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Browsing Posts published on June 12, 2005

お疲れ様です!

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It’s Sunday evening, and I haven’t left my apartment since last night when I got back (around 7PM) except once to do laundry. Why am I wasting a perfectly good Sunday in Japan? I’m tired! Haha. Summer IES kids got here on Thursday, and ever since that day I’ve been actually doing a pretty good deal of work and running around.

For the most part, my internship is to shoot video and then produce (by August or September) a 50-minute promotional video for IES to use to promote the Tokyo program. That really isn’t too bad, except also the last few days I’ve been helping out with the orientation and various other things associated with the beginning of the summer program. On Thursday I went to the airport to help welcome and move the new kids in. On Friday I sat through and helped kinda with orientation sessions all day long. Yesterday, Saturday, I helped with the lunch where all the kids met their host families and then move in. I guess I haven’t been doing that much especially, although I have been running around a lot between the IES Center, school, the OVTA hotel where the summer students stayed for the first few days, went to Narita Airport, and etc. Last night, I skipped a BBQ at Huston’s because I just wanted to go home and rest. And I’ve been doing so every since, it’s been nice. I took a slight detour last night before coming home to go to the next station and pick up like 10 volumes of the Detective Conan manga. I’ve read a bit, but am skipping the chapters that I’ve already seen the anime of.

The summer kids, for the most part, are the normal batch of IES kids. And IES groups are usually pretty relatable to the kids you will find in a Japanese language class in the US. There are a few cool kids, a good number of huge dorks, some people who seem to be lost, and some who seem to be here to just party. I’ve associated myself with the cool kids as I see fit. I’ll probably hang out with some of the kids I like, and ignore the rest. Sounds like a good plan to me!

Oh yeah, if some IES kids are reading this (it’s inevitable), it might be interesting. Actually I should go read some summer/spring IES kids blogs (I know a few have them). Might be interesting. I think from here on out, my job is to just go on all the fun trips and film stuff, so probably the heat is over (haha until I go back to the US and actually have to edit this video together).

デビルマン

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I just finished watching Devilman, which I rented a few days ago. Before I go any further, there are 2 things I should point out that might affect my viewpoint on this movie, and thus my thoughts. 1) It’s all in Japanese, and I’m not completely fluent in the language. 2) I never read any of the original comic or saw any of the original anime, which I’m sure a big majority of Japanese people have.

Now that that’s out of the way, I think this movie ranks up there with movie greats like Versus, and might I even say The Hulk from a few years ago. And not just because both movies have pretty cool computer effects, but because both of them have their screenplays seemingly written and edited by retarded drunken monkeys. From the very start of Devilman, I had no idea why things were happening. They didn’t bother to explain everything or show any continuity, which may be because the majority of Japanese people watching the movie probably knew the general story of Devilman. I, of course, did not (let’s be honest, I STILL don’t).

The easiest way to explain the movie is to call it an hour and a half long movie trailer. There are a lot of awesome visual effects and the movie definitely looks cool. However, dialogue and the general storytelling seems a bit sketch, and there are a lot of holes. Another way to explain this movie would be if you took all the pre-rendered movie scenes out a of a video game like Final Fantasy, edited them together, and expected people to understand what the heck is going on. Near the middle of the movie, there was some kind of plot going on, but by the end they decided it was hopeless and just had a really cool CGI fight and a really bad conclusion. In summary, this was a really really bad cool looking movie. Does that make sense? Probably more than this movie did.

I do have to say though, that having Bob Sapp in the movie as the world news anchor was a nice touch. If the rest of the movie doesn’t make sense, you might as well throw in Bob Sapp. Overall this movie gets a 6 out of 10. Maybe a 7. It would be good to watch at a party where everyone is doing something else, because even paying attention (and even knowing Japanese) doesn’t help save this movie from being anything more than eye-candy.

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