Attack of the Clones

If you’ve ever wandered why the license tests in Gran Turismo are so hard, it’s because that’s what they’re actually like over here in Japan. Apparently, before any sort of action is made, your mirrors need to be checked in some specific and arbitrary order and if your tires so much as touch an object outside of the test area at any point, you’re automatically disqualified. Case in point: Charlie finally received his license on Friday, thereby proving the old adage that the third time is a charm. He actually had to pay some driving school something like $50 an hour so that he could do practice runs on their track before he was deemed road worthy.

Well, this was good news for both Charlie and my mooching self. We celebrated today by eating at a small ramen shop and then enjoyed a brief stint in Hachinohe where we browsed the electronics store and I bought a toy Godzilla at Toys R Us.

At this point, I think that if I failed to make an appearance at the Shimoda Mall for even one day it might arouse suspicion from the locals, so we returned to the mall for a movie. On the way in, Charlie told me that they used to have a huge ferris wheel in back of the mall that they tore down and paved over a few weeks before I moved here. That was pretty depressing.

Anyway, we decided to see The Island because I didn’t know very much about it aside from the fact that it looked like a bad sci-fi movie and also because I am prone to acting on blind faith when it comes to matters regarding Ewan McGregor. Well, it turns out that it was actually an action movie that simply used post-Matrix dystopic fantasy as a springboard for lots of explosions and a series of increasingly unlikely narrow escapes. It also was apparently trying to break the Guinness book record for product placement or something. Bad news mac fans: apparently Apple will still be selling the same cinema displays in 60 years time. Compounding these problems, the movie copped many of its only redeemable ideas and visuals from THX 1138, wholesale. In fact, you might say that the plot was essentially a cross between that movie and The Matrix.

This being my first experience at a Japanese movie theater, however, I have a number of interesting things to report on. Movies in Japan are really expensive but there are a few ways to get around this. First off, it’s the opposite of how things work in America-matinees are expensive and late shows are cheap. They also have themed days (“men’s day,” “women’s day,” “couple’s day”) when you can get a discount. Since we went late, I only had to pay about $10 for my ticket, not much more than I paid in Chicago.

When we bought our tickets, I was surprised that we had to choose seats from a seating chart. Our assigned seat number was then printed onto our tickets. I was relieved to find that refreshments seemed much cheaper than their American counterparts but were considerably smaller. For example, the small popcorn came in a 12 oz. soda cup.

Before the movie, they played this anti-piracy public service advertisement that was, quite possibly, the strangest thing I have seen in this country so far. It featured an actress looking directly into the camera and saying things like “important things are being damaged”. Then black tears start rolling down her cheeks. Then those tears fall into a pool of water and turn into skulls. Watch and learn, children.