Summer Wars
I’d caught wind of a new Anime export to the West called Summer Wars sometime late last year. Based on the trailer and favourable fan reviews, I just went ahead and ordered the Blu-ray online. For someone like me who loves a great story regardless of style or genre, it was one of the best impulse buys I’ve ever made. Being an Anime fan is by no means a prerequisite for enjoying this film. From the same director who brought us the The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, it’s got universal appeal.
I often wonder, at what point did the internet become a necessity to us? My best guess would be that the point of no return came sometime around the turn of the millennium, the milestone beyond which our dependence on the internet had become so absolute that we really couldn’t live without it. Because if the web suddenly disappeared today, national economies would be thrown into chaos and mass hysteria would grip those of us who had suddenly lost that instant connection with friends we could never have met, due to geography, any other way.
Summer Wars is a story about this absolute online dependency and the fallout that could result if our business/social lifeline were suddenly cut. At the same time, it contrasts the high-tech virtual lifestyle with a low-tech, old-world sensibility that still values face-to-face human contact above all else. Set in Japan, but referencing the globe, what we’d think of as Twitter, Second Life, Amazon and online banking are consolidated into a single cyberspace workplace/playground called Oz – a virtual world layered over the real one, in which people lead double lives as idealized incarnations of themselves. This virtual world inevitably comes under threat, and the social-economic chaos that ensues from its capture calls for ingenuity, courage, and the banding together of friends, family and strangers to restore order once more. It’s an entertaining and touching story that celebrates the human spirit in the age of pixels. Definitely worth a watch.
Neuromancer The Movie
Novice director Joseph Khan has somehow earned the privilege of directing the screen adaptation of William Gibson’s quintessential Cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. I’ve mentioned before that Neuromancer is my favorite novel, so to gauge the potential calibre of a Neuromancer movie by this virtually unknown director, I looked up his credentials.
Khan directs music videos for Britney Spears.
I decided not to hold that against him, though. After all, David Fincher, who started out directing Madonna for the MTV crowd, has proven his big-screen directorial talent with such flicks as Alien 3, Fight Club and Zodiac. I felt it would be only fair to reference Khan’s filmography before lamenting his handling of Neuromancer.
Khan has one film credit to his name: Torque. Released in 2004, it’s been described as a motorcycle version of The Fast and the Furious. A quick visit to RottenTomatoes.com, where the majority of critics wrote off Torque as utter crap, confirmed my suspicions about that dubious comparison. The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, declared Torque to be “A strong candidate for the most thunderingly stupid movie of the year.”
Now, indie producer Peter Hoffman is handing to the maker of said “thunderingly stupid movie” my favorite novel.
I don’t want to sound mean. Khan may achieve directorial greatness one day, but that day has not yet come. My frustration, therefore, stems from the realization that a sci-fi masterpiece is being entrusted to a novice. As one reviewer writes, Khan, like many music video directors, has “no clue how to tell stories (longer than 4 minutes).” Gibson’s novel engages readers for 271 pages, and has done so for more than 20 years. Any would-be director of Neuromancer should possess commensurate expertise with the motion picture medium.
If David Fincher was busy, I’m sure fans of the novel would have waited. I know I could have.
Home-grown
The phrase “home-grown terrorism,” which seems to describe acts of terror perpetrated by the offspring of newcomers to a country, suggests to me that those offspring have been somehow cultivated for such by their new country, just as a farmer raises crops to his liking. Ironically, there may be more truth wrapped up in that media-worthy catch phrase than most would care to acknowledge.
I remember reading Black Like Me, the memoirs of a white man who chemically tanned his skin dark enough to experience, first-hand, what it was like to be black in the American south. He observed that the southern blacks had been forced down by a white-biased system and, worse, blamed by that system for being down. The effects of such persecution on the psyche of the southern downtrodden was clearly segregative.
Today, a comparable situation exists for certain Western-based minorities who are, more and more, demonized by popular opinion and media sensationalism. Those whose skin is a little too dark or whose names are a little too Arabic tend to experience more than their share of persecution, these days. Some of the persecuted, naturally, seek refuge among those who profess to be like-minded. Sometimes, though, they wander into the company of those who prey upon their despair and channel it into acts of evil.
We are each responsible for our own actions, of course. I cannot blame another person or group for the actions I, myself, choose to take, no matter how much prodding towards those actions I endure. The decision is, ultimately, mine. At the same time, do we not have a responsibility towards one another to ease the prodding? Perhaps a smile in place of a frown might replace a bomb with a book. Naive? Fanciful? Maybe. But maybe not.
In the words of Kahlil Gibran, “Like a procession you walk together towards your god-self. You are the way and the wayfarers. And when one of you falls down he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone. Ay, and he falls for those ahead of him, who, though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.” As human beings living on one planet, tribal differences notwithstanding, we’re in this together.
We’re all home-grown. Each of us is the product of cultivation, and each of us become cultivators. The sweet flavour and ripe colour of the crops we raise are a reflection of the love we put into them, just as fields of disease and rot are signs of our neglect. Beyond ethnicity and countries of origin, beyond second languages and sacred customs, we’re each the product of the communities we create together. We’re all home-grown, regardless of what we call home. The only question is: What are we growing?