Perfect Blue (Japan, 1998)


With a couple hours to fill before the Tall Blacks vs Lebanon game began, I decided to watch this film. And blog about it too. It was in a stack of DVDs the Knifeman loaned me a few months back that I am ever-so-slowly working through. The director Satashi Kon died a few days ago, aged on 46, which was good impetus to finally see this animated film.

It’s been on my list for a long time. I’m fairly sure it came through the NZ Film Festival back in ’98, and it was one of the films I circled in the guide but didn’t go to see. It’s a psychological thriller that’s one part Alfred Hitchcock, one part Dario Argento, and one part Wes Craven – or their Eastern equivalents. It starts out as a fairly by-numbers suspense film, but then goes very weird indeed in the second half, finishing up with an intense final sequence that is carried off by its visual verve and commitment to its distinctive vision.

There’s some stuff in it that doesn’t entirely sit well with me – the film was too keen to show us the lead character naked and exploited, so much that the in-story protests about how this was gratuitous and demeaning seemed both too much and too little. One line of plot in the film is about an actress working her way to greater prominence by using her body and performing in scenes involving sexual violence, but as the story fractures around questions of reality and fantasy it becomes impossible to find any resolution for this thematic question. Not as well-handled as I’d like, and raises questions it can’t quite resolve.

It’s a great ride though, with some amazing flourishes. There’s a funny scene that precisely dates the film where the main character struggles to understand the internet and the web; this scene played out in a lot of TV and film in ’97-’98 as I recall. How far we have come…

Overall: it’s a good watch, if not quite as cerebral and intense as I’d been building up in my head for the last decade. Contains nudity and violence, so not for family viewing or casual night, but if the suspense/psychological stuff like in Shutter Island works for you, this will be a good time. Thumb goes up.

Thanks Dad

My dad just dropped around to drop off some lemonade and food treats, on account of hearing that I’m home with a cold.

He is a good man, my dad.

It’s just a little cold. I hope. Fascinating sleeplessness night-before-last though, as the sickness rolled in on me like a stormfront, and I found myself lying awake nearly face-down on the pillow and with the clear awareness that my head was a seamless component of an enormous crystalline array of cubes constructed of thought. Ideas represented as small visual icons flipped through the cubes to line up in long significant sequences, but it was impossible to complete a thought because the meaning always extended out of reach into the distant extent of the array. I was awake and asleep at once, like a lucid dream that perfectly overlapped with reality. Heh. Consciousness is fun.

But, thanks dad! Yum. Red licorice.

Asian People in NZ: Having a hard time

One of the strands of being really busy is finally resolved and open to public view: the Diversity Issues page on the Issues.co.nz site. This has been a long-term idea for my work at the Centre for Applied Cross-cultural Research, dating back to some attempts way back in ’04 to develop a better way to communicate about cultural diversity outside of the academic sphere.

The specific impetus was the well-received report by CACR and the Human Rights Commission, launched at the Diversity Forum last Monday, about the experience of discrimination by Asians in NZ. It’s a great report, easy to read, and worth at least a glance by every New Zealander. Here it is on Slideshare:

Barriers to asian equality discussion paper

Of particular interest to the From the Morgue audience, I think, are parts 3.2 and 3.3, about employment access – the comments of recruitment companies (in 3.2, page 12) are shocking and the study where the same C.V. was sent out with either a Chinese name or a European name (page 14) matches it.

Overall it produces a pretty rough picture, but also the message is clear that Asians in NZ aren’t being destroyed by this consistent unfairness. They’re happy here, and happy to be here. That’s good to know, as they’re a huge demographic group in this country and growing all the time.

So I hope you’ll check out the report, and pop over to the Diversity Issues site to look around there and maybe to add a comment. Discussions online are always hard to foster so any contributions would be welcome!

Sort of Busy Linky

The sort of busy where netball is delayed by 90 minutes and I think “awesome, I can stay in the office another 90 minutes!”


A Brazilian city that ended hunger. (Not sure where I got this from – Vivian from Chicago, maybe?)

Album cover, lyrics to “Nobody loves the Hulk” at a fun Vintage Comics blog. See also: Bangladeshi Hulk parody/appropriation.

All Tarkovsky’s films are available to watch free online.

Half-hour episode 1 of internet tv sci-fi series Pioneer One. Haven’t watched this yet but word around it is good. Via Warren Ellis.

Alan Moore interview at Quietus, and guest appearance on comedy podcast.

Terrifying Green Dragon! Since reading this plot synopsis weeks ago, it has haunted me. By the inimitable sleep-dep.

Via Stephen Fry – stunning close-up photos of eyes. Beautiful and weird.

This week’s Star Wars reimagining: Wookiee the Pooh

And finally… bicycle safety. At the half-way mark it gets particularly funky.

Headshot Linky

While the voting continues apace in previous-post (midnight tonight NZ time is when I count ’em up and apply the result to my Twitter account), here be some linky.

David Tennant, post Doctor Who, went the House route and got a U.S. pilot. It wasn’t picked up but a clip from the pilot has emerged. Enjoy David’s accent here (because there isn’t much else to enjoy – this is so by-the-numbers it hurts).

Stand-up Dan Telfer explains dinosaurs (via George L)

Here is some well-expressed love for the KLF’s Doctorin’ the Tardis. I was holding my cassingle of this just the other day. Linky includes .pdf of KLF’s “The Manual” about how to get a #1 single, whose rules were famously not followed by the KLF themselves.

via Samm: WWII as seen on Facebook

Steve Leon introduced me to the sublime Smarthistory, an art history site with excellent, deep, tempting content.

More Star-Wars-reinterpretation. Young Daniel Logan (Boba Fett in the preview trilogy) made this Stormtrooper helmet as Maori carving; and Victorian interpretations of Star Wars characters.

As the US political scene races further and further away from sanity: I’m voting Tea Party.

You are not so smart – read this blog and you might become a bit more smarterer.

Simply incredible: Real-Life Superheroes. Whatever your expectations are, this will exceed them. (via Bleeding Cool.)

Words to use if you really want to win at hangman.

And finally: Pulp Fiction redubbed with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck voices. I don’t know why either.

Profile Pic

As part of some other work I’ve needed to finally look for a new profile image. The ones I use currently are a photo from 2006 and a cartoon image that’s even older than that.

Here are three more recent profile pic options. Which should be my go-to option when I need to present a face to the world?

I’ll close voting Friday midnight, NZ time. Winning choice becomes my Twitter pic.

(I’ll make no comment until voting is closed.)

Climate in Court

I was mostly intending to stay quiet on the court challenge to NIWA’s temperature record on account of it being nonsense and well-covered elsewhere, but last night while watching Outrageous Fortune (NZ free-to-air = graphic rendition of a twincestuous threesome in an 8.30pm show)(scene played for pathos) I followed a link to Poneke’s blog comments, where Iwi/Kiwi advertising guy John Ansell was holding court.

He referred to the Inconvenient Truth court case in the UK: “the movie was banned from schools” he said. Another commenter challenged him: “Banned?” he was asked. “Yes, banned in its original form.” I couldn’t resist mocking this farcical display, to which he replied with further dancing around the subject and pretending “banned” was an appropriate word to use when of course nothing of the sort was ordered by the judge.

And it strikes me that this is exactly what the court challenge is designed to do – not merely to gain the oxygen of publicity, as I’ve read all over, but to provide another chunk of narrative that can be circulated through the denier infosphere, heavily manipulated into service of their pre-defined conclusions. It isn’t intended to convince anyone of anything – but a year or two down the track, *whatever* happens, this court case will be one of the talking points mentioned by the John Ansells of the world, one more factoid in the rolling maul of misinformation and disinformation thrown out by people desperate to believe in a comforting conspiratorial lie.

Coincidentally, Ansell has just now gone off the deep end on race. Charming.

(See also this headache-inducing Kiwiblog thread where friend-of-FTM Repton tries to take up a wager on the outcome of the court case. The other party has gone strangely silent as of this writing.)

Delinquent Linky

A case of writers room fun. (via Warren Ellis)

Doctor Who lego

Star Wars in Edo Japan (action figures)

Star Wars blaxpoitation:

Star Wars ad for immunization

(Is the endless series of Star Wars variants and reimaginings and parodies an indicator that these films have indeed become a modern myth cycle?)

The knifeman posted a bunch of mind-blowing posters to Italian horror films. These are definitely worth a look.

This has been getting into legal trouble and is gone from YouTube, but I found another copy: Newport State of Mind. This is the good stuff boyo.

The greatest and most dramatic Wikipedia edit wars (are we finally over that annoying stage where people argue that Wikipedia is a blind alley because it doesn’t have expert-curated content? Good.)

Check out this great profile of Debz at Prinkipria, in support of this story. Nice one Debz! Interview contains bonus pukeko.

From all over, this neat project overlaying WWII era photos on their contemporary locations.

And finally, via Theremina… eating figs.