Oh, hello there. I was just cleaning up a little, but come on in. Welcome back to the newly resurrected Psychosis Studios MediaSlave site.

I’m going to try (again) to be a little less wordy and make this a little bloggier. In a way, I’m preemptively making excuses for a lack of consistency in future posts. Sometimes, I’d just like to have a little reminder of things I talked about or wanted to talk about after having just seen something. That way, I can more easily pick up the conversation with some of you who are slow to catch up with stuff you should see (you know who you are). Also, I think there will be times when i just want to get the word out on something, just to get you to check something out. Either way, I guess I feel like it shouldn’t take me four densely packed pages of text to explain why I think you might or might not like something.

This post fits neither description, though. In the half a year or so since the site went on “hiatus,” some stuff has happened. I started writing for the New York-Tokyo site, where I’ll mostly be covering Japanese flicks that are going to be released over here. I haven’t been edited since I did five years in Boston for my undergraduate “education” and I’d forgotten what it feels like. If the previous sentence has a tone reminiscent of discussions about prison sex, well, don’t read into it too much.

My evaluation of Hula Girls appears here at the aforementioned site. I was going to post the original, unaltered version of the piece here, but then I came to my senses and realized that I’d be lucky if anyone (other than my editor) bothered to read the whole thing once, let alone twice to compare and contrast. So, I’ll just say that my self-deprecation seems even less important than I’d imagined. Two edits that I thought were notable:

1) I was commenting that it was strange to see the appropriation of Hawaiian culture by the Japanese mining town for what appeared to be relatively fluffy entertainment when I realized that I’m a jackass American guy who spends every free moment fetishizing Japanese stuff. So it’s like if I sat around calling someone a twinkie all day. But perhaps the target readership is comprised largely of people like me, and it’s unwise to interrupt everyone’s review-reading fun with awkward self-consciousness as if they’d just downloaded Asian porn or J-Pop music videos.

2) I noticed that they seemed to Disney-fy hula dancing, making it wholesome fun for all and deliberately playing down any lasciviousness. I wrote that this apparent sanitization produced within me a measurable amount of chagrin, but this was apparently excised as unnecessary information. But I felt it was worth mention, as Aoi Yuu has a place on the better side of the scale from “not exactly as cute as Kanno Miho” to “a little cuter than your mom.” Did I just write all that as an excuse to mention Kanno Miho and denigrate your mother?

Or perhaps these edits were made because I overshot the target word count by over twenty percent. Kind of like with this post. If you have indeed returned to give this a read, please leave a comment. I crave abuse.

This entry was posted by eugene on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 3:57 am and is filed under japanese, movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.