Confessions KOKUHAKU BOOK + MOVIE

  
  
Wow! So I realized even more how amazing the movie adaptation is after reading the book.  When I watched the movie it was really good and it almost made it seem as if making a good book into a good movie is almost effortless. omg the screenwriter and the director is the same person 中島哲也

Firstly my views on book -> movie transition is that it shouldn’t be exactly the same (add in dialogue, take away boring crap, tell it in a different way, rearrange scenes/dialogue/events,… make changes because movies aren’t books (i wasn’t surprised when i was forced t see the unger games 2 ansd saw that it sucked just as much the first one if not more when i heard that it’s closer to the book. making a movie just like the book doesn’t mean shit since movies AREN’T BOOKS. and that trilogy is just hopeless since the books suck so how can a decent result). too much dialogue/narration is a problem). it takes away the point of the movie because it’ll be damn boring to watch for people who read the book and for the people who didn’t read it. the movie is so good. it’s enjoyable for people who read it (to see all the differences/add-ons/ and just seeing it movie-form) and for people who never read it. For confessions, I really appreciated the way the director/screenwriter arranged stuff and changed stuff. Like the monologue in the book are long and he did not put every frikin’ sentence of the monologue into the script and sometimes he even added stuff after cutting stuff. I loved the way he arranged stuff (I’m only saying this because i’ve had to sit through ridiculously long movies that accomplish NOTHING ie that awful 9/11 movie about killing saddam hussein). For example that last part with shuuya’s confession on the “blog” was set up in a way that he showed 2 possibilities. The thing with confessions and monologues is that they’re all subjective so the characters aren’t necessarily only saying true things… there may be lies etc in there.  I appreciated the add-in of the big scene at the cafe which is not in the book or at least not in that form…  I feel like going through the list of the japanese acamdemy awrads and check out the movies that interest me…. i hope they’re not as rigged as messed up as ours like jennifer lawrence winning best actress is just a complete slap in the face to all the other actresses who actually deserve it.  her acting is okay… nothing special but her acting was AWFUL in silver linings playbook. the script of that movie was AWFUL and i’m sure better acting would make that seem less obvious but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s shit. 豚に真珠 ! But anyways reading the book made me appreciate movie-making and book to movie adaptions more! since they can be really good if the writer puts in effort which does not happen with harry potter etc etc.

If you like the movie (like is not the right word… if the movie was interesting to you), I recommend the book. some stuff I didn’t pick up from the movie or didn’t understand were clarified with the book. it could be because i’m not a “critical” “adroit” movie watcher or maybe i would’ve noticed upon re-watching etc.. you definitely learn about what’s going on with the characters more since monologues are long and movies can only contain so much dialogue before it turns to shit. I personally like the writing style and i would read other books by the author for that reason. it’s very compatible with me and i read every syllable. for writers that i don’t really particularly like I have to either just read the dialogue or skim-read even more or just go to the last chapter or just read the summary-ending on line or just stop reading al together lol.  higashino keigo is no…. but for some reason the last 100 pages were more readable.

Confessions KOKUHAKU 2010 movie~ finally a good japanese movie!

Finally as in my first japanese movie that’s not anime that’s good. I found it enjoyable and i can definitely it recommend it to normal people (people who don’t watch asian movies etc etc ) GOOD.

So I was going through lines and i googled a line then I found the whole script online (japanese subtitles almost…) like towards the end of my process lol. It wasn’t like I had mad trouble with the lines in the movie so I wasn’t really bummed out. I only added a few things to my anki deck in the end.

http://blog.yeshj.com/zozl/articles/1667654.html

I saved it as a text and uploaded it

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/7omupi13ez549/confessions

in case the site disappears, dies,etc. I also put in the korean subs, the korean subs translated to japaense, the english ssubs that came with the movie, and txt of the lines i was writing down before i found it lol (there’s a couple really minor lines that’s in mine that’s in that. or maybe it was 1 line. just sharin’ ) .  I watched it with the ghetto-pseudo japanese subs so i can easily keep track of parts that i want to rewatch or figure out what was said that i couldn’t catch etc.

AS FAR AS the movie is concerned it’s dark, disturbing, interesting, artsy, mv-esque at times. It has good ost (radiohead <3) and cinematography. speaking of which, the hunger games will never be any of that lol. i was thinking since this movie is about revenge and has disturbing content and all that maybe some people wouldn’t want to watch it which is perfectly reasonable and fine. but then i realized that the number one movie in the US for many weeks? it made a shitload of money in short…. that that movie is about kids killing each other. I’ve seen both hg movies without my volition lol (no im’ actually crying becuase its almost 5 hrs + 20 $  i will never get back! and GODDAMN jennifer lawrence’s nose is UNNATURAL. i was looking at her face going wtf is wrong with her face ) . I would never watch those of my own accord because of the content and the fact that i can tell it’s boring as hell and poorly made, ridiculously long, and shallow and all that. as much as the movie is disturbing with the concept i don’t feel that at all when i watch the movie. i’m just bored. jeez how pathetic are hollywood movies?  But anyways since i thought of the hunger games after watching confessions after thinking about random things i just wanted to say go watch confessions instead if you’re going to watch thehunger games lol. hunger games to me is like 1/10 or 1/20… so awful.  Don’t worry I think battle royale sucks too lol… for god’s sakes fujiwara’s in it: the worst actor in japanese cinema j/k but seriously he’s AWFUL. IF YOU SEARCH 過剰演技 i’m sure he’ll pop up lol

When I think of japanee movies I think of crappy acting (overacting,bad acting,etc), crappy script, crappy cinematography, crappy pacing as in slow as hell, crappy audio (not the audio file but the actual recording and after-processing or lack there of etc), NOTHING HAPPENS (the only thing it has going on for it is the “atmosphere” fuinki which is complete BS)  or something happens but it’s so trivial you might as well say nothing happened. I haven’t seen many japanese movies but that’s just my general thoughts which I am open to changing as  I watch good quality movies.  My thoughts regarding j-dramas have changed too since i had the opportunity to see some really amazing ones which i’ve reviewed. i’ve also seen really crappy ones which happened to be praised somewhere like its popularity or the japanese people or the american bloggers etc etc which made me realize it’s probably just best to watch whatever interests me and ignore whatever it priased or hyped if the drama itself doesn’t interest me ( there is a little chance i’m missing something amazing but 99% of the time u really should listen to your guts)

For the acting the 2 main kids are both in suzuki-sensei i tihnk . i didn’t look it up but i’m pretty sure. I must say that one kid is really blessed with his roles. he has such awesome unusual roles. it’s really good experience for him.  Confessions is a lot more interesting than suzuki-sensei with better pay-off and not as slow-paced btw. i have yet to finish suzuki-sensei though.  all in all the acting was amazing. usually with jaapnesemovies or dramas i have to sorta prepare myself ( mentally? ) for the crappy acting that may ensue just because it is a japanesemovie/drama… but this one my worries were completely unnecessary. y’all know what i’m talking about right?

This is a definitely i will recommend to anyone else who wants to obviate their preconceptions of Japanese movies like me.  I have no idea why i waited so long to watch this movie . i tihnk i just have no enthusiasm towards japanese movies becaues they just disappointed me in the past lol (the movies i checked out weren’t obscure… they were popular or praised or something but they all sucked so i was like wtf? ) . one of the reasons of my disappointment is they have the kishakaiken for the omvie ( I HAVE TO CHECK IT OUT for this movie to hear the director and the actors… SO CURIOUS!! ) and everyone talks about how much they thought about x and the little things they fixated on and how this movie is really good with the themes of xyz and blahblah and want everyone to check it out. but then you watch the movie and you’re like irritated at the shitatistic script that is not salvageable by anything…. and you wonder did i watch the correct kishakaiken or did i watch another kishakaiken with the same cast but different movie. the script is so so bad. so in that way sometimes the kishakaiken sorta makes me feel the potential of the movie and the movie just makes me go wtf is wrong with japanese movies and that the kishakaiken is more interesting and stimulating than the movie in the content and the quality/minute ratio.

Imma read fthe book toooooooooooooooooooo. I got the book but then i was like i want to watch the movie first. i like finding out about interesting information like twists or whatever through video than reading… that’s just my preference. I’m glad i did that because  i was surprised many times when i watched the movie. I suggest watching this movie without reading summaries, trailers etc. I saw the trailer a long time ago and forgot/misunderstood stuff lol so i wasn’t “bored” from knowing too much…  and i thought hey what was the significance of the last line in th emovie so i googled in japaense and i will side with the pessimistic group… it’s the most logical ending you know.

at this point I’m thinking of watching mtasuko no isshou since it’s the same director, i lvoe the actress and i distinctly remember her saying ～言ってみたり about kiraware matsuko no isshou  on shabekuri which was hilarious. it’s a definitely a shabekuri ep i recommend~

copy + paste

有田さんは嫌われ松子が大好きで特典映像なども観てその中で「この役をやるために女優になったのかもしれない」と言っていたのを観て感動したが、中谷さん自身はそういうことを言ってみたかもしれないと有田さんの思いを一蹴

だがこの役は苦しんで苦しんで悩んで悩んで作り上げた中島哲也監督作品で、出演者の魅力を存分に引き出してくれるが非常に厳しくて、監督とも言い合 いになって「中島監督と付き合っていると胃が痛くなります」と言ったこともあったが、それぐらい自分を追い詰めていい映画を作り上げる素晴らしい監督だと 評していました。

===

oh and I also did the opposite pattern  of reading the book vs  drama becuase the drama looks mad tedious to watch especially while i was reading the book. himitsu by higashino keigo.  I didn’ tknow there was a drama when i bought the book. then i got to the main story and then i remembred shida mirai was in a creepy jdrama and i realized that this was the gensaku. so i’ve avoided higashino keigo all this time. i think there’s been many movies and dramas based on his works all these years. the reasons for avoiding include the fact that he has many crime books (there’s a bunch of authors in the $1 section of book-off that have a bunch of books about crimes especially murders and i just thought he was one of them but then i heard his name on japanese tv a few times since he is famous) and… i just tried other authors. so one day i was like let’s try him just to ge tit over with to see if i’m missing out or if my gut prediction is correct that it’s not for me. so i chose a book that won an award which was this.  so first of all his writing does nothing for me…. reaidng around people say it’s “easy” to read or something but to me it’s not easy to read because i do not have compatibility with his writing. sometimes for me 読みやすい is 読みにくい　or 読み進めない not because my japanese sucks but becaseu the writing style doesn’t do shit for me. i agree techinically it’s easy to read and i barely looked up anything ( as in take pictures with my iphone) but the actual action of reading is borderline torturous? lol… it’s just not enjoyable as with other authors who make me realize how how much fun reading can be… how much fun reading japanese can be for japanese authors.  of course i’ve come across worse writing styles than him that are considered yomiyasui but are painful for me to read. so reading to the page when i find out the plot was tedioussssssss. this writing style is just not for me… 万人受け。。。doesn’t me it’s for me.for example shit like hunger games is mad popular… just means there’s lots of idiots in the world… doesn’t mean i’m one of them.  of course higashino is better than hunger games but just to give an example.  so anyways i started my tobashi yomi , naname-yomi which is what i do with books in english with writing styles that just dont’ do anything for me which is only read the dialogue. the only problem is sometimes i don’t know what’s going on so if i care enough etc i read the other text too. but for certain scenes, before i even read it i know it’s going to be tedious and who gives a shit (だから何？感　IN Japanese) ie when the characters interact with family members or go to the jikka.. lol. so that works really well for that or maybe i should skip that whole part. BUT SURPRISINGLy the last 100 pages were more interesting  and i did less tobashi yomi because i catually cared and for some reason the byousha didn’t feel as tedious and soulless and tiredsome as in most of the first 300 pages. the ending was sad…. not sure how i feel about it. so i wanted to watch parts of the drama for the sceness that interest me ESPECIALLY the ending.

I wrote what i wrote here for the most part on dokusho meter and surprisingly people niced it… and i read the kansou by the people who niced me and they were the ones who liked the book or cried after reading it.. which i find strange. this has happened in the past too where i basically talk shit about the book bc i did’nt like it for whatever reason but people still nice it lol. i was sorta scared people may “attack” “flame” me or something but japanese people aren’t like that i guess~ NAISU!

http://book.akahoshitakuya.com/b/4167110067

Getting the most out of anime?

interestin’ i get so irritated at those people that say oh but i just use the subs to confirm or i’m listening still even though the timing of the subs match the audio exactly or apperas 0.5 sec before the dialogue starts.

A Japanese Odyssey

So lately I’ve been watching some soft-subbed DBZ. And episode 43 had a bit of a 300frame delay. Before jumping to fix the subs, I decided to see what happens. Basically the sub would appear roughly 10-12 seconds after the audio…

And whhaddya know, my attention span followed my cry. Actually got myself to listen(and understand) to what they were saying, with the subs as confirmation/correction, instead of just automatically reading the subs. Guess that’s one way to do it.

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Resentment

Looking back on “義務教育” schooling that i had to attend (there’s mad high school dropouts so it’s not gimu kyouiku in america or it’s not enforced?? lol) . i really don’t agree with some of the methods of learning… ie busy work like copying crap or copying crap multiple times or just writing mindless stuff in general. In short I resented it then and I resent it more now because of the success and trials I’ve had with Japanese and even Korean to some extent (I totally consider Korean a behemoth lol. That’s my subjective opinion that I will probably never drop or at least not for a while).  I’ll give examples and I hope that you can’t relate to whta I’ve experienced because it’s so INEFFECTIVE and time-sinking but… there’s probably a high probability you did unless you were home-schooled?

Ex: English Class – only thing i can recall that is germane is vocabulary tests. Everyone has their own methods. I do the remember and forget as fast as possible method lol which requires no writing… which i consider “busy work”. I just use my brain and remember it before the test and forget it afterwards (I alreayd did the initial work of looking up the words and writing down the definitions as part of the previous homework so… ). So the teacher had this policy that if you used flashcards to learn vocabulary and you brought the voabulary cards in you get an extra 5 points or something on your quiz. I was thinking I’d rather not do busy work even if it’s 5 extra points… I’l just get the 97 or 100 or wahtever on the actualquiz and move the hell on. The cost/benefits were just really obvious to me. I tihnk most of my peers including my friends made the flashcards and blahblahblah because i guess they didn’t mind whatever whatever. Something in me was like this shit makes no sense. I understand she’s just trying to encourage people to study and learn snce american kids are so “dumb” and unmotivated and irresponsible and “not scared/intimated” of the teachers lol.   I’m not pissed about the 5 points x number of vocab tests at all… it’s so beneath me with the busy work. I just find it so dumb. Maybe some poeple do find flashcards so helpful but I honestly can’t imagine why it is… I already have a piece of looseleaf paper with the word and definitions…. why copy it again…dude.

Spanish/ French – there was a lot of copy all the dialogue for homework or copy the vocab x number of times.. there was also make flashcards of all these verbs and nouns or wahtever. Obviously that’s really pointlesssssssssss lol. Even now I would never ever ever ever make a “notebok” for japanese or korean  where i copy dialogue or vocab or grammar or anything like that… it’s not gonna help me remember at least not as much as encountering it in different contexts (immersion/comprehensive input/exposure etc etc) with AUDIO (the time/cost/benefit equation just….. is spinning in my head). HELLO A LANGUAGE IS FRIKIN’ ALIVE and spoken by lotsa people around the world. it can only thrive so much on a piece paper especially when i have close 0 hours of listneing hours (im’ referring to spanish/french of course)

I’m glad that I never atetended japnaese class and never had to waste time doing crap like that that obviously is not conducive to learning… at least not nearly as efficient as anything else.  I love having free reign on my japanes studying/well nowadays it really isn’t studying considering what i do and how much i understand etc.  I hope to god nobody was “brainwashed” from school that x is an effective way of learning when it really is not. You should be suspicious and doubt it…  I encourage people to try different study methods whether it’s language or some subject in school etc etc and not just blindly follow/believe whatever they’ve made you do for 12 yers or however many dpeending on how many times you got held back lol… super seniors…. just no.

For my japanese studies, from the beginning I resisted writing stuff down superfluously. I did have a brief period where I did that for kanji a little bit && that was only because I didn’t know about RTK. And even if you write the kanji 2 billion times, you can still not be able to write it the next day lol (I know this from experience and it wasn’t 2 billion times btw lol)…. learning about the radicals or the story as to how the kanji or the radical came about or stroke order or just heisig is so much BETTER than writing/copying shit over and over… i know they do that in korea and it’s so dumb.

I think this is part of that argument about school killing creativity or killing thinking in children . it makes sense. if you write it over and over and can’t remember it  … it’s because you’re not thinking because after th3 rd copy it becomes it mindless. it’s all about strategy… study methods.

for a more specific example… i resisted the mind-numbing write write write for learning hiragana and katakna. I remember looking at it on the computer on tae kim’s guide or something and just trying to memorize it hardcore right then and there. It’s okay if I forget some but my intention to memorize most if not all of those suckers. then I took a board and marker and just tried to remember and write whatever i could after the computer was turned off (or maybe i just truned the screen off, I don’t remember). I remember I noticed most of them except a couple.  I was more focused on the stroke order than being able to “write” it. I knew that even if I was able to write everything without looking at anything  at that moment it wouldn’t continue to the next day or even the next week… that I will most likely forget or BLANK OUT (I’ve only started exposing myself to japanese no duhs). I undersatnd that, I accept that, and I will work with that. Iknew from reading/exposing myself to japanese I would remember how to write it effortlessly and whatnot. What I can’t get from just exposure is stroke order. Like I remember looking at あ and learning the stroke order and go ohhh that makes sense. if you don’t know it’s intidimiating and maybe if I guessed I migght’ve figured it out after a while or whatever but it’s a waste of time to “guess” when it’s available”.  My hypothesis was absolutely right.. I don’t blank out or anything because I read a SHIT LOAD of japanese and  I did not write/copy over and over and over…. I think that time could be put to better use and i really look down on people who do the write itdown over and over especially “alphabet” (yeah hiragnaa/kataknaa is not alaphbet but more like phonetic characters?) because they’re not even words. you’re just writing gibberish… wtf.  Those people piss me off… they remind me of attention whores to some degree. it’s sorta they’re trying to appeal to his/herself or other people ” i’m working so hard towards x look at all the shit i wrote and the time it took for me to write it.” All i’m thinking in my head is you’re a fucking idiot. hence i have strong resentment of the crap I was forced to do in middle/high school /leemntary school. of course there’s no point getting mad at the time or even now because I can’t get my time/effort back but from now on I can choose wahtever study method I want.  It’s good that I learned from the past that those methods don’t work. what pisses me off is it doesn’t take me that many repetitions or experiences to figure out that it’s pointless and useless yet i’m forced to do it because i’m school.  I was a pretty seemingly calm, obedient student so I followed the rules of the assignment as I completed them and whatnot and  didn’t really dissect the pointlessness of what I was doing… but I think the me at that time felt the pointlessness to some extent and I just didn’t bother to really FACE it. Even if I did and blbahblah it  doesn’t change the fact that i have to do this shit

Speaking of “appealing””insinuating” etc etc.  I wanted to write about the role of japanese to my identity. I think some people use that to “feel special” “feel worth” and whatnot but honestly I don’t add it my specialness nor my worth. the bottom line is there are so many people who speak/understand/write better english/japanese than me ie other japanese learners or halves or japanese-americans or translators. Not to mention they probably have other talents and/or succeed at other things and/or have good jobs or make money off of their language abilities etc etc. I learn japanese for myself. I use it for myself. there’s no point feeling special/more worthy over it…. you’ll eventually find out that you’re a loser since you’ve been near-sighted to have the audacity to think that japanse makes you special.  it’s a poor man’s excuse to feel worth/special imo lol.  you know that for some REASON there’s a trend that anime fans are “losers” especially the american ones? it’s sorta like that? Me being proficient in japanese doesn’t change the fact that by society stands I’m failing lol. well I’ll see if I reallly am.