World's Most Expensive Crash

Gotta love it:

Eight Ferraris and a Lamborghini were part of a 14-car crash in Japan yesterday that wrecked more than $1 million of vehicles.

“The accident occurred when the driver of a red Ferrari was switching from the right lane to the left and skidded,” said Mitsuyoshi Isejima, executive officer for Yamaguchi Prefecture’s Expressway Traffic Police unit. “It was a gathering of narcissists.” The drivers were aged between 37 and 60 years old, he said.

A gathering of narcissists...isn't that a GOP Presidential debate?

And maybe a car crash as well.

Finest Cuts

If you've been wondering when the next great samurai movie would come along, wait no longer. Prolific Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike has remade a black and white pic in bloody color, and it rocks very, very hard:



13 Assassins certainly recalls Akira Kurosawa's classic The Seven Samurai with the assembling of a small team against a larger enemy, the late addition of a final "samurai" who is not actually trained and certified, and a humongous battle scene climax (@45 minutes to end this pic) that leaves the jaw dangling from your mouth and delivers major satisfaction.

The main difference of note is the cruelty of the villain, which crosses the line into the horrific, making this one not for kids. Director Miike is known for his "pulpy" style, and while I don't think I've seen more than maybe one of his reported 80 films, I can say that this one is pretty much classically/artfully shot, making it a pleasure to watch.

If you can get the big screen experience, go for it, but 13 Assassins is also available on Pay-Per-View. If you like action, honor and swordplay, not to be missed.

Change

We're witnessing huge tectonic shifts right now, changes that one needs to step back to realize are bigger than the November election, bigger than we've had in awhile. Not only is our entire communications system in the process of becoming a subset of social media, but the Middle East and North Africa are shifting politically as has not been seen for many decades. Even Syria is having serious protests. And Qaddafi's compound was just hit, it appear by one or more cruise missiles.

AT&T just announced that they are buying T-Mobile, which will make them the largest carrier in the U.S. -- and give us one less choice of carrier, albeit the smallest of the majors. The clear upside to people like me who own AT&T iPhones will be better coverage, assuming that's the reason for the acquisition.

Meanwhile, President Obama is wisely opening up business channels on a major trip to Brazil, a potential winner of the 21st Century, and the earthquake/tsunami death toll is mounting (18,000 and counting).

Welcome to interesting times.

May they not be a curse for you.

Meltdown Approaching

On another day it would make sense to write about the the economic injustice in Michigan, where newly elected Gov. Rick Snyder (R) has given his corporate buddies an 86% tax cut and is making it up with, I kid you not, a 31% middle class tax hike. You know, class warfare.

Or maybe I'd write about newly elected Gov. Scott Walker (R) being heckled by large crowds everywhere he goes in Wisconsin. Or about newly elected Gov. John Kasich (R) in Ohio whose approval ratings are now completely upside down. Get ready for another seesaw election in 2012.

I wanted to write about the wussy National Rifle Association, who's Chief Executive, Wayne LaPierre, declined to meet with President Obama to discuss a sensible approach to gun control. He's probably a birther.

Then there's the news that the king of all LSD makers, Owsley Stanley, just died in an auto accident in Australia. Flashback while driving, perhaps?

But all that news is dwarfed by the nightmare of multiple nuclear reactor failure in Japan, radiation leaks, plant evacuations and impending meltdown:

Japan faced the likelihood of a catastrophic nuclear accident Tuesday morning, as an explosion at the most crippled of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station damaged its crucial steel containment structure, emergency workers were withdrawn from the plant, and a fire at a fourth reactor spewed large amounts of radioactive material into the air, according to official statements and industry executives informed about the developments.

...

They initially suggested that the damage was limited and that emergency operations aimed at cooling the nuclear fuel at three stricken reactors with seawater would continue. But industry executives said that in fact the situation had spiraled out of control and that all plant workers needed to leave the plant to avoid excessive exposure to radioactive leaks.

If all workers do in fact leave the plant, the nuclear fuel in all three reactors is likely to melt down, which would lead to wholesale releases of radioactive material — by far the largest accident of its kind since the Chernobyl disaster 25 years ago.

...

“It’s way past Three Mile Island already,” said Frank von Hippel, a physicist and professor at Princeton. “The biggest risk now is that the core really melts down and you have a steam explosion.”

And expect that radiation to travel - around the world...to us:

We’re all exposed to a certain amount of radioactivity from natural background sources. Americans old enough to have lived during the era of atmospheric nuclear tests have some amount of radioactive residue from those tests. Today, tiny amounts of radioactivity from Chinese nuclear tests can still travel to the US on the wind.

“The question is not can it reach us. The question is, in what concentration,” says Daniel Hirsch, a lecturer in nuclear policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a nonprofit that works to expose what it says are the dangers of nuclear power.

Prevailing winds in Japan blow west to east, notes Mr. Hirsch. Radioactive materials released by the current crisis would take about four days to reach Alaska and another day or so to reach the continental US.

Prayers welcome.

Pure Power

Tell me if you felt the same -- my first feeling after the earthquake in Japan was that this isn't Haiti, they've had Kobe and have since made earthquake preparedness a national pastime.

Then the tsunami came. Wall of dirty salt water picking up everything in its path, cars, people, buildings. Like here.

And now the death toll soars as the nuclear reactors start blowing up and the radiation is released.

Not to get political, but the taxpayers are on the hook for the reactors -- not the insurance companies.

Dream Spice

I have been remiss in not writing about a Japanese animated feature for grown-ups that I saw this past Sunday night, Satoshi Kon's Paprika. There's really no equivalent to this genre in the U.S., as there have been no R-rated animated features here that I remember since the 1970's when Ralph Bakshi put out Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic and Coonskin. Kon's picture is almost PG-13, but there's a little nudity and maybe some language I can't recall. Mainly it is an intriguing science fiction concept executed artfully for the adult mind to try and untangle.

I'll admit that I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool anime fan, but I like me those Miyazaki movies like Totoro and Spirited Away, and have come to terms with the plot issues inherent, it seems, to anime. Paprika is a better than most, even as the basic premise lends itself to arbitrary twists and obscure endings.

The basic plot is that a young female scientist named Dr. Chiba (maybe a joke for the pothead in-crowd?) is working with a device called the DC Mini that allows her to enter into the dreams of patients as a kind of guardian angel/detective alter ego named "Paprika". Paprika has, like her namesake spice, red hair, while Dr. Chiba is a brunette. Both are dedicated to their work, but Paprika is less stern than the psychologist, and one of the elements that kept me thinking was the differences between the two characters, that we're not just seeing Chiba in the dreams but an entirely different person who is somehow a part of her.

The make or break aspect of the movie is Kon's vision of dream states and, in the case of Paprika, essentially lucid dreaming. I've previously found dream representations in film and television to be maybe 5% of the actual dreaming experience, usually just there to forward the plot or pull a trick moment on the audience. Paprika does a lot better, maybe averaging in the high 60% range, higher in the opening sequence and I think one other. Sure, it's animation, so the tools are there to make stuff like this work, but more importantly there is are some great instances of dream logic, where running towards an objective becomes impossible like molasses, when attempting to vault a rail leads to the rail morphing away in the hand as the dreamer enters the falling state, and those patented Nightmare on Elm Street lack of transitions between waking and dreaming that leave the viewer wondering whether the scene started in reality at all.

I haven't seen Kon's earlier work, all of which sounds just as adult but less obviously trippy, but I like the human moments he drops in, certain reaction shots with minimal or no animation that play on characterization in a way uncommon to animated features in Japan or the U.S. There's also a few twists near the end, a subtle one intimating who's schtupping who and an admirable, if not perfectly convincing, romantic one at the end.

I guess Paprika isn't for everyone. It's modern, it's pop, it's Japanese, it's animated. Anyone who's already an anime fan is likely to be pleased with this advance -- both stylistic and thematic -- in that field of moviemaking. For those looking for an entree into this constantly growing, eye-pleasing genre, here you go.