pure craftsmanship

With nothing interesting to do on a lazy Saturday morning, I went to the museum to catch Komaneko the Curious Cat, one of the features in Cinematheque’s Animation Nation programme this year. Komaneko is a series of stop-motion animated sketches about a cat aspiring to become a stop-motion animator. She drafts storyboards, creates her cast of stuffed animals, illustrates backdrops and painstakingly captures every frame of her movie using her 8mm camera. When not busy filmmaking, she goes out with her dolls for picnic, eating donuts and drinking coffee.

After seeing all the sketches, there’s nothing else to say but “Kawaii desu!” Really, leave it to the Japanese to come up with a visual feast such as this. The detailed sets and accoutrements, the lovable characters, even the musical accompaniment, showcase nothing less than exquisite craftsmanship. I’m so glad most of the Komaneko episodes are on YouTube so I can view them in awe again and again and again and again.

Komaneko the Curious Cat is directed by Tsuneo Goda, the same guy who created Domo-kun, NHK’s strangely adorable station identity mascot.

radio, live transmission...

This afternoon I went to a screening of Anton Corbijn’s black-and-white Ian Curtis biopic Control at The Substation. I loved the movie so much that I’m thinking about watching it again tomorrow.

Conditions inside the theater seemed to turn a lot of people off but I honestly thought the place had the right ambience to complement the movie. The screening room was packed, the wooden seats were tiny, and there was no sufficient legroom for the cute Caucasians. The place was stuffy as the air-conditioning system broke down during the earlier show. Less than 30 minutes into the movie I could already smell the sweaty guys surrounding me, which actually made me miss slam-dancing in the middle of a mosh pit (something I was glad to experience during my high school years without my folks’ permission).

Excellent, excellent performance by a very intense Sam Riley (the song numbers and epileptic fits really sent chills down my spine) and the immensely talented Samantha Morton, as expected, does not disappoint as Debbie Curtis. I was grinning like the Cheshire cat during their flirtation scenes with Bryan Ferry singing “Here’s looking at you kid…” in the background. And then, of course, the “Love Will Tear Us Apart” and “Atmosphere” montages just broke my heart.

Sigh. Does anybody else out there love the band?

(I’m generally against Joy Division covers and I’m indifferent towards The Killers but apparently Corbijn said in an interview that he used their version of “Shadowplay” for the closing credits because he wanted to end the film on a positive note. Then I thought to myself, "After the countless seizures, the tumultuous relationships and the tragic suicide?" :-))