Monika’s Pensieve

{FILM DIARY}

Gohatto (Japan/France/UK, 1999)

Seen: Monday, 22nd June 2009 (DVD, repeat viewing)
Runtime: 100′
Director: Nagisa Oshima
Cast: Takeshi Kitano, Ryuhei Matsuda, Shinji Takeda, Tadanobu Asano
Production House: BS Asahi, Bac Films, Canal+, Eisei Gekijo, Imagica Corp., Kadokawa Shoten Publishing Co., Oshima Productions, Recorded Picture Company (RPC), Shochiku Kinema Kenkyû-jo
Plot: A mysterious teenager joins the militia. His comrades and superiors alike develop a very er… keen interest in him.

Trailer

Impressions In Short
Gay samurais are sexier than gay cowboys, but cowboys have better hairdos ;-P

More About the Film
I must have seen this for the first time around 2002. It was my first ever Ryuhei film and I became an instant fan (he was my first Japanese teen idol ;-P), but at that time it was hard to get any of his other films and I eventually forgot about him and didn’t renew my love until a few years later when I started getting into other Japanese teen idols *grin*
It’s funny looking back at this now. It was his début film and he was only 15 or 16 - even his voice wasn’t quite broken yet. It was a phenomenal piece of casting though. I remember reading somewhere that Ryuhei originally turned the part down, but later changed his mind. I wonder what they would have done if he hadn’t… It’s a really difficult part to cast. The film requires Sozaburo Kano to be magnetic - the audience needs to understand why all these herds of men are falling for him. And all this needs to be achieved with very restrained acting. Although I think Ryuhei is a better actor now than he was then, he was just perfect for the part.
On the whole, Gohatto is a very weird, but beautiful film if you get into the mood of it. It doesn’t give many answers as to what precisely happened though, so most of the plot needs to be interpreted. In fact, in past viewings of the film I thought I grasped what must have transpired pretty well, but after this viewing I’ve suddenly concluded that I missed some interesting clues ;)
In particular I somehow always missed the significance of Soji. What is he going back to do at the end of the film? I always assumed that Hijikata had gotten swept away by Kano’s magnetism like everybody else and his judgement of Kano gets more and more suspect as the film goes on. I still think that’s accurate, but because I assumed this I never gave much thought to what he insinuates about Soji and Kano. I’m not sure I go with the interpretation that Soji and Kano were lovers (I read some clever interpretations on imdb about that today :) ), but Soji does do a couple of fishy things throughout the film.
Another thing I saw somewhat differently this time round was Kano’s relationship with Yuzawa. In previous viewings I associated Kano almost solely with the judgement Hijikata makes about him at the beginning (that Kano’s attraction to the militia was “the smell of blood”) and with Kano’s own statement (he joined the militia “to have the right to kill”). That makes Kano into a kind of villain or oppressor. There’s a lot of coquetry in his behaviour, so I assumed that he had intended to use the interest he garners for his own dark ends almost from the start. Now I’m not so sure. It was always clear to me that Kano was rather far from enjoying Yuzawa’s “attentions”, but this time round it felt more like rape than it had done before. Yuzawa was, after all, Kano’s superior. He wasn’t as easy to shunt as some of the others. Was it Yuzawa who drove Kano into manipulating men for his own ends? Or even - were there more incidents like that with other men? There’s a conversation in which Kano admits to being courted by some of his superiors. He fiercely denies succumbing to any of them - including Yuzawa, which we know by then to be a lie. Like the Soji subplot, having men use Kano in this way is more in line with Hijikata’s judgement.

Recommended?
Yes, as long as you take into account that this is a very art house sort of movie. And also, you’re going to have to do a lot of detective work to come up with what precisely the plot of the movie is (it certainly does have one, but it’s subject to a lot of interpretation - especially the ending).
For Ryuhei fans this is an absolute must if you haven’t already seen it (is it even possible for a Ryuhei fan not to have seen this? *grin*).

{FILM DIARY}

Koi no Mon (Japan, 2004)

Seen: Sunday, 21st June 2009
Runtime: 114′
Director: Suzuki Matsuo
Cast: Ryuhei Matsuda, Wakana Sakai, Suzuki Matsuo, Hijiri Kojima
Production House: Koi no mon Seisaku Iinkai
Plot: (from imdb)

Live-action adaptation of a madcap manga about art, opposites, love and a whole lot of cosplay.

Trailer

Impressions In Short
I wonder about the sanity of the people who made this film… I worry about my own sanity too cause I seem to have liked it lol
Oh, and last but not least I think I’m going to have to eat up my words about Matsuda Ryuhei again - he has chemistry with girls after all ;)

More About the Film
It’s the kind of film where anything can happen and I mean anything. I kept having thoughts like “surely what I’m watching is a dream sequence, they can’t just put something like that in so randomly!”, “omg, did he just get a hard-on from that!?”, “no, he’s not going to vomit now, surely!”, “what??? did the owner of the diner really turn out to be an S&M pervert who rapes customers who don’t pay? and is he really wearing stockings?”. To further illustrate my point, perhaps I should add that it’s the story of a guy who is in love with rocks. Every time he sees one it’s like magic. Even by Japanese standards this film is just so incredibly random, but that’s its attraction *grin*
It looks like a pretty low budget production, but it has style. It’s mostly a hand held camera, but it has very cleverly crafted shots (a lot of close-ups and I loved the way the camera moved). I think it’s also the first time that I’ve seen some naturalistic elements in a Japanese film, which just seemed normal. I mean usually they stick out like a sore thumb to me - like they either don’t suit the film or you can feel they were put in very deliberately to shock the audience or something. Here, you’ve got a leading man who looks like he never washes his hair, keeps vomiting at the most inopportune moments and there’s the hand held camera and mostly natural lighting on top of it all and it just fits *grin*
The sexual content in the film is perhaps a little outside of the comfort zone of some people. It’s not really that the film is particularly explicit… it’s just that the scenes of sexual nature are so weird ;) I totally loved them. They were numerous and hilarious (though rather sexy all the same). There’s a great deal of kissing in the film - every kissing scene is totally different (Hollywood kissing is so boring by comparison ;-P). They range from very coy pecks to quite the contrary. And then there’s all the awkward attempts at intercourse, which totally cracked me up.
Ryuhei is hilarious in this (he’s such a total pushover!) and again very different to what I know him for. I’m appreciating his body language more and more, he can clearly do a great deal with it. The body language he chose for this was quirky and rather exaggerated, but it still looked very natural.
It was fun seeing Wakana Sakai in this as well - I know her from Kimi Wa Petto (as Fukushima). And actually the whole cast was really good. It was a difficult film to do. They were all sort of balancing between doing the really exaggerated Japanese comedy kind of thing and yet not making it look too fake (with a plot like that it’s a huge challenge!). They miraculously managed - the characters are somewhat human ;)

Recommended?
Cautiously, but I would recommend it, yes *grin*
I really enjoyed it, but it’s probably too wacky for most people. Anyone who needs plots to follow some sort of structure or logic will have problems with this.
However, anyone who likes very crazy comedies and doesn’t mind plots with absolutely no logic whatsoever would do well to give this a shot :) And for Ryuhei fans this is an absolute must!

{FILM DIARY}

Ashita no Kita Yoshio (Japan, 2008)

Finished Watching: Saturday, 20th June 2009
Runtime: 11 episodes (45min. each)
Director: Ten Shimoyama (ep1-2,5,7,10-11), Manabu Asou (ep3-4), Yoshishige Miyake (ep6,9), Akira Hibino (ep8)
Cast: Fumiyo Kohinata, Ryuhei Matsuda, Manami Konishi, Chiaki Kuriyama, Yuriko Yoshitaka, Jun Kaname
Network: Fuji TV, KTV
Plot: Kita Yoshio has decided to commit suicide in 11 days. He meets a host of weird characters during his last days and finds out some strange things about his past.

Trailer
Couldn’t find any suitable video to embed :-/ (there are mostly only entire episodes on the streaming sites and they don’t have subtitles).

Impressions In Short
A relatively watchable, but not amazing J-Drama I guess. Very bizarre to see Matsuda Ryuhei in a part like this *grin*

More About the Series
I think the idea was much better than what they did with it and I don’t think they had enough plot for an 11 episode drama… There were a lot of episodes where the plot just seemed to be running around in circles and they kept killing the suspense in dumb ways. The strongest points IMO were all the strange dreams and visions and the whole mental instability of Kita Yoshio. His negative alter ego was pretty interesting. Though even the mental illness thing could have been done much better.
The acting was a bit stiff. The roles I liked the most were actually background characters. Yoshitaka Yuriko as Shinobu was hilarious and cute. And Kanabe Jun did a really good job as Moriwaki.
Ryuhei was… weird ;) Prior to seeing this, if I had tried to write a character that he’d be least likely to deliver well then it would have been similar to what he played in this ;) Heita, you see, is the owner of a go-go club. He’s very extroverted, social and quite friendly. Though if he has a problem with someone he usually reacts with spontaneous violence. This is quite a far step from what I’ve seen him do before. I know him for extremely introverted characters (not to mention sexually ambiguous and even a bit “genderless” ones - Heita is quite macho and heterosexual in comparison ;) ). The way he was dressed and styled with his facial hair and short haircut was quite weird as well - for once he did not look like a beautiful porcelain doll, but just a regular looking guy ;)
On the whole, he wasn’t bad. He adjusted his body language quite a bit and he actually got better and more natural as the series progressed. What, to me, seemed like the bigger challenge for him was not the character, but the convention. He’s one of the most restrained and subtle actors I know of, so pulling off the loud and exaggerated style of J-drama doesn’t really seem in his nature. I thought he was rather uneven with it. He got the spontaneous, macho violence right ;) But some of the other bits were a bit fake and he does have a tendency to “play it small”. I think he was at his best during the sentimental and soppy stuff actually cause everybody else was playing it big and corny and he was just doing his subtle thing ;)
Oh, and IMO he has no chemistry with women on screen ;-P I think my “least likely to be played well” character for Ryuhei now is a romantic hero - intense and soppy love for a woman and all that… especially a possessive sort of love would challenge him I think *grin* Seriously though, he had more chemistry with the leading man in this than with any of the women - there was a scene in the last episode where they were looking into each others eyes and it looked like they were going to kiss or something ;-P
And while we’re on chemistry, I thought it was hilarious how this series has so many potential romantic pairings and yet only breakups and disappointments seem to materialize ;) I thought Mizuho and Moriwaki in particular were perfect for each other (though of course Mizuho could have ended up with at least two other men and Moriwaki had at least one other woman he could have been paired up with lol).

Recommended?
No ;-P Except for Ryuhei fans that is, cause this part is just so weird *grin*

A slightly more extended version of the young Voldemort trailer is available here and for the first time I actually liked it. The boy works much better on the new clip than on the previous ones - I finally get why they cast him *grin*
I hope the film version is less choppy. I expect the scene has even more potential if they give it a smoother and slower feeling in the film.

I thought this was hilarious, I don’t normally like fan videos, but this one was edited really well. Poor Severus lol

P.S. Can you tell I’m avoiding studying for my exams? ;)

I’ll start off with the one piece of publicity that isn’t Tom Felton related and that’s the Steve Kloves interview, which I think is a very good read :)

This is an interview with Tom Felton, Bonnie Wright and the Phelps twins. I think I’m mainly linking to it because I loved the bit about the Sectumsempra scene - I’m really looking forward to the broken toilets now lol

There’s been a slew of various promotional photos and TV spots released. I’m only going to link to one photo though ;) That’s because it answers something about the Sectumsempra scene that I’ve seen debated at length on imdb months back *grin* People were wondering whether they’d go as far as in the books and have Draco in tears. Naturally, everyone was very excited about seeing Tom Felton cry (I mean - who wouldn’t be ;) ), but at the same time few believed they’d go that far in the films (that’s what I thought too). If you’re in the same boat - check this out *grin*

Finally, here’s an interview with Tom Felton that has nothing to do with anything, I just thought it was sweet :]

This article is very chilling - apparently one in four men in South Africa admit to having raped somebody.

I thought this was rather interesting - some good tips for dieters.

The story of 16 year old Abel Selaocoe, who plays the cello. He sees classical music as his destiny, even though according to stereotypes black musicians are not associated with the genre.

{MONTHLY SUMMARIES}

My Month in Brief

May was a month during which everything kept happening insanely fast and planning anything seemed completely impossible - something would always turn things upside down :-/

Major Events

The month started very inauspiciously when my dad fainted in the local shop. They called the ambulance and my dad refused to go with them (he refused to believe he had fainted - not remembering how he had ended up on the floor didn’t bother him at all :]). To make a long story about having a very stubborn dad short, he ended up in hospital for a week and had lots of medical tests and examinations. They finally found what they think was the culprit and he’s alright now or so we hope.

Shortly after all this my aunt Zosia from Manchester made a visit to Poland. My aunt Zosia is an amazing person really. She’s 87 and is half-deaf, but has more energy than my whole family combined. This may sound really cool and great (and it is sort of inspiring), but her combination of traits can be rather difficult… You see on top of it all she’s very forgetful. And since she can’t hear a lot of what’s being said and forgets a lot of the stuff she does hear, her imagination has room for a lot of creativity ;) Couple that with the amount of energy she has (she could talk all day) and you might start getting the picture ;)
She spent the last night of her visit to Poland in our house. Naturally, she didn’t tell us when she’d be coming so we could pick her up from the centre or something like that - she never does :] I think she either likes the independence of getting to places on her own or she thinks it’s too much trouble for people to pick her up from places. It rather freaks us out when she does this (physically she can handle it no problem, but we always worry something will happen because of her forgetfulness or inattention). For once we were worried with good reason. She left her bag with all her documents and money on the train! So me and my mum spent a night at the police station (she needed a police report to be able to get any documents from the British embassy, so she could return to Manchester) and then I spent the entire next day with her at the British embassy.
The police station experience was very surreal due to my aunt Zosia’s rich imagination. By the time we got to the police station, the story of how she lost her bag sounded very different than what the rest of the family remembered. She had noticed that her bag was missing after supper. But she claimed she had noticed it straight after leaving the train and that she had dramatically thrown herself on my dad’s neck shouting about her bag the moment she entered the house (with my dad’s shingles problem and him generally being a bit more fragile than usual due to the hospital incident I don’t think that was even physically possible :]). She gave far more information than was necessary (if it had been me it would have taken me about 10 minutes to give the policeman the necessary information for the police report, it took her an hour) and of course a lot of it was made up. The policeman was amazing cause he just patiently listened with no change of facial expression. Me and my mum were trying to hide our silly smirks for most of that hour. But once my aunt Zosia started reading the police report and correcting it stylistically (she used to be a Polish teacher in England), it was a bit much even for the policeman. He actually banged his head on the desk out of exasperation lol He remained polite to her all the same. The hilarious thing was that she was so deeply concentrating on correcting his writing that she didn’t seem to notice anything.

Another important change in my life is discovering bioresonance therapy. My health was getting worse and worse and I figured a lot of it was due to my allergies and being overweight. Conventional medicine couldn’t even give me a diagnosis for what I was allergic to (I have tried in the past), alternative medicine apparently can *grin* For the moment I’m not allowed to eat dairy products, wheat, eggs or sugar until they “deallergize” me. They found a number of other ailments they’re treating me for as well and I’m feeling much, much better :) One of the other things they found was a virus that slows the metabolism. So apparently my weight is not just bad diet.
I’ll let you know how I feel after I finish the treatment. For the moment I’m really impressed - I have more energy, my skin and hair has improved and I no longer start the day with a cough that sounds as if I’ve got tuberculosis. I’d say these are significant improvements ;)

Fixations of the Month

There wasn’t really time for any, I miss my fixations *sniff*

Films

Film Count
8 films watched this month, of which 7 films were new to me and only one was a film I’d seen before. Planete Doc Review really made its mark on my film watching pattern in May - half of them were documentaries.

New Additions to My Favourite Film List
Sadly none *sniff* That’s not to say I didn’t watch some good films in May. I think it’s just that the best ones happened to be documentaries and there’s veeery few documentaries that I want to watch “again and again”. So anyway, the best films I watched in May were:

• Afghan Star (UK, 2009)
• Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (USA/UK, 2008)

Most Intriguing Films of the Month
I didn’t watch any very unusual films in May really. The most intriguing would probably be the two I mentioned above already.

Worst Films of the Month
The “honour” goes to…

• Yuvvraaj (India, 2008)
• Becoming Jane (UK, 2007)

Full List of Films watched in May (in the order they were watched in)

1. Yuvvraaj (India, 2008)
2. Dhoom:2 (India, 2006)
3. Afghan Star (UK, 2009)
4. Latawce (Poland, 2007)
5. De verloren kolonie (Netherlands, 2008)
6. El crimen del padre Amaro (Mexico/Spain/Argentina/France, 2002)
7. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (USA/UK, 2008)
8. Becoming Jane (UK, 2007)

Books

I got through two books yet again. One was related to A Child Called ‘It’ (my masochistic read from last month) - A Brother’s Journey: Surviving a Childhood of Abuse by Richard B. Pelzer, which is more or less the same story that David Pelzer told in A Child Called ‘It’, but told by a different family member. I found it quite fascinating to compare.
The other one was Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money–That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! by Robert T. Kiyosaki, which is obviously about getting rich. It includes lots of very useful tips, my favourite is - don’t spend money ;)

Diet

My diet has been going very well since I started the bioresonance therapy. As I want to get rid of my allergies very, very badly, I have practically no trouble motivation-wise to keep the necessary diet for 6 weeks. Even though my meat intake has risen, with no sugar and no dairy in my diet I am definitely losing weight!
I think that by the end of May I was weighing in at around 74kg, so that’s 2kg less than in April (I’m 73kg at the time of writing). So my BMI was 28.2 at the end of May and is down to 27.8 at present.
I’m feeling much better than I have for a long time and the weight loss is really starting to show. I’m getting comments about it from almost everyone who sees me, which is nice :) Though my favourite part is seeing it in the mirror ;) Also, my trousers are getting very loose (I can take most of them off without unbuttoning them - it’s only the belt that holds the ones without rubber bands up!).