Oriental Magic Realism

Notes after reading Haruki Murakami’s “The Elephant Vanishes,” “The Wind-up Bird Chronicle” and a few of his stories found online:

*Fiction that you have to read through the end. A persistent craving, comparable to my unquenchable thirst for beer.
*Superbly written. Beautiful language with no fancy, flowery, words. The beauty of language is contained in what the words actually say, not in how it is said, but in how easy they are to absorb and how deeply you come to absorb the story itself.
*The books weren’t too insightful, it lacked a philosophy. It didn’t submerge your mind in a reef of ideas. The stories didn’t have a strong advocacy.
*I also didn’t find the usual quotable quotes. It's all about what happens.
*Each book cost me more than 700 bucks each. But it’s worth a lot more than that.

My Murakami fever is spreading.

Anaesthetize & Remember How to Feel

“Then my life just felt like a so-so life bordering on the stupid.”

Before Sunset. I must admit that I thought I enjoyed watching Before Sunrise since Ethan Hawke did a stunning job of pulling his philosopher-wannabe antics, and Julie Delpy was a strikingly beautiful girl who spoke English with a French accent. Both characters had a knack in conversation, in a movie that was about a glorified, romanticized one night stand. After the one night stand, they decide not to exchange numbers. Instead, they set-up a meeting at the train station six months later.

Only later did I realize how this movie was so un-thought of. I wasn't even waiting for something grand. It was just two people meeting then having conversation and sex. It would have been too mindlessly minimalist if all the movie wanted to say was - "they were young and stupid, and this is what happens in real life." I was so unimpressed and imagined how everybody wrote something like that. It wasn’t an entirely vacuous, abhorrently stupid movie. It was just a so-so movie that bordered on the stupid.

What I couldn’t believe is that this so-so-bordering-on-the-stupid movie even had a sequel. A strike two. Given its availability and cheap cost at Quiapo, I just had to watch it. I secretly hoped it would redeem the first one, the way the New Testament redeemed the Old.

The sequel had the same cast. Julie Delpy is still captivating. But Ethan Hawke couldn’t grow old graciously. His pick-up lines don’t deliver anymore, he’s lost his philosopher-rocker appeal he so strongly exuded in Reality Bites. Mentally, at least in this movie, he didn’t seem to grow old.
The 1.5 hours of the movie covered the length of less than five hours of them seeing each other again in six years. Nothing particularly happened in the movie except that the characters met, had coffee, and had good conversation and played the are-we-gonna-have-sex? guessing game. Amusingly enough, they talked about guns and violence in the US Media. Annoyingly enough, they threw impossibly cheesy lines meant to throw a stranger into bed. And that’s that. A movie made of snippets of conversation. On the whole, watching it feels like reading a badly written short story or a prosaic poem.

Another so-so movie bordering on the stupid. I half-expected it to be good, and I half expected to be salvated. In Fury, Salman Rushdie writes, “Perhaps daily life, its rush, its overloadedness, just numbed and anesthetized people and they went into the movies’ simpler worlds to remember how to feel.” Then my life just felt like a so-so life bordering on the stupid.

That’s how I remembered feeling.

The Better US Movies I saw this 2004 (In no particular order):
21 Grams
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Fahrenheit 9/11
Bowling for Columbine
The Event
The Usual Suspects
Love Actually
Dogville
Kill Bill Vol. 1
Troy

The Better non-US Movies I saw this 2004 (In no particular order):
Central Station (Brazil)
Zatoichi (Japan)
Vibrator (Japan)
The Apartment (France)
Run Lola Run (Germany)
Imelda (Philippines)
No Man’s Land (It's No Man's Land)
Not Ones Less (China)
City of God (Brazil)
My Wife is a Gangster (Korea)
Chunking Express (Hong Kong)