Lost In Translation

New Cult Canon: The Big Lewbowski

I just recently got the 10th anniversary edition of The Big Lebowski on DVD and it is a true classic, a skillfully written ensemble piece that is completely original and entertaining. The AV Club gives it its proper treatment as a cult classic:

That said, who doesn’t love The Dude? And who’s to say he isn’t a hero anyway? Inspired by Raymond Chandler detective novels—and the hazy L.A. vibe of Robert Altman’s brilliant Chandler adaptation The Long Goodbye—the Coens have created a character not far removed from Elliott Gould’s Marlowe in the Altman movie, a laid-back gumshoe dragged reluctantly into a case his conscience (and curiosity) quietly implores him to solve. Just as Marlowe would much rather hang out with his cat and the commune of free-spirited (read: frequently topless) hippie women next door, The Dude would like nothing more than the peace of a hot bath, a doob, and the soothing sounds of bellowing whales piped through his Walkman headphones. But the funniest running joke of The Big Lebowski is that someone is always there to drop the proverbial ferret in the water: The laziest man in Los Angeles County, the ultimate in live-and-let-live hippie pacifism, is constantly being pushed out of his shell. 

It all starts with the carpet-pissers. And that’s another brilliant thing about the shaggy-dog plotting of The Big Lebowski: By and large, the incidents that drive the story along are, in The Stranger’s words, “stupefying” in their absurd triviality. (The Coens pulled the same trick off again—to much more sweeping effect—with last year’s underrated Burn After Reading, which whips up a maelstrom of intrigue over an item of absolutely no value whatsoever.) Had the carpet-pissing goons not mistaken The Dude for the other Jeffrey Lebowski—the wealthy, wheelchair-bound businessman whose trophy wife (in the parlance of our times) owes money all over town—there’s no movie here. That rug “really tied the room together,” and The Dude’s quest to replace it leads him to get mixed up with a phony kidnapping scheme, a band of nihilists, tittering avant-garde artists, a pornographer, the fascist Malibu police chief, Saddam Hussein (as a bowling-alley clerk), and one Larry Sellers, a hollow-eyed young D-student who may have run off with $1 million in ransom money. 

The Dude’s sidekick throughout his adventures is John Goodman’s Walter Sobchak, a short-tempered, well-armed Vietnam vet (and practicing Jewish convert) who tends to view everythingthrough the prism of his war experience, no matter how slight or tangentially related. After watching his buddies “die face-down in the muck,” Walter feels entitled to a world that’s just and orderly, even if his idea of what that world might look like is completely absurd, distorted, and overblown. When a competitor steps over the line, out comes the handgun. (“This is not ’Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.”) When a waitress asks him to pipe down a little at a diner, he lectures her on the concept of “prior restraint.” And though he claims to have “dabbled in pacifism,” his hair-trigger aggression thoroughly violates The Dude’s peacenik philosophy, feeding into a hilarious dynamic of mutual exasperation. Still, they aren’t the opposites they appear to be. Both are outsiders, both are men out of time, and both are deeply suspicious of The Man. The Dude acts embarrassed when, late in the film, Walter drags Lebowski out of his wheelchair to prove he’s faking his disability, but there’s probably a side of him that suspects his friend may be on to something. Their oddball chemistry sparks one unforgettable exchange after another, including this scene, where they and their bowling teammate Donny (Steve Buscemi, as amusingly meek and unassertive as he was brash and talky in the Coens’ previous film, Fargo) discuss the rug-pissing incident: 

The Sociopath Next Door

Sometime a while back I read a really fascinating review of Martha Stout’s book The Sociopath Next Door. Her thesis is that 4% of the population (1 in 25) are sociopaths-that is people without consciences. She also clearly shows that these people aren’t necessarily only in prison (there are a number of factors that contribute to antisocial behavior), but many of them live among us and hold positions of power. Interestingly she notes that there are fewer in group-oriented societies like Asian societies that place a greater emphasis on group harmony, whereas in the west there is a greater emphasis on individuality. Essentially sociopaths care only for themselves and have no empathy for others (lack a conscience). Stout list seven factors, in which having three for more may suggest sociopathic behavior: (1) failure to conform to social norms (2) deceitfulness, manipulativeness  (3) impulsivity, failure to plan ahead (4) irritability, aggressiveness (5) reckless disregard for the safety of self or others  (6) consistent irresponsibility (7) lack of remorse after having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person.  Stout uses several case studies and anecdotes to show the different ways sociopaths exist in our society and contrast the condition with narcissism to show the difference between the two.  She gives advice on how to spot sociopaths and how to limit their control on your life.

 

Behind The Screen: Where Is The Screen?

I used to be a big fan of sociologist Sawa Kurotani's Daily Yomiuri column Behind The Paper Screen for its insight into Japanese culture via comparison with American culture. But I have noticed that in the past year or so she has focused exclusively on American culture without bring ing the comparative element of the Japanese perspective. Take this recent column where she takes American students tot task for their "consumerist" approach and lack of intellectual interest in their college education. This would have been a great comparison/contrast with Japanese attitudes to college which I think are even more consumerist-get into the right school play for four years join the corporate machine. I would  have liked to she how she would defend this attitude-and while I generally agree with her (it was generally like that when I went to school)-however most of my friends had some intellectual engagement with their subject, which is probably because I was an English Literature major. That being said it is extremely rare to find a single Japanese student engaged in an academic subject. A common response to why they study their particular subject is that they were unable to get into "X" department. It is a missed opportunity to make some comparative observations about two of the strongest economic countries and their attitudes about higher learning and the importance of the intellect in society. I have seen her miss similar opportunities with the politics when she wrote about Obama earlier in the year.

Hanna No Ji

Hana No Ji is a tasty little fusion restaurant in Ebisu with a stylish ambiance. The food is traditional Japanese with a twist-the dish above is Chinese cabbage with egg. Below is a rice cracker with fish (I forget the name of these little fish at the moment). One of their best dishes (not pictured) is salmon cheek. 

Shakespeare Wrote For Money

Shakespeare Wrote for Money is the third installment of collections of Nick Hornby’s entertaining column, “What I’m Reading”, for The Believer magazine. Sadly, it is also his last; he has given up the column. I find the editorial policy of The Believer that won’t allow Hornby to talk about books he doesn’t like a bit off putting, but the concept of celebrating good books isn’t such a bad idea really. I have to say that I have been inspired to read dozens of great books by Hornby over the years and this collection is no different some of the titles I look forward to read include: A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Klafus, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning by Jonathan Mahler, Ironweed by William Kennedy, Naples ’44 by Norman Lewis, On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, The Blind Side by Michael Lewis, Coming Through Slaughter Michael Ondaaje, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder, The Secret History by Donna Tart, Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia by Robert Saviano.

And now my usual homage to Hornby with my list of books bought and book read:

Books bought: Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Nick Hornby, Bangladesh Lonely Planet Guidebook, Glamorama by Bret Eason Ellis, Our Story Begins Tobias Wolff, Unaccustomed Earth Jhumpa Lahiri, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. 

Books read: (Reading) Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 by Max Hastings, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Shakespeare Wrote for Money by Nick Hornby, The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout.

Jamaica Festival

There was a Jamaican festival at Yoyogi park this afternoon and that means reggae, ska, and good eats. I loves me some jerk chicken-in this case a jerk chicken sandwich (to be honest I also had tacos rice and some samosa). 

Underdogs

Malcolm Gladwell has another interesting article about the tactics of underdogs through the ages in The New Yorker:

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

30 Rock: Conservative?

There was a thought provoking article about the politics of 30 Rock in Slate recently that is a worthwhile read:

30 Rock will have its Season 3 finale next week, and, barring an unforeseen plummet in viewership, the curtains will close on some good news. Thefirst and second seasons averaged 5.8 million and 6.4 million viewers a show, while the typical Season 3 episode has brought in more than 7 million. That's a small but happy triumph for a series that's flirted with oblivion since its start—even if it's a triumph many onlookers saw coming. This season premiered just a month after Tina Fey crafted her devastatingly ditzy Sarah Palin impression on SNL and became, for a spell, the fourth-most-famous woman in American politics. It was all but guaranteed that Fey's newfound celebrity would give her baby a boost.

Golden Week Films

I was somewhat interested in seeing Gran Torino after re-watching the excellent Unforgiven recently. I think elements of the film were interesting, but hose thing were mostly glossed over. It would have been more interesting if they had spent more time talking about the role of the Hmong in Vietnam and how they have or haven’t integrated into American society-instead it was colorful insults of bigoted working class Americans. I felt it was overrated but it’s the kind of thing that major wards academies like. Can Eastwood effectively play the tough guy anymore? Perhaps miscast. 

Elegy is an adaptation of a Philip Roth novel, The Dying Animal. I haven’t read it but it seems that he has written his last 10 books on sex, old age, and death. So as Woody Allen makes the same film over and over again-Roth writes the same book over and over. Kinsley is great and Penelope Cruz pulls off the student look in a beautifully filmed movie laden with stereotypes. It is beautiful but depressing.

Tell No One is a French adaptation of an American crime novel by Harlan Coben. It is a fascinating film directed by Guillaume Canet. It calls to mind several great European thrillers-at first the inexplicable video footage of his dead wife calls to mind Peter Handke’s brilliant Cache, and the bucolic European landscapes in contemporary European films seem to suggest dread and certain death: the aerial shots of the cars driving through the forests remind me of Handke’s Funny Games and the serial killer film The Vanishing. But it is a mystery film that keeps the viewer guessing and watching. I also liked how the doctor played by the mesmerizing François Cluzet turns to his gangster client Bruno to hide him and help him find out who is trying to set him up. At this point we leave gentile civilized Paris of elites and visit the ghetto of the marginalized former colonies of France-the mean streets of Paris. I was engaged throughout the well-paced film. It is a first class thriller.

Wako

Wako is a Japanese tonkatsu chain. This is the set lunch with deep fried shrimp (ebi fry), pork cutlet with shisha (sasami fry), and pork cutlet (tonkatsu).