Movie Review: The Sky Crawlers

Japanese Anime, very recent; directed by Mamoru Oshii; from a novel (graphic is my guess) by Hiroshi Mori.

Air combat, in the style of World War II but with semi-futuristic aircraft that reminded me of the comic, “Luftwaffe 1946.” For fighters, one side flies a very Mustang like aircraft with double prop’s; the other side flies a swept-wing, double pusher-prop plane with canard wings, very reminiscent of the planes flown by the English sky-carrier pilots in “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.” Other than the scenes of aerial combat, other aspects of actual war are strangely absent.

I watched the movie on my “Asia Movies” channel, so it was in Japanese with no assistance for the layman. After my viewing, I checked the Internet Movie Data Base and found out a little about the story, which I will share at the end of this post. (imdb.com)

The story is told from the point of view of the side with the pusher-prop planes, one particular unit at a remote airfield where the hangers show signage for “Rostock Iron Works.” The insignia on the planes is vaguely reminiscent of the logo of U.S. Steel. The pilots, and the commander, are teenagers, which is the norm for Japanese Anime. They speak Japanese and read Japanese newspapers, but when they leave the base they go to “Daniel’s Diner,” where the T.V. news is in English. In one news article, the announcer says that a number of “Rainbow aircraft of the [so-and-so corporation] were shot down today . . .” The pilots also speak English in the cockpit on sorties.

That corporation remark was a good clue. There’s obviously no real war going on, there’s virtually no security at the air base, the aircraft are kept in old fashioned, above ground hangers that would be right at home at any small, 20th Century civilian airport. There are no revetments, no earthen birms, no perimeter, no blast protection of any kind. (They do have radar.)

A tour bus comes to the airport with another clue to what’s going on. The tourists are fans of the pilots, even seeking autographs. They flatter the pilots that they are “fighting for a peaceful world.” They refer to the pilots’ “team.”

The presentation is visually wonderful, and the music is good too. The textures of surfaces, and the perspective of rooms, are rendered with remarkable precision. Things like clouds, or the surface of the ocean, are naturalistic in their appearance and movement. All thanks to modern software, no doubt. The characters, on the other hand, are the usual Anime abstractions.

The pusher-prop ace is a kid named Cairn, who is perpetually lighting a cigarette and never loses his 2,000 yard stare. The second half of the movie was mostly exposition, including a long memory-montage, but I missed it all, not understanding Japanese. There were little windows of English, like when Cairn says in the cockpit, kind of blandly, “I killed my father.” Maybe he only heard it, or thought it. If anything, he sounded a little bit surprised.

The pilots and the commander kill time at a giant whore-house, they go bowling, they have a few beers, and they ride around on or in vehicles including scooters, motorcycles, a late seventies Porsche Carrera, and a late fifties Cadillac convertible with huge fins. They are obviously deeply depressed, they wave guns around and threaten suicide, usually with cigarettes in their mouths and/or beers in their hands.

In the midst of the exposition, there is a huge, well mounted air battle that looks like a high-tech Battle of Britain. There are hundreds of planes in the action, with lots of loses. By the end of the movie, a huge catalog of these old fashioned/future tech planes have been lovingly displayed. (Insider alert: if you are a fan of “Luftwaffe 1946,” or Nazi X-planes, you’ll love this movie.)

There is a final showdown between Cairn and the ace of the Mustang jockeys, a guy with a long, abstract black cougar on the side of his plane. Cairn is brilliant, as usual, the aerial maneuvers are very creative, but he gets shot down. The ‘Stang driver is just too strong, and his plane is very heavily armed. When the wing guns fire, shell casings fly out the back of the wings wholesale, and in the final encounter he fires a big nose cannon that he had kept under wraps until then.

The ending is a cliché, the commander standing on the field, beneath ominous clouds, accompanied by the squadron’s faithful dog. Finally she and the dog turn and walk away. (Fade to credits.)

EXPLANATION: Here’s the synopsis from the Internet Movie Data Base:

“Youngsters called ‘Kildren,’ who are destined to live eternally in their adolescence . . . everyday could be their last, because they fight a war as entertainment, organized and operated by adults . . . they live their day-to-day lives to the full.”

So it’s an unconventional anti-war movie. It’s no “Burmese Harp,” no “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,” no “All Quiet on the Western Front,” but I get it, and it’s a pretty good show. Find it if you like this kind of thing.

The Very Valuable Thing

I just passed a good time looking back over this thing of mine, this blog, this "Spin Easy Time." I am very favorably impressed.

There's a lot of good stuff here, and tons of it. My opinion is that this blog is a very valuable thing, literature even. I would recommend it to anyone with some command of English. Reading the entire thing from beginning to end would repay the effort.

I see lots of blogs. Many are just dull; many try so desperately hard to be cool that they are just sad; many are anger based and vaguely disturbing; many are single-purpose and therefore of limited utility; many are news/politics oriented and I think of them as more magazine than blog. I do see some good ones, but "Spin Easy Time" is still competitive.

Thanks for reading.

The Song

A few friends treated me to a delicious lunch for my birthday, and later we shared a cake and they sang the birthday song. It was such a nice gesture, and I really appreciated it, although I don't find my birthdays much cause for celebration at this stage of the game.

Khun Fad ("Twin"), Khun Uan (sounds like oo-wan, "Fat"), and their niece, Nong Mai ("New") are a good bunch, and they always show proper respect for their elders.

The Hollies - Look Through Any Window

I don't mean to harp on this, but the Hollies were great. (Read the post below first, please.) My first criterion is always: can then set up and play? No lip synching here or below. This was the first Hollies song that I heard. 1964, on radio station CKLW, from Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Late at night you could pick it up in New York. I purchased the album immediately, or sooner.

The Hollies had some great songs, you have to admit. Something like fourteen top ten songs in a row while the Beatles were ruling the charts.

THE HOLLIES - On A Carousel (1967)

I was in the bath one time, in the mid-1980's, listening to my favorite radio show of all time, "The Cool and the Crazy Radio Show," on Corsair Radio West. The theme of the show was loosely Beatlemania. "If I Needed Someone" came on. As I reclined in the tub and listened to the song, I remember thinking, you know, maybe the Beatles were better than I thought. Then I realized that the song being played was a cover version by the Hollies.

The Beatles were a very good band, but they were not the only ones. The Hollies were great.

Spam Can Be Fun

I got the greatest spam "comment" today. Some of the best Engrish, weird English, that I have ever seen. Such as:

"exclusively tipple guaranteed to carry far-off the palm you fancy superabundant!"

That was the first sentence of the message, no initial capitol.

Or this one:

"Our all surprised syndication of herbs and aminos is Dr. formulated and proven to commend relief, proceeds magnify cusp unusual and in annoy of raise your wisecracks!"

What were they thinking! It's like some crazy Old Bill Burroughs cut-up.

So Spam can be fun too.

Alert The Media! Foreigners In Lower Manhattan!

I try to leave the important topics to those with longer attention spans than me, journalists and bloggers with more desire to do research and be reasonable, to get to the crux of a matter, and, truth to tell, those with more horsepower than me, people who seem to sprout wonderful ideas like Iowa sprouts corn. But this thing about the Islamic Center in lower Manhattan has grabbed me by the nipples and is twisting furiously. I feel compelled to put my two cents in.

There’s been lots of loose talk about this thing, this “Mosque (virtually!) on top of Ground Zero!” The Sacred Ground, as some opponents of the project would have it. By employing some of the tortuous logic that is suddenly popular these days, lots of folks are relating this innocuous community center to some imaginary cultural conflict, or the crimes of a small group of individuals, or the delusional belief that our president is a Muslim, or another of the weird ideas that are circulating today. They say that building the community center would be some kind of sacrilege, and should be forbidden by some unspecified mechanism of law.

That’s the problem: what mechanism of law? The nay-sayers understand that they have hit a little snag here, a little First Amendment snag, a genuine Constitutional problem to get around, and they have come up with a good sounding way to get around this religious freedom issue. They’re suggesting that Islam isn’t a religion at all, it’s a “totalitarian political ideology.”

This is a great argument, considering that over the entire history of religion most of them were, have been, or are totalitarian political ideologies.

It is beyond argument, for example, that for over a thousand years Christianity was a totalitarian political ideology. From before 500 A.D. to after 1,500 A.D., Christianity, in the form of the Roman church, was the final arbiter of all things political in Europe. They were as self-defining and exclusive as any other totalitarian regime that you could name, and they slaughtered the ideologically impure with unseemly enthusiasm. What changed for the better was the eventual separation of church and state. The Christian world grew up a little, and the totalitarian instincts of the Roman church were slowly bent to the interests of secular government.

So it seems, at first blush, a colorable argument to suggest that this is still true concerning Islam. The main problem is that Islam is nothing like the monolithic political presence that was the pre-Renaissance Roman church. There are lots of Islamic countries, and they all put their little twist on things. There are a few different sects of Islam, and they don’t even like each other, much less cooperate in bringing about the downfall of the West. What could be totalitarian about a mosaic like that? I mean, in a million years? Duh.

Consider, if you will, the countries of Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. That short list represents enough variety to make you dizzy. They are all Muslim countries, there’s no doubt about any of them, but they have very, very different social environments. You can get a drink in three of them, and the hosts will join you in two of them, possibly three (if no one is looking). One is filled up with non-believers who are left to their own devices, and one features considerable religious and cultural diversity (although the playing field is adjusted to boost Islam). You can’t have a cultural war with a culture that’s all over the map like this. (What’s the final result . . . separation of church and state, 2; failure to separate as of yet, 2? Maybe two and a half to one and a half.)

Add to this all of the eminently logical arguments that you’ve heard already. Muslims died in 9/11! This guy who wants to build the thing works for the FBI, he’s no radical! We have no beef with Muslims, just some wackos among them! We have religious freedom here! And there’s tons of Muslim citizens in America, especially in New York! It’s up to them how they use their private property! It’s Manhattan, for Christ’s sake, if you walked the four hundred feet from the old World Trade Center site to where they want to put this new place you’d see a hundred buildings and seven thousand people!

Put the thing up, this community center. It’s no big deal. Not a minaret in sight. What are people complaining about? I don’t really get it. Just another excuse to say something preposterous to try to effect upcoming elections.

So that’s my two cents, for what it’s worth. Not worth the time it took to write it either. What could be a greater waste of time than trying to shine a light on the stupid shit that passes for political discourse in America these days? Like trying to kill a million ants with a tack hammer.