Synaesthesia

This year my con experience was rather abbreviated and I didn’t feel quite as exhilarated as I have in the past. My favorite part this year was spending time with my friends and making a new friend.

AnimeNEXT is a good-sized con held in Secaucus, NJ. This con used to be held at a smaller hotel nearby, maybe six years ago or so, but now it’s held at the Meadowlands Expo Center. This year, the con took up TWO floors of the Expo Center, and even added the option of picking up pre-reg badges on Thursday, a great idea since the line last year was an hour or so long on Friday morning.

On Friday, I had to go to my cousin’s middle school graduation in NYC, so I didn’t get to the convention until much later in the day (around 4 pm). I went through the Dealer’s Room and the Artist’s Alley/Show (scoping out the competition a little bit, since later I put up 3 pieces in the Art Show). I didn’t think there was anything particularly special about what was in the Dealer’s Room this year (although now it was much more like a market, since it took up almost half of the first floor), so I just bought some manga in Japanese so I could practice reading hiragana and katakana. My friends met up with me a little later and we ate dinner at Nikko Sushi, which has reasonable prices and where I got a beef bento. Then we went to the Holiday Inn to use the bathroom and watch a few minutes of a fandub (best joke: a Chinese character tattoo someone shows that is translated as “Stupid gaijin I take your money”)

We went to Starbucks and I got a Shaken Iced Tea Lemonade – extremely refreshing! Particularly in the hot weather.

Rentrer en Soi performed at the convention, and I’d like to offer a few tips to people looking to see bands at AnimeNEXT. For the past few years, the band has appeared in the large Panel 1 room. The seats in the center are cleared away so the crowd can move in, and people can also stand in the seats. If you’re not that interested in the band, don’t bother getting in line – there has always been room in the past to not only get into Panel 1 but also sneak your way toward the front. Unfortunately, if you’re short like me, being stuck in the crowd is a pain because there are so many tall people around.

So, since my friend and I were with someone who wasn’t particularly interested in the concert – and neither were we – we dropped in after the show had started (surprisingly, it started on time!! and no opening band). Immediately, I was amazed by the crowd’s silhouette against the bright white, smoky lights hitting the stage. They announced the band and the audience erupted, and when the singer came up he screamed into the microphone. Then the music started. Thankfully, Rentrer en Soi isn’t a screaming kind of band, but we only stuck around for 10 minutes or so before leaving since my friend wasn’t having fun unless she was close and our new friend really wanted to leave. I was in the middle on the decision and I sort of regret leaving because our friends who had VIP spots said it was AWESOME but…well…whatever… I’ve never listened to Rentrer en Soi so for the moment, I don’t regret missing them.

We hung around outside for a while and then we went home. It wasn’t particularly eventful, but I had a lot of fun just hanging out and talking. On the way home, the clouds that had been hanging around on the horizon finally came over us and the rain beat down hard enough that we wanted to pull over since our driver could barely see. We saw so many lightning bolts in the sky, including horizontal ones in the distance, that I started to worry we were going to have a repeat of that awful thunderstorm (actually, microburst) that hit NJ two weeks ago. We made it home safely, though, and I crashed into my bed soon enough.

Yesterday was hot and hazy and it poured for a few minutes before my dad and I left for Giants Stadium to watch a friendly between the US and Argentina. I’ve only been to Giants Stadium once before yesterday for a soccer game, when River Plate and the Metrostars were playing. (Actually, there were two games in a row, but I can’t remember who played in the first one we watched). The stadium was packed, with 78,000 people, and ten minutes before the end the announcer said it was the 9th largest turn-out for a game in this league. We had “nosebleed” seats way up on the top tier, but we had a view of the entire field, which was awesome. During halftime, some guy ran out onto the field wearing Argentina colors, and the security guards chased him until one of them tackled him. There was much shouting and cheering.

The game itself was intense. My dad says today’s commentators said it was boring, but I guess the intensity of the crowd made the game awesome. Everyone was shouting and chanting, but there were two REALLY annoying guys sitting next to us. One spent most of the time yelling at the referee, the other one just kept shouting “USA, motherf***ers!” And plenty of people left repeatedly to get more beer and food. As my dad reminded me, there might have only been one goal, and you should have made sure you saw it. But the game ended 0-0.

At the end, though, the best part was when the thunderstorm came. Around the 80th minute, it started pouring. A few people left immediately, but we stuck around. Only 10 minutes left, right? Except 5 minutes of overtime were added. We left completely soaked (no umbrellas allowed in the stadium, and we didn’t have ponchos). Today my throat hurts, but it was really fun.

I took a bunch of pictures, mostly of the crowd and the balloons that were floating around. One long yellow balloon floated onto Argentina’s goal during the second half and everyone started cheering (btw, I ended up sitting on the mostly USA half of the stadium). The wave went around the top tier about 3 times, which was really cool to watch. And the USA fans at one point started shouting, “Estados Unidos” at the Argentine goalie. During Argentina’s corner kicks, too, they unfurled a US flag at the corner. After the game, a bunch of guys were yelling “Overrated” but I thought maybe they might have thought differently if the game hadn’t been a friendly. Still, Argentina made six substitutions, I guess so they wouldn’t wear out their players. There were a LOT of injuries and a lot of fouls during the game, and two red cards, one per side.

Well, a great game. Can’t wait to see a non-friendly, hahaha.

My dad and I went out for his birthday and since we both do martial arts (me: Isshinryu karate, my dad: kempo) we went to see The Foot Fist Way. The only theaters near me that are showing it are in New York City, so we saw it at the AMC on 42nd St. It’s a HUGE theater, with plenty of long escalators and attendants ushering you in and out of the theaters, up stairs, and even down in elevators. It’s twelve bucks a ticket with no student discounts. I didn’t check the concessions stand prices.

The Foot Fist Way tells the story of Tae Kwon Do instructor Fred Simmons and his two lives – the one as a hard-ass Tae Kwon Do instructor, the other as an asshole husband. But when his wife cheats on him, his personal problems start leaking into his life at his martial arts school.

The movie was shot in 19 days with a $70,000 budget, and it shows in the grainy footage and, well, all areas of the movie, but I wouldn’t say that’s to the movie’s detriment. It’s just something to keep in mind, that it isn’t 100% polished. Some scenes could have been shorter, some pauses needed to be longer for comedic impact, etc.

Eh…okay, so I’ll get down to the nitty-gritty. I admit that having my dad around for this movie may have skewed my perspective on how funny it was (you know, sometimes instead of laughing I might have been wondering what he thought of a certain joke and whether I’d get in trouble for it later), but we both generally agreed that it was a strange mix of the funny and the horribly unfunny. A lot of the characters were rude jerks, and Simmons’s marriage problems weren’t as laughable as they might have been.

The New York Times compared it to Napoleon Dynamite and similarly, some of the characters were caricatures, but not quite as abstract as those in ND. Really, I could almost imagine this guy teaching TKD, and I was very, very happy that my sensei, despite being a hard-ass, is nothing like this guy.

So, the movie may not have been as funny as it could have been, but it had that strange oh-my-God-what-are-they-doing-now feeling to it. As a martial artist, I enjoyed watching the goings-on at the TKD school and the occasional fighting (but honestly, when that one guy showed he couldn’t control his violence, Mr. Simmons should have beat the shit out of him). What I missed at the end was a final fight between Mr. Simmons and Mr. Adulterer (or Adulteress, as Simmons calls him) and a little more closure than the final speech Simmons gives that really has nothing to do with anything we’ve learned about the characters. So…maybe the movie finds a good deal of its humor in its irony. The TKD students talk about perseverance and self-control, and the movie is split into sections marked with those headlines – very ironically-titled sections, since Simmons, for example, beats the crap out of a little boy because he thinks the kid’s dad has been messing around with Simmons’s wife Suzie (a perfect mix of the bitchy and the sweetly apologetic).

I still haven’t made up my mind about this movie, so for now I will recommend watching it if you do TKD or another martial art or if you’re looking for a relatively funny film, but try to find it for less than $12 a ticket (which is a ridiculous price for ANY film). Also, please let me know what else you want to know about the film. I’m still torn between saying it definitely wasn’t as funny as pre-release reviews said it was, and saying it was a good short indie film.