A Long Way Gone - Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

This book is a memoir written by a young man not much older than myself who was a child soldier in Sierra Leone.

I actually don't know what to say about it. It took me about three months to get through it fully, because I kept having to put it down. That isn't really a criticism... at no point did I want to stop reading the book altogether or anything of that nature. Rather instead, the book is just so intensely sad and filled with such horrifying stories that it's just hard to read continuously. Beah exacts an emotional toll that is designed to obliterate everything before it.

This book might be too much for most people to read, but those that can withstand the intense and soul shattering grief that is presented will probably find the thing to be somehow rewarding. It's not a political book at all and at no time does it attempt to pass judgment on the political conflict. The story is rather told from the perspective of a boy who saw his family die in front of him before being given a gun, drugged up with cocaine mixed with gunpowder and sent to kill. The author tries to write as he feels and is extremely good at doing that.

It's not an easy story to read. But if you can get through that sort of thing, this is worth picking up. Just be prepared.

Few comments:

1) This is a memoir, so one is presumes that Mr. Beah's experiences are true here and I don't doubt them. A cursory glance at his wiki page reveals a discussion of some 'investigation' of a journalist from Sierra Leone that nitpicks details and tries to make the government look a bit better ('we didn't CONSCRIPT child soldiers, they were volunteers!'), but I'm willing to dismiss all of that as politically motivated hogwash.

That said, I did sense a certain amount of drama that felt a bit artificial. At one point, he's told that his parents and siblings are waiting for him in the next village and arrives in the village to find it burned to the ground just hours before. I would never have the guts to go up to this author and say 'Did it really happen like that?' but it still didn't quite ring true.

But quite frankly, I think it's his right to take some dramatic license with his story if he so chooses. It's his story to tell, after all, and I give him the benefit of the doubt.

2) The most powerful bit of the story for me was when he was standing in prayer in a village when the rebels attacked, scattering the prayer save for the Imam who stood before his Lord reciting a long sura until they came to butcher him. Beah isn't explicitly religious, but that image has power. That is the spirit that one hopes to hold onto as a believer, I do feel.

3) I don't cry for things that often and this is no exception. That isn't an assertion of some kind of machismo or anything, but rather it's just not what I do. Rather instead, when something makes me sad it gets me in my dreams. This book has haunted over me for the last little while and I think it will for a some time to come.

I should read something more cheerful next. There's more ...

Baccano! - "My, my. This is quite a racket."

I feel that this is a nice contrast to the last post.

Baccano is about two things. The first thing is 1930s New York gangster families that wear awesome hats and hire hitmen to shoot each other. The second thing is magic. Needless to say, it was really fucking good.

More than that though, it's a story that seeks to be innovative. It's not really a single story either, but rather something like three or four really cool stories (each with subplots inside) melded into each other. There are gang wars involving magical artifacts. There's a train that a terrorist group, a bunch of gang enforcers and some bandits try to hijack at the same time. There's an ancient feud between rival magicians. There's a Robber Couple that likes to dress up in weird costumes during their heists. It's a bloody wild ride. The only downside is if you aren't quick-minded you can easily get lost.

The cast is enormous (something like 15-20 characters in a 16 episode series) but everyone's such a character that they all get a lot of development in a short period of time. One of my favourite characters was this guy called Luck who didn't get much face time but made up for it by being so ridiculously laid back about the work he does that he just radiated cool. There is no dead weight on this cast list, which is very very rare.

It's a real breath of fresh air, I think. It's unique, arty (arty is not to be confused with artsy) and smart but never pretentious. It's just about having a lot of fun. Check it out.

Bit more talk after the jump.

Three spoilery things to touch upon:

First: The antagonists were great.


I really thought it was amazing how the villains were all these over-the-top cackling fiends and still managed to be somehow humanized. Ladd, Vino and even Dallas. They all were comically evil on one hand and yet filled with all these believable redeeming features. I think my favourite of the bunch was Vino, who's blood drenched affections will be difficult to forget.

Second: I liked how the magic worked.


There was a coherent and straightforward system for it. No magical surprise bullshit in this. The way that Maiza's character was sort of minimized so that he was really just a side character that was never in the thick of things I thought was an especially good touch. It leaves a lot to be inferred about him, which I think is a positive thing.

Third: Those hats really are pretty cool.


Seriously, why did gangsters stop wearing those things? They're awesome. They should bring them back.

Oh and I should also mention: Isaac and Miria.


Fuck yes. Normally pure gag characters wear thin after a while, but holy fuck I loved those two.

And nothing else needs to be said. There's more ...

Ef - A Tale of Memories

(Before we begin: Note that comments on the site are currently broken)

This was... hm... It's a 12 episode series about uh... artists.

The first storyline is about a one eyed writer girl with a bizarre form of Plot Amnesia that makes her forget all her memories for the day on the thirteenth hour of every day. She meets a dude who tries to give her confidence in her writing abilities so that she can write a post-modern novel about being a one eyed writer girl that loses her memories every thirteen hours.

The second storyline is about a genius manga artist that's trying to balance his publishing schedule and schoolwork. He has two co-dependent girls interested him (a cheerful though somewhat emotional gal and an overly possessive childhood friend) and he has to deal with that stuff somehow.

So... um... I am avoiding the use of the word 'bad' in reference to this, because really that's a bit too harsh. Still, I'm fairly certain that no one I know that I'm on good terms with would like this. But at the same time I'm sure there are a lot of people that swear by this thing and think it's the most deeply beautiful and meaningful thing they've ever seen. It's certainly very popular (multiple recommendations is why I ended up going through it, in case you were wondering). But still... let's talk about this, if you wish.

Let's start with the manga artist. Hiro Hirono.



When artists create fictionalized versions of themselves it usually is an excuse to pat themselves on the back. This is a tradition that goes straight back to that part of the Odyssey where that Bard sings about the Trojan War and has Odysseus in tears because of how awesome his storytelling skills are. That's basically what this guy is. He draws Shoujo Manga which he apparently started publishing when he was like 14 or 15 and while the show never mentions anything about what the stuff was about it is generally understood that it is awesome and that Hiro is amazing.

That in itself is a problem. I've never been a fan of the whole 'look at how awesome my artist character is, you can't see even a hint of what he might create' thing. It's a cheap device. But fine, whatever, that isn't the big issue here. The issue is that Hiro's utter awesomeness transfers to pretty much everything else in his life.

The guy spends his entire story being cool. He spends his time making deadlines and being pursued by gorgeous women. The women themselves are both kind of crazy and vicious, with each seeming to look to destroy the other's self esteem in order to win the artist. But the manga artist is pretty much detached during most of that giant emotional war, as he's just too busy being awesome. His only 'flaw' is that he didn't choose which girl he liked earlier, but that seemed to be pretty much thrown in as it was fairly clear who he would choose from the get go.


It's funny to me that this show plays at being post-modern and artsy so much and yet lapses into the 'stable, responsible and logical male'/'emotional, fickle and irrational women' molds. I don't know anything about who made this or why, but the way this thing was written struck me as base artistic wish fulfillment. And that just doesn't yield a satisfying story.

The second story is about Chihiro Shindou.



The amnesia I described earlier was caused by a car accident (which also took her eye). I know I don't really need to mention how stupid her condition is, but I will anyway. Thirteen hours of memories a day (her memories from before she was 12 are intact) and then she forgets it all. That is not simply not plausible. People might say 'well, it's fiction' but fiction needs to be internally consistent. I could not feel any sympathy for her condition throughout the show because it was just such a silly idea.

And that's a big problem. As I mentioned Chihiro's goal is to write a novel with the help of her boyfriend Renji, who she'll tell what's going on so she can keep on track and keep writing in spite of her memory loss cycle. But honestly, no matter how much she struggled and suffered, the inescapable fact was that it's a stupid premise that I couldn't suspend my disbelief for. Amnesia is an overused trope in any case. It's in everything from Firefly to Gundam. But this is stupid amnesia.


I doubt whoever wrote this doesn't even cared about that, being concerned more for the overall effect. It's 'a tale of memories' after all and so the author has to deconstruct the role of memory in human experience and obviously turning to something crazy like say science fiction to explain reoccurring short term memory loss would have just been so vulgar. So just stamp on 'amnesia' and keep going!

For some people that's probably enough... but me? I think it's lazy and irritating.

Finally, let's talk about the most egregious thing about this piece of work, mainly the art style.



Pretentious.

I get the feeling that whoever was art director for this thing thought that no one could understand him/her in high school. Every once in a while (sometimes more often than others) the scenes would randomly cut to a shot of one of the characters as a shadow or as a purple outline or the background would suddenly change or text would flash by. I'm not sure whether this style is called Impressionist or Expressionist or what... that isn't my area of expertise. But I do know that it was really annoying.


You can say art is subjective, of course, and I acknowledge that. But I think often people mistake novelty value for actual value. Great art would be something like Jin Roh rather than something that slaps a shadow on someone's face. I would even say Kaiji's big noses and weird looks outstrip this thing. All the silliness with photoshop filters and random scene cuts struck me as the product of someone who's really insecure and terrified that no one would 'get it' (though what 'it' is is rather nebulous). There was one scene that I really disliked which consisted of one of the girls leaving messages on the manga artist's cellphone.

That's how it looked like. As she left messages, what she said would write in text across the screen and she kept leaving messages which made more and more messages appear until the screen was covered. It went on for like ten minutes. After a minute or two I just said 'okay, I get it' and skipped the rest of the scene. But that's the junk I'm talking about.

Overall, I can say I got through it which is more than I can say about a lot of things. But generally speaking, I think this is not the way things should go. There's more ...

District 9

District 9... hmmm. Not too shabby.

Gotta give a film credit first and foremost for innovation. An alien refugee crisis in Africa filmed in pseudo-documentary style complete with occasional cuts to random experts/acquaintances of the main character. I've never seen anything like that before and it's a neat idea. The documentary aspect sort of breaks down after a while and it becomes what I think is fairly straight-forward science fiction. But still, I tip my hat towards risk-taking.

The movie was fairly politically charged, perhaps even a bit too politically charged. The politics of District 9 are pretty heavy handed, but also kind of vague. Refugee camps have extremely poor living conditions. Racism is bad. Okay sure. But these are bloody aliens.

Personally if alien refugees came to earth I would be in favour of a massive quarantine. You can't just let a bunch of people from another damn planet set up camp without knowing anything about them. Who knows what damn biological weirdness can come out of that? I don't care how damn malnourished the damn aliens are, you don't just let in a bunch of unknown organisms onto our planet. That's just stupid.

But in any case, details aside it was good. So let's talk about some specifics here...

Documentary-style:

I liked this. Documentaries have sort of become an art form these days, what with the spooky music and the interviews with loved ones/generic experts with European accents. It's all pretty standard and so seeing science fiction using the documentary style like this was rather nice. I would go so far as to say that I think that the first chunk of the movie before the infection part took off was actually the best part.

I especially liked the use of past tense. "Wikus was this" "Wikus was that"... made the movie more tense as you watched to see what was going to happen to the guy.

Main Character:


I liked the actor, I have to say. He really played the part of the semi-charismatic pseudo-liberal nerd pretty well. You could tell right from the get-go that this is the kind of guy that was picked on in high school and probably got his degree without doing anything that remotely resembled field work. He talks a lot about things being illegal, doesn't seem to like violence but is still kind of prejudiced. I don't think the audience is supposed to really like him, but he really works as a believable character.

That is until he gets some alien guns and becomes frackin' Rambo. Up until that point I was really liking the whole documentary aspect of it, but when Wikus blew up that whole military base and then escaped... well, he also blew up the documentary part too. Which is a shame really, as they could have still kept it going and put up some interviews with some people that survived his onslaught. That would have been awesome.

"He came through the door and shot the guard, yelling 'FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!'. We hid under a table and then he..." *breaks down weeping* "He told us to run... to run or else he would... he would..." etc. etc.

I don't know why they just abandoned that in favour of just a standard action scene.

That said, that mech he had was pretty cool.

Politics:



My main objection:

Why is it a stupid private contractor managing the aliens rather than some sort of government or UN agency? I mean, sure, I understand. Blackwater (or whatever the fuck those fuckers renamed themselves... Xe or something, isn't it?) is one of the most evil organizations on the globe. But for crying out loud, Blackwater are a group of mercenaries who are given contracts. You can't just put them in charge of the aliens. The whole shadowy 'MNU' thing running the show just felt silly.

Good Detail:



I think the movie does a fair enough job with explaining why the aliens don't just attack. They might have cool guns but when they get shot they die just the same and there aren't so many of them that they can just take over the Earth. If you chuck missiles at their spaceships, they will explode and if you shoot their crazy mech enough it will be destroyed. Nice way of justifying the refugee thing.

Bad Detail:

I don't understand how a trigger pulling mechanism is supposed to be linked to DNA. That's nitpicking though. But while we're on the subject, why exactly did alien fuel stuff make him turn into an alien?

Worst part of the movie:

Cannibalism. Or well, maybe not 'cannibalism', but the whole alien eating thing. I know that there are some weird cults with inhuman practices in Africa. But that was still really stupid. "I'm going to eat this thing to see if I can use this gun" is an idea with practical intentions. When that shit doesn't work then you can maybe see it not gaining too much traction.

The whole 'scary African gun guy' thing just felt out of place and unconvincing.
There's more ...