TV Shows

[Dilscoop]

IDK, I watched one ep, while watching 10 other comedies on NBC and CBS. It's on a terrible time slot for me (and I'm kinda glad, because it moved my one of new fav show "The Finder" to Friday night, and doesn't overlap with Thursday night comedies).

I didn't get to pay much attention to it. Story seems pretty interesting. And with Mr. 24, you can expect some good action.

[Navo]

Have there been no good bangla natoks/telefilms to follow?

I remember watching one last year, which was really inappropriately funny. I can't remember its name but it was about the running of a company and its related intrigue. For some reason all the meetings occurred at lakeside retreats and all the employees spoke hilarious banglish. (Did anyone else see it?)

[Dilscoop]

NOO!! Can't believe The Finder got cancelled!! WTF!! Now I'll never watch touch now..

[Zeeshan]

Just barely started watching Weeds (Next Entourage is in the list). Re: Weeds, so much for staying inside an oyster shell all my life, hehe.

Pilot of Lost was meh. Kinda predictable.

[Maysun]

^ I watched Weeds and stopped half way through.. And when I did that, their ratings went up. Never got the time to catch up on that..

And damn, I miss Entourage! So sad, the show ended.

[Maysun]

Game of Thrones 9th episode was very interesting..

[Navo]

Originally Posted by maysun
Game of Thrones 9th episode was very interesting..

Why such an ambivalent statement? I thought the episode was great!

[Maysun]

Originally Posted by Navo
Why such an ambivalent statement? I thought the episode was great!

Oh yes, it was great. It's just that I thought Stannis would invade and be successful. But the episode was brilliant.

Have you read the book?

[Navo]

I've not read the books and I don't plan to in the immediate future. Have a long list of books to read as it is.

I have spoiled some of the future events for myself by reading character bios on the Game of Thrones and Songs of Ice and Fire wikis but I was prepared for that. I know that some of the book characters have been scrapped and that some of the characters have had their story arcs changed significantly.

[Navo]

I've not read the books and I don't plan to in the immediate future. Have a long list of books to read as it is.

I have spoiled some of the future events for myself by reading character bios on the Game of Thrones and Songs of Ice and Fire wikis but I was prepared for that. I know that some of the book characters have been scrapped and that some of the characters have had their story arcs changed significantly.

[Navo]

Started watching Modern Family last week. On Season 2 now. Great cast!

[mufi_02]

Game of Thrones season 2 is over.

But what a finale it was. HBO had record viewer rating.

[Navo]

^ a good finale but a bit haphazard as they tried to show the story arcs of ALL the GoT characters. Nice to finally see the House of the Undying. I really enjoy reading the reviews of the AV Club: http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/tvshow/...s-newbies,176/

(Don't worry, the Newbies section doesn't contain spoilers as the reviewer hasn't read the books! The message boards are also actively moderated. If you don't mind having the surprise spoiled somewhat, you can read the expert reviews on the same website. I think they're better written and don't really give away too much since the tv show has really started to veer away from the books)

[Maysun]

Was a good Game of Thrones season finale.

[mufi_02]

That is one of the challenges for GoT. It has way too many sub plots. But what works for GoT is the amazing cast.

When all the plots come together, it will be epic.

[Zunaid]

Looks like I'll have to give GoT a try now. Catch up time.

[zinatf]

Have been hearing about "Game of Thrones" from everywhere so much....guess will have to start watching it....

[Zunaid]

Originally Posted by zinatf
Have been hearing about "Game of Thrones" from everywhere so much....guess will have to start watching it....

Good luck. I don't watch much TV and I'm so far behind that I'm still on the first season of Bonanza.

[Maysun]

Yep, I started watching Game of Thrones half way thru Season 2. It's

But like mufi_02 said, has many sub-plots, and all of them are exciting!

[mufi_02]

The buzz is for the right reasons. Well, if you are a fantasy/Lord of the Rings type fans then you will love every bit of it. I am huge fan of that type and I even watch fan made LoTR youtube videos.

But it has good budget for a TV production, great cast, complex plots, and unexpected twists.

[Navo]

I think it's quite illuminating that even avid fans of the books are generally pleased by the show. Most realize that it's logistically, conceptually and financially impossible to translate everything on the page to the screen but it's how they make the adaptation which is crucial. It seems the screenplay writers do it quite well!

[Sohel]

Originally Posted by Navo
I think it's quite illuminating that even avid fans of the books are generally pleased by the show. Most realize that it's logistically, conceptually and financially impossible to translate everything on the page to the screen but it's how they make the adaptation which is crucial. It seems the screenplay writers do it quite well!

An excellent point. I like films that an independent genre stand on their own while being faithful to the thematic content and narrative flow of the book. In order to pull that off successfully, a difficult task indeed, the screenplay writer needs to be sensitive, erudite and unashamedly empathetic to the original author's intent and style, and then inspire a visionary director to inspire the collaboration that bring it to an audience.

Here's a collection a piece I wrote on one of my favorite novels by a favorite author, inspiring a great "derivative" film by one of my favorite directors:

Norwegian Wood: Haruki Murakami, Tran Anh Hung and a Few Afterthoughts
by Sohel Nadeem Rahman

Murakami’s first novel Norwegian Wood. What’s it about really? Is it about the impact of depression-driven youth suicide on modern Japanese culture undergoing the paradigm shift of the 60s? Or is it more about the overall experience, and quasi-random codes and freely associated, elliptical thoughts generated from that experience in a reader such as myself, after reading the book at the turn of the century?

Not that they have to be mutually exclusive. Most things aren’t when it comes to complex and deeply nuanced, yet evocative, entertaining and sexy literature from a modern master who observes what is known, unknown, unfolding and yet to unfold around him using what al-Ghazzali referred to as all 10 of our senses. Haruki Murakami is a modern master with the unique vision capable of hacking closely into the world of dreams, the world of ordinary and often casually brushed-aside reality, and the world in between. We catch a sustained glimpse of that keen ability in his first novel.

The story begins with a 37 year old Toru Watanabe, the protagonist and narrator, looking back 17 years because a cheese ball, easy listening version of “Norwegian Wood” emotionally throws him there unexpectedly, and ends on the day when the rest of his life, the life he’s living now, began. The day he began to move on. Move on not because things got any better, but because it got different enough for him to believe he can manage his grief, and find tranquility in love and in hope.

The plot can be Cliffsnoted without too much difficulty. Toru, Kizuki and Naoko grew up together in a small town. All three were close friends, Kizuki and Naoko were especially close as in soulmate-close, even more so after Naoko’s elder sister commits suicide at age 17, and in due time that closeness became romantic in nature. Toru was happy to be the protective third wheel. Then Kizuki commits suicide at age 17 also and something snaps inside Naoko. She becomes hole-up and Toru moves away to Tokyo for college.

Both are deeply rattled by the suicide. The profound sense of loss leaves a sustained note they know they’d never be able to shake. Naoko feels she has permanently lost something, and Toru is shadowed as well as surrounded by an air of death. It is as though life is no longer synchronized to their consciousness of it. Life is a live podcast and there’s always a niggling transmission delay with occasional buffering. No way to upgrade you MBs either and no way to avoid logging on.

Toru goes through the academic and social motions without much drive as Tokyo goes through the transformation of the 1960s. He shares his dorm room with the uberdisciplined, anally-retentive “Storm Trooper”. Storm Trooper pretty much exemplifies everything he finds ridiculous about his school and its rituals. But his curious, almost mocking gaze isn’t entirely without a bit of gentle empathy, as absurd as the blind adherence to cultural Salafism and some of the traditions seem to him. “Storm Trooper” represents a crypto-Fascistic national stereotype reinforcing itself.

That being said, Toru isn’t impressed by the overly righteous and always indignant radical left either. He sees them as weak-willed, and sublimating some sort of pathology using the political arena of their time just below the surface of that righteous indignation and the luxury of ultimately totalitarian intent wrapped in archaic virtue. Their eventual exposure as hypocrites doesn’t really surprise Toru at all. But he doesn’t go out of his way spraying his thoughts and opinions all over the place either. Wallowing in self-importance and admiration isn’t his thing.

We see him somewhat detached from the tumultuous events unraveling around him, perhaps because he sees through it all, while he takes the time asses Herman Hesse’s Beneath the Wheel. The novel’s an important work exploring pure academics vis-à-vis personal development, exasperation/disappointment/burnout vis-à-vis mental illness, and the life of an intellectual elite vis-à-vis that of an ordinary craftsman working with his hands. Hans Giebenrath, Hesse’s protagonist in the novel, is found drowned in the end and it’s not clear whether the death was an accident or a suicide driven by the quiet capitulation to irreparable despair despite great efforts to the contrary. Great yet subtle use of a literary mirror without any horned-rimmed pretension whatsoever.

Then Toru meets Nagasawa, an elegant young student at the elite diplomacy school. He’s a future face of modern Japan to the rest of the world. They share their love of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and become friends. By the way, before Gatsby becomes his favorite, Toru was taken by John Updike’s The Centaur, and read that several times. That anecdote sets the stage for the George and Peter, Chiron and Prometheus, or a socio-sexual Senpai-Kohai/Mentor-Protégé nature of his friendship with Nagasawa.

He takes Toru around Tokyo and shows him some of the instant gratification, escape and indulgences it has to offer. Like Gatsby, Nagasawa’s a cool guy. He’s deliberately enigmatic in his coolness and sophistication, like a puff of mysterious smoke that ought to shadow cool sophistication wherever it goes. But there’s something heartless, dystopic, distant and alienating about him, and that strangely cool heartlessness adds to the overall urban mystique. A pleasantly stoic and handsome mask that perhaps initially served to mask any combination of pain, sorrow and humiliation which led him to wear it. But it is a mask we don’t see him take off anymore perhaps because he no longer believes it’s there. It is as though that mask may have dried up that deep well of emotion and passion inside.

It is that heartlessness that makes Nagasawa non-committal to Hatsumi, his long-suffering, warm, sophisticated and predictably upper-class girlfriend. She claims to be OK with all this, and that helps Toru maintain a comfortable distance and maintain his friendship. The relationship is akin to love with a prostitute one never marries but claims to genuinely love only they’re together. Out of sight, and then for all practical purposes, out of mind.

Toru and Nagasawa appear as close friends who can never get as close as it seems from the outside because there’s a fundamental clash of values. Values with regards to love, passion, loyalty, responsibility, guilt, and the way those emotions impact our perception and use of time experienced. The way we’re stuck in the past, or the way the past weighs us down in the present and choose our future. Toru holds on to those values while hanging out with him – values conveniently shelved on occasion, but never forgotten perhaps out of loyalty to the memory of Kizuki – while Nagasawa deliberately runs away from them believing he’s simply too cool to run away from anything.

Nagasawa reacts to whatever sadness in his life but running away from it. Seeking relief in his cool, cutting-edge, metrosexual persona, and everything expected of such a construct to make it appear as real as possible. Perhaps masks seem more real once the person wearing it believes it to be so, simply because he never takes it off and allows time to take its toll, cementing the delusion.

Eventually the time comes for Nagasawa to move on and pursue a life and career without Hatsumi. After all he made no promises to her. Toru finds this unacceptable in his heart and whatever respect or human kinship he felt towards Nagasawa ends there, pretty much. We find out later that Hatsumi tried to move on by marrying someone else, only to slit her wrists a couple of years into that marriage.

Toru on the other hand, traumatized by his best friend’s suicide, holes up inside a bubble but keeps deeply internalized versions of those values with him. He sees his life from within the bubble and never losing sight of the fact he’s there, even when he chooses to be intimately interact with that life, totally inebriated or not. It is as though he’s watching some sort of Google-mapped cosmic TV, and has the power to step in and out of the programming as he sees fit.

In some ways, Toru represents a more traditional Japan moving organically forward, and coming to grips with a more decadent, faster moving modernist urban challenge paying little heed to those values. Perhaps that’s why he only makes a halfhearted attempt to accept the new dance and synchronize his own steps to it when with the hip and happening Nagasawa. Or perhaps he’s learning just for the sake of intellectual novelty tempered by curiosity and boredom. There is an obvious discord with that deep well of passion and emotion deeply embedded in the Japanese spirit, and it manifests itself through two distinctly different value systems.

Anyway, as Toru continues to find himself caught in the stream of life around him in Tokyo, occasionally swimming alongside Nagasawa to find a small measure of dissipating purpose, he runs into Naoko again. They spend time together in an effort to comfort and console each other, and over time, develop feelings for each other. Then on her 20th birthday, they consummate their love. Toru finds out then that she’s a virgin and it surprises him to realize that in all her time with Kizuki, she remained one. She takes off the next morning while he’s still asleep, and leaves him a note saying she’s checking into a sanatorium to get herself right.

Toru and Naoko stay in touch trough letters and he makes plan to see her in the mountains. Interestingly enough, he’s reading Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain at the time and we’ll see that fiction somewhat mirror Murakami’s thematic content once Toru goes to visit Naoko later.

In the meantime, Toru meets Midori Kobayashi, an attractive, vivacious and interesting woman he has a couple of classes with. The chemistry between them palpable from the start. She loves the way he puts things and he her love of life, something that’s powerful enough to pull him out of his proverbial bubble just as much as Naoko’s fragility can make him sink deeper into it. He’s involved with Naoko and she’s also involved, but the attraction is mutual and their friendship grows as they spend more and more time together while Naoko’s away.

Midori represents a more natural, unhurried, but equally dynamic modernism in a life undergoing major transformation, and that life, the life of Toru without all the death and gloom, representing the unheard, quieter voices of the Japanese majority not quite ready to abandon its social fabric for the sake of an externally imposed modernism internalized by some of their more spotlighted compatriots.

The time comes for Toru to visit Naoko in the mountains, and she tells him about Kizuki and herself. She tells him that although they were true soulmates, there was a severe problem pushing them apart. He didn’t turn her on. We don’t know whether it was purely biochemical, more psycho-somatic or a combination of both, but the exasperating fact broke their hearts and filled the cracks with confusion and doubt. Perhaps that combination confusion and doubt grow to become a loss of faith in life, and devoid of hope and fraught with self-loathing and pain, Kizuki killed himself. Naoko, who had lost a sister to suicide before, simply fell apart after that but somehow managed to reassemble herself, without any real purpose she was aware of other than perhaps living for her parents, with a loosely glued-together collage of conflicted emotions ready to unravel, burst through, and tear her apart again.

Then she finds herself easily and deeply aroused by Toru on her 20th birthday. That momentous event, while assuring her that there’s nothing innately wrong with her, sinks her further into confusion and she decides to check herself into where she’s now.

During the course of his visit, he meets Reiko Ishida, a music teacher at the asylum. Someone with a lifelong history of mental problems, problems that wrecked her music career and later her marriage, she assumes the role of Naoko’s confidante and encourages her relationship with Toru. They all hang out together and talk in the evenings after Naoko and Reiko’s daily work in the garden. Taming the wild and growing something beautiful to enhance the natural beauty of the surrounding wilderness and redefine it. One such evening, she sings Naoko’s favorite song, “Norwegian Wood”.

Upon his return, Toru begins to feel a subconsciously expected but consciously unwanted vibe resonate and rise up from the depths of his heart. He begins to feel torn between Naoko and Midori. Between the tragic past and sustained uncertainty, and a promising future with exciting possibility and hope. Between loyalty and deep empathy, and a new beginning full of hope and with the possibility of love. Between love and that other kind of love. But his sense of loyalty and decency doesn’t allow impulsive haste and he continues to float between the two possibilities with almost muted determination and resilience.

During subsequent visits to the secluded sanatorium, both Naoko and Reiko reveal more about themselves. Naoko talks about the unexpected suicide her elder sister, and Reiko about her search for sexual identity. Meanwhile back in Tokyo, Toru begins to alienate Midori by not responding to her desires and needs, in no small part due to his all consuming concern for Naoko. He doesn’t want to hurt Naoko but he doesn’t want to lose Midori either. Reiko advices him to take his chances with happiness and let the chips fall where they may with Midori.

Then a letter informs Toru that Naoko has killed herself. Dazed with grief, Toru wanders around Japan for a month before returning to Tokyo. He gets in touch with Reiko and she leaves the asylum to visit him. They have sex and that experience seems to cathartic for Reiko, unlike what happened to Naoko after they made love on her 20th birthday. She finds enough hope to try and start all over again and leaves. Toru calls Midori and she leaves open the possibility of a new life with her without saying as much.

The common thread running through each one of the 4 suicides also represents a break from more traditional suicides in the Japanese tradition. Traditionally, at least in the idealized narrative, Japanese suicides were firmly driven by the social tangibility of honor. You killed yourself for honor. You killed yourself to protect the honor of your family, community or group, and by doing so saved your own face, becoming borderline honorable yourself in the process, if you were somehow the cause of the initial dishonor. You could also kill yourself to prove your loyalty to authority, or in some cases like that of Yukio Mishima or Isao - his protagonist in Runaway Horses from the Sea of Fertility tetralogy - to become “poetry written with a splash of blood”. Killing yourself at the height of your beauty by seizing the moment of perfect or near-perfect “harmony between the pen and the sword” or the ever elusive balance between noble intent and virtuous action, and literally freezing that moment in time by taking your own life in a beautiful ritual.

But in Norwegian Wood, Murakami describes a more familiar, more universal, and less operatic type of suicide. Suicide driven by loss of self worth. Loss of self worth etched into the soul like an eternally stinging tattoo because of tragic failure in great love. The tragic loss of great love leading to the loss of all hope, and the ultimate tragedy. Suicide driven by depression and despair. Going back to where all the buried sorrow began and not wishing to start living again, and there’s nothing honorable in that.

Perhaps such an immense mutation of intent from the traditional, idealized ritual to what we see Naoko’s sister, the love of her life Kizuki, Naoko herself and later Hatsumi is merely a reality check underlining the difference between the “unreality” of cultural and literary motifs, and the “real reasons” why people kill themselves. Or maybe that mutation is an expression of the radically severed connection from traditional culture and the modern, increasingly globalizing world corrupting its natural evolution, whatever that may mean.

That deep well of passion within the Japanese soul was harnessed with discipline and ritualized into several art forms integral to the art of living. But the modernist and globalist assault on that renders that sublime beauty into something utterly ridiculous, and makes it OK for young people being yanked away from those traditional values in the name of modernism and globalism, to feel alienated enough to kill themselves without considering the adverse impact their suicide will have upon the loved ones who survive them. That is the severed connection. The connection between love and consideration. Between passion and empathy. Between the “now” trying to break away violently from its roots by allowing itself to be pulled by forces not of its own socio-cultural fabric, and the “old”, also inevitable in a dynamic, albeit gentler state of flux and progression, that has withstood the test of time and its ephemeral trends, whimsy and on occasion, madness.

In the end, we can only ponder whether the freakish and tragic unrequitement of true love, the love between Naoko and Kizuki or between Toru and Naoko for that matter, is a function of the modern age, or a matter of modernist perception of a naturally occurring misfortune. We can only ponder whether holistic love becomes subverted because of modernist compartmentalization and abstraction being irrevocably weighed down by accumulating baggage, or the idea that holistic love itself is an idealized and romantic abstraction, and therefore inadequate when it comes to all the complexities and grey areas that constitute lives lived. Lived rather than contemplated after the event, conceptualized and perceived as merely animated examples of a totalizing but always evolving discourse full of concepts signified by signs. I don’t think a definitive conclusion is either possible or important one way or another. What matters is how we grow to deal with love, unrequitement, despair, death and grief by either holding on to hope or abandoning it, no matter what the odds.

Tran Anh Hung’s bold attempt to make a movie out of this elegant and original masterpiece of words, concepts, narrative and characters made me excited and skeptical at the same time. Excited because he’s a master in his own right. The Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo are two of those movies that occupy a prominent place in the highlight DVD of my life. Skeptical because any attempt to do a cinematic adaptation of any of Murakami’s novels, bound to leave many holes despite best efforts, is likely to fail.

I was elated to see Tran Anh Hung realize this and take a totally different approach. He took the improvisational approach. He took the inspiration, characters, thematic content and scenes from the narrative he thought essential to produce a derivative work. Not unlike Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis or John Coltrane playing the hell out of the “standards” of their times. That being said, the director never strays from the emotional and thematic depth of Murakami’s work. His unique visualization of the selected scenes, and the sheer virtuosity of the performances he squeezes out of the cast, made sure I too was hit just as hard as Toru Watanabe was on that plane, and that the melody never fails to send a shudder through me.

Must-read AND must-see!

LINK

[Ajfar]

Charlie Sheen's coming back with a new TV series. It's called 'Anger Management' on FX. I hope it will live up to the expectations.

[Maysun]

The Killing, what a finale. The story is completed, and I hope the AMC doesn't renew it for a 3rd season. The writers may spoil it.

[mufi_02]

I came across this show recently. Its alternative/skit comedy. Very good.