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So earlier this evening I saw one of the most fun movies I’ve seen this year. Spider-Man 3. Yes, I already saw it. Apparently at some point over the past few months, they changed the release date in Japan to May 1, while the rest of the planet has to wait until May 5. I assume this is because of Golden Week, but who cares? I got to see it before pretty much all of my friends.

Now, I will post a very long and nerdy entry about the movie. There will, of course, be spoilers and stuff, so if you don’t want to spoil any of the movie for yourself, DON’T SCROLL DOWN!

Now, this isn’t really going to be a true review or anything. Just me running my mouth. If you want to read a review or something really objective, I suggest you look elsewhere. And since I’m writing this half-asleep at past 4AM, things might not make sense. There is a change I’ll edit this post later, but mainly I wanted to get it up before you guys actually watch it in the US. But yea, I loved the past Spider-Man movies and even used to be really into Spider-Man stuff back in school, so of course I was looking forward to this movie for a long time. Just the fact that Venom is in it would be enough to get me to pay money to see it. I’ll say some negative things about this movie, but overall it was a lot of fun and very entertaining. The story and everything isn’t necessarily the best in the world, but if you want to just be entertained, you’re getting your money’s worth. If you like action, sci-fi, comic book stories, etc, then you’ll be getting more than your money’s worth.

As usual, the movie starts off with a really long and drawn-out credit sequence, with CG graphics and a musical score. This time, however, it didn’t seem as eye-gougingly boring since they gave us a nice summary of the past two movies through short video clips. Spider-Man’s life is great. People love him, he’s got his picture on magazines, a hot girlfriend on Broadway, parades in his honor, yada yada yada. He is, however, still fighting with his pal Harry, played by worst actor in the world James Franco. This time, it’s literal, since Harry, who couldn’t pass high school science without help from Peter, has somehow managed to use his father’s leftovers and engineer himself a brand new set of Goblin equipment, including a new glider that looks more like a hoverboard from Back to the Future on crack. And with his new gear, he attacks Peter. The fight is pretty sweet, especially since Harry ends up getting destroyed, laying unconscious in a rainy ditch Did I mention I hate James Franco? So he goes to the hospital, gets fixed up, but conveniently now has memory loss and can’t remember anything that happened since before the first movie.
Note: there are an awful lot of things that happen in this movie that are very convenient for the plot.

Oh yeah, Peter is going to propose to Mary Jane, but of course not before a long speech from Aunt May. There is also a small meteor that has crashed on Earth, conveniently bringing with it a black symbiote alien that attaches itself to Spider-Man. Next up is Flint Marko, played very well by Thomas Hayden Church. He is the guy who really killed Uncle Ben, escaped from prison, has a sick daughter, and is on the run from the cops. He is being chased at one point, jumps a barbed wire fence into a molecular alteration lab area, and falls into a pit. This pit is filled with sand, and also a giant machine being used to alter the particles of the sand in the pit. Although it’s sometime very late at night, the scientists at this lab are hard at work and getting ready to run a test. Marko gets sucked up in the particle changer gadget, and instead of dying like in real life, gets fused with the sand into Sandman. He is the emo villain, who is supposed to be a good soul who is only fighting and destroying the city to save his daughter. Yeah yeah yeah.

Spidey saves this girl from his science class, Gwen Stacey, as she is falling from a building that is being destroyed by a construction crane run amok (huh?!). She is actually pretty hot. Who would have known that Ron Howard could have a hot daughter? Anyway, since he is such a super hero, the town gives him the Key to the City, with her presiding over it. She gives him the upside-down kiss, and Mary Jane gets angry. She is pretty much angry the entire movie, by the way. Sandman interrupts the parade, fights with Spider-Man, and escapes for now. We then find out that Sandman is actually the guy who killed Uncle Ben, which gets Peter all pissed off. This goes well with his new black/symbiote suit, which amplifies his anger and rage and stuff. Black Spider-Man goes to track down Sandman. Bunch of fights, sweet. Since I’ve forgotten most of the intricate details of the movie’s chronology, I will mention here that Bruce Campbell has a long cameo in 3 as a French Maître d’, and it is awesome.

Oh yeah, Harry also regains his memory and attacks Peter again, but the black suit has warped Peter’s mind so he’s all angry and moody, causing him to totally own Harry again in their next fight. Dark Peter has a pretty cool scene at the end of this fight, throwing a cheap shot of a Pumpkin Bomb back at Harry. Although the bomb goes off right next to his head, it doesn’t kill him and somehow only gives him a slightly disfigured face. Ah well. All along in this movie, we also have Eddie Brock, a new photographer character played by Topher Grace. He is more of an Eddie Haskell type, sucking up to people and saying all the right things. As if his personality wasn’t enough of a giveaway, he is a con, revealed after he Photoshops a picture and sells it to the newspaper. He is ruined by Dark Peter who exposes his Pshop job. Now Eddie Brock is angry. Dark Peter is almost completely mental from the symbiote, which makes him either be really nerdy, dancing down the street like he’s a ladies man, or really angry and wanting to beat the crap out of everyone.

Spider-Man finally ditches his symbiote on the top of a church, where a down-and-out Eddie Brock happens to be praying. The symbiote latches onto Eddie, and we now have the sweetest movie villain ever: VENOM. Unfortunately, Venom isn’t used as much as I would have liked in this movie, which is a real shame because Sandman was overall pretty boring and the New/ninja-like Goblin also overall sucked. What we do get to see of Venom is awesome, but it just makes you wish you could see more of him. He teams up with Sandman, and Peter convinces Harry to help him. We have 2 on 2, in a huge fight that is overall pretty amazing and very well put together. Sandman is lame and has morphed into a giant monster, and he fights Harry. Harry gets killed saving Peter from Venom. Sandman ends up…dying? I don’t really get it. He apologizes to Peter, they make up, and he flies away.

Venom is beat by Spider-Man, who uses a bunch of pipes and the vibrations from them to paralyze the symbiote, who is weak to noise. Spidey uses a Pumpkin Bomb to supposedly finish off Venom, although I’m sure he just escaped. Let’s hope they make a 4th movie. Venom’s voice was also slightly disappointing, because I was looking for a two-voices-at-once thing like they had in the 1990’s Spider-Man cartoon. While unfortunately there was no “We are Venom” quote, the Venom scenes are overall
amazing, although extremely heavy on the CG. I don’t think there were many shots of just Venom’s face, probably to hide the fact that his head was always CG (blame it on the huge mouth, which would require an animatronic head or something). The fights were very fast paced, with Venom flying all over the place and being awesome. Oh, and of course I couldn’t find a good picture of movie Venom online, but this concept art I found is pretty close to what he looks like. Very close to the comic/cartoon, but more realistic (not built like the Hulk), and definitely supposed to be a dark Spider-Man. Overall he looked great, trust me.

Definitely see this movie.

It’s been a great Golden Week so far. A lot of free time, hanging out, eating, and most importantly, NOT WORKING. Basically, Golden Week is like a national spring break here in Japan; a week long period where so many national holidays ended up being close together that the country decided just to declare the whole week like a holiday. Technically, May 1st and 2nd this year were the 2 weekdays that weren’t national holidays, but a lot of people take these off anyway. Overall, a lot of people have a full week off at the beginning of May, including luckily AEON staff.

Sunday, spent the entire day sleeping and relaxing. Nick decided to come to Chiba/Tokyo for Golden Week, and flew up via Haneda. There is actually a bus that goes directly from Haneda Airport to Goi Station, so he took that and I met him at the station. Headed to Global Viking for dinner, that enormous yakiniku all-you-can-eat plus more restaurant up in Hamano. Checked out arcades in Chiba and Goi, and watched some of Curb season 4, which I had never seen. On Monday, we checked out Asakusa and Ueno, then stopped by the Don Quixote on the way back. The JR Holiday Pass or the Tokunai pass have been pretty useful so far this week, although I guess we haven’t been using it to the potential that we could be. Overall I think we’re at least breaking even on the value of the ticket versus how much it would cost if we bought separate tickets every time we went somewhere.

On Tuesday, had a scheduled “geek day” with Matt, Yori, and Nick. Went into Akihabara to play in the arcades, look at video game shops, etc. Also we decided to try a Maid Cafe, since none of us had ever been to one. We wanted to go to the one near Super Potato that they used in Tadano Hitoshi, but there was a long line and we didn’t really feel like it would be worth it. We just walked around and picked one, since there were quite a few around the same area. Overall, it was a really weird experience. The one we went to was really small, and had a little stage (more like a 2×3 ft platform against the wall that was only about 4 inches off the floor. Drinks, food, and coffee were of expensive but fairly normal prices for Japan. I guess where they get you is paying for maid services, which is not the sexually explicit stuff you would maybe expect when talking about a place like this. Maid Cafes are, in many ways, like sex clubs without any reference to or inclusion of sex. The nerdy customers who frequent these places are apparently perfectly satisfied with just saying Hi to a girl in a maid outfit, or maybe springing to take a picture with them. There is no kind of sexual interaction, no flash of skin, no dirty talk. In fact, the maids and stuff generally talk in a disgustingly super-cute manner. Oh yeah, maid services. We didn’t buy any of them, but we read the menu. Most things cost around 700 or 1000 yen, but they had stuff like “take a Polaroid with a maid,” “play video games against a maid,” or “have the maid do a song and dance on stage.” Really strange. During the 15 or 20 awkward minutes that we were there, this creepy guy in the corner paid for one of the maids to sing a song on stage. The entire time he just kind of stared at her like a creep. Overall, I’d have to say that maid cafes are extremely uncomfortable, expensive, and not really even that interesting as a cultural phenomenon. Or maybe we just went to a bad one.

After the geek day, we headed back to Chiba and were just hanging out in the Hana no Mae up there, which is very different form the Makuhari one, but a really nice place overall. Hana no Mae is another one of those Japanese restaurants that changes their menu with the season, and apparently the “new” menu now features horse meat and a whole selection of whale dishes. I’m going to try them sometime over the next few months just to say I did. After that, Yori headed out and Brian took his place after spending a day showing his mom around Tokyo. So it was me, Nick, Matt, and Brian. We then proceeded to Utahiro for 2 hours of karaoke. As if that wasn’t enough, we then headed to Kamatori, sort of near where Matt lives, for more karaoke. Of course by this time it was after 11, meaning we had to commit to all night. Oh well, we were having fun and it was Golden Week. Overall a very fun night although as expected making it all the way to 5AM was very very rough. Surprisingly, I think this was the first all-night karaoke session where I didn’t fall asleep, although Nick and Brian were sleeping for about 15 or 20 minutes near the end of it. As they did that, I played a bunch of Kamen Rider songs just to watch the videos in a daze.

Got back to Goi around 6AM, then showered and went to sleep until the late afternoon, which felt absolutely amazing. Completely refreshed. Some people would see waking up at almost 4 int he afternoon a complete disaster, but I see it rather as a great triumph. Finally got out of the apartment and headed to Soga with Nick to see Spider-Man 3 and eat tacos. What’s that, Spider-Man 3? Already!? Yep. And that will deserve it’s own blog post next…

It’s been a busy past few weeks, although strangely full of nothing. I haven’t fully decided if time is going by fast or slow, since it seems to change depending on what I’m doing, either sitting at work bored, teaching several classes in a row, or sitting at home watching Seinfeld on my computer. Either way life is enjoyable. Speaking of the passage of time, it has come to my attention that I have finished half of my 1-year contract with AEON, meaning I’ve been here for over 6 months. It really doesn’t feel like I’ve been living here for that long, but 6 months is a lot of time. Things can change a lot. I, however, feel like the past 6 months haven’t changed me a whole lot. Again, not sure if this is good or bad, just pretty neutral overall. I try thinking about something substantial that I’ve accomplished over the past few months. I bought a Wii. I went on a sweet vacation to Kansai. I’ve met a lot of people. But that’s about it. Nothing super duper.

I think that was one of the main things that made me decide to not renew my contract with AEON. I don’t exactly mind working long days, or just working period. Yes, this job is pretty easy and my hours, co-workers, etc, are great. Actually, my co-workers are one of the main reasons I would consider staying because they’re pretty sweet and I get along well with all of them. But I don’t feel like I’m getting much fulfillment out of this job overall. There are no projects or goals. There’s very little reward or motivation for me. I suppose some people gain satisfaction from helping people learn or grow. Real teachers. I’m too selfish for that. I’m not myself for most of the day, specifically when I’m in the presence of almost any of my school’s students. I’m not as fake-cheery as I appear, I don’t care how your weekend was, and yes I can speak Japanese. Money and small contract details are another factor, although not as important as I would have thought. In short, I like this job and my overall situation more than I might have expected, but after my agreed upon 1 year is up, I’ll be ready for a change.

Well that was deeper than I was planning. Anyways yeah, I’m planning on finishing out the rest of the AEON contract then who knows what I’ll be doing afterwards. I don’t have a very solid idea of what type of job I’ll be doing next or even which side of the Pacific I’ll be on. I do, however, want a job where I can feel a sense of accomplishment. Being able to buy stuff like food is also a high priority. In one way I would really like to stay in Japan and work but at the same time it would be nice to be back in the US. I suppose it’s time to start looking for jobs again, and time to update the old resume.

In other news… what have I been doing these past few weeks? Last weekend I saw 2 movies at the Soga XYZ Theatre: どろろ (Dororo) and 龍が如く (Ryu ga Gotoku). The former was disappointing while the latter was awesome. Dororo (Apple trailers page) is a live-action movie based on a really old Tezuka comic. It’s about this guy who has to kill monsters to get his body parts back. His arms, before he gets them back, are swords. His sidekick is a thief named Dororo, played by super-hot Kou Shibasaki. Sounds sweet, right? Too bad they tried to fit too much story into what otherwise could have been a good fantasy-monster fighting movie. The last straw was when they would spend long scenes on boring dialogue, then only show clips of various fights. Just random fight scenes to music! You can’t do that! Montages were outlawed in movies back in 1990 I thought. Anyways yeah, the theme song and trailer was awesome but the movie was sub-par. I actually fell asleep a few times. Ryu ga Gotoku (official site, with trailer) is based on the PS2 video game series of the same name (called Yakuza in the US). It was directed by weirdo Japanese director Takeshi Miike, which automatically tells you that the movie will be amazing and/or super weird. This one was pretty much just amazing. Nothing super weird or strange. It was actually a hilarious action movie about a yakuza’s life. Lots of good fight scenes and a really good bad guy. I’ve never played the video games, but this movie really makes we want to.

This Wednesday is a national holiday, and since it doesn’t fall on a Monday, I actually get to take advantage of it. The “holiday” is 春分の日 (Shunbun no Hi), or “Spring Equinox Day.” Thank goodness these people love the seasons. I’m planning a day full of absolutely nothing but relaxing. Yay spring.

(Yes, I love that pun.) This past week was pretty much the same as most weeks, with the major exception being the huge purchase I made last Saturday during my lunch break. The Nintendo Wii finally was released in Japan, and I had reserved one at the Goi Laox, a Best Buy kind of store, so I was able to get it no problem. I’m glad I did, since both Laox and the department store Ito-Yokado were completely sold out of the systems by 2PM on launch day. Games don’t seem to be in any short demand though, which is good. I haven’t purchased a video game console in a long time, let alone on launch day, so I was pretty excited about getting home that night and playing this new toy. And yes, it was as fun as expected. Even playing it at E3 last May, and seeing commercials, displays, etc for it since then, having it in my apartment and being able to play it all I want was really way more fun than I even expected. The controls, despite being wireless and everything, are more accurate than you would expect as well. I bought Wii Sports and Zelda, both of which are awesome. Blanchard bought an extra controller that came with Hajimete no Wii (Wii Play in the US), so with all those games I’ve had something to further take away from my free time. I’ve played Zelda the most, and it really is a good way to kill 2 or 3 hours of your evening at a time, even when you don’t mean to. Well, I think that’s enough of a nerdy video game rant. If you like video games, I definitely recommend getting a Wii. It’s fun and cheaper than a PS3, and there are at least good games for it right now. I might end up getting a PS3 in a few years, but for right now, there aren’t hardly any games I’d want to play for it. That and it costs more than like 500 cans of Boss coffee.

Last night my entire school’s staff had a year-end/Christmas party in Chiba, which was fun because it was a good chance to hang out with my staff outside of work. We went to this Korean restaurant named Kim-chan which was really good. There was some Korean okonomiyaki/pancake type thing full of vegetables and seafood that was served on a hot iron plate that was absolutely amazing. I don’t remember the name of it, but it was definitely worth ordering again. The restaurant wasn’t super cheap, but it was way good. After that we went to Uta-Hiroba near Chiba-Chuo station for all night karaoke, which was awesome, but we were all exhausted by like 4AM. It was a painful walk back to the station and back home in the morning after the trains were running again. I came home and slept pretty much the entire day, and it felt great. Also finally figured out what I’m doing over winter break. I have a decent amount of time off (Dec 23-25, then Dec 28-Jan 4), but am not going back to the States this time. I wanted to at least do something, though, so I’m going with Blanchard down to kansai, the western part of Japan, for a few days. I haven’t been down there for a few years so it should be really cool. Definitely want to check out Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara. Shinkansen tickets are decently priced and I think it’s less hassle than getting a plane ticket, but I can’t help feeling strange about paying so much money to go halfway down an island that is about the size of California. Ah well; it should be fun.

This blog post has been a work in process for over three hours. I obviously didn’t write for that long, but I spent most of the past few hours watching a Japanese movie called Always: 三丁目の夕日 (English title: Always Sunset on Third Street) which is set in the late 1950’s in Japan. The film does a really nice job of recreating the look of what I guess that period in time looked like, and it was nice dramatic film that just showed the life of a bunch of people. I would definitely recommend watching it. Apparently it won a bunch of Japanese Academy Awards and did pretty well in international film festivals and such. Find it at your local Tsutaya, or on the bit torrent site of your liking.

And I leave you tonight with a nice bit of Engrish, found at a store in the Soga Ario mall. And no, it’s not really some dirty book, just whatever in the world the “Sendenkaigi Award Text” is. Still, it’s funny.

Last week at work, the other foreign teacher got really sick and was out of commission for a few days. While this didn’t really affect my schedule too much, save for having to teach 3 extra classes over 3 days, and changing my schedule around on Saturday, it was very interesting to see how things operate at AEON and at my relatively small school in general. Since there are so few teachers at my school; 4 full-timers and 3 part-timers, when one person is sick or takes a day off or something, it really screws things around. That being said, it’s nearly impossible to take vacation days or anything, unless you want to royally bone your co-workers. This is an example of a situation at AEON, and in Japanese culture in general, where you’re not explicitly not allowed to do something, but doing so is so socially unacceptable or otherwise frowned upon that there is no way you could even consider doing it. It would be like meeting your boss’s wife, and instead of shaking her hand you German suplex her to the ground and do the Rocky victory dance. No one told you explicitly not to do that, but you just can’t do it. That being said, I doubt I’ll be taking any extra days off this winter break. Might be heading down to Kansai either way, although if I thought it would be possible to take off 2 extra days before Christmas, I’d be able to hang out with Nick in Kobe before he heads back to the States for break. This, my friends, is a prime example of giri.

Anyways, I had a great weekend. Saturday night after work I bolted to Soga and saw Death Note: The Last Name, the sequel and conclusion to the first Death Note movie. To quickly explain, the movie is based on a comic series that I read this past summer. A prodigy named Light finds a notebook that kills people when you write their name in it. He starts killing criminals, and the world-famous mastermind detective “L” is put on the case. It’s not an action movie, it’s not horror….it’s a little hard to describe. It’s like a really good drama with detective elements added. Either way, I highly recommend you download the first movie via your preferred illegal downloading methods, and enjoy. I’m pretty sure that there is an English subtitled version up somewhere. The first movie was really good, and pretty accurate to the original comics. The second movie, though, was even better, and had some really good plot twists that weren’t in the comic. The concept of this story is just amazing, and the movies did a really good job. You pretty much have two geniuses trying to outwit each other, one with a magic notebook and the other with the Japanese police force behind him. It might sound really hokey and stuff, but trust me, this is a damn good set of movies. Also, Takeshi Kaga, the guy who played the Chairman on Iron Chef, plays the police investigation chief (who happens to be Light’s father). Believe it or not, he’s a really good actor. Also many hot chicks in the movie, so you have a little bit of everything.

Here are the trailers for the first and second Death Note movies. I found them on YouTube.

Hit up Costco on Sunday, which was everything I hoped it would be. Met up with Blanchard and waited for the Costco bus outside of Kaihim Makuhari station. The bus was really late or something, and I think we were waiting in the rain and cold for almost an hour, but it was totally worth it. First we ate a ton of food, mainly the giant Costco pizza which we couldn’t finish. We then went shopping and I bought some of the stuff that is near impossible to buy anywhere else in Japan. Namely, a jug of Picante salsa and 3 bags of Tostitos. The great thing about Costco is that they have a ton of American stuff, but to make that even better, it’s all super cheap and pretty much the same as it would be in the states. It was also funny that when we entered, I showed my Dad’s old Costco card, but the lady checking cards noticed that there was no picture on the back of “my” card. So I had to go to the customer service desk, where I thought I had been caught. No, not at all. I gave him my ID, which obviously doesn’t have my Dad’s name on it, but they must have thought “oh well, foreigners must have weird names,” and he took my picture and put it on the card. I’ll now never have problems getting into Costco. Also, I’m pretty sure that the American and Japanese Costco systems are not connected, so they can’t tell that I’m using an old (and probably expired) membership card. Woo-hoo!

And, since they have so many American products there, they also had this monstrosity. The signature of Mr. Patrick Ellison:

I don’t know if I could type a good enough introduction to this entry, so I instead will use this large image to convey my feelings:

Yeah. It really was. Super awesome, even. If you haven’t seen it yet, go see it now. This movie is actually worth going to the movie theatre and paying money to see. It is that awesome.

After months and months of hype, I was so ridiculously excited to see this movie. I think perhaps even more excited than I was to see the Ninja Turtles or Power Rangers movies back in the day. The filmmakers knew that this film was going to only have a chance of survival on said hype, and I think their decision to go back and edit the film into an R-rated one was well worth it. If anything, they got to also re-edit it and make it an awesome movie for the fans. There were no boring, long “let’s build up these characters” moment; it was instead “here are some people. They will all get attacked by snakes…now.” Well done sirs, well done indeed.

There will be some spoilers in this post, but it’s not like any of the movie is actually a surprise. In fact, the poster or trailer for Snakes on a Plane pretty much gives away the entire premise and plot: Samuel L. Jackson is stuck on a motherfucking plane with some motherfucking snakes and has to kick some ass. Pardon my language. I enjoyed how the movie starts off like every movie shot in the 80’s, with some peppy music and beach/bikini shots. Before the intro music is done, we have met this dirtbiker guy, who witnesses the murder of some lawyer at the hands of some gangsters. And to make this even better, the gangsters are Asian gangsters. I mean, who else would think to kill an incriminating witness by filling his plane with poisonous snakes. Anyway, that is the plot. Samuel L. is an FBI agent escorting dirtbiker guy to LA, and on the flight over they have to fight tons and tons of snakes. Throughout the course of the ride, all kinds of stereotypical characters get killed by snakes, including snooty British guy, hippies having sex, fat lady, and old stewardess. See? Even the filmmakers agree that there shouldn’t be old stewardesses.

There really isn’t much more to say, just please go see this movie immediately if you haven’t yet. It might not win any Oscars or set any box office records (although that would have been absolutely amazing), but this movie was just what the industry needed. I’m sick of all these stupid remakes, sequels, and books-turned-into-movies. All we need is snakes, a plane, and an angry black guy who curses a lot. Cinematic gold.