Big Nose Knows Best
Jan. 21st, 2009 07:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusAbout a year ago I made a slideshow of Japanese book covers which happened to show the book jacket you see below, the one with the elephant on it. "Here's an elephant," I explained, helpfully, on the commentary track. What I didn't know at the time was that this was Keiya Mizuno's million-selling novel Dreams Come True, the tale of 25 year-old Hoshino Asuka, an OL whose life is going horribly wrong. Asuka gets sent (presumably from Magic Realism Central Casting) a weird fairy godfather in the shape of Ganesha, the elephant god from the Hindu pantheon. Ganesha -- who rather incongruously has an Osaka accent -- lives in a cupboard in Asuka's nice-but-shabby shitamachi flat. They spend most of the time slandering each other, but Ganesha tutors her towards her ultimate goal: getting married.
In the first part of the TV adaptation, Ganesha has Asuka cut her over-long sparkly fingernails, learn to cook, and try using her left hand instead of her right. These are all supposed to make her a better, happier person, and, in turn, help her attract a husband. I've been watching Dreams Come True and Big Nose Knows Best -- another title in the Ganesha saga -- via Free Movie Navi, a site which hosts pirated flash-media TV dramas from Japan, harvested from YouTube, Veoh, Pandora, Youku and Tudou. The stuff I usually watch is on Pandora, a Korean company that ransacks the domestic output of Japanese TV and slaps Korean subtitles under it. It's a bit hard to navigate around on the Free Movie Navi website if you don't read Japanese, so I end up choosing stuff at random. Most of it is pretty formulaic, but I enjoy the little glimpses of Japan the programmes afford, and the chance to pick up some new vocabulary. The Ganesha shows link from this page (look for the tiny blue episode numbers in the square brackets).
So far on Free Movie Navi I've seen a terrible "bionic schoolgirl" drama called The Masked GIrl (lots of panty-glimpses as she battles the ninja-like henchmen of The Joker), a drama in which a cancer doctor discovers he has cancer, a budding-sexuality-at-school drama, and something about a prissy little girl who buys two cut-crystal glasses in a department store and gets them smashed by a rowdy little boy. And we mustn't forget the weepie about the deaf girl who goes on holiday by the sea.
These dramas are pretty cookie-cutter, but they're non-toxic -- full of good-heartedness and tinkling pianos. Oh, and pretty schoolgirls tied down helplessly on operating tables.
In the first part of the TV adaptation, Ganesha has Asuka cut her over-long sparkly fingernails, learn to cook, and try using her left hand instead of her right. These are all supposed to make her a better, happier person, and, in turn, help her attract a husband. I've been watching Dreams Come True and Big Nose Knows Best -- another title in the Ganesha saga -- via Free Movie Navi, a site which hosts pirated flash-media TV dramas from Japan, harvested from YouTube, Veoh, Pandora, Youku and Tudou. The stuff I usually watch is on Pandora, a Korean company that ransacks the domestic output of Japanese TV and slaps Korean subtitles under it. It's a bit hard to navigate around on the Free Movie Navi website if you don't read Japanese, so I end up choosing stuff at random. Most of it is pretty formulaic, but I enjoy the little glimpses of Japan the programmes afford, and the chance to pick up some new vocabulary. The Ganesha shows link from this page (look for the tiny blue episode numbers in the square brackets).
So far on Free Movie Navi I've seen a terrible "bionic schoolgirl" drama called The Masked GIrl (lots of panty-glimpses as she battles the ninja-like henchmen of The Joker), a drama in which a cancer doctor discovers he has cancer, a budding-sexuality-at-school drama, and something about a prissy little girl who buys two cut-crystal glasses in a department store and gets them smashed by a rowdy little boy. And we mustn't forget the weepie about the deaf girl who goes on holiday by the sea.
These dramas are pretty cookie-cutter, but they're non-toxic -- full of good-heartedness and tinkling pianos. Oh, and pretty schoolgirls tied down helplessly on operating tables.
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Re: Thanks
Date: 2009-01-21 01:00 pm (UTC)By the way, isn't it interesting that movies are now in exactly the position music was in ten years ago -- something we suddenly grab for free, and stop expecting to have to pay for? It can only be a matter of time before the film industry collapses the same way the record industry has. And yet the UK had a a record year for box office (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5hspH6tCExdltuOD95m3dMqZTyNmQ) in 2008.
Re: Thanks
Date: 2009-01-21 02:16 pm (UTC)You can download an entire album in less than 10 minutes, all at very high quality, and you can play those MP3s on virtually any piece of equipment -- there's no need to buy it. When people download movies they're usually bad quality or in flash format and restricted to being played on your laptop or computer. Even if you could download movies at DVD quality it would take ages to download, and burning them to DVD to play in a DVD player is a pain because it takes hours. Also, going to the cinema is the equivalent to going to see live music -- something you can't replicate at home.
My relationship with the internet's "grab it for free" culture is not as straight forward as "if I can download it for free, I'll download it and that's it". At the back of my mind, I'm always thinking "would I buy this at the price it's available for if I didn't have this download?" and if the answer is yes I'll buy it to support the artist. 90% of the stuff I download I wouldn't actually buy though... it's kinda like TV or radio -- just because we'd watch something on TV or listen to it on radio doesn't mean we'd buy it, so I don't buy into this whole "if you download it you're stealing" bullshit. I believe that if you would have bought it and you still don't buy it, then you're harming people's careers and hurting artists. And if anything, the internet has encourage me to buy more purely because it's allowed me to sample so much.