Thursday, March 21

>>  Better Luck Tomorrow

Roger Ebert while defending Justin Lin's critically acclaimed film Better Luck Tomorrow at this year's Sundance Festival:

I quoted Chris Eyre, the Native American filmmaker, who was on a panel with me that afternoon. "For 100 years," he said, "American Indians have played the same roles in movies. Either savages or spiritual peoples who exist on some mystical plane. It is time to let us just simply be people."

The same could be said of Asian-American characters, who are often either martial-arts practitioners, exotic sexual prizes or winners of the spelling bee. Justin Lin's film tells the story of a group of bright, ambitious Asian high school kids who live in an affluent suburb and have their sights set on Ivy League schools. The hero is a brain who captains an academic decathlon team. Because he wants his college application to look good, he also plays basketball, does community service and belongs to half the clubs in school, in addition to getting high grades.

Meanwhile, he and his friends drift into criminal activity—at first selling cheat sheets, then dealing in drugs. Eventually they commit murder. He considers turning himself in to the police, but "I couldn't let one mistake get in the way of everything I'd worked for. I know the difference between right and wrong, but I guess in the end, I really wanted to go to a good college." >> more...

The idea behind the film entices me enough, at a personal level, that I don't even think I'd care if the production was weak. It's kind of like Gregg Araki's The Doom Generation where the concept alone kept my attention. Absurdity is exciting because of its novelty. But sadly, the general population has the tendency to feel uncomfortable with unnatural/unfamiliar situations. What's funny, then, is the fact that these situations do truly exist. Somewhere.

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Tuesday, March 19

>>  It's Not Insomnia, Really

A quick glance at my schedule for today (or why I did not sleep last night):

08:00 >> Introduction to Marketing
09:30 >> Modern Art
11:00 >> Mini-break; Homework for MOA; Send out emails; Eat
12:30 >> Managerial Accounting FINAL EXAM
02:00 >> Management & Organizational Analysis
03:30 >> Managerial Accounting Final Project

I'm looking at it this way: Since this Managerial Accounting class is a 2 credit course, and today is the Final Exam, it means that for the rest of the semester, I won't have classes on Mondays until 2PM. God bless, no? Indeed.

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>>  A Regular Noboru Watanabe

Rain seems to make the world feel a lot more romantic. Maybe it's a mediacentric archetype driven by classic 1950s films. Maybe a bit of Bogey and Audrey's hidden in my thoughts. But the bottom line is, I've always wanted to walk a girl home in the rain. Some kind of wonderful, that would be.

Sadly, it wasn't as amazing as I had hoped. In fact, it was the opposite—a disastrous night leading to an utterly forgettable weekend that stained me for a year.

They leave the juicy bits out sometimes. Long before Ricki Lake or Jenny Jones fed us the meat, the black and white silver screen filtered our imagination. Those films, they knew how to calculate emotions: Just the right touch of sadness, of love, of hope and the string would stretch—but not pop.

It was perfect.

But that night, as I walked her home, something was miscalculated. Gravely, so. The rain fell harshly. We had no umbrellas and we weren't holding each other by our shoulders. I was walking five paces behind, five paces to the left. Somehow, that's how it turned out. Somehow, I didn't make an attempt to get closer. Not again.

I had given up.

Too much confusion, role-playing. Too many expectations. When we had arrived at her residence, she asked me something and I said something and then I walked away. It seemed simple. But she had to follow and chase and catch up by fate's little mistake. And then I said something and walked away again.

You know, it's not the same anymore. You can't make it happen twice. You can't.

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Sunday, March 17

>>  Birth of the *SUPERPLASTIC

I'm not sure when it happened. Must have been when I was younger. Glued to the television and the sort.

Once I was innocent. I had no expectations. I had no dreams. At birth, what can one dream about? Everything without outsider influence is natural. And is probably acceptable. And is probably probable. But once I realized the world outside, my thoughts burgeoned out.

By age eight, I wanted to be an astronaut. Living in a country where the GDP per capita won't buy you a Sony Playstation 2 or a Microsoft XBox, I wanted to be an astronaut. Really, seriously, how exceptionally amazing is it that we have such dreams at such a young age? It's because we don't know our boundaries then. And that's why we continue to dream and wish and expect.

My mother tells me that I had often tried to jump off tall structures in order to fly. I wanted to be Superman. I had the belief in me that I could be Superman because I saw Superman on television and thought Hey, Superman is cool, I wish I could be like him! I wonder if then I really expected to fly.

The imagination of others is the fuel within us. It's what makes us want to be Super. It's what makes us want to be Plastic.

*SUPERPLASTIC: And we're running out of dialogue.

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