. Wenda Trevathan, an anthropologist and trained midwife, has studied pelvises of human fossils and concluded that childbirth has been physically tortuous, and therefore probably assisted, for millions of years. Maternal feelings may be adapted to a world in which a promising newborn is heralded with waves of cooing and clucking and congratulating. Those reassuring signals are absent from a secret birth in a motel room or a bathroom stall.
So what is the mental state of a teen-age mother who has kept her pregnancy secret? She is immature enough to have hoped that her pregnancy would go away by itself, her maternal feelings have been set at zero and she suddenly realizes she is in big trouble. Sometimes she continues to procrastinate. In September, 17-year-old Shanta Clark gave birth to a premature boy and kept him hidden in her bedroom closet, as if he were E.T., for 17 days. She fed him before and after she went to school until her mother discovered him. The weak cry of the preemie kept him from being discovered earlier. (In other cases, girls have panicked over the crying and, in stifling the cry, killed the baby.)
Most observers sense the desperation that drives a woman to neonaticide. Prosecutors sometimes don't prosecute; juries rarely convict; those found guilty almost never go to jail. Barbara Kirwin, a forensic psychologist, reports that in nearly 300 cases of women charged with neonaticide in the United States and Britain, no woman spent more than a night in jail. In Europe, the laws of several countries prescribed less-severe penalties for neonaticide than for adult homicides. The fascination with the Grossberg-Peterson case comes from the unusual threat of the death penalty. Even those in favor of capital punishment might shudder at the thought of two reportedly nice kids being strapped to gurneys and put to death.
But our compassion hinges on the child, not just on the mother. Killers of older children, no matter how desperate, evoke little mercy. Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who sent her two sons, 14 months and 3 years old, to watery deaths, is in jail, unmourned, serving a life sentence. The leniency shown to neonaticidal mothers forces us to think the unthinkable and ask if we, like many societies and like the mothers themselves, are not completely sure whether a neonate is a full person.
It seems obvious that we need a clear boundary to confer personhood on a human being and grant it a right to life. Otherwise, we approach a slippery slope that ends in the disposal of inconvenient people or in grotesque deliberations on the value of individual lives. But the endless abortion debate shows how hard it is to locate the boundary. Anti-abortionists draw the line at conception, but that implies we should shed tears every time an invisible conceptus fails to implant in the uterus -- and, to carry the argument to its logical conclusion, that we should prosecute for murder anyone who uses an IUD. Those in favor of abortion draw the line at viability, but viability is a fuzzy gradient that depends on how great a risk of an impaired child the parents are willing to tolerate. The only thing both sides agree on is that the line must be drawn at some point before birth.
Neonaticide forces us to examine even that boundary. To a biologist, birth is as arbitrary a milestone as any other. Many mammals bear offspring that see and walk as soon as they hit the ground. But the incomplete 9-month-old human fetus must be evicted from the womb before its outsize head gets too big to fit through its mother's pelvis. The usual primate assembly process spills into the first years in the world. And that complicates our definition of personhood.
What makes a living being a person with a right not to be killed? Animal-rights extremists would seem to have the easiest argument to make: that all sentient beings have a right to life. But champions of that argument must conclude that delousing a child is akin to mass murder; the rest of us must look for an argument that draws a smaller circle. Perhaps only the members of our own species, Homo sapiens, have a right to life? But that is simply chauvinism; a person of one race could just as easily say that people of another race have no right to life.
No, the right to life must come, the moral philosophers say, from morally significant traits that we humans happen to possess. One such trait is having a unique sequence of experiences that defines us as individuals and connects us to other people. Other traits include an ability to reflect upon ourselves as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death and to express the choice not to die. And there's the rub: our immature neonates don't possess these traits any more than mice do.
Several moral philosophers have concluded that neonates are not persons, and thus neonaticide should not be classified as murder. Michael Tooley has gone so far as to say that neonaticide ought to be permitted during an interval after birth. Most philosophers (to say nothing of nonphilosophers) recoil from that last step, but the very fact that there can be a debate about the personhood of neonates, but no debate about the personhood of older children, makes it clearer why we feel more sympathy for an Amy Grossberg than for a Susan Smith.
So how do you provide grounds for outlawing neonaticide? The facts don't make it easy. Some philosophers suggest that people intuitively see neonates as so similar to older babies that you couldn't allow neonaticide without coarsening the way people treat children and other people in general. Again, the facts say otherwise. Studies in both modern and hunter-gatherer societies have found that neonaticidal women don't kill anyone but their newborns, and when they give birth later under better conditions, they can be devoted, loving mothers.
The laws of biology were not kind to Amy Grossberg and Melissa Drexler, and they are not kind to us as we struggle to make moral sense of the teen-agers' actions. One predicament is that our moral system needs a crisp inauguration of personhood, but the assembly process for Homo sapiens is gradual, piecemeal and uncertain. Another problem is that the emotional circuitry of mothers has evolved to cope with this uncertain process, so the baby killers turn out to be not moral monsters but nice, normal (and sometimes religious) young women. These are dilemmas we will probably never resolve, and any policy will leave us with uncomfortable cases. We will most likely muddle through, keeping birth as a conspicuous legal boundary but showing mercy to the anguished girls who feel they had no choice but to run afoul of it.
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Bad Date Blog
Thursday, Aug 27, 2009 12:55PM / Standard Entry
This is actually an old blog that I posted on the now defunct 360 site at Yahoo. Someone held a competition to see who could write the best blog about a bad date they had had. I didn't win but I didn't expect to. The blog I ended up writing, which I have reproduced below, is one of my favourite blogs. I haven't had much time for writing lately so I thought I might just recycle this blog:
Bad Date Blog
I don’t go on a lot of dates – I don’t get asked out much. And while I would like, perhaps even crave, a more romantic action in my life I am very bad at eliciting it. Part of my reluctance comes from the fact that I am choosy when it comes to men, and I also hate letting people down. Therefore if some poor bloke asks me out and I turn him down I tend to feel guilty and uncomfortable about doing so.
The reason why I have a current policy of being so choosy is that I have terrible taste in men (and in people generally, perhaps). I sometimes think that I have a Neon sign mounted over my head that everyone can see except me. I suspect that it says something like “Arseholes, please queue up here!” Then, quite apart from that, I also transmit what I like to call my ‘rogue Mummy vibe’ or my ‘Auntie Meredith’ vibe. Life’s losers and professional victims tend to circle me like sharks circling a bleeding person. In a room full of crowded people, they elbow others out of the way to come to my side. Their eyes alight on me and a look of hope and great interest spreads across their faces. “Ah!” they say, “if that nice lady could just be my friend then that would be good. If she were my friend then that would reflect well on me, and if I could subdue or control or diminish or compromise the qualities that make her a person that reflects well on me then how happy and nice I would feel. And if I impress her with the tragedies of my life then I am sure that she would willingly, and at short notice, make herself available, without demur, for
· Sex
· Sympathy
· Life coaching
· Counselling sessions
· Organising my life
· Walking the dogs
· Making peace
· Watering the plants
· Other
· (circle any that apply according to desired relationship status and sexual preference)
“I am sure she understands,” they say to themselves,” that she was put on this planet to fill the aching void within me, and free me from having to do so myself.”
Why have I started the Bad Date Blog with this long vitriolic ramble? Because it explains a lot about my romantic past. I have not had many dates in my life, but a high percentage have been bad. But the trick to writing a good blog is, I think, to pick a bad date that was interestingly bad. During my one big love affair I had 3 years of bad dates. They were bad because they were filled with stony silences, my partner looking bored and absent, me prattling away to put him at his ease (which never happened) followed by perfunctory demands for sex. Bad? Yes – but too dull to write much about.
So who to choose? The handsome actor who constantly shushed me every time I mentioned I was on the dole, then looked around to see if anyone had overheard, following this up by perfunctory demands for sex? The British painter and decorator who put on the soundtrack to Zorba the Greek, danced around his lounge room in his socks and leopard skin print undies, announced he had herpes, and followed this up with a perfunctory demand for sex?
I could almost make a story about the 2 Israelis I met at an art exhibition. I thought I was meeting up with them AND a crowd of other folks for drinks. But the other folks never materialised and I realised that I had in fact been lured to a date where perfunctory doesn’t even start to describe the quality of the demands for sex.
“We love Australia… so beautiful… and Australian girls love sex… so do we… You drinking wine?... You like wine?... So do we… gets you in the mood for sex… We go surfing… we look at art… we have sex… We are in army in Israel… did we mention we like sex?... I am his captain… He is under command… but in sex we are all equal… Wanna have a threesome?... We go somewhere and have threesome”
“No.”
A short but astonished silence greeted this answer. There was a brief exchange in Hebrew, and the beta male quickly left the room. The captain turned to me:
“He go… he find another girl for sex… We have twosome… We go now.”
“NO!!!”
As this ejaculation was the only one I was going to allow to happen that night, the matter quickly came to a close.
The actual story I want to relate revolves around a man whose name I realise I have now forgotten. I went out with him a couple of times in the late nineties. I can see his face clearly in my mind, so I am quite startled to find that I have forgotten his name.
He was a tall young man, around about the same age as me. He had dark, curly hair cropped short, and a slim build. He was not handsome but had a pleasant face, with intelligent eyes and a ready, quirky smile. His manner was diffident and good natured and he was an articulate conversationalist. I met him when he gave me a tarot reading. One thing lead to another, we met a couple of times for a drink, and when my birthday came around he offered to take me out for dinner to celebrate. I appreciated the invitation, actually, as in those days I was choreographing and performing full time, and this means I was living the bohemian life and permanently broke.
We met in a café where he wished me a happy birthday, and announced that he intended to show me a really good time, but that I would have to pay for both of us because he didn’t have any money. He then gave me a card with an amusing message. I had turned 30, and the card depicted a grumpy old lady with her face screwed up as if revolted by something bad. I forget the exact wording but the message was something along the lines that turning 30 was akin to lingering around like a fart. Maybe my mood was affected by the fact that I was mentally doing sums and wondering if I could afford to take me and my swain out for a meal, but I found that I didn’t like being compared to one of the grosser bodily functions.
One very cheap and nasty pizza meal later, we retired to a cheap and sticky pub for a couple of drinks. My new age beau had been regaling me with stories of various psychic development workshops he had been to. Now, I find this kind of stuff interesting but I was wondering why he had been to so many – how to draw your spirit guides, reiki, tarot, astrology, recovering past lives, discovering future lives, talking to the angels, swimming with the dolphins, sending healing to the planet, sending psychic messages to the extraterrestrials – believe you me he had done them all. Finally he started telling me about the support groups he was attending. One was for men to get in touch with their emotions. His particular challenge was to get in touch with and express his anger. I was just wondering why it was so important for him to do this, when he told me about the other support group, which was for people who had grown up in abusive situations as children.
His father had had mental health problems. One of the ways these manifested was through extreme paranoia – the father was living in daily expectation of some unknown but deadly enemy descending upon the household. Family life revolved around placating the father by cooperating in his comprehensive preparations for coping with this calamity. Food was horded, hiding places had to be hidden in, escape routes had to be travelled, and the day to day activities of the family themselves were scrutinised for tell tale signs of slackness and betrayal. The worst thing was that the father regularly beat the mother, and before doing this the 2 sons were called in to take a seat and watch in silence – it was a kind of ritual. One day, when they were teenagers, the older brother snapped, grabbed a kitchen knife, and stabbed the father in the neck. This brother was serving a murder sentence in prison at the time of our date.
My date chatted on about the other members of the group – his experience had by no means been the worst. One story sticks in my mind – one woman in the group had a father who had built a torture chamber under their house and equipped it with implements of his own making and design. Every day after school, this woman had to go into the chamber, select one of the implements and then the father would torture her with it.
I was just drawing back from gazing into the abyss that my companion had been so explicitly describing when I found that I was being confronted with a slightly perfunctory request for sex. This chick, he said suggestively and wistfully, had once taken him into her bedroom, tied him to the bed and tickled him with a feather. Wouldn’t I like to…?
No.
No. Parts of me were still in the underground torture chamber, worrying about that woman, and I just felt numb.
Poor, poor boy. If this had been a bad date for me, it had been a terrible, tragic life for him. He had done well to emerge into adulthood as a warm and open human being, but his frantic addiction to alternative lifestyle workshops revealed him as a man with a hollow space that was more than I could fill. Moreover it was a space that was big enough to swallow me whole. I just had to walk away.
I wonder where he is now. Has he been able to reconcile himself to the fact that some damage just has to be lived with, that some hurts can never be workshopped away, and that he just has to draw a line in the sand and get on with his life somehow? Or is he still out there, nursing his dream of some nice lady who will swoop down and carry him off to her boudoir, tie him to her bed and restrain him from the awful burdens of being responsible for his own wellbeing, and tickle him into a state of comfort, wholeness and joy.
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bizarre travel story
Monday, Aug 24, 2009 12:55PM / Standard Entry
My cousin emailed this news story to me last week:
Sydney to Gosford... via Brisbane?
http://au.travel.yahoo.com/special-features/sydney-gosford-via-brisbane/
We've all decied to take the scenic route home every once in a while, but
these six CityRail passengers got a lot more than they bargained for after
accidentally boarding the wrong bus.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the ordeal began on Sunday evening
when the CityRail service to Newcastle, via the Central Coast, was held up
at Hornsby station after an accident. After a two-hour delay, the passengers
were herded off the train and on to coaches hired by RailCorp.
Seven passengers bound for the Central Coast boarded a Pegasus coach.
Unfortunately, it was a vehicle hired to transport passengers from an
interstate CountryLink train which had also been delayed at Hornsby Station.
Among the unlucky travellers were an elderly couple, a teenage boy who was
supposed to make it back in time for a curfew and Jerome Conway, a student
studying at the University of Sydney.
their predicament was revealed shortly after the passengers noticed the
outskirts of Newcastle passing them by.
When questioned, the driver told them they were on their way to Brisbane and
regulations prevented him from diverting from his route.
According to Mr Conway, there were no signs or announcements to indicate the
destination of the buses.
"The driver told us, 'Sorry, mate, too late. You're going to have to go all
the way to Brisbane,' I just wanted to get home to Gosford," he said.
Mr Conway told the Sydney Morning Herald that the driver informed the
passengers about Pegasus's contract with RailCorp, not permitting him to
pick up or set down passengers between stops.
While the bus would make two stops along the way, they were in small towns,
and the passengers were better off enduring the 10-hour bus ride to
Brisbane.
Mr Conway arrived in Brisbane on Monday morning and was told he would need
to pay his own way back to Sydney on that afternoon's train.
A spokesman for Pegasus told the Herald the use of buses as last-minute
replacements for trains often created "confusion about who goes where...
because everyone is upset about having to get off the train".
RailCorp has offered to reimburse the passengers for their return journey
and additional costs.
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Films: Yakuza Eiga / Still Walking / Film ist. A Girl & A Gun et al
Monday, Aug 3, 2009 9:32AM / Standard Entry / films
Films I have recently watched:
(Please note: films that I have watched that are part of the Melbourne International Film Festival have been prefaced with MIFF)
MIFF Yakuza Eiga, France, 2008, directed by Yves Montmayeur. Stylish and interesting documentary on Japanese Yakuza films structured around a series of comments from directors, actors, writers, a fight director and some real life members of Yakuza gangs and families. Yakuza films are not my very favourite genre of films – I find them to be too blokey and testosterone drenched, plus I have never understood the attraction in glamourising thugs. Recently here in Melbourne the media have been avidly following the trials of various organized crime families and their networks. I don’t understand why we should be expected to care if these hideous people knock each other off – not to the extent of reading inches and inches of newspaper column space about it anyway. And I am not hugely interested in watching one tattooed gangster beating up another in a Yakuza film. But I do watch some Yakuza films, and I did go and see this documentary because of that. Why? First of all, I lived in Japan for 2 years (where I did NOT encounter any Yakuza) and I currently study Japanese (beginner level – watashi wa nihongo o sukoshi wakarimasu) so I have an interest in Japanese culture. As an aid to my Japanese studies I will watch most Japanese films just to enhance my comprehension skills. Yakuza Eiga did reveal some interesting things about Japanese culture and history such as the desperate struggle that most ordinary Japanese had to find food after World War 2. This led to the formation of a thriving black market and a rise in prominence for the Yakuza gangs who ran it.
The second reason I went to see this documentary is that I adore Hong Kong chop socky movies, and I am aware that Hong Kong film makers have always been heavily influenced by Japanese film makers (and vice versa). In order to better understand my current favourite genre of films I like to watch the films that influenced this genre, and this means Japanese Samurai and Yakuza films. Overall, what I admired about this documentary was how well balanced and even handed it was in its treatment of the Yakuza. There is a good mix of people who admired, distrusted or felt ambivalent about the Yakuza and the way they are portrayed in these films. This gives the audience a good insight into the place the Yakuza have held in Japanese society, and how Yakuza eiga (or films) have contributed to this.
MIFF Still Walking, Japan, 2008, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. This family drama is likened to Ozu’s films in the MIFF programme and, having seen it, I can understand why. Both this film and the Ozu films I have seen focus on the commonplace existence of a family and the dynamics between its members. Similar to Ozu’s films is also the feeling that the director intends to take all the time in the world to tell his story. The tensions, loyalties and love between the family members are teased slowly out and gently revealed, and it is a testament to both Kore-eda and Ozu and their actors that, when watching these films, the viewer never feels impatient or bored with the everyday happenings on the screen but rather fully engaged with and moved by them. Another quality of these films is that a quiet humour is allowed to insert itself into the dialogue. The acting in this film was excellent from the whole cast, especially from the actors portraying the parents and very especially from the woman portraying the mother. The roles of the parents would have been difficult to sell to the audience. A central plot device is that the extended family has gathered to commemorate the untimely death of a revered son. As a result of unresolved grief the parents have become quite toxic, but the direction and interpretation of these characters ensure that the audience feels great sympathy for these particular characters. Good, assured film making.
MIFF Film is. A Girl & A Gun, Austria, 2009, directed by Gustav Deustch. The title of this film has been adapted from a quote from D.W. Griffith – “A film is a girl and a gun”. In order to describe this film to you I will quote from the MIFF programme (page 10):
“Weaving together a hypnotic mash-up of archival film from the first five decades of cinema, Deutsch splices together ethnographic films, war footage, science documentaries, explicit pornography and 1930s feature films to concoct a kaleidescope visual essay in five parts about love, sex, violence and death.”
This was a very powerful film to view. Extracts from films from the aforementioned genres are cleverly juxtaposed against each other while being aptly accompanied by a soundtrack made up of contemporary and classical music as well as music from some of the original 1930s films used. The sometimes surprising grouping of various film extracts threw certain qualities of those films into stark relief – the beautiful grainy quality of the monocoloured films, the charged quality of the performances of the actors, the sensuality inherent in natural images such as ferns unfurling or lava flowing. A word of warning – this is not a film for the sexually squeamish or prudish. The pornography shown is hard core and extremely explicit footage of penetration is shown. There is even a mercifully fleeting glimpse of bestiality. This is not meant to be a criticism of the film – I just mention it because not everyone is comfortable with viewing sex in public. I don’t think that the film maker intended the porn to make anyone overly horny or disgusting – he uses this pornographic footage to show other facets of the human condition (vulnerability, abuse of power, intimacy for example). The film is erotic, but, for me, the erotic charge came from footage showing actors performing scenes of flirtation fully clothed. The only minor quibble I had was that the film felt a little too long. However, over all, I thought that this was a pretty spectacular cinematic experience.
British Intelligence starring Boris Karloff and Margaret Lindsay. A black and white war time spy thriller with an entertainingly intricate plot.
A Tattooed Life. The editing seems to have been a bit brutal – I kept getting the impression that scenes were missing, as the plot would jump abruptly from one incident to the next without any of the usual plot explication to help the audience follow the story. The final fight scene is a humdinger and contains some very elegant images, including one where our Yakuza hero is shot from behind, his body leaning at a graceful angle to denote fatigue or pain, his back covered in tattoos, and his clothing draped from his hips.
The Killing Machine usual macho Sonny Chiba fare
Also:
Mystery Men
Stardust
The King and the Clown
Godzilla
The Bad Sleep Well
Nausicca of the Valley of the Winds
Tony Takitani
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Henry Rollins – Live in the Conversation Pit
Monty Python’s And Now For Something Completely Different
Joh’s Jury
Wonder Boys
Pirates of the Caribbean
Rhinoceros
Inside Deep Throat
