Awa Odori Festival in Tokushima

I visited Tokushima recently to check out the Awa Odori Festival.    It's one of the two most famous festivals on the island of Shikoku.  It takes place every year in August during Obon.  The festival is a typical Japanese summer festival.  The streets are absolutely flooded with people, many of them wearing yukata or kimono.  This is one of the more famous festivals in Japan, so it was particularly crowded.  Luckily, while it was hot, it wasn't unbearably hot, so I was able to enjoy things a little more.  There were also, of course, tons of food stalls with lots of delicious wares.  This festival is notable for the Awa Odori itself, meaning Awa dance.  There are groups of dancers all over the streets of Tokushima.  They wear Obon costumes and dance in groups along with lutes and drums.  The dance itself is pretty interesting.  It's like a serpentine kind of movement.  Sometimes it seems like something out of a Drunken Master movie.  The dance is basically the same, but each group was somewhat unique.  And there were many, many groups.  They came from all over Japan.  Anyway, here are some pictures and video.

 

Yakisoba!

Franks!

Movie Review - Amazing Spider-Man

  The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

Director: Marc Webb

Starring: Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans

I don't blame Marc Webb for this. And I don't blame Andrew Garfield either.  I think they probably did the best with what they were given.  They were probably very excited to make a Spider-Man movie.  But this was a bad idea from the start for a variety of reasons.  I'm not a hardcore comic book fan by any means, but even I know that there are tons of comic book titles out there that have yet to be adapted into movies, and would not doubt have been much more interesting than Amazing Spider-Man.  Unfortunately however, there are few comic book franchises as prominent and recognizable as Spider-Man.  With that said, we have to recognize and accept Amazing Spider-Man for what it is: a blatant (and very successful) money grab by Marvel Entertainment. 

If anyone reading this is able-minded enough to think back to the far-away world of the 00s, they may remember that there were 3 highly successful Spider-Man movies directed by Sam Raimi and starring Tobey Maguire released between 2002 and 2007.  The 3 movies received varying degrees of acclaim.  It's my opinion that the first movie in that series was good, the second was better than the first but not great, and the third was terrible.  But whatever you think about the quality of the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, there is no denying their lasting pop culture significance.  Spider-Man  was released at the onset of the comic book movie wave along with X-Men.  It gave us some truly iconic moments (remember all those upside down kiss scene parodies?).

And more importantly from the perspective of a movie executive, the movies made a boatload of money.  Well over $2 billion worldwide.  And that's not mentioning the innumerable marketing tie-ins.  So when Sam Raimi walked away from the Spider-Man franchise after Spider-Man 3, the Spider-Man property would not be allowed to lay dormant for long.  This is despite the fact that we are, in 2012, only 5 years removed from the final entry in the Raimi series.  A series which will probably always be the most iconic cinematic depiction of Spider-Man.  Even now, after The Anazing Spider-Man, when people think of Spider-Man, they think of Tobey Maguire.  I don't think that's because Tobey Maguire did an incredible job in the role, although he was fine.  It's because we just spent nearly 10 years of our lives having Maguire Spider-Man movies shoved down our collective throats.  And judging by the box office numbers, nearly everyone with a functioning pair of eyeballs went to see those movies.

I've taken a while to get to it, but my point is this:  The Raimi movies were far from perfect, but taken as a whole, the trilogy was quality-wise very solid.  And everyone saw them.  Just 5 years ago.  For those reasons, a new entry in the same series would have been acceptable.  A reboot, on the other hand, would only be acceptable under one circumstance: if the new series was dramatically different from the Raimi one.  With that said, if the goal with Amazing Spider-Man was to make a lot of money, then Marvel Entertainment has succeeded.  However, if the goal was to create a new franchise that would make us forget the Raimi movies or even not question why a reboot was necessary in the first place, then they have failed miserably.

I would like to clarify now that this movie is not terrible.  It's just really, really mediocre.  Throughout the movie, I frequently found myself just questioning the necessity of it all.  The movie wants to be a reboot, but visually it looks just like the Raimi movies.  The web-slinging scenes are the same.  The protagonist is yet again a white, brown-haired baby-faced young man.  And I don't want to criticize Andrew Garfield.  He simply failed to distinguish himself in this role in any meaningful way.  There was a grassroots campaign to cast Donald Glover from Community as Spider-Man in Amazing Spider-Man, and I wondered why the producers didn't give it a try.  At least then something would have been different about these movies.  One faint bit of praise I will offer is that the fight scenes are pretty distinguishable from the Raimi movies, and are probably actually better-choreographed.  In particular, Spider-Man's fight with the Lizard at the school was entertaining.  The scene made good use of Spidey's powers and of the space they were fighting in as well.

There are some other differences between Marc Webb's Spidey origin story and Raimi's version.  But they are mostly superficial.  The web shooters are man-made this time around.  Uncle Ben actually sticks around for a few scenes before kicking the bucket (a decision which only lessened the emotional impact of his inevitable(and thus predictable) death, because he came off as kind of a dick in the few scenes he did have).  In the end, I get the feeling Marvel Entertainment was afraid to change too much for this new movie out of fear of losing some of the massive market built up from the Raimi ones.  Which is a really unfortunate decision.  Because this movie could have been much more provocative and interesting than it is.  I'm a big fan of Marc Webb's work on (500) Days of Summer, so I know he's capable of much more than this lazy effort.  Ultimately, the best decision may have been to lay off this franchise for a few years and come back down the line with a stronger effort.  Of course, that would have meant risking lesser box office returns, something Hollywood is not exactly famous for doing.

Verdict: 6/10