Wired is hyping up the power of bloggers in an article giving them credit for the ouster of Trent Lott. It seems to miss the point that mainstream news sources broke the story first, and it's when they picked it up again that something actually happened. Sure, some key bloggers like instapundit kept it alive but I'm a bit dubious as to how important that was. Bloggers have a much, much tighter production schedule so maybe they just beat the mainstream news sources to the punch and the mainstream were going to run with it more once they had their facts straight.

A bit harsh, but still some valid criticism:

"Bloggers are navel-gazers," said Elizabeth Osder, a visiting professor at The University of Southern California's School of Journalism. "And they're about as interesting as friends who make you look at their scrap books."
She added, "There's an overfascination here with self-expression, with opinion. This is opinion without expertise, without resources, without reporting."

I've never been a Nipponophile. I pick and choose the pieces of Japanese culture that interest me and leave the rest behind. However, I'm beginning to think that the Japanese culture fiends are onto something. Perhaps being bombed into the twentieth century has a funny way of setting you free from cultural limitations and promoting invention and creativity. Tonight I saw Takashi Miike's Visitor Q. In 11 years he's made 52 films according to IMDB. It's clear from this movie he's become quite skilled. This is certainly one of the best digital pieces I've seen. It's also clear that he will never find a large audience because they don't come much more extreme than this.

The movie opens with a title screen that says "Have you ever fucked your father?" Then goes right into a scene with a daughter seducing her father into paying for sex. They're both filming it and taking stills as well. It concludes with her mocking him repeatedly, "Early bird," and charging him extra because he came too quickly. Pile on violence, rape, necrophilia, lactation/urination, heroin addiction, dismemberment and people being hit on the head with a large rock and you've got some idea of the boundaries being pushed here. What makes it bearable is the element of humor that is carried throughout the movie. This isn't like watching Pier Paolo Pasolini's film "Salo" which features repeated child rape, fecal feasts and plenty of other perversions all wrapped up in an overbearing semiotics lesson about the evils of fascism. Miike has a sense of humor and realizes how extreme these situations are.

One might be tempted to label this as pornography because it sounds like it exists solely for the voyeur but it doesn't. Take out some of the more extreme elements and you have a classic dysfunctional family like "The Royal Tenenbaums", "The Ice Storm", "A Boy's Life", "The Lion in Winter", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof", etc. The plot is fairly conventional. It's about a family that's falling apart that is brought together by a strange visitor. Miike takes "Visitor Q" perhaps a step further than other films in the genre in that "the medium is the message." The fact that it's shot digital is important. In every scene we either see one of the characters taping the action, or we see the action straight from the camera in the actor's hands. The father is a news reporter who detached from the world around him and only feels purpose when he's taping. All the family members live their lives moderated by a video camera with meaning and purpose as disposable as a video tape. Change comes about when the visitor practices his destructive construction. Later on he takes the camera and the family members find themselves actually interacting with each other directly, albeit in their weird, extreme way.

I was throughly impressed by "Visitor Q." It's doesn't resort to melodrama or a didactic family values message. It's not filled with exposition with each family member boring us with their personal problems. On a technical level it doesn't suffer from the bad editing, bad lighting or digital gimmicks that other DV movies run into. Sure, some DV can look incredibly good, "Things Behind the Sun" comes to mind but that's because it looks like film. "Visitor Q" embraces the digital aesthetic and contributes a new voice to the world of movies. I sincerely hope that an American film maker reponds to movies like "Visitor Q" with a movie that has the same hearty vigor and inventiveness.

Okay, it's television which is generally crap but this is Brilliant, but Cancelled television on Trio. They built a list of 150 cancelled TV shows and whittled the list down to:

• The Ernie Kovacs Show (Particularly innovative production techniques)
• Now and Again
• Action (One of many great shows Fox idiotically canceled)
• The Famous Teddy Z
• Kolchak: The Night Stalker
• United States
• Gun (Robert Altman's (!) TV series where the only repeat character is a gun
• East Side/West Side (George C. Scott was in this one)
• Profit (Another Fox show. A *very* dark show about evil multinational corporations that had difficulty selling ad time to evil multinational corporations, imagine that)

These are showing this month on Trio.

If a million people died and nobody remembers the story did it really happen? In 1915 the Turkish government turned on its own citizens and killed or forcefully deported a million Armenians. "Who remembers the extermination of the Armenians?" A line allegedly spoken by Hitler to his top generals to quell their concerns of getting away with the Holocaust. Atom Egoyan's new movie Ararat tries to tell the story of the Armenian genocide, and a the same time remind of us of film's inability to tell the whole story.

As he did in "The Sweet Hereafter" and "Exotica" he uses criss-crossing timelines, and interlocking character arcs to try to reveal all the layers of the story. At one level he's just trying to tell a little known story about the Armenian genocide. Interwoven with that is questions about cultural identity and heritage, hatred, truth and family. It is easily his most ambitious film to date, but perhaps because the material is so personal (Atom Egoyan is part Armenian) it gets muddled. He seems to force detachment from the story in order to tell it truthfully and in doing so that emotional connection is missing.

The film is filled with clever devices to further the story. Such as how to get at the truth of what's in the sealed film canisters during the custom's scenes. The mother-son relationship between Gorky and his mother and Raffi and his mother. Ani's attempts to explain her second husband's death parallels her son's attempts to understand what happened to the Armenian people. The big one is of course the movie-within-a-movie. In Ararat's movie-within-a-movie we see a film called Ararat being filmed. As we watch and hear the discussion between writer, director, actor and historian it's clear a movie only captures a small part of the story. All these devices further the story in clever and insightful ways, but at the cost of forming an emotional connection with the story, which is what leaves me ultimately unfulfilled.

Mount Ararat is depicted in the film and serves to remind us of the challenge we face as we struggle to accept our inability as observers of history, and participants, to understand the whole story. It's also a reminder of the challenge Egoyan set for himself in trying to understand what happened in 1915 and how its effects continue to ripple through nations and individuals even today.

I just finished watching the "Fellowship of the Ring" and I am really touched by the friendship between Sam and Frodo. It's unwavering no matter the peril each may face. I guess I find such a constant reassuring in a world that seems more and more alien to me every day. I remember when I was young, and on into my early twenties, having friends that I thought were like that. I don't feel that way now though. As I grow older is it time to put away childish things? To quote another movie "Everyone dies alone." Maybe it's folly to yearn for someone or something always at the ready?