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Hitting The Ground and Running At Comic Con 2009
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- Parent Category: Blogs
- Category: Eric Lurio
- Published on Monday, 24 August 2009 20:22
- Written by Eric Lurio
Humor is one of those subjective things that either works or it doesn't. Andy Borowitz's recent "critique" of last week's San Diego Comic Con is just one of those misfires that's just pathetic. 
The reason I bring this up is that there may have been more women than men -- not much this year -- having seen the line for the Twilight Panel with literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of teenaged girls waiting for hours on end to get in. Which brings me to my real point here: How big is too big?
I've been going to this thing on and off -- mostly off -- for around 18 years, and while the TV and movie panels and swag were always there, it was much smaller and more about what it was called. Comics.
Don't get me wrong, the guys doing the panels needed to be there as much as the people who paid to get in, and the media parties were pretty good (you can get a healthy and filling meal from hors d'oeuvres, and I especially liked the fact that none of them kicked me out). But aside from most of the actual stuff that had to do with comics, it was impossible to get into anything without waiting on line for hours on end.
The TV lines were even worse. One of the stars of Dollhouse is a friend of mine, and due to situations that were nobody's fault, we didn't manage to hook up last month and not showing up for this would possibly ruin our platonic relationship. I missed most of it, and had the security guards not been looking the other way for a second, that would have been it for her and me. The happy ending notwithstanding (nothing is more validating than having one guard stopping another from throwing you out of a place), the simple fact is, is that unless you are prepared to just sit in one place all day, you cannot see anything that didn't have to do with the actual art of cartooning. From what I heard, the Pat Oliphant tribute wasn't particularly full.
It wasn't always like that. When I first started going, San Diego was the place every cartoonist in north America would get together to schmooze. The parties to get into were not the ones sponsored by IMAX®, (who were kind enough to drive me to their presentation), Wired magazine or Entertainment Weekly; the pick-up soirees were where the top cartoonists in the industry -- and I mean newspaper strips and underground stuff -- would get together to jam on paper while getting wasted in places that no longer exist. But time marches on I guess...
The crowds and the lines are bringing the event to a crisis. The whisperings about moving the place to Las Vegas are beginning to get louder, and to be perfectly frank, I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Unfortunately, they may not be able to pull it off if they tried. San Diego became what it was because it was convenient to LA and easier to get around. Getting around LA is difficult even with a car, and Las Vegas in the summer even more so. Besides, I don't think they would have a venue large enough.
It could be possible to split Comic Con in two, with the movie stuff run as a giant film festival and the comics stuff returning to the art of drawing and storytelling.
White on Rice's Director Dave Boyle
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- Parent Category: Blogs
- Category: Nobu Hosoki
- Published on Saturday, 13 March 2010 16:34
- Written by Nobu Hosoki
Dave Boyle
Q: What was your collaboration with co-writer Joel Clark like? Because there are lot of Japanese lines in this film, wonder whether any of you speak Japanese?
DB: I speak Japanese; Joel does not. Basically our collaboration went like this: I didn't meet him until midway through writing the screenplay. And when we were both writing in English together, the actors and I decided which scenes were going to be in Japanese and which scenes were going to be in English.
I worked with the actors on the Japanese language dialogue, so the screenplay is mostly in English, but then the parts where they are in Japanese I had a Japanese version of lines. I let the actors improvise some of the Japanese language dialogue or at least changed it to fit their way of speaking.
Q: So you weren't born to the Japanese parents?
DB: No, No, I'm not. Do you know the Japanese talent, Kent Derricott? I learned Japanese the same way he did a long time ago, I was a volunteer missionary except I didn't go to Japan. I went to a Japanese community in Australia. I thought to learn to speak Japanese, and I learned a little bit about Japanese culture and stuff. In making this movie, I really relied on the actors for the dialogue, and some of the cultural things.
Q: Did you know that the actress Nae was really popular in Japan back in 90's? How did you cast her?
DB: I've actually seen her in a Yoji Yamada's movie Gakko /School, and around the time we were making the film, she was just started to do Hollywood movies like Letters from Iwo Jima, and Inland Empire. I think that somebody suggested we try talking to her, she really liked the script. She's an amazingly talented actress, and a lot of fun to work with. So I hope she gets more recognition.
Q: So what particular element fascinated you so that you cast her?
DB: I had a meeting with her and Hiroshi who played the main character. They really seemed like brother and sister; they had a really good interaction with each other. They really had the right type of chemistry to play siblings. So that's why I knew she was the right person for the part.
Q: There's interesting stuff in the film that, like the traditional Japanese man, who is close to 40-50 years old like the main character in this film, they kind of hate or dislike the tall woman. I thought that you got that down about the Japanese!
DB: That's actually my favorite scene in the movie, and the part of the tall woman was really hard to cast. It's hard to find somebody who was a good actress and tall enough to make that gag funny. Kayako Takatsuna who played the role, she's actually not that tall, but she was always standing on a box or whatever, so that she looks really tall. But she was really a great actress.
Q: The kid Bob is played by Justin Kwong, who doesn't speak any Japanese at all in the film. There are lots of people in this country who can't speak their parents' mother tongue? Were you consciously aware of that to incorporate it into this film?
DB: He's just like character Bob in real life. His mother is Japanese, and she was always on set, and she always spoke to him in Japanese, but he just speaks in English back. A lot of my Japanese American friends or Asian American friends do the same thing. They get to a certain age, and they don't want to speak their parents' language any more. They just start speaking English, and later in the life, they regret it.
Q: The main character, Jimmy, is played by Hiroshi Watanabe. Jimmy had a ex-wife. But you actually didn't go through the process of showing the back story of how they divorced or got married, was that something you consciously avoided to focus on the current situation?
DB: Year, I thought it would be a little bit funnier, if we never meet her, the only thing we know about her is seeing her picture. Probably no matter what we did, what ever I imagined about their first marriage, it's probably funnier than anything that I can come up with. So I just left it up to the viewers to imagine his life in Japan.
Q: Could you talk about casting Hiroshi Watanabe? He was really the right choice.
DB: You know it's funny. I made another movie called, Big Dream Little Tokyo, a very low-budget indie film. I did that before he was in "Letters from Iwo Jima." We became friends; I thought he was really good in my first movie. He just played a little part, but he totally stole the scene away from the everybody else. So I remembered him, and thought he would be really great in a leading role in a comedy.
I thought that he would be really great for the Tora-san (the Japanese comedy series) type of movie. So I had a script called "White on Rice," and at the time, it didn't have Japanese language in it or a Japanese theme it was just story about 40 year old man. Then I decided that I was going to cast him in the lead role, so I changed it around to use the Japanese culture a little bit.
Q: Talk about the challenge of balancing out or trying to avoid the stereotype of Japanese or Asian characters while at the same time, trying to be funny?
DB: Yeah, that can be challenging. Since I'm not Asian, I had to be extra careful. But I think what I trying to do was, basically that all the characters had to be very unique in and of themselves. Whenever it's possible that somebody might think of a stereotype, I try to make the character so specific that it's different from what people would expect.
There's big variety in a number of the different characters. I think there is somebody in the movie for everybody to relate to. You know when Americans see it, I don't think that all Asian people are like Jimmy or like Bob. They just recognize them as an individual character for his/her individuality instead of as a stereotype. So far the reactions have been good.
Q: What is your fascination with the Japanese culture?
DB: You know it's funny. I speak Japanese, but I just learned that accidentally I guess. My first movie was more specifically about the Japanese culture whereas this one, it's just the story that happened to star Japanese characters, if that makes sense. So it's not really directly about Japanese culture, it's just that the people happen to be Japanese.
Q: So what your next film?
DB: I'm working on a couple of different projects that I'm writing. And I'm shooting a very low-budget movie this summer called "Surrogate Valentine." That one doesn't have any Japanese language in it. But I'd like to make a movie in Japan at some point. I'm actually going to Japan for the Japanese premiere on "White on Rice" this weekend, March 10th, 2010. Hiroshi, Nae, and I are all going to be there as well at the Osaka Asian Film Festival.
Q: Have you found the distributor in Japan?
DB: We don't have a distributor yet, but we are shopping it around. And I think that the festival would be a big test. This will be the first time showing it with Japanese subtitles to an all-Japanese audience. So depending on their reaction, we can probably find a distribution in Japan. That's what I hope.
Nobu Hosoki
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- Parent Category: Blogs
- Category: Nobu Hosoki
- Published on Thursday, 27 August 2009 00:47
- Written by Brad Balfour
Animal Triste
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- Parent Category: Blogs
- Category: Laura Blum
- Published on Tuesday, 30 July 2013 17:13
- Written by Laura Blum
The saddest scene in movie history isn't Mammy lamenting what's gone in Gone With the Wind or even the choice Sophie is forced to make in Sophie's Choice. It's the agonized bellow that killer whale Kasata lets rips when her calf, Takara, is taken to entertain SeaWorld crowds an ocean away, as featured in Blackfish.
Gabriela Cowpwerthwaite’s documentary unfolds a damning exposé of the multi-billion dollar sea-park industry and the connection between its inhumane treatment of orcas in captivity and the resulting perils for the trainers who work with them.
Humans may be the only species to crack out the hankies and Häagen-Dazs when things get glum, but evidence is mounting that we have no monopoly on mourning loss. "Every time we've taken a calf away from the mother, we've seen it be a traumatic experience," former SeaWorld trainer John Hargrove told Film Festival Traveler following a Blackfish sceening at Lincoln Center's Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center. "The observable behavior that we saw and the vocalizations that we heard when they stripped Takara away from Kasata and transported Takara to Florida [SeaWorld] went on for days."
Not only did SeaWorld ply the wailing whale with meds, per Hargrove, it also brought in a senior research scientist from the independent non-profit Hubbs SeaWorld Research Institute to anayze the vocals. Having studied orcas in the wild, the scientist determined that Kasata's cries were "long-range vocals," reported Hargrove. Plainly, she was amping up her vocalizations in oceanic search of her calf. "So if Kasaka had never even used her long-range vocals in 30 years, she knew instinctively how to do it," said Hargrove.
Dolphins are other cetaceans known for their mournful behavior at the loss of kith or kin. In How Animals Grieve, author and anthropologist Barbara J. King lavishes examples drawn from her research on emotion and intelligence in animals. Her article in the July issue of Scientific American, "When Animals Mourn," gives a full-blooded depiction of a dolphin in a state of grief:
On a research vessel in the waters off Greece's Amvrakikos Gulf, Joan Gonzalvo watched a female bottlenose dolphin in obvious distress. Over and over again, the dolphin pushed a newborn calf, almost certainly her own, away from the observers' boat and against the current with her snout and pectoral fins. It was as if she wanted to nudge her baby into motion—but to no avail. The baby was dead. Floating under direct sunlight on a hot day, its body quickly began to decay; occasionally the mother removed pieces of dead skin and loose tissue from the corpse.
When the female dolphin continued to behave in this way into a second day, Gonzalvo and his colleagues on the boat grew concerned: in addition to fussing with the calf, she was not eating normally, behavior that could be risky for her health, given dolphins' high metabolism. Three other dolphins from the Amvrakikos population of about 150 approached the pair, but none disrupted the mother's behavior or followed suit.
Can't get enough of this fascinating topic? Pick up a copy of King's book, How Animals Grieve.
