verbminx

I was going to embed this video, Kamisama Mou Sukoshi Dake Ep 1 Pt 1, but as it turns out, the person who uploaded it to YouTube disabled embedding. 

Frustrating! So, you'll have to follow the link. Subsequent parts of each episode (6 per ep, I believe) are always linked from the previous part's page. This is also available as a torrent from various sites and is not difficult to find. There are either 12 or 13 episodes all together. 

I suppose I should tell you what it's about. OK... it's a 10-year-old Japanese TV "dorama." The stars will be familiar to a lot of people: Takeshi Kaneshiro (who was in Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, and House of Flying Daggers, and is basically one of the top ten prettiest men in the world, *swoon*thud*), and Kyoko Fukada (Momoko the BTSSB-obsessed loli-chan from Shimotsuma Monogatari/Kamikaze Girls). It would probably look dated to a Japanese person, but does not look as dated to me as, say, something from 1988 looked in 1998.

Kaneshiro plays Keigo, a songwriter/producer/musician; Fukada's Masaki is a huge fan, still in high school, who would do just about anything to get to his next concert. Will they fall in love? Will she die young? Is HIV/AIDS a major social problem? Will it be a tear-jerking tragedy? The answer to all those questions is YOU KNOW IT! I watched all six parts of the first episode the other day.

The title has been translated as "Please, God, give me more time!" -- which is as good as anything else. Technically, mou sukoshi means "a little more," and Japanese culture isn't particularly monotheistic, so a possible conceptual translation is "Asking the gods for a little more."  I'm not sure what dake is -- it could be "only," in which case "time" would be something that you'd understand in the context of the show's plot -- or it could be a word I don't know, which is significantly more likely.

How did I find it? 

Luna Sea's "I For You" has been one of my favorite songs for about the past decade (it's not a great video, though -- mostly landscape shots). I don't know whether or not it was written for Kamisama mou sukoshi dake, but it was definitely the theme song of the show. It also plays as the recurring theme in the show's instrumental score... I like the oboe motif! There's a variant video for the song that uses footage from the show, which was linked from one of the uploads of the regular video. It was really just a case of serial browsing, like most things on the web.

Anyway, I think a few of you will... be interested to watch the show. (It's a melodrama, so it doesn't seem like "enjoy" is the right descriptor.) Give it a chance. I tend to get drawn in by this stuff the way some of my friends get drawn in by bad reality shows.

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Judging by what I have out of the library right now, you'd think I was a massive fan of French New Wave cinema (I have: Jules et Jim, which I still haven't watched all the way through, along with Breathless and Bonjour Tristesse, which is not totally Nouvelle Vague... but it does star Jean Seberg, and is based on a 1950s novel that was insanely popular and "alternacool" at the time). 

This is not the case; I have a running list of films I think I really ought to see, and I tend to grab them when I see them. The latter two just happened to be on the shelf, so my theory is that it would be more accurate to say that there are no massive fans of French New Wave cinema who go to the same library as me. Or that they're all done watching movies for now....

Not a huge amount of things going on, except the usual: hanging out with my mom and boyfriend and pets, running errands, etc. We have new neighbors in the building who seem like they might be cool; one of the guys looks like he's in his 20s and has full tattoo sleeves. I got the new ShojoBeat last night, finally. ( a digression thereon: Nana, Godchild, and getting Mary Weather's look. )

I was eating a snack of Goldfish crackers earlier, and since Max is a cracker-loving cat, I had to give him some. He's extremely pushy about this sort of snack food, so I toss them across the room one-by-one so that I have a few moments of peace with my bowl of crackers. This appeals to me in an odd way: such a pretty, almost cartoonish black cat, sleek with big yellow eyes, and I send him chasing around the room after tiny "fish", which he then eats. It's so much less fun when it's regular crackers or bits of corn chips or etc.

Tonight: I think Tom and I might be heading out to the movies. There are a few that we both want to see: The Aristocrats, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Broken Flowers, Red Eye. Perhaps at some point this weekend I will: try to make nice with the new neighbors, and head over to the Tiki and Custom Car Culture Fest that's being held all day tomorrow. Alone... can I handle it? And if I do, I'll probably have to forgo the Mai-Tais.

(music also: elvis costello: "radio radio", fishbone: "ma and pa", the jam: "down in the tube station at midnight", eurythmics: "sweet dreams" - I'm listening to the Music Choice Retro-Active channel that comes with digital cable, which is excellent; their Alternative channel is pretty good too. I've discovered plenty of bands on the latter, and both play album cuts, rather than just hits. OSU does not have a college rock station - instead, it has a NPR/classical station that it broadcasts on both of the frequencies it owns. There is a student indie-rock station, but it's internet-only.)