Metropolis
Metropolis is an anime flick currently playing at Dendy Martin Place. I am not a huge follower of anime, but I’ve seen enough of it to be familiar with the Japanese style. To Western eyes, it’s strange. A mishmash of styles, both Western and Eastern reverberate throughout the film, from architecture to music. The portrayal of the futuristic city of Metropolis is offset by the Art Deco buildings crouched under the towering techno Ziggurat. Ziggurat is, of course, the ancient Akkadian term for for a tower, of which the Tower of Babylon was one. Probably the strangest moment in the movie, but something so disctinctly Japanese was during the apocalyptical climax – a gigantic explosion is replaced, cut out instead by Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You”. There’s actually a lot of jazz in that movie, intermixed with more traditional sounding anime music. Was an enjoyable movie, but it’s a surreal world those tormented Japanese minds (could they be anything else?) concoct. Tormented, and a lot of issues with self-identity. Perhaps this reflects on national identity as well. When developing countries develop, they tend to Westernised. However, arguably Japan is more modernised in the technological sense than any other country in the world, yet its culture has still stood strong (from my armchair amateur’s point of view). You get Japanese youth walking around with crazy hairstyles and girls trying to look white, but these same people bow and appear subservient in the Japanese way. I dunno, this is all speculation on my part, could be totally off the track. But yeah, the movie was a good change from the blockbusters.
1:31am (GMT +10.00) tomorrow 
