Television makes you smarter! I knew all those hours invested in LOST and 24 and The Sopranos were worthwhile (though Reynolds will want to smack Steven Johnson for not mentioning his faves Deadwood and The Wire). I say more TV shows that traffic in a “thick network of affiliations.” For the uninitiated click here (you may need to register but I’m assuming you already are).

Two quick takes on two films recently watched (in the midst of tons of work, though, I have seen not much at all):

“Dolls” — didn’t do it for me. I love the look of Takeshi Kitano’s films–the strange tableaux he uses for his composition–and the oblique rhythms they rely upon for character development and editing. But after a wonderful opening, where a troupe performs a traditional ‘puppet’ show about failed love, the film enacts three separate versions of those archetypal plots, none of which escaped a dull portentousness. Or, rather, what I liked in the 5 minutes of the puppet show I disliked in another ‘medium’ over 30-45 minutes; I don’t think the film translated well, and that may be a flaw shifting from the elaborate artifice of the dolls to ‘real’ people, or it might be an American watching a Japanese genre that he didn’t quite get.

(That said, it is intriguing to think about all of Kitano’s films as reworkings or translations of traditional Japanese genres, particularly in light of “Zatoichi,” which I found to be lovely and funny and surprising in its reimagination of hoary old samurai tropes. “Kikujiro,” too, has all these interesting intertitles with paintings and crafts that may be more culturally-resonant than this viewer could make out.)
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