i use science and technology to formulate my theory that your DNA is the DNA of something strange and amazing

still trying to make all the finishing adjustments on this script. i keep having all these little things that need to get done right away, and having no time to work on this damn thing. it's very frustrating. yes, studio comes first, but what am i supposed to do, fail my other classes?

anyway, watched a really good movie called "Cafe Lumiere" which starred one of my favorite actors Tadanobu Asano. It was a really good lesson in slow pacing, letting the audience get really comfortable in a space. One scene in particular: Asano and Yoko are in his bookstore and as they sit there and have a slight conversation while flipping through books and cd's the camera remains still in front of a window, outside the window is the street where sunlight reflecting off the passing cars dances around room. it's great.

the 20 Movie Pack: Apocalypse movies Claire lent me is pretty awesome, some goodies in there. working on trying to narrow that stuff down and selecting what i'm going to want to use.

new album from Converge, "Axe to Fall" is amazing.

I'm beginning to find film review writing not so fun anymore. you have to be so serious and i write much better when i can just be opinionated and casual. whatever.

it's like... like nothin matters! i bet it does.

yeah, i don't know, i'm beginning to lose faith in this whole blog thing. i know no one from class reads this. am i just doing this for me? i know cyan wants us to keep this updated but other than that there's really no point. anyway, it doesn't matter...

i just wanted to say i spent the last hour or so reading through the short journal i kept through most of my freshman year here. it was pretty crazy. crazy how much it helped me learn about myself. i mean at the time i was just writing whatever but now reading it it's like, hey, i knew what i was talking about. so it was interesting. really depressing too. nostalgia. ugh, all that kind of stuff. that was just a very very hard year. an especially hard spring emotionally, mentally. Never had i wanted to leave more than March of 2007. but it's interesting, the thing that kept me sane, got me trough it was just my dream of not giving up til I had at least been to Japan, all i wanted was to just get to Japan. Of course, for anyone who know's the story, the net year, January 2008 was just as hard if not worse, I really just don't really like talking about it. such a weird time. very painful to think about.
but now that i've been to Japan, i just feel even more motivated to just get BACK to Japan. i just don't really know how to explain it. Wim Wenders explained it pretty well in "Tokyo-ga," the magic of Japan, what exactly it is about that place that makes it so wonderful to certain people. just watch that film and you'll know what i mean. but then again, the few of you that MAY read this probably won't see it, so nevermind. sorry-

DESPERATE LIVING!

HORSE the band has done it again!!!

i've been listening to their new album "Desperate Living" since monday and i can't get enough of it, it's amazing. they've never let me down before, this is a band that can simply do no wrong, people.

i would say you need to listen to it (them), but i know it probably won't be exactly everyone's style, especially those of our class (assuming that no one else aside from classmates might ever read this). but here's a link to something you might find somewhat interesting, give it a chance...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBvWgbcE8J4

"wasting my life" -Keiichi

so just a little note.
I just got done watching a film called "Tokyo-ga" by Wim Wenders.
It was so great. It's basically half documentary on modern Tokyo (modern to 1985 when the film was made) and half documentary about Yasujiro Ozu, legendary director of 50 some films in his 60 years of life. Wenders just has a lot of really good points and inspirational things to say. It's interesting that what he loves so much about the films of Ozu are the same ideas I love so much about contemporary Japanese film (made since '85). Ideas like film capturing real life, telling a very simple stripped down story, use of nostalgia, and making films that are very Japanese, yet completely universal.
In the part of the film where he visits Ozu's grave he points out that there is no name on the tomb, only the Chinese character for "mu" meaning emptiness/nothingness. He then goes on a long though about this which I found incredibly fascinating: nothingness is an idea that fills us with fear;
"each person sees for himself...life. and each person knows for himself the extreme gap that often exists between personal experience and the depiction of that experience up there on the screen. we have learned to consider the vast distance separating cinema from life as so perfectly natural that we gasp and give a start when we suddenly discover something true or real in a movie. be it nothing more than the gesture of a child in the background, or a bird flying across the frame, or a cloud casting it's shadow over the scene for but an instant. it is a rarity in today's cinema to find such moments of truth... for people or object to show themselves as they really are. that's what was so unique in Ozu's films. ...films which actually and continuously delt with life itself and in which the people, the objects, the cities, and the countrysides revealed themselves. such a depiction of reality, such an art is no longer to be found in the cinema... it was once... mu, nothingness, what remains today."
So I have just been looking into this "mu" a bit more and find it extremely interesting.

http://www.soundofmu.no/2006/about-mu.html

Also, Werner Herzog had a cameo random appearance coincidentally in Tokyo at the same time as Wenders.

On a side note: I've begun my application to the JET Program. My application portion is done, now I have to write my statement of purpose and wait for my letters of recommendation to come back to me. I'm very affraid.