Nothing Yet

I’m having the worst drought of ideas I’ve ever had since I started this blog. Instead of tormenting my readers with another ill-conceived litany about how I wish everything is better, I’m just gonna say that I’ll be back next week.

The Worst-Placed Advertisement I’ve Ever Seen!

(Nope, I’m not gonna do a worded post today).

Macross Frontier

It has been two weeks since I finished all episodes of Macross Frontier (MF), yet it was not until today when I actively sought the time to write about it. To be honest, I would rather not have chosen it to be the first anime commented on in my blog, but it is the only one I’ve finished so far this year (out of the 9 I planned to watch). Furthermore, if there’s anything I am dying to write about right now, it is the stuff that would make me feel more positive. Anyone who’s been reading my posts since the previous two months will notice that I have recently been critical of too many things, and I desperately need a change of tone, because I hate being the poster-boy for premature crankiness. Unfortunately, my crankiness goes on today, because I’m having a very uneventful year, and I don’t have anything else to update my blog with besides my thoughts on MF, which will no doubt be full of rants.

I’m quite aware that Macross has a huge fan base, and that they’ve been gushing about MF as being a great tribute of the series’ 25-year run. I haven’t seen the earlier Macross, though, so all the tributes are lost to me. And if any of the huge fan base should start calling me names for not liking MF, please note that I take no pleasure in disparaging it. I was hoping that I’d like MF enough that it would get me interested to seek out the older Macross. Sadly, that did not work out too well, because after viewing it, I not only disliked it, I also started doubting I’d like the older titles too.

The one thing that I did like was the production. The show was unmistakably high-budgeted, and looked great most of the time. There were occasions when the characters looked inconsistent, but they‘re not too noticeable or distracting. The Variable Fighters (i.e. fighter planes that transformed to robots; essentially the hallmark of Macross series) looked great and it’s a joy to see them in action. They almost made me want to buy their miniature toys — my overall sentiments with MF were my only causes of hesitation.

Starting of with its list of duds (which is long) is the characters. It’s one of the show’s biggest failings to have myriads characters but develop only a very select few, and those few weren’t likable beyond their fan service appeals (because they were designed to be good-looking). I’ll say this with some caution: MF is a love-triangle story of a guy and two girls. Respectively, Alto Saotome is a pilot-in-training, Ranka Lee is a waitress aspiring to be a songstress, and Sheryl Nome is the most popular songstress of the galaxy (yep, like many sci-fis, the Macross stories spans multiple planets). Their lives intertwined in a soap-operatic way, which annoyed me to no end, because Alto was unbearable to the point that I often wondered what it was the two girls saw of him. Put simply, I just don’t understand what the deal is with all these Asian shows making the ungrateful, ungentlemanly self-absorbed pretty boys the protagonist, like they’re requiring us to sympathize with people who couldn’t even bother to respond to other’s kindness. Alto, somehow, managed suck more than the jerks I see in other shows (anime or not) by being extremely boring whenever he’s not yelling at either of the girls (and he did that a lot). It’s like he only knew of 1 way to respond to flirtations, and that’s with an outbursts of “Shut up, I….” which would then be interrupted by plot contrivances like explosions or the appearances of side characters. I also didn’t even get why he antagonized his family so much. Compounding to my aversion of obnoxious anime pretty boys is the side character Michel, who thinks he’s God’s gift to women, and always spouts things that make me want to punch him in the face.

If the protagonists were bad, the antagonists weren’t any better. Their motivations were flimsy at best; they never rise above tripes like “ruling of galaxy” for the “evolution of mankind”, which has gotten old since Evangelion. They could’ve been portrayed as people deserving sympathy despite being at odds with the good side, but MF is content to merely cast shadows on them while they glare, pump their glasses, and laugh like a maniac, because there’s nothing that says “evil” more than following those archetypes.

And then there’s the plot, which I think is the most haphazard I’ve seen in any shows. A while ago, I said I was “cautiously” claiming MF to be a love story. That’s because classifying MF as romance is to cover how it raised other themes but couldn’t decide what story it wanted to be. Sometimes it would be about war and geopolitics, but their severity always get downplayed by ridiculous scene transitions. My favorite example occured in the 19th episode: we see a sniper aiming his rifle at the president. Before scenes of JFK assassinations could even resonate, the show shifted focus to Ranka running to confess her love to Alto, only to catch him hugging Sheryl. I didn’t even know how the writers want me to take this scene; sure, Ranka had her personal dilemmas, but were they supposed to matter? There’s a presidential assassination going on here, folks! Things like that happen in the story all the time it was reading tabloids that footnoted reports of war, but headlined celebrity scandals.

I was told that the Macross titles could essentially be summarized this way: there’s a colony, and in the colony there were pilots who flew variable fighters as defender from invading forces, and songstresses who performed to keep everyone’s hopes alive. And the latter is where I found MF to be the most insufferable, because it’s taken too far. The songstresses here had singing voices that could do amazing Deus Ex Machina things, such as stopping aliens dead on their tracks, transporting an entire colony to another galaxy, healing the diseased, saving the world, etc. It’s corny beyond imagining! I also hate to slight the composer Yoko Kanno, but the songs used here were quite ill-fitting. In the fight scenes, I was supposed to feel the horrors of war, and yet how could I, when someone was singing bubblegum pop songs in the background? Plus, there were scenes when it made sense that the songs would only be in vocals, but the background instruments would come anyway, because MF never wanted its viewers to forget that the songs were all recorded in a studio and heavily computerized. As a result, the songs here felt like overproduced fluff that dragged on for too long.

Which, really, sums up my overall feeling of the show. Beyond the production values, I couldn’t see it as anything else but a glorified 25-episoded MTV with the most superficial guises of having a story.

Monsters vs. Aliens short review

(…with no plot summary, because I’m burnt out.)

There was a scene halfway through Monsters vs. Aliens when the monster protagonist was battling the alien antagonist, and the monster was clearly advantaged. It’s this moment when I was at the edge of the seat, hoping that the “bad” would be at the mercy of the “good” and that the movie would work its story from there. Alas, that didn’t happen. Just one minute after that, the alien would incapacitate the monster with a conveniently placed weapon, and the remaining time of the movie would be devoted to rescue missions. Had it chosen a different outcome, the movie would’ve been unpredictable, and maybe less forgettable.

The word forgettable just about sums up most of DreamWorks Animation (DWA) recent works. It’s like they’ve been riding in the success of Shrek for far too long that they have yet to stray from its formula. Their common threads include misfits becoming unlikely heroes, and, more irritably, having myriad pop references. Shark Tale is like that. Madagascar is like that. When Kung Fu Panda came along I thought DWA had finally ditched the pop culture name-dropping like it was an embarrassing phase in college. But Monsters vs. Aliens evidently showed that they haven’t grown up.

I forgot to mention that every DWA movie has a novelty song young viewers can torment their parents with. She’s livin’ la vida loca! Everybody gets kung fu fighting! I like to move it move it, I like to move it move it, I like to move it move it… repeated until barf. Monsters vs. Aliens also has one, I just don’t happen to remember what it is, which means I’ll be sane for the next few days. And no, I don’t have kids yet.

To its credit, the main characters from Monsters vs. Aliens were a marked improvement over those from DWA’s past offerings. I never warmed up to Shark Tale’s and I hated those sassy animals from Madagascar. At least Monsters vs. Aliens had a sympathetic group helping each other overcome their self-doubts. That is quite unlike DWA’s other movies where everyone was just smart-assing their way throughout. It’s just too bad that they’re stuck in movie with a very generic story.

Reaction Paper Blues

A college freshmen friend of mine was upset by the way I reacted when I saw him writing a reaction paper. When I walked into his room, he was in front of a monitor showing an almost-blank Word document file, and it was apparent from his body language that he was in mental agony. Both his hands pressed against his temples with such forcefulness you’d think that he was trying to poke his brains out.

I let on to him that I was aware of what he’s doing, and that’s composing a reaction paper. He whiffed, as if relieved that, at last, there’s someone in his room who understood his troubles and who would smile and nod and say comforting phrases like I understand what you’re feeling or I’ve been through the same predicaments before if he vented his frustrations. And then he vented for a while, after which he told me how he intended to be honest, by writing down how he didn’t care much about the seminar the paper meant to recount. That put me into a derisive laughter.

Reaction papers are undesirable to me because I get this vibes that they’re professors’ darling way to blackmail students into part­icipating in activities. I initially meant to say that they’re carrot-and-sticks, except I can’t ever recall a time when they offered any carrots or any real benefits besides coercing students into caring about the things that brought them, and that does not sound like a benefit either. It’s probably an easy feat to compose them when they deal with experiences that provoke emotional responses (like movies or novels), but it’s just excruciating when they’re about experiences (like factory visits or technical forums) that are tantamount to watching a paint dry. If I may add, watching a paint not your own dry. And if those are not bad enough, you can’t be truthful and say that you were bored because your professors would think that you were not paying attention, which is reason enough for them to deduct your grades. As a result, you’re forced to tire yourself out in being insincere, racking your brains for flatteries that would pad your paper. It’s a catch-22.

Now before you start saying, “But they’re no big deal! We write reaction papers from activities anyone from our courses love anyway” I’d just like to point out that I was an engineering student, as is my freshmen friend. We don’t major in literature, political science, philosophy, or even in business. We don’t watch documentaries about Marcel Proust. We don’t get pep talks that inspire us to Nietzschean-quote our way out of debates. The stuff we study are not communication-driven. They’re so technical, so cut-and-dry, that I’d like to think that we’re more motivated to get the hands-on with them than to listen to people talk about them. You don’t go to coffee shops and hear someone converse about bandwidths, torques, gears, and capacitors, do you? Well, what’s bad for us is that when we get too caught up in our field, we become jargonistic speakers, and we don’t realize how boring they are until we hear them ourselves, which is what happen in our factory visits and tech forums.

One of my professors had a face that would look exactly like the mascot of Pringles had he twirled his mustache. He was doomed from the moment he stepped into our class to incite a running gag about what flavored Pringles he is, depending on what colored shirt he’s wearing. When in green, we call him Sour Cream & Onion. When in red, he’s Original. When in orange, he’s the Cheeze ’Ums. This flippancy never seemed to bother him, but I wonder if the difficult exams he gave us were his ways to get back at us. Everytime we get our test results, there would be mock-cries followed by pleadings to ease up the next exam, and he would respond with only a grin.

He has always been an enigmatic figure to me, but I will never forget an assignment he once gave my class. Accordingly, we had to go to a hotel and attend its symposium for Asian award-winning thesis. And of course, we had to write reaction papers too. I was in my fourth year then and, despite still having months to go, was dying to graduate. Though exhausted to the point where I just didn’t care about thesis presentations or breakthroughs anymore, I admit that in my anticipation of this hotel-stint, I was excited to the level of teenagers at their most hormonal. I imagined banquets, grand ballrooms, and string quartets, and I fancied sipping martinis while having sophisticated discussions with elegantly dressed beauties.

It was when I was nearing the hotel that my spirits began to dampen. Located near the city’s edge, it had no scenic places nearby, and what killed me is that it failed miserably in such an obvious task of standing out amidst the unremarkable. Just looking from outside, I could already predict that it’s anything but grand. Forget about the banquet then, I thought, but there might still be cute Koreans or Singaporeans inside.

Minutes later, I was in a conference hall, listening to a guy talk about an image-processor that’d turn a 2d portrait into a 3d face.  He stood on a podium facing us, and we were seated on rows of monobloc chairs. Something was wrong with that scene. We were in a hotel and the best seat we had were monobloc chairs! The speech wasn’t bad but the speaker compounded my fear that this would be a very long day, as he seemed like the only person with an active social life.

I scanned around the room and noted that just like outside, nothing in the building struck: not even the female receptionists, as they looked bored in their job and wore expressions that said, “Please don’t remember my face”. Well, at least I forgot what they looked like in spite of their slacking: they didn’t bother to give us snacks—not even the cheap appetizers like cheese on toothpicks or roasted peanuts. Their only services were preparing stomach-turning coffees that, at least, awakened us, if only so we could dash to a toilet. I wonder if anyone wrote that on their paper (“As I sat crapping, I pondered if the image processor could turn 2d pictures of my waste to 3d”).

Apparently, the cute Koreans or Singaporeans stayed home, and the ones who came here looked like adolescents who played Starcraft until 3 in the morning, depriving them of hygiene and communication skills. Staring at them in horror was my only way to tell them, “For the love of all that is Holy, please don’t talk.” That’s when one of them stood on a podium and spoke about his research. It was about a soccer-playing robot called “Mirosot” or something that sounded like a counterfeit of Microsoft with few letters knocked off its name to avoid infringing copyright. I don’t know if it was his broken English, but I couldn’t comprehend what he was babbling about, and my classmates fared no better because they nodded off five minutes into it. And that speech went on for two hours. Some time in the middle, my professor turned to me and asked, “How do you find the conference?”

I said, “I like it. It’s very, uh, uplifting. I can envision a future when we’ll be seeing World Cups played by robots, and that excites me to no end!”

Snickering, my professor said, “Uplifting?”

The conference was concluding when I felt a finger poke on my shoulder. Behind me was a guy I used to have lunch with two years ago before our place got taken down, and we didn’t see each other ever since. “Dee!” I exclaimed, “It’s been so long! How are you doing?”

“I’m, uh… hey listen,” he said, “could you do me a favor, and e-mail to me your reaction paper this weekend? I gotta go somewhere. Bye!”

I submitted my reaction paper in my next meeting with Dr. Pringles. In there wasn’t any of the angers and frustrations I had from our assignment. Instead, it was filled with voluminous praises that I must have quoted from gush handbooks. My favorite line was, “They’re so revolutionary they make my head revolve!” Did Dee copy that too?

In all the writings, the lone insight I got was that reaction papers may not be insidious after all. They’re more of the first lessons you actually apply on work, that when you’re in company functions, you should silence your discontentment but voice out approvals until you look like an acquiescent sheep.

Whenever I start doubting the axiom of honesty being the best policy, I get mental pictures of Dr. Pringles grinning.