Last Tuesday Shohei Imamura (今村 昌平) died at the age of 79. I’ve seen only two of his films, The Eel (うなぎ) and Dr. Akagi (カンゾー先生), but I found both of them to be profoundly affecting. They are very different, but what impressed me about both films was how they celebrated humantity without any effort to disguise its faults, egregious or otherwise. Imamura was truly one of the great cinematic talents. Go rent one of his films this summer.

The 24th annual Asian American Film Festival (directed by my college friend Chi-Hui Yang) is going on right now. Friday night Yuki and I checked out Linda Linda Linda at the PFA, and I loved it. Four girls, three Japanese and one Korean, have three days to learn three songs by The Blue Hearts so they can play at their school festival. I’m a sucker for movies with plots that revolve around music (I cried at the end of School of Rock), and Linda Linda Linda is one of the best I’ve seen. Du-na Bae is especially good as the hilariously blunt Song. Definitely see it in SF on the 22nd if you have a chance.

Next week we’re checking out the festival’s showing of Cafe Lumiere.

I finally saw Uzumaki last night. Really great, better than I had expected. The plot concerns a small town where the idea of the spiral has infected the minds of its inhabitants. I love plots that involve mind viruses. Christopher Cherniak’s “The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution” has a particularly good one: students and researchers studying the brain and consciousness begin falling into comas when they encounter the equivalent of Godel’s incompleteness theorem for the human mind.

Closely related are plots involving ideas so sublime they destroy their receivers, or videos so pleasurable/horrible to watch they destroy their viewers. Both Infinite Jest and Ringu made use of the latter.

As a plot device, a thing which will spread inexorably by virtue of its intrinsic structural properties makes for a compelling story. I was always fascinated by the idea of ice-nine for that reason. Prions, too.

Boing Boing has a good round-up of tentacle porn-related links today. I studied ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints) as an undergraduate, and we saw a lot of tentacle porn. I wrote a paper tracing the use of erotic violence in Japanese art from Yoshitoshi to Merzbow. I like that certain outlandish themes in Japanese art and entertainment have continued for hundreds of years from woodblock prints to computer-generated anime. Of course, no roundup of tentacle porn is complete without including a piece in my own backyard, at the Albany Bulb:

Looking forward to seeing Peep “TV” Show when it comes to the PFA this weekend:

Peep “TV” Show finds room for re-organizing reality in the new media of on-line broadcasts, cell phones and ever-smaller cameras. Through the coming-of-age story of Hasegawa and Moé, it asks why people only seem to be alive if they are preserved in exchangeable, exhibitionist digital form - like cell phones, cameras, puri-kura, and surveillance cameras.