We’re fine, we’re all fine… how are you?

So, yeah, we’re having a bit of a reactor leak this week. On the plus side, this was the week we had already planned to skip a comic (and pre-warned y’all) due to Dawn’s final exams. On the minus side, both our Cable and Internet are completely kaput at home and the earliest a repairman can get there is Wednesday afternoon. I’m already getting the shakes.

Also, I at least was planning to do a blog as usual, but at the moment I’m limited to typing this during my lunch break at work. So I’ve got to keep things short and sweet for once, and schedule this ahead for the usual just-past-midnight update. My plan at the moment is maybe to come back and edit something more fulfilling into place once things are back to normal.

So, apologies. Oh, and if you have Netflix Instant and want to check out a crazy entertaining pseudo-western out of Thailand, look up Tears of the Black Tiger. It’s slow in some places, but when it goes over the top it is TAKING that next trench!

Yeah, that’s right, I just made a clumsily awesome World War I metaphor. Don’t you tell me it’s Too Soon.

And see you next week! Or maybe later this week, if we get everything sorted properly. Very small leak… don’t send security team…

EDIT: Okay, so our home internet is fixed! Yay! So as I sort-of-promised I’ll add a little more to this post. First off, I mentioned Tears of the Black Tiger above, which is a movie made in 2000 that I swear looks like one from the early 60s, right down to the faaaabulous color choices for characters. It’s a very stylized piece of work, set in a world that seems stuck somewhere between 1960 and the Wild West. And like I mentioned, very over-the-top, to the point where Dawn is certain they went to the trouble of coloring in geysers of spewing blood in post-production. That or Thailand allows a level of explosive squib packs that would make OSHA flip their lids.

I found this movie while browsing an interesting thread on Warren Ellis’s online forum, Whitechapel, pondering if the release of Red Dead Redemption might inspire a renaissance of the western genre (click here if you wanna see). A decent number of responders declared the western a dead and gone thing, a product of a time and place which has passed. On a related note, one of the makers of Red Dead Redemption talked about how much the western, almost uniquely amongst film genres, is tied in to geography.

But if you play Red Dead Redemption, you’ll notice that there’s several types of geography you progress through during the game, so it sort of undercuts the point. A western doesn’t have to be set in the desert under towering rock formations. There is a geography to westerns, but that geography is a frontier. You have a wilderness dotted by settlements here and there, and maybe the occasional big city for contrast and conflict between the forces of freedom/savagery and law/civilization. You really don’t need to be more specific than that for a “western” tale to work.

So, frankly, this is why those Kurosawa movies about feudal Japan translate so well into the American Old West (and Kurosawa was in fact inspired by John Ford in the first place). In fact, this is also why the whole concept of Space Cowboys work so well. What could be more of a wilderness than the depths of space? What was that famous line…? “Space… the final frontier…”

Perusing the Whitechapel thread, I ran across another new movie I want to get my hands on, this time out of Korea: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0901487/ . The original title is a mouthful, which is why it’s funny one of the international titles is “Nom Nom Nom”, but it’s also going by “The Good, The Bad, and The Weird”. So far I’ve only seen a clip, and it’s really kooky stuff. Do a search on Youtube and you might find it.

So does this mean there’s a new era of Spaghetti Westerns coming out of mainland Asia? What do you call that, Rice Westerns? Regardless, there’s an ebullience and enthusiasm to them that calls to mind Bollywood’s revisiting of the classic movie musicals of the mid-20th century.

So if a genre can skip from America, to Japan, to Italy, to Thailand and Korea, and even to the reaches of outer space, does it really make sense to call it a dead product of a time and place now gone? Me, I say you’re one poor misguided sonofabitch, and you’d best draw that katana/sixgun/blaster pistol and defend yourself, pardner.