Monday, August 21, 2006

never has there been a better use of slow motion


I really wish I had a reason for liking this aside from the blindingly obvious. I do not.
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Sunday, August 20, 2006

"If the dolls had voices they would have screamed, 'I didn't want to become human.'"


This is probably my favorite scene in GITS2. Not just because it's so damn pretty - when I first saw this scene, I was floored also by what it said about the central thought that the movie keeps hammering on. The thought of the first GITS (which I didn't really dig) was a kind of crossing of the line between the human and the artificial, where the human turns artificial (what is most essential about human beings becomes calculable and subject to alteration; the "ghost" can be hacked) and the artificial turns human (one of the humans' tools gains something like free will and decides that it wants to have "kids"). This isn't really something new, and in any case it's pulled off in a somewhat sloppy way - the movie is more or less structured as action scene --> talky scene --> action scene, and there's very little integration between the two.

Innocence is totally different. Far from there being more "transgression" (god, I wish I could go through the rest of my life without hearing that word again) of the line between human being and the artificial, at this point the line has for all intents and purposes disappeared. No more natural or unnatural, real or unreal. The movie constantly tries to pull the carpet out from under you on this - what looks like a regular conference between a group of people turns out to be a construct, what looks like a gunfight in a convenience store is actually a kind of psychological assault. Everything in the movie speaks towards absolute "subjectivity" and the total determination of everything in the world by technology. The beagle, for example, is completely adorable - and asking whether it's real or artificial in order to determine the beagle's "value" (so to speak), is no longer really possible.

And the height of all this is the scene linked above. Where is the true here? Where is the false? Not a trace of either to be found - just an extraordinary, terrible kind of beauty. If I can be forgiven some obscurity, this entire scene speaks to something Nietzsche once wrote: "Art is worth more than truth."

Ask me again about the ending later on, maybe I'll have understood it better by then. I have some grasp on it as it is, but it's going to take me some time to get it to a point of clarity.
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Saturday, August 19, 2006

cars don't need functioning shocks anyways.


Eazy E is the Miles Davis of gangsta rap.

I like this video because it manages to cram in all the lurid ass-shakin' and stupid rapper hijinx (the car hopping) of later hip hop videos without a trace of unnecessary bling. Plus, goddamn that beat.
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Friday, August 18, 2006

2Kids makes Higurashi suitable for domestic television.

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Wednesday, August 16, 2006

man, Marty looks so old and frail here...


"No one knows what the fate of thinking will look like. In a lecture in Paris in 1964, which I did not give myself but was presented in a French translation, I spoke under the title:
'The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.' I thus make a distinction between philosophy, that is metaphysics, and thinking as I understand it. The thinking that I contrast with philosophy in this lecture—which is principally done by an attempt to clarify the essence of the Greek aletheia (unhiddenness) — this thinking is, compared to metaphysical thinking, much simpler than philosophy, but precisely because of its simplicity it is much more difficult to carry out. And it calls for new care with language, not the invention of new terms, as I once thought, but a return to the primordial content of our own language, which is, however, constantly in the process of dying off. A coming thinker, who will perhaps be faced with the task of really taking over this thinking that I am attempting to prepare, will have to obey a sentence Heinrich von Kleist once wrote, and that reads 'I step back before one who is not yet here, and bow, a millennium before him, to his spirit.'"
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Tuesday, August 15, 2006

OPerdämmerung


Good god, and I thought they were doing way too much with the PREVIOUS Negima OP. I think this might be the most complex set of opening credits I've ever seen...

(definite parallels with recent Futakoi Alternative and Eureka 7 OPs also)
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Saturday, August 12, 2006

My favorite ED of the season.

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Friday, August 11, 2006

Nekonyan Dance!


The incoming new shows for the mid-season have been surprisingly low-quality as far as the ops and eds go; only a couple have really caught my eye. And of them all, this one is EASILY the most shameless.
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Thursday, August 10, 2006

JD ad-libs about love


He does surprisingly well, considering they kind of put him on the spot!
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Wednesday, August 9, 2006

SHIN!!! GETTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!

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