webcowgirl

So after two months, the Ozu festival has ended. We saw three movies in the last week: End of Summer, Early Spring, and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice. I'll be happy to not see anymore Japanese domestic dramas for a while, despite the "masterly" film making; too many people making choices based on what society expected of them, too little of people seeking personal understanding, happiness, or fulfillment. Lots of insights into Japanese culture, mind you, but sometimes it was all a bit too harsh.

The very last movie we saw (Green Tea Over Rice) had some great scenes set at a Pachinko parlor, and I laughed out loud when they went out to eat at the "Calorie Hut (insert picture of pig)." However, it was mostly about a rather priggish wife doing her best to "outwit" her husband, and rather sad insofar as neither of them seemed to be making any attempt to get to know the other. Ah, arranged marriages!

Of this lot, my favorite was decidedly End of Summer, which was about an aged patriarch embarassing his family as he gets closer to death. He was probably in his sixties or seventies, and I loved that he was sneaking away to go drink some hootch with the girlie he'd hooked up with way back when. His daughter in law was mortified, but I think the phrase "he died as he lived" was far more of a celebration in this case than a cause for remorse.

Early Spring, meanwhile, was more of a domestic drama, "married man fools around on wife, will she forgive him!", but fascinating in its depiction of Japanese office culture. I also liked that for this film, finally, we actually saw a woman taking ownership of her sexuality; she was portrayed as a wee bit of a villain, but I found her far more appealing than most of the dull young virgins who seemed to spend all of their time contemplating marriage proposals and little else (in most of the last half of Ozu's work).

Overall, I saw 14 Ozu movies in two months, but only missed two I was really hoping to see (due to scheduling issues). With the twelve I saw in 2005, I've now seen 28 of his 37 or so movies (many are missing; some only exist as fragments, but I did see some of those!). The only one of his sound black and whites that I missed was "The Munekata Sisters;" sadly I didn't see many of his color movies at all, but since there are only 6 and I've seen three, well, that's not too bad, really. As for his silents; well, there are many of them, but I don't think I'm particularly interested in seeing the ones I missed as I nearly fell asleep during every one of them.

Best movie? I'd say Late Spring, which I rated equal to Tokyo Story as 3 1/2 stars (out of four) but which just shimmered with beauty. And I got weepy at the end. I'd say watch them both if you can. As for me, my next stop in movie-land is Alice in Wonderland; after all this I could use something a little bit lighter!

J and I went to Sadler's Wells last night to see Eva Yerbabuena - it was a much more satisfying experience than last Sunday. Next week we're going twice, though I secretly want to go see one of the acts happening between now and next Thursday. Ah well. Time, never enough.

I've been thinking a bit about aggressiveness. I get called aggressive, almost always by men, and usually when they're unhappy with my behavior (bosses, my dad, Wechsler). I have come to believe that this calling a woman aggressive is actually a control tactic. I say this because you ONLY hear a man called aggressive because of physical behavior - though, to be honest, I think you'd just NOT say it to his face, you'd say it behind is back - but you don't call a man aggressive simply for stating his opinion. I believe aggressive, applied to a woman, is a way of saying "opinionated," as said by someone who doesn't enjoy having a woman express their opinion more strongly, or more convincingly, than the person who calls them aggressive. Because, really, they would NEVER say this to a man. It's a control tactic used to shut women up. And along those lines, have a look at this article on stereotyping women in business. Read the report at the bottom, it's where the meat is.

Uh, what else. J and I went to the BFI to see Late Autumn, which is one of the last movies we'll be seeing in the Ozu festival - it was nice but kind of light (a relief) with a very funny scene in which the men were talking about a colleague who had died 7 years ago ...
Man 1: His wife is so beautiful still!
Man 2: He used up all of his luck marrying her.
Man 3: You have to die early when you marry a woman that beautiful.
Old waitress: You need more sake?
Men: No thanks!
Man 1: Her husband will have a long life.
Man 2: Thank God for unexpected blessings, eh?

I was laughing out loud at how amazingly rude and mean they were. Later they were all saying they wished THEY were widowers - a horrible sentiment given that they were all married!

Anyway, we're having theatre geeks over for tacos tonight. It should be lots of fun, but I've got to clean STAT!

My "keep yourself busy" strategy for the month of February has really kept me hopping this week. Fortunately I've still been seeing lots and lots of Ozu, which means going out but not coming home late. This week we saw Late Spring, which was really just quite a Japanese movie. It had a tea ceremony, a trip to Noh theater (have never seen it before!), and lots of visits to sake bars. It also really pointed out some very Japanese attitudes that I'd never conceived of before, such as that getting remarried (even after being widowed!) would make you unclean. I especially enjoyed the scenes set in Kyoto, which reminded me of J and mine's trip back in 2001, right before I started that horrible job at the insurance company. (The icon is from Floating Weeds, by the way.)

Wednesday, then, was a trip to see Bette Bourne of Bloolips in A Life in Three Acts. Bette had a lot of great stories to tell (the play was about her life, basically a reenactment of a series of interviews) and I really enjoyed the insight into 50s-80s London. Whoda thunk that being an actor could be just as much of a trade as being a printer? And also it was great to hear someone who felt so strongly "I just gotta be me."

Last night was a Fado colored dance show at the Linbury called "God's Garden" (which I haven't written up yet). It was a little incoherent but pleasant enough - they did give out wine to the audience and there was a very hunky man taking off his clothes. Beforehand we went to Kitchen Italia, which unfortunately has gone for those bench seats I hate so much. They also made their waiters upsell you to "filtered" water when you ask for tap specifically. I was aggravated, and to make it worse the risotto was chalky (read: underdone). But I ran into my old coworker Ken there, and he didn't snob me off. We'll see if he really wants to hang out and play games.

And if there are any Faulkner fans out there, this New York Times article about a notebook that influenced much of his writing is well worth reading.

Off to work now ...

Saw a really great scene in "Hen in the Wind" of a woman, in a very solid fashion, falling down a narrow and steep stairwell.

Really, for all that the previous movie ("There Was a Father") was all about keeping in your feelings and sacrificing, this movie was about the truth, that keeping it in bakes your brain and makes poison.

This is the one, the start of his mature style. I wonder if it's just the use of the new film stock that made it possible? Really very good.

Afterwards we blew it all away by going to a musicals nightclub event called Musicalifragilistic and singing "Oom Pah Pah" with a room full of people dressed like they were in Cabaret or Chicago (or Duran Duran). Good night all in all. I like my tofu salty.

Uhh ... Madeira is already a year and a lifetime ago. I spent today training my employees. During a talk about what I was trying to do with the department as a whole, I went into some of the things I wasn't expecting to need to do but am, and briefly wondered if I was being "too vulnerable" with them about how this was a learning process (as it were) for me. Then I mentioned that one of the things I wasn't expecting was going to be part of my job was "cheerleading" for the department, as the previous test managers I'd known who'd spent a lot of time going around promoting their departments were basically .... long pause while I came up with the perfect word ... "useless parasites." Which means now I think maybe that's now the perfect word they're going to use to describe me in their heads, or maybe "big faker" or "useless prat" or "I could be doing that job better." Anyway, we had four and a half hours of training, with 11 total speakers, and I thought the huge thing was a big success, unless of course now my employees all think I'm a moron.

Anyway, that killed my energy for going out and for once I had the option of choosing to go home instead of doing something else, so here I am hitting the LJ while my spaghetti digests. I've been to see another Ozu movie, "The Only Son," which was Ozu's first talkie and a nice break from the four or so silents I've seen. The plot is that a woman who sacrificed everything to send her son to school goes to visit her son in Tokyo, now that he's all graduated, and finds out that, basically, he's a total loser (he's gotten married and had a kid and not bothered to tell her, much less visit her or invite her to see him all this time), and she's squandered her life trying to help him make something out of himself. Oddly, the scene I liked the most was this tiny moment in her house in their small town when there were a couple of little chicks hopping on the stairs of what was for all intents and purposes a perfectly composed still life of a Japanese house, with a bit of feather fluff floating in the air. I wish I could have a poster of that scene; it was just beautiful. The movie was also interesting in terms of my realizing my total lack of understanding of Japanese culture; when the mom leaves the married couple money at the end, were they grateful, ashamed, or even mad at her for embarassing them? I just couldn't tell at all. Fun to puzzle over it, though. Oh yeah: and thanks to seeing all of these movies and not going to see plays, I've ended this month Not Broke (Much). I like that.

Oh. And at the end of the day of training? Every one of my little "we just do user acceptance testing" team said they wanted training in test automation. I was so proud my heart about burst. Bless their socks, we're taking this damned company into the 21st century together, just about 10 years later than it should have happened.

Quick update. What I need to be doing right now is finishing my Little Dog Laughed review. I'll call this my warm up.

Looks like I haven't been posting about "life" on here, so:

Friday: a day at work I've already forgotten about, followed by birthday drinks chez booklectic, where I got to see lots of my friends but was really struggling to stay awake.

Theme: not enough sleep lately.

Saturday: an Ozu themed day, with an afternoon lecture at the BFI about Tokyo Story (comparison of him to Chekov very good), then a viewing of Dragnet Girl, which I had a hard time not dozing off during. Then we slogged through the rain to Amy's house, where she served us chile and we watched State Fair. It was a good night but I felt beat.

Sunday: headed to Putney after lunch and then walked to Wimbledon Heath with wechsler. A good evening, really, and I managed to get to sleep at a decent hour.

Monday: at work, I spent most of my day with my peer from our government owned doppelganger. Part of this was listening to a presentation on "What Good Is," which started out with me arguing for half an hour with the speaker, who asserted the goal of testing is finding bugs. Seriously. He might as well say that the goal of medicine is to keep doctors employed. Later MyTwin and I talked about how screwed up the situation is at the companies we work for. Always good to have someone who really understands your situation, I say.

Monday night: went to see Little Dog Laughed, for which I got free tickets and for which I'm being paid to write a review ... you know, when I finish this journal entry. I started it on the train on the way back home - a girl's gotta take the time where she can find it.

This morning: joined BookMooch. Decided not to post any books (even though I have a basketful I want to give away next to the couch) because I don't feel like mailing them right now. FYI, I've been reading Steel Remains and enjoying it quite a lot. Man on elf smut in actual printed literature: what has the world come to? (The answer to which is "good things," of course.)

Work: two hours of coaching from the Silver Fox (not time too well spent but I got a good idea on teaching people how to "challenge," in this case take all the things they see that don't work right and try to get them to think how they might be fixed, or even improved a little, THEN work on getting them to do it); wrote up job descriptions (this is why I forget what I do, it was boring); then a two hour meeting I didn't really need to be at which forced me to listen to a colleague berate a supplier for not doing something three months ago that he no longer cared if the guy did or didn't do. I wanted to leave the room.

I was late getting out because I needed to set an OOF message as I am in training the next two days, and I was 5 minutes late for A Mother Should Be Loved at the BFI. I had a hard time not falling asleep again, so I was okay with the fact that the final reel was missing and we all got to leave after a mere 77 minutes. J and I used our extra time to get dinner at Chatkhara, which was good.

And now: writing!

I'm missing Tokyo Chorus and Walk Cheerfully tonight. I don't know if I would have had the energy to see both, but bah. I hate thinking I'm missing a movie that will never come back again, and Japanese silents are highly elusive. Apparently the last Ozu festival at the BFI was in '88 or something; I may have to wait rather a while for these two films to get revived. Or, hey, maybe the BFI will put them out as DVDs. It could happen.

At any rate, I've spent the time tonight going over the February Ozu festival schedule and have the rest of the shows and dates picked out.

3 Feb Wed 6:30: There was a Father
4 Feb Thu 6:20: Hen in the Wind
6 Feb Sat 3:20: Early Summer
7 Feb Sun 6:20: Brothers and Sisters of the Toda family
9 Feb Tue 6:10: Late Spring
12 Feb Fri 6:20: Munakata Sisters BAILED
20 Feb Sat 6:20: Equinox Flower BAILED
21 Feb Sun 3:20: Wutai Jiemei (actually this is a Chinese movie which I'm seeing to celebrate Chinese New Year but I thought I'd add it in)
22 Feb Mon 6:20: End of Summer
24 Feb Wed 6:00: Early Spring
27 Feb Sat 4:00: Green Tea Over Rice

That should keep me busy enough ...

Madness, madness. In no things moderation. Yep, that's me. This time it's movies, not theater. BFI's got an Ozu festival going on January and February and I'm going to do my best to see all the movies I've seen by him that I've not seen before (i.e. when they did the Ozu festival at the Northwest film festival, a score of reviews from me here). It's odd to think that I saw twelve and yet there are many, many more I've missed - nine movies in January alone, and I could see another two that I'm postponing until February instead. In addition, there are two Ozu lectures I want to attend - one a general one, the other a scene by scene breakdown of Toyko Story, billed as "his greatest movie," and certainly a goodie.

At any rate, here's the schedule I'm looking at for this January. Let me know if you want to come to one or more of them with me. I'll be buying tickets Tuesday.

1 Friday: 16:00 Le Jour se Leve (1939 - oops, this isn't by Ozu, it's a French Gangster flick but looks really good); 18:00 Days of Youth (1929) (both of these are just maybes, I won't be buying tickets for this until the day due to anticipated New Year's Eve exhaustion)
2 Saturday: 18:20 I Flunked, But & A Straightforward Boy (two short movies)
3 Sunday: 18:00 Les Diaboliques (1955, another French gangster flick, but still, at the BFI)
6 Wednesday: 18:15 Ozu, Emotion and Poetry: An Introduction (this is the lecture)
8 Friday: 18:30 Tokyo Chorus (1931); 20:45 Walk Cheerfully (1930)
9 Saturday: 16:10 Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth (1932); 20:30 Days of Youth (maybe - two movies might be too much given the previous night's schedule, and Days of Youth will also depend on whether or not I make it out on the 1st)
16 Saturday: 13:00 Tokyo Story masterclass (scene by scene breakdown); 16:00 Dragnet Girl (1933 - Ozu's gangster flick)
19 Tuesday: 18:30 A Mother Should Be Loved (1934)
27 Wednesday: 18:30 The Only Son (1936)

My voice lesson was decidedly the high note of my evening. ( Stop me if you think that you've heard this pun before. Also ... )I talked to the woman that would be the hiring manager for the London office today and she wants me to send her my resume again. That'll give me a chance to polish it up before it goes out - apparently they lost all of their mail for a day so she never got it the first time. Things are looking good both for an interview while I'm there AND for maybe getting a more challenging job than Localization testing. Huzzah!

Today has left me beat! Home at 7:30 after going like gangbusters since my laaaate wake-up time, I found myself eating two plates of spaghetti and then looking around the house for some fruit juice. The 4:30 Ozu silent I saw today was great, a genuinely funny film, and the folks who did the accompaniment were good enough that I've decided to go see "An Inn in Tokyo" on Thursday just because they're going to be doing that one, too. Then we ran right off to Pilates, and for some reason Echo decided it was Kick Their Asses day and did just that. Ugh! I mean, sure, it's great that my upper thighs and abdomen are achey right now, but, jeez Louise! And now it's bedtime. shadowdaddy's got the day off, but software folks don't get banker's holidays, so I'll be in at the normal time tomorrow ... and off to see another silent movie tomorrow, Male and Female, as part of the Silent Movie Mondays at the Paramount. As for the house ... well, I can always clean it when I'm dead.