Multi-Media Review

[sienamystic]

The local cable channel MhZ airs, on Tuesday and Thursday, an International Mystery movie featuring detective/cop shows from around...well, I'd say the globe, but I've only seen European ones, so I'll limit it to that. This is where my friend CrazyQuilt videotaped one based on the Andrea Camiliari Inspector Montalbano books, and also where I caught another Italian cop show sort of movie called, I think, Homicide Squad. Would that I had a multi-region DVD player, because they're available but obviously coded for European players.

Last night, Bemo and I watched one from Sweden. It was called The Man Who Smiled, and featured a detective more self-destructive than Sam Spade ever hoped to be. His name is Kurt Wallander, and he's a big, beefy type with a jowly, sad-circus-bear type of face, and a penchant for destroying the relationships that make him the happiest. The story was interesting, the supporting cast excellent, and the baddie of the story genuinely creepy and evil. (Points for me and Bemo both for going, "Eww, there's an icky incest vibe happening here!" when our suspicions were validated ten minutes later as the smug millionare discussed artifically inseminating his adopted daughter so he could continue the family name.)

I've just added a bunch of the books that the show was based on (the author is Henning Mankell) to my Amazon wish list - a trifle warily, as I'm better dealing with very depressing topics via a tv show than I am in books. If these turn out to be as bleak as the Michael Dibdin books set in Italy, I'm not going to enjoy them. Anybody who has read them, please feel free to let me know what you thought about them.

I'm also reading - or attempting to read - a book by Nicholas Bornoff, called Pink Samurai: Love, Marriage, and Sex in Contemporary Japan. The book is an unfortunate mishmash of an attempt at serious scholarly work, day-in-the-life-of set pieces, personal experience, and anecdote. It's very disjointed, and apparently relies on data that was rather outdated at the time the book was published, and is even more profoundly so now. It also paints a portrait of Japan and the Japanese that I hope is, for their sakes, rather exaggerated. It's strange to say this about a book that goes into detail about neon-encrusted love hotels, Japanese schoolgirl Lolitas, and the No Panty Coffee Shop, but much of the book is, quite frankly, boring. I'd love to read a better study along these lines, but I'm afraid that I can't recommend this one beyond the most basic, "read it if you've got nothing else."

Oh, and also - GIP *g* Everybody else grew up with Hello Kitty, but I was always a Little Twin Stars girl myself.

Comments

[queenofthorns.livejournal.com]

Hmmm! I love the Dibdin books - I haven't read the Mankell ones yet, although I own a couple of them.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

I wrote a bit about Italy police procedurals and mentioned the Dibdin books a while back. I find the books so unrementingly bleak - not just the character, but the picture they paint about being an Italian - and never wanted to reread them. It could very well be a personal quirk - I love Italy with a firey passion and maybe that makes it hard for me to think of Italy as a pit of snakes where justice is nonexistent and there are no honest people left because they've either had to adapt and become snakey themselves, or have been devoured. Some of this could be the result of reading a bunch of them back to back.

[queenofthorns.livejournal.com]

Heh! Well, I think things get less bleak in the later books (I really found Cosi fan tutte wonderful!) And I loved Dead Lagoon and its portrait of Venice and I love the political commentary as well. So yeah, they're kind of bleak, but I do like them quite a lot.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Little Twin Stars! I had almost forgotten them! I had a set of Little Twin Stars stamps that went on all my thank-you notes when I was small.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

I had a kind of playhouse-in-a-briefcase kind of thing with them, complete with little pink plastic beds and toilets and cars and a table with a lazy susan and a conveyer belt that went from the kitchen to the outside of the house that you could actually roll food down. It was the Best Thing Ever. I was delighted to find it in my mom's spare closet, so I handed it on to my friend Persia's little girl, who seems to be having just as much fun with it as I did.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I couldn't deal with Bornoff, either. I gave up when I realized the index had dozens of entries on prostitution but not a single one on birth control.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

*Such* a frustrating book.

[oyceter]

I really didn't like the Bornoff as well. He's got another book where he argues about the samurai ethic in Japanese literature and overgeneralizes it dreadfully. Alas, I don't have another book recommendation that goes into detail on modern Japanese sexual culture, although Anne Allison's Nightwork goes into the mizu-shobai (hostesses, clubs, etc.) in the 1980s. It's been a while since I read it, so I don't quite remember why I don't fully endorse it, but it was less irritating than Pink Samurai

I also rec Gary Pflugfelder's Cartographies of Desire as a rule. It's more on Tokugawa and Meiji Japan, but there's a fascinating chapter in there on the evolution of medical vocabulary on sex and sexuality in Japan, up till the 1950s.