Just Can't Get a Break...

If there's one thing I've done this break (besides sleep fifteen hours a day and finish Kindred, oops), its been watch movies. By which I mean three-- fifteen hours of sleep doesn't leave time for a lot of other activities. But those three movies set off all of my new-found postmodernist radars; Django Unchained, The Wind Rises (not so much postmodern, but historical-fiction so still relevant), and The Grand Budapest Hotel.

We've already discussed Tarantino a lot in class, so I won't dwell on that one. Needless to say, it was over the top, hyper self-aware, and postmodern in the essence of postmodernism. The Grand Budapest Hotel was somewhat similar, though perhaps not as blatant. A very well-to-do hotel concierge gets involved with a 92 year old woman who is murdered, leaves a very valuable painting to him, the family is outraged, and there is a long police "investigation" that mainly comprises of pastries, mush, and chopped off fingers. The number of tropes that were played on were myriad, from the innocent in prison, to the refugee story, to the nostalgic mysterious man who has an important story to tell.

The Wind Rises was perhaps my favorite of the three, but that's probably because I have a massive Hayao Miyazaki bias. It was strange, revisiting WWII from the Japanese perspective. For those who haven't seen it, it follows the story of Jiro Hirokoshi, a boy who dreams of creating beautiful airplanes in the vein of his idol, Caproni. He takes this aesthetic beauty with him through his life and goes on to create the single man plane primarily used by the Japanese in the Second World War. What we see however, is a country struggling to even produce a single plane. "We have oxen to drag the planes out to the test field. How backwards can you get?"

It was interesting to think about the people behind the design of the planes that would go on to kill thousands of people. Jiro's planes would eventually go on to be the most versatile carriers in the world, and later adapted to Japan's last ditch kamikaze fighters. Yet behind that, Miyazaki paints a picture of a man who doesn't really want to be creating planes for war (actually, nearly all of Miyazaki's films are anti-war), but instead just wants to bring more beauty to the world. Some of the planes, such as Caproni's Caproni Ca.60 look ludacris and an idea from Miyazaki's boyish fantasies, but in fact they too were real. It was a strange break to say the least, and it felt more like I was living through class for a week.