Filed under: Industry, Movies, Numbers | Tags: action movies, Movies, women in film
First, a New Year’s Resolution: I may or may not post a whole lot, but I will at least stop promising posts that don’t materialize.
Anyway, here’s your next linkspam, themed around film. I still have a ton of links on other topics, so more will be coming eventually. However, I’ve got a handful of other things I want to write about (as opposed to copying-and-pasting about), so things will get done as they get done.
The first lot relates to women in action movies:
- Faster Pussycat! Kill! Bill!, on Kill Bill as a milestone, and standard plotlines
- The “people won’t watch female action movies” myth, breaks down the numbers behind action movies with female protagonists
- In Audiences Won’t Go to See an Action Movie That Stars Women, Robert Elisberg further breaks down those numbers.
- (Not about women, but this one was spawned by similar ideas: Why Don’t White Audiences Go See Black Movies?)
- Token female characters in ensemble action movies is about exactly what it sounds like
- The actress behind an iconic action heroine reflects in Sigourney Weaver on the Legacy of ‘Aliens’ & Her Sequel That Hollywood Won’t Make
Next, some technical/behind-the-scenes articles:
- A short course in A video primer in shot-making from Majestic Micro Essays
- Piracy: Enforcement Isn’t Working, Prices Need to Come Down – some interesting ideas about intellectual property
- The “Gray Ones” Fade to Black – notes from a film teacher
- One More Glass Ceiling Shattered: Patty Jenkins Signed to Direct Thor 2 – article also explains why this is important
- Warner Brothers Talk About Plans for Ultraviolet, Flixster, and Johanna Draper Carlson points out the myriad problems with what they’ve said
- Hollywood hooked on sexualizing women and teen girls, a new study from the University of Southern California
- Women Make Up Only 33% of Speaking Roles in Films, commentary on the USC study
- Breaking Dawn Scores 5th Highest Opening Weekend Ever – numbers, numbers, how I love numbers~
- The Good New Days Are Over – discussing the merging of publishing and distributing companies in a variety of industries
Uh-oh. I thought that that would take care of a hefty chunk of the links I’ve stored up, but no such luck. Maybe I’ll get them all done by next year…
Filed under: Industry, Numbers, Resources, TV shows | Tags: Fall 2011, TV shows
I promised a linkspam awhile back, and then avoided doing it because the list of links I’ve been wanting to share is so long. My solution: multiple, themed linkspams. Today, a collection of links about television and TV shows. I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, but they are thought-provoking and/or informative.
First, some articles about how we watch:
- Should We Watch TV Shows from the Beginning?
- Should Continuity Be King in Serialized Television?
- Television re-runs: only 235 episodes to go
- Time Warner Cable’s Stern: We Have to Move Away from Monolithic TV Packages
- In switch, cable operators want to go a la carte
- New broadcast channels offer reasons to pull plug on cable
- Comcast’s MyTV Choice: Is this the future of pay TV bundling?
- Notes on Rewatching
Trends in TV and how to understand how decisions get made about TV shows:
- Down with Television Repeats
- “Do Season Finales Even Matter Anymore?” or “Season Finale, Schmeason Finale. I Don’t Even Know When It’s On!”
- Putting Ratings in Perspective: Today’s Hits are Yesterday’s Bombs
- A Look at the Relationship Between Buzz and Ratings
- The truth about TV ratings, online viewing and sci-fi shows
- TV: Besides Cops, Lawyers and Doctors, What Else Is There?
Some suggestions for and commentary about women and men on TV (three more links relevant to this season in the bottom section):
- Sugar and Spice and Vicious Beatings
- “Parks and Recreation” Open Thread: Feminist Landmarks
- The 25 Best TV Roles for Women
- Five Great Shows About Masculinity — So You Don’t Have To Watch The Terrible New Ones
A few about the real people behind the shows:
- A Tear for Sarah Jane – A Feminist Aca-Obit
- Why Cast a Spotlight on Joss Whedon?
- DGA Report Assesses Director Diversity in Hiring Practices for Episodic Television
And, of course, interesting articles about the new fall season:
- After One Week, Which TV Shows Look Like Hits and Which are on Death Watch?
- It’s time to do or die for high-priced broadcast TV entries
- Women Rock Prime Time
- Lady, Lady, Lady, Lady, UR Doin It Rong
- What Makes a Show Aimed at Women?
- Ratings report: CBS picks up 2 Broke Girls, and old people love Andy Rooney (surprise, surprise)
Whew. I should not have started that this late at night. More installments on the way when I recover.
One of the oddest parts of a doctorate, at least at the beginning, is that you enter the program because you want to help people learn, but then you basically ignore undergraduates in favor of studying like mad. It can be very isolating; you sit in your apartment and study most of the time, unless you leave your apartment and study. Plus, you have all of the normal household duties (dishes, laundry), and since you probably moved to a new city for your program you also have to set up a new apartment and adjust to a new city. Last year, my biggest “hobby”, time-wise, was shopping for new furniture and household goods. I brought a lot of stuff across the country with me, but most of it was of the clothing-and-books variety.
Postcard advertising tonight's event
All of which is to say that I didn’t feel like I had much of an impact on anything last year. I wasn’t really helping anyone or creating anything, just ingesting books and discussing them. That’s important, and I learned a lot last year, but my background is in the educational non-profit sector. It was odd to be not helping people. I’m already working on changing that this year, but yesterday something great happened. I was wandering around whiling away the hours between classes when I ran across a fellow student from a different department as he was showing a pair of visiting Japanese artists (collectively called Tochka) around. I tagged along for lunch, and suddenly it was seven hours later and I had helped translate subtitles for a short video and a set of informational cards for an exhibit of the artists’ work that is going on today and tomorrow. I had a blast, I got to help some great people, and (I hope) I helped make a suite of pieces that will explain Tochka’s art to the students who show up tonight and tomorrow.
Example of PiKA PiKA
Tochka uses long exposure photography to create gorgeous images of light (usually made by volunteers holding LED flashlights), then brings the photographs together to create short, animated films. They call these works “PiKA PiKA” in reference to the Japanese onomatopoeia pika, which means the sound of light flashing. (And yes, that’s where the pika in the name of Pokemon‘s Pikachu came from. After all, his power is lightning, right?)
I did not see that coming. I have to admit to being tired and behind in my homework, but I can handle it. I’m just excited for tonight. If you’re in the Los Angeles area, Tochka will be leading a workshop tonight, and there will be a showing and a Q&A with the artists behind Tochka, Kazue Monno and Takeshi Nagata, tomorrow. Here are some links with more information:
Details for the event tonight
Tochka’s English-language blog, which has sample video files
Filed under: anime, Movies, Reviews | Tags: From Up on Poppy Hill, Kokurikozaka kara, Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli
Umi raising flags in Kokurikozaka kara
Studio Ghibli is best known for those of its films which were directed by Hayao Miyazaki, one of the company’s two co-founders, but its other films are hardly low quality. I may be generalizing a bit too much, but those films not directed by Hayao Miyazaki seem to stray into slightly more adult territory – for example, the possibility of an affair is alluded to in Poppy Hill. The newest film melds this material with a kind of elegiac tone that made for a nice afternoon. Beyond that, I don’t really want to say too much about the film. Being in Japan, I watched it in Japanese, of course, and while I understood enough of the dialogue to enjoy the film, I didn’t quite get enough to feel good about analyzing it to closely. Luckily, Aaron Gerow also saw it and has written an interesting analysis which I suggest you read.
Incidentally, I’ve been saving up interesting articles for awhile now, and I’ll probably be unloading a link spam on you soon. If you’ve got any suggestions, feel free to leave them in a comment.
So much for updating more frequently 
Well, I’m in Japan and partway through my program. I thought I’d give a run-down on the nuts and bolts of intensive, short-term language study in Japan, writing down some of what I’ve found out about research in Japan along the way. I’m hardly the only person doing that sort of thing (and someone I know already beat me to actually setting fingers to keys on this one to an extent), but I haven’t seen anything about the specific topics I’m going to cover.
The first thing I want to talk about is a bit boring, but horribly useful: Japanese bookstores and film theory. Studying film academically is a matter of course in America, but it’s a relatively new development in Japan. (See here for a short history of its development.) To be clear, I’m talking about academic study – film theory, not film criticism. As a result, it’s many times easier to find books or magazines reviewing the latest films, doing photo spreads on the newest hot young thing or listing someone’s favorite horror movies than it is to find an analysis of, say, the recent spurt of manga, TV shows and movies about Abe no Seimei. That disparity exists pretty much everywhere – talking about the latest blockbuster is as international as it gets – but it’s exaggerated in Japanese scholarship. Moreover, the way that Japanese bookstores are organized kind of highlights it. Still, you should know the Japanese scholarship on a topic before you start shooting your mouth off, right? I’ll show you how to navigate stores for academic books about film, and that should give you a good enough idea of how the system works that you can figure out how to find other kinds of academic books, too.
Let’s say you want to find books about women in film. Not a specific book, just academic books on that topic. In America, you’d stop by two bookstore sections – women’s issues and film – and maybe the women’s interest and general interest sections of the magazines/journals area. In Japanese bookstores, there are far more sections, but they’re smaller and less likely to have what you want. The various women’s sections (books and magazines) are largely fashion- and diet-related. There might have been one or two other subsections, but they’re similar in tone (i.e. useless for our purposes). There is a large section labelled nonfiction (ノンフィクション), but it seems to be all/mostly memoirs. Likewise, there is a section labelled essays ( エセイ ) which consists of compilations of essays by single authors on a variety of general topics (i.e. a volume won’t discuss one topic in depth, but cover various aspects of society in different essays).
So much for the less-useful areas, on to the good stuff. Japanese bookstores have at least two film sections – “film” (映画) and “Western film” (洋画) – both sections are mainly filled with non-academic works (“Best Ever” lists, for example), but I found a couple gems in them on my last trip – the second issue of Pop Culture Critique, whose theme is “girls’ combat experience”, and a book on film by one of Studio Ghibli‘s producers. Nearby, you’ll usually find sections on TV dramas, anime and games. Similarly, I suggest taking the time to go through the related magazine areas. Magazines themselves haven’t panned out for me yet, but stores often shelve books and unusual items with the magazines. On a recent trip to a bookstore I hadn’t visited before, I found a set of specially reissued Ozu films. Each “volume” included one film and a short (40-ish page) set of specially printed notes, interviews and so on.
Now, those suggestions work for your standard new and used bookstores (i.e. Kinokuniya and Book Off), and assume you don’t have a specific title in mind (if you do, order it). When looking for other kinds of resources, other guidelines apply. If you want dōjinshi, for instance, Kathryn Hemmann recently posted an excellent guide to dōjinshi resources in the Tokyo area. If you have any suggestions or know of other, similar resources, please do comment. I’ve got less than a month left, and I want to make the most of it.
Update: I dropped by the Jinbocho area today, and they have boatloads of used book stores. (Also, apparently, CD/record stores.) There’s even a store that specializes in science-fiction and mysteries. Some of the stores are pretty small, but the flip side of that is that they carry rarer books and magazines. Happy hunting!
Hello all. FYI, I should be posting more often over the summer than I have been recently. Right now, I wanted to briefly point out that I’ve updated, organized and added to the blogroll on the left side of the screen. I’ve divided the links into a general blogroll and a list that’s useful for studying anime. The anime section includes blogs about non-anime topics which are useful for scholars of anime, such as a blog about women in the American film industry that has often inspired me to look at other media in different ways.
I’ll probably add a few more links, and maybe divide the general section into several sections. Eventually, I’ll build up a list of useful articles, webpages and so on for your perusal. Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend, and don’t forget to thank any service members in your acquaintance. If you’re doing the challenge, why not help someone specific – send a care package to some our soldiers overseas. You can get an address and suggestions for what to send through Any Soldier. I like to send a mix of fun stuff (games, magazines, crossword puzzles, candies) and nicer necessities (handy wipes, sunscreen, lotion, fancy chapsticks [with sunscreen], those expensive hiking socks that keep your feet cozy through anything, gourmet coffees and teas).
Filed under: Academic stumbling blocks, Grad Student Life, Professorial Skills, Resources | Tags: fellowships, FLAS, Japanese, language study
Sorry for not updating more recently – between midterms, getting sick, finals and what I’ll be writing about today, I haven’t had the time or energy to flesh out any of the things I’ve wanted to write about recently. With any luck, things will settle down soon and you’ll get a rash of posts on slightly old topics shortly. Today, however, I thought I’d write a bit about that which is currently consuming this grad student’s life: summer plans.
The vast majority of the people pursuing Ph.D.’s do so with the help of fellowships, a certain kind of scholarship. These come in a variety of forms, but the aspect that concerns me at the moment is the summer. Some fellowships cover an entire year, but some only cover the academic year. That can leave you scrambling, but it also opens up other opportunities. (To be honest, in practice most people seem to be more irritated at the scrambling than thankful for the flexibility.)
For an area studies scholar like myself, the government runs a program called FLAS, or Foreign Language and Area Studies. FLAS fellowships are designed to ensure that the United States has a pool of people trained in speaking various languages in case a need arises. The academic-year fellowship also have an area studies component, in addition to language classes. You can use a FLAS fellowship to study Arabic, Chinese, Korean and a number of other languages deemed both important to the United States and understudied by Americans. The fellowships are administered by various colleges and universities and come in 10-month and 2-month strains. In other words, a fellowship covers either an academic year or the summer. Each one has two parts: a set amount of money for tuition, and a set amount of money for you to live on. If you’re a grad student, your school may add in some extra money if it’s in a city with a high cost of living.
There are several tricks to the summer FLAS which complicate matters. First, summer classes have to be intensive – 120 hours is the minimum, and that’s only for advanced language learners. Then you have the double bind of the spirit versus the letter of the fellowship. For my own purposes, because it is best for me, I want to be as fluent as possible. The Program wants me to be as fluent as possible. Ditto everyone else on the FLAS. However, the best way to gain that fluency is often to travel to a nation where your language is actually spoken to take your intensive class – a $1,000+ cost that is not included in your fellowship. In addition, you most likely have carrying costs in America during this time – a year-long lease you can’t sublet, car insurance payments, cable/gas/electric bills – which you have to cover out of an already-small stipend.
It’s hard. Figuring out the details and trying to get additional funding so that I can do this right has occupied a lot of my time, a lot of my advisor’s time and a lot of our local FLAS administrator’s time. To some extent I’ve had to recover lost territory – I couldn’t buy plane tickets until getting the details of a certain kind of funding set, but by the time that was settled, a sale I had found was gone and tickets had gone up $500. I got $600 in another kind of funding explicitly for tickets around the same time, but now tickets are up $600 from when I first looked for them.
It’s complicated. It’s a bit unwieldy, as a system, since you have to apply for funding and programs separately, and can’t guarantee either until you’ve heard from both. This summer, lingering effects of the earthquake in Japan got several summer programs cancelled, and even more were considering until very close to the deadline by which the FLAS administrators needed to know where I was going. (Past, actually. They have been extremely understanding and helpful throughout.)
All that said, I’m going to attend the premier Japanese-language program in the world this summer, and I will be far more fluent in August than I am today. At this point in my career, I need a great honking shove in the patootie to get over that next major hump in learning Japanese. This is it.
Having this opportunity means that next year, if all goes as planned, I will be able to start learning Korean. Learning these languages helps me do my job, but it also helps the nation. We’ve seen what happens when we’re suddenly thrust into an engagement with a group whose language we hardly understand twice now. FLAS is intended to protect against that by ensuring that languages which people wouldn’t necessarily study on their own get studied and that people who might study a language a little bit in high school or college and then forget half of it are able to take the extra steps to become fluent for life.
Filed under: Challenge!
… though not many.
I’ve added to the Books Worth Reading page. Enjoy.
I’ve added a page with various book recommendations. It’s divided into fiction, non-fiction and poetry right now, but I’ll probably shift it into more specific lists as I add more books. (Well, except the poetry. I’ve pretty much topped out on that list already.) This was just to get started, so feel free to suggest more in the comments. I’m not just looking for good books though, I’m looking for good books that offer something a little different. If you look at the books already listed, you’ll find that many were authored by women or the Japanese, in contrast to a lot of reading lists which mostly contain books by white men. In a similar vein, if you look at the non-fiction, you’ll see books about jobs in America, getting along with people, food safety and a little-known minority with a long history of interaction with the United States. Important topics, all, but topics it’s easy not to pay too much attention to. This list should help get you started if you decide to try the challenge.
