Entry 095: "Stranger in a Strange Land" Pt.3 End

Dear Internet,

                I finished listening to "Stranger in a Strange Land."  I have to say that I will not be going back to it again anytime soon or for that matter ever.  The book is another one of Heinlein's preaching books where he hopes to change all of society while poorly attempting to masquerade itself as a science fiction novel.  True by definition, it is a science fiction book.  The main character is a man born on Mars that has psychic abilities that would put him as some sort of super human.  The fact that he defines those who will gain his abilities as "Homo superior" in the end is proof of his self definition of being different than man and being better than him.  There are some sort of super elevators, water beds, hypnotic techniques, and a bunch of other inventions that were not present when the book was made.   But all of these are secondary in the novel.  The main focus is clearly the philosophical discussions that the characters have rather than the novel's plot and setting.  It is a construct of Nietzsche philosophy and eastern religious constructs that emphasizes the lack of individualism while being wrapped up in escapism fantasy without the whimsicalness of reality.

                I can only get a little into this, but I will try.  I should start off with what I said I was going to do yesterday.  I mentioned the book's use of strawmen arguments.  The most obvious form of this is its discussions about religion.  The book creates a fake church for its use.  The Church of the New Revelation, or Fosterite, is so far removed of any sort of motion of religion that it is a joke.  "Stranger" acknowledges this, and it is supposed to a joke religion.  People wantonly commit nearly every sin under the sun under the protection of being told that as long as it is done under the blessing of the church it is not an act against nature or God.  It is such a joke of a church that Smith creates his own church as a reaction towards it and also in regards to the other world religions.  However, the fact that the book makes use of this joke religion as the ultimate and central foil to Smith is a failure of creating an argument for itself.  It is almost the definition of a strawman fallacy.  It concocts its own enemy from its own mind so that it can bolster the alternative.  Instead of addressing the whole arguments that real religions put forth as their dogma and doctrine, Heinlein centers his proposal of a new religion against the backdrop of a cartoon faith.  There are times that he goes off into a tandem about how real religions treat certain aspects of life, but he does it half heartedly, never really delving deeply into one religion or the other to analyze the core philosophy.  He only scratches the surface and is always shy of ever actually stating outright the incorrectness of a particular dogma.  In the end it feels more like he is too afraid to ever actually step on anyone's toes lest he actually upset anyone.  It is more cowardice than carefulness.  Maybe that is why he has Smith refuse to decide if his "Church of All World" is indeed a church with a religion or a sort of philosophy, despite them being one and the same.

                Do I need to talk again about how Smith is some sort of superman?  Some sort of Übermensch?  Smith is some sort of great being that has got every sort of mental power at his fingertips.  Astral projection, invincibility, telekinesis, teleportation, levitation, telepathy,  body regulation, and the ability to make things immaterialize, which probably already has a name in some database.  The only thing that it seems he cannot do is materialize matter.  And this is a major factor.  Smith can destroy, but what can he create?  The only thing he makes in the entirely of the novel from his own self is a child, and he does not really acknowledge it in the sense of fatherhood.  In fact, under Smith's church there is no parenthood.  Everything is communal.  But this is a falsehood within humanity for a mother will identify her child as her own even if the father cannot or will not.  To make the children as a part of this communal society would require a replacement of the process of birth.  The book treats children as accessories rather than individuals with the dignity of human life.  But I am supposed to be talking about Smith.  His wealth comes not from his own efforts.  It is inherited, so he knows not the value of a man's sweat.  Even to the end, he refers to those outside his fold or those lower to him as "marks," a derogatory term used by carnival workers to those they swindle.  Until they share with his experiences, they are beneath them.  At the end of the book, it has the gall of placing Smith as a Christ figure.  He is supposed to be sacrificing himself to the mob and becoming a martyr for his beliefs in the process.  Afterwards, his friends perform a cannibalistic ritual which is supposed to mirror the Christian sacrament of Eucharist, albeit done rather tasteless manner.  The greatest problem with this is that throughout the book, Smith is never once displayed as being subject to the human condition or even ever really being a man at all.  Even Christ was tempted in the desert and cried over the death of his friend Lazarus, but Smith never knows pain nor ever says he loves anyone because he says he cannot understand love.  He says that if Jill says he loves someone he will agree with her because she understands love.  Smith's death as a Christ figure is broken when one sees that his death was not to prove anything or even done for the benefit of those around him.  It is done for showmanship rather than love for his fellow man.  If anything it could have been done selfishly because he wanted to ascend to a higher plane.  Christ's death was done to allow the chance for the ascension of the soul of man to heaven because only once God has known death can a flawed man sit at the same table as God.  You can disagree with me on this, but having Smith as a representation of Christ is more a slap in the face of Christianity than a straightforward analogy.  Then again, this whole book is supposed to be a slap in the face of most world religions.

                The book want to erase the importance of individuality more than it wants to admit.  It pushes the hive mentality even when Smith makes an altered version of it for his church made of humans.  The word god is thrown around like a baseball.  Smith says that all living things are god with oneness, that every person is god and that god is all.  He says that it is a poor translation of what he is saying, but that does not stop him and all the rest of the characters from interjecting "grok" as much as they can, which is supposed to be a mixture of think, understand, and drinking.  All it ends up being is a sort of pantheism with a new set of cloths.  Throw in a little Buddhism, Hinduism, and a bit of sideshow theatrics and you get Smith's quasi-religion.  Individualism definitely goes out the door once everyone starts sharing each other's experiences through some sort of constant mental link.  The book tries to say that this is not the case with how it tries to keep individuals from retaining their personalities once becoming a part of Smith's collective mind, but this is a joke considering that the point of the religion is to melt everyone's minds together.  

                "Stranger" tries its hardest to remove itself from reality that it finally succeeds.  It removes itself from the manner that people behave.  It removes itself from how people think.  It removes itself from the troubles of man that someone reading it forgets his own troubles.  This is escapism plain and simple, but not all escapism is a bad thing.  It is like jumping up into the air to feel the effect of weightlessness when falling.  It is when one jumps off the Burj Khalifa to maximize the time of euphoria that a bystander should intervene.  That is what makes "Stranger" such a pile of drivel.  It goes so far out of reality that it forgets that it is a fictitious work.  It spreads a con, and worse than that, believes its own con.  The escapism that "Stranger" puts forth is the kind that makes a person lose touch with reality because they believe the unreality that is clearly being put forth before them.

                "Stranger in a Strange Land" is a terrible work.  At first I thought I was going to like it because of its premise.  A man returns home to Earth after being raised by Martians.  In the end, the book is a soap box sermon from Heinlein that again forgets to tell an enjoyable story.  After that it delves scantly into religion and philosophy while pretending it is deep.  The majority of the characters are unlikable to the point that if they in the least point step outside of the book's philosophy they are ironed out to fit the book's mold or are catapulted into a joke character.  Everything becomes so matter-of-factly in the way that the characters react to the important things of life that nothing, not even life or death, has any sort of significance.  The character of Smith fails as a prophet, a self insert, a sacrificial lamb, or even as a protagonist.  In the end, the book is a waste of time that does more as an antithesis of reason and reality.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Tomorrow is the "Genocyber" OVA.

Entry 069: "Saikano"

AKA: "The Last Love Song on This Little Planet"

Dear Internet,

                Everyone dies.  There, Internet.  I saved you four and a half hours of depressing teenage angst filled with plot holes.  I do not like to spoil stories, as I have said before.  But when the story is already a spoiled mess that is not worth the time to view, the argument against doing so goes out the door, gets shot, blown up and dies a somehow slow death being burned alive.  That could basically sum up my feelings over "Saikano," but that would be taking the easy way out, much like how the characters seem to do countless times through the course of the film. 

                About the only thing good that "Saikano" has going for itself is the premise.  Chise and Shuji are two teenagers in high school who are dating.  A war of unknown details breaks out.  Chise is taken by the Japanese government and has a weapon system implanted into her body.  She then fights the enemy forces that wage war on Japanese land.  Shuji find out and deals with the fact that his girlfriend is has been modified into a bio-weapon soldier.  The two must figure out their relationship with the backdrop of war behind them.

The show pours the creative budget into make a different set of wings for each scene requiring them.

                That is where the good stuff ends.  The only thing that I should add to the premise is that Chise spends a considerable amount of time questioning her humanity and sanity.  Shuji does likewise, but Chise really goes in circles.  Speaking of circles, the first half of the show goes around in circles for much too long.  One episode they are together, next they want to break up, and then they miss each other and want to be together but do not want to go back on saying that they only want to be classmates.  The indecision between the two is annoying at first and just gets worse as the show continues.  Take for example Shuji's actions towards Ms. Fuyumi, his teacher from middles school who he had sex with.  She makes advances towards him because her husband is gone for long stretches because of the war, and she feels lonely.  Shuji keeps going back to her, engaging in some action, and then pulls back at the last moment before doing something that would go against his feelings for Chise.  This happens at least three times in the show and each time it kept feeling like a bad plot point that was going nowhere rather than the test of Shuji's love for Chise that it was supposed to be.  

                You can look at Fuyumi as one of a dozen characters who are thrown in as nothing more than trying to show the horrors of war.  There is the fellow classmate that is killed in the first episode before he can give his girlfriend a necklace.  While one would think that this would act as a catalyst to make the two main characters come closer because they would realize the fragility of life and wish to live without regrets, it does not.  In fact, Shuji and his friends decide to completely ignore their friend's death rather than acknowledge it and heal.  There is the female soldier that dies off screen while on patrol, whose gender was only put there to make the viewer more sympathetic.  What about the man who helped Shuji fix the motorcycle just in time to be blown apart by a bomb?  How about the friend who decided to go fight in the war to protect his sweetheart who does not even like him, which is somewhat even more invalidated because of the fact that the war is never even explained fully until the last scene of the show?

                The war is perhaps one of the biggest problems with the show.  The war is shown to the audience in the same way that it is presented to the characters in it.  Which is to say that next to nothing is ever explained.  International, and even domestic, communication is shut down at the beginning which means that the full scope of the conflict is never quite shown unless what Chise says can be trusted.  More on that in a bit.  Planes just show up whenever they want and bomb towns.  There are no air raid sirens or any sort of warning system to tell the residents that the enemy is coming.  Bombs and planes make no noise until the bomb explodes, then they make lots of racket.  The enemy that Chise and the army is fighting is never explained who they are or why they are bombing civilian cities.  Only at the very end does the show do a horrible job of explaining.  Apparently, the big wigs knew the world was ending and are fighting for resources.  How does the world end?  Earthquakes.  What is causing the earthquakes?  Why are the earthquakes occurring?  No reason.  It is a poor attempt at filling a plot hole that the show created to add the feel of helplessness but only makes a bigger hole in the end.  It is worse because the info is being delved to the audience and characters by an even bigger plot hole, Chise's bio-weapon modifications.

                Chise's modifications are the center point of the show.  Without them, she and Shuji would have had a pretty average life compared to her peers who are being blasted apart.  I can deal with the fact that she is implanted with some sort of space-age technology.  That is the free ticket for the show.  However, the show makes no attempt to say WHY she is selected to get the weapon implanted.  She is obviously taken by government spies, but the show never attempts to say if she got the implant willingly or not.  On top of that, the show never explained why she willingly follows orders in the beginning.  Later on, Chise is shown to be acting as a soldier so that she can feel numb to the pain of leaving Shuji, but why she cooperates in the beginning is conveniently left out.  It is not as if she is being forced by some override switch since she is constantly running off and avoiding her military role and duty.  The army cannot even threaten her to do what they want because she is indestructible.  The one thing that the army should have done, and would have made more sense, would be to threaten Shuji's safety, blackmailing Chise to do what they want.  What does occur is even more mindboggling.  No one from the military ever discourages Shuji from interacting with Chise.  In fact, whenever Shuji is anywhere near a soldier while with Chise, he is completely ignored like he is not there.  The single person who interacts with Shuji from the government does so in a jelly-spine, half-hearted manner that it is amazing that he got the position at all.  I just expect my MIB type characters to have more confidence.  

                Then there is the fact that the origin or design of the bio-weapon is never explained.  Even how the weapon works is never quite brought up.  Is it of an alien design, as can be seen in the later half?  Is it made by modern science, since she seems to hide missiles under her shirt?  There is no answer for any of this.  The audience must also conform to the fact that Chise is the only source of information about the world.  How does she know this?  Bio-weapon.  Throughout the show she is constantly getting various powers and abilities and the audience is constantly being told to "just go with it."  The accuracy of her knowledge is never questioned by anyone in the show.  The show just wants to use the excuse of her having a plot device sewn into her to be able to fall back on time and time again.  The problem with this is that unless you explain the plot device to a point, the credibility of it can be called into question.  Even the fact that the show wants to showcase Chise questioning her humanity as the bio-weapon takes over her body falls flat.

                The various things that I have talked about are mostly plot based.  However, the show is supposed to be character driven.  The problem with this is that nearly every single character is completely messed up in the head and has not learned how to grow up.  With the exception of Shuji's parents and the guy who fixed the bike, every character has emotional problems that paint the world as being filled with broken people.  Take the middle school coach who had sex with her student.  How about the character that decided to have sex with a boyfriend she did not love out of pity for that fact, not to mention that he knew she did not love him?  How about the army lieutenant that goes on dates with Chise but ends up crying the name of his wife as he bleeds to death?  When confronted with problems, these characters take a defeatist attitude, which makes even less sense when the soldiers choose such.  It only brings up what kind of training they are giving the recruits if they fall apart so easily.  Even the main two characters are so filled with backwards logic that it becomes grating.  One moment they want to live, the next they want to die.  Each episode feels like a trip down a schizophrenic road with the way that they bounce back and forth.  You might argue that the worst culprits are supposed to be acting so because they are teenagers filled with angst and depression caused by love and war.  The problem with this is that this kind of horrible drama only appeals to teenagers filled with angst and depression.  I did not like that drama when I was a teenager, and it is even more annoying when being portrayed in stories.  Teenagers in stories never have the right answer to life's problems and it takes them forever to reach the right ones.  This is exactly what happens in "Saikano" throughout the show except it applies to nearly everyone.  

At least he was chastised for asking such a dumb question.

                "Saikano" is a screw being turned slowly in my head.  The premise felt exciting and refreshing when I started.  As the show continued, it became bogged down by depressing pessimistic philosophy.  It never shines a gleam of hope, and when it does, the hope is bombed out of nowhere.  The show is not happy in the least.  It is a giant pity party for people who cannot deal with the difficulties of life and would rather wallow in sorrow than better their conditions.  The worst part is that the ending wants to present a picture of some bitter sweet ending, except it fails.  Like I said, everyone is dead, except for Shuji who must wait out his life as the only human alive while walking around in a dream state.  He is trapped in an inverse form of Kurama's Sinning Tree from "Yu YuHakusho," living in a dream world until his death.  "Saikano" would like to think that it can capture the pain of love and war but it feels like a pile of cynicism which spills over into the attempt at romance.  

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Tomorrow is  "The Mysterians" (1957).

Entry 027: "The Ramen Girl" (2008)

Expect to see black bags that look like black eyes for the entirety of the movie.

Dear Internet,

                I was hoping it would not come to this, or in the very least not come to it as quickly.  I am not talking about having to watch "The Ramen Girl."  I knew that eventually I would have to watch that movie.  It was on the Backlog, and if I really never wanted to watch it, I would never have put it on the Backlog in the first place.  What I could not have know prior is just how bad it is.  Even the reviews online, that I only looked at after viewing the film to prevent any sort of bias, rate higher than what I think of this atrocity.  "The Ramen Girl" is a film that utterly fails on so many levels that it is amazing that it was made in a movie at all.

                The plot can be summed up in two sentence.  A blond American travels to Japan to be with her boyfriend.  When he dumps her, she decides to learn to be a ramen chef.  That is it.  The film does not hide that the plot is threadbare and simple.  What is also simple is the vast majority of characters presented.  There is the titular character, Abby, who has the mentality of a high-school cheerleader.  The few English speaking characters who are pointlessly added so that there is more than one character not speaking Japanese.  Even the non-moronic characters have moments of stupidity so that humor can be added to scenes that are supposed to be emotionally deep and thought provoking but instead become terribly cruel because of it.

                On of these twisted scenes occurs three quarters  through the movie.  After being told that she needs to add her emotions into making her ramen in a language she never quite learned through the course of the story, she makes a trail batch to a group of regulars to the ramen shop.  Each one of the customers begins to eat the meal and each one is moved to tears.  One laments going through life with no wife.  Others cry over not seeing their hometown and dead dog.  One woman tearfully admits that her husband has not touched her in over 15 years.  Even the usually temperamental chef runs out of the room, supposedly moved by the magic ramen and most likely tearing up over the thought of his estranged son.  What does the movie do then?  The wife of the chef, who had been the most even-headed and kind character throughout the film, laughs right out loud.  She is supposed to be laughing happily at how well Abby was able to make a dish that moved people to tears, but it creates the exact opposite for the scene.  It trivializes the problems of the minor characters, trying them seem pathetic for having problems in their lives, or even trivializing what their problems are.  When one realizes that the character who misses his hometown has the same dilemma as the titular character for the first third of the movie, it is apparent that the movie is not laughing at itself but cruelly mocking its own characters.

                On the note of cruel mocking, Abby has a moment of intense nastiness late in the film.  She asks the chef who is the man in the pictures of Paris that the chef cries over.  She makes an over exaggerated crying gesture wiping away fake tears.  The chef gets angry and asks if she had been spying on him, something she does not understand because she does not know Japanese.  When the chef decides to walk away, Abby screams out victory with "You can dish it out but you can't take it?  Yes!  I gotcha."  The chef's wife then says that the man in the photos is their son and he has not talked to his father in five years.  The point of this scene is obviously supposed to illustrate that the chef is human too and has problems of his own, but because of Abby's immature manner of taunting the chef it just highlights her own shortcomings and childish behavior.  While it can be argued that this was the actual point of the scene because the audience learns the troubled relationship between the chef and his son, it would be wrong because it supposed to recall a previous scene.  In an earlier scene, the chef makes a similar over emphasized crying gesture when he finds Abby calling home in the middle of her cleaning, saying in Japanese "Mommy...I Want to go home to America."  When he says it, it is meant to highlight how Abby contradicts herself saying that she wants to learn how to cook ramen but wants to go back home.  He wants her to make a decision about what she really wants to do.  She cannot have it both ways.  Later on, there is a scene where she wholly decides to make ramen.  When Abby mocks the chef, she is not forcing a decision out of him.  She is acting out because of her misplaced frustration.  She is rebelling against one of the most underlining problems of the movie.

                Language is a one of the most important foundation blocks with inter-cultural communication.  One can use mime for minor things like eating and sleeping, but try to express complex immaterial thought like the purpose of man in an unforgiving universe through charades.  Throughout the entirety of the film, Abby never goes higher than a two week crash course level of Japanese.  She carries around a pocket dictionary for the majority of the film but seems to never remember anything.  The one thing that she says more often than anything else is "I don't understand."  Even the chef points this out.  All it does is illustrate how poorly thought out her decision to stay in a country whose language she does not understand.  And after a year she should be well past only knowing a few dozen words.  There are a lot of times throughout this film that the audience is the only ones to fully understand what is going on because of subtitles.  Abby, however, is like a dear in the headlights trying to piece together what people are saying.  If she just spent a little more effort in learning the language, her problems would have been halved instantly, but, no, that would have reduced conflict.  A conflict in my opinion was unnecessary.

That is some new level of incompetent.

                Then there are the love interests.  The first guy from the starting gate is a jerk of a special sort.  The movie makes this clear and we know this.  When he gets a job elsewhere, he drops Abby high and dry in Tokyo despite her moving there from America.  Abby does make a protest, saying that he wanted her there, but he says back that he never asked her to come.  The movie does not say whether he was right or not, but it is shown throughout the film that Abby acts upon impulse and she even admits to it.  While it does not excuse him from being a jerk, it does stress the fact that Abby is an idiot.  The romance sub-genre comes back when Abby starts dating a new guy, a Japanese salaryman who also speaks English.  Eventually he has to go to Shanghai because of his job, just like the first guy.  There is some mention of how he would rather be a musician than a paper-pusher, but that is only there to make him unhappy with his current job.  Where the problem with this occurs is in the final scene of the film.  One year after Abby leaves Japan, she has her own shop in New York City.  Japanese guy shows up out of nowhere, says that he got bored of doing the same old same old, and is now a musician.  They get back together and the movie ends.  When I saw this, all I could think of was "So, when he gets popular he will be out touring and leave you high and dry for months on end?"  Not to mention that how often she goes through boyfriends, there was a good chance that she would have been taken by the time he decided to show up again.  And how in the world did he find her?  They were not keeping touch before the one year time skip.  She went back home to another country.  There is some serious gap of information going on here.

                Then there is the ramen itself that I take issue with.  I do not mind that it is ramen or that it is used as some sort of plot device to push character development.  The "Karate Kid" remake was able to show that it is not karate that is important but that a focus for an individual is important to channel growth by having no actual karate in it.  What I do not care for the ramen bit is that it takes on some magical, otherworldly aura that can either make crying adults giggle uncontrollably or others lament their problems.  What is this stuff?  Some sort of crazy manna that comes from the heavens?  The movie takes this simple dish to such lengths it is hysterically bad.  I can understand that good food can affect how people feel.  A home-cooked meal can mean more to a person than a fancy hard to pronounce dish.  But "The Ramen Girl" elevates it to a height that is unreasonable, especially when it does so to get a laugh and the joke fails.  If you take this aspect away, the ramen is a sign of Abby's growth as an individual.  When she makes some sort of Italian inspired ramen to be judged by the Grand Ramen Poobah, he says that it needs improvement.  A year later at Abby's restaurant, she feeds the same thing to her customers.  I am not sure if the movie is saying that New Yorkers will eat anything, which has some truth, that Abby has striven to improve herself or that Abby's skill stays stagnant.  Sure the restaurant is filled to its max capacity of ten, but there is still the lack of validation from a professional standard.  If the film is trying to allude that professional standards made by unrealistically and outdated values are null and void when it comes to what the general public eats then it invalidates the chef Abby trained under who was trained and taught by those values.

Oh, she got better because she took out the peppers, but shows personal growth by keeping the corn? 

                On a quick note since I realize this is now the longest write up I have made, I want to point out that Abby spends some time just cleaning up the store before even being allowed to cook.  I am not sure if the movie was trying to make it seem that the chef was not being fair and making her do menial labor instead of teaching, but I am reminded of old time apprenticeships.  For example, blacksmith apprentices would tend to the shop and do all the annoying tasks for quite a while.  They would not even get a chance to work metal for a year after they started.  Abby should have expected to be working her way from the bottom up, even in a three room restaurant.  

                "The Ramen Girl" is a horrible movie.  That thing that I wanted to not come to quickly at the beginning of this tirade is awarding a one star review.  I do not like to rate something a one out of five, not because I do not think there are badly made stories.  I do not like to do so because there has to be something so inherently with its message to make me think it is worth telling people to avoid it.  It has to be "The Notebook" bad.  A film that skewers the meaning of commitment and love.  It has to be a literal "Victory Can Be Pre-ordered" bad.  It has to be "Twilight" bad.  One star, or horrible, has to be something that can create a ripple effect that affects anything near it.  It is not a bird dropping in a tree.  It is a diseased fish in a output water pipe that has puss filled boils leaking into the water that goes into your and everyone else's faucets.  "The Ramen Girl" creates a level of ineptitude that is hard to duplicate.  Romances are only there to pad out the plot.  "I don't understand" is a slogan for this film.  I did not even touch the level of promiscuity that this film displays despite the level of sophistication that the rest of the film showcases, which makes it seemed aimed toward 12 year olds.  But it is most likely aimed at idiots, which is something that cannot be fixed.

Did I mention that the shop MAGICALLY glows? Or was that just a grease fire?

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

 P.S. Tomorrow is "Starship Troopers," audiobook version.