Last night, I watched a Japanese/Polish-made SFD film directed by Mamoru Oshii called Avalon. A bit dated, the film was made in 2001, but anyway, it was new to me. I don’t know quite what I think of it: it certainly doesn’t live up to anything like The Matrix in terms of SF-action, but then I don’t think it was supposed to be that kind of a film. As some of the commenters on the IMDB message boards have noted, it’s very Tarkovskian, slow and full of empty silences, beautiful mundanities, and a kind of weaving of “mythic” materials with …
Month: March 2005
Whasango
Lime knows me very well, and she outdid herself this year. She ordered something for my birthday, online, because all the shops seem to be going out of stock, and seeing as it wasn’t a popular movie in Korea, it probably soon will be permanently unavailable. I picked up a copy for Marvin in Chinatown, Toronto, but never got one for myself, and I love this movie. I don’t care how low it is in the opinions of most Koreans, or how confusing it sometimes is (as Marvin noted to me once before); I think Whasango (here’s a pretty balanced …
Christian Fundamentalists, Korean Communists…
What do the devout (fanatical?) Christian E. L. Bynum and Kimg Jong Il have in common? See for yourself. via a really funny article at Landover Baptist.
Finally My Computer Looks Hi-Tech
Here are some very beautiful screensavers via Weird is Relative.
Oblique Strategies
As a birthday gift, the inimitable 강미 posted a link to this Oblique Strategies page. It’s all about Oblque Strategies, a kind of semi-random cardset that gives advice to people working on creative projects, meant to be used when one feels “stuck” or at some kind fo creative impasse. Thanks, Kangmi! Of course, the cardsets themselves are pricey, because they weren’t widely released and they now seem only to be available on ebay, at insane prices… but there are links on the page to an electronic version or two. The problem is, the scripts for the electronic versions don’t seem …