Another September, another Japanese Prime Minister resigns. September 2007 it was Abe. September 2008 it was Fukuda. September 2009 it will be… sorry, all bets are off.
Not much happening these weeks. It seems that I spend a lot of time in front of the computer doing a bit of this and a bit of that. My social life has deteriorated completely. I have been researching the composition of query letters and and have been sending them out. The first one went out on Wednesday night, and I already had my first rejection on Thursday morning. Oh well, I’ll keep on keeping on.
Last Saturday I took Zen and one of his little buddies to see “The Clone Wars.” The kids enjoyed themselves, but I was wondering where the magic was. Droid armies, clone armies, it somehow doesn’t seem like a real engagement. Starship Troopers had more heart. Oh well, the kiddies enjoyed it. I’m now looking forward to the 3-D re-release of the original Star Wars movies. I wonder how that’s going to proceed – whether they’ll do them in order of story (Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, with Jar-Jar Binks and Qui-Gon Jinn, the weakest characters in the story, albeit with the second-coolest villain – Darth Maul) or in order of release (1977′s Star Wars: A New Hope). I hope it can come out by the time Zen is eight years old, since that’s how old I was when I saw A New Hope…
Wednesday was a similar day – I took the day off and Naoko and Zen and I went to the theatre again to see WALL-E, which was good fun, ate at Burger King, and hung out. Zen was off school this week so he was at home a lot and either doing homework (two hours a day) or playing with his little buddies. Ah, to be a kid…
Zen lost his first tooth, a lower one. Hard to see the gap in this picture, but he’s holding the little lost tooth between his fingers.
Movie Reviews:
WALL-E – WALL-E is an interesting movie about a robot that goes about doing stuff with garbage, and over 700 years he builds giant cities of crap. Human beings have gone into outer space to hang out on arks, their lives taken care of for them by automated services, floating around on moving beds and drinking milk shakes all day. It’s all a bit silly, and the message of hope at the end is a bit murky. The saving grace of the film was EVE, WALL-E’s “love interest,” and she is surprisingly fleshed-out (and oddly sexy!) considering that she has a three-word vocabulary: “WALL-E” and “EVE” and “prime directive.” More EVE, less WALL-E, and no humans. That would have been a fun movie. As it is, the film is less interesting than Monsters Inc or Cars. (By the way, Zen does a great impression of EVE saying “WALL-Eeeeee…”)
The Clone Wars – A dull film. The only thing that it manages to resolve is that at the end of the film the Jedi are allied with the Hutt clan, at the beginning they aren’t. The pre-story manages to turn the world of 1977′s “Star Wars IV: A New Hope” upside down, since we see Jabba and the Jedi and armies of stormtroopers all on the same team.
CD Reviews:
Nico: “The Frozen Borderline” – Nico’s second and third albums, with outtakes and demos. Great collection, even if the music is tough to take. Very same-samey with Nico’s voice the only real colour throughout, although one number is sung by her son Ari.