Griff's Village

I recently read Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories , a collection of short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, translated by Jay Rubin. Akutagawa is one of Japan's most celebrated writers, but, for most of us in the west, he's most notable for "In a Grove" and "Rashomon," which provided the plot and name, respectively, for one of Akira Kurosawa's best-known movies. I'd be lying if I said that his connection to Kurosawa had nothing to do with my decision to check this book out, but I don't want to imply that Akutagawa is little more than a cinematic footnote: his short stories are some of the best I have ever read. While enjoying this book, I often thought about the language barrier. When you're watching a foreign movie, the picture is, for the most part, unaltered, so much of the artistry (the lighting, set design, costumes, and cinematography, for example) is preserved. Words are different; you can't really see a writer's words through...

I've been interested in the public domain for a long time. When I was an unemployed, carless twenty-something, I liked knowing which works of classic Literature I could find for free online. To this day, there's something very satisfying about downloading P.G. Wodehouse's A Damsel in Distress or Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin versus Herlock Sholmes from Standard Ebooks and loading them onto my eReader. Some people always get excited about Public Domain Day, but this year's has been one of the biggest because of soon-to-be horror icon Mickey Mouse's new legal status. It's funny to think that Disney, a company who embodies art and commerce in almost equal measure, has lost even a little bit of control over one of the world's most recognizable characters. The same thing happened when Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain a few years back.  It was Walt Disney, and not A.A. Milne, that made the idea of Pooh as a slasher villain so appealing. A lot of ch...

I've always been a fan of the Mario games. When I was a kid,  Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars,  released in 1996, was probably my favourite. For the first time, gamers got to play a story-focused Mario adventure. And what an adventure! The thought of an enemy so dangerous that Mario and Bowser had to team up left a big impact on my ten-year-old self. Now it's 2023. The remake, still called Super Mario RPG , but with the Legend of the Seven Stars subtitle dropped, has been available for a few weeks. But how does it hold up? Should you play Super Mario RPG ? Should you play Super Mario RPG on the Nintendo Switch? And should you play Super Mario RPG on the Nintendo Switch if you already own the original? It's fashionable for gamers and gaming critics to say that a remake renders the original obsolete. Super Mario RPG on the Switch complements the original Super Nintendo version, but I don't think it's a good replacement. Yes, this new release adds severa...

I recently attended a performance of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.  It got me thinking about the age-old debate over plays, and whether they are to be read or watched. It's a discussion that seems to follow the Bard of Avon more than any other writer. My first direct exposure to Shakespeare's literature was in a high school English class, when I read  Romeo and Juliet . I already knew who Shakespeare was, of course, but this was the first time I experienced one of his masterpieces first-hand. At fourteen, I still struggled with understanding the play, but I enjoyed it, found the footnotes fascinating, and looked forward to studying Shakespeare's other works in future English classes. In the summer I turned 17, I bought a collection of Shakespeare's plays, and read both Much Ado About Nothing and  Hamlet on my own ;  the latter would soon show up on the syllabus in my last year of high school. I would soon after become an English major at Carleton University,...

I'm scared of ghosts. That's not to say that I necessarily believe in ghosts, but they scare me just the same. The thought of something that's real, but not QUITE that real, is frightening. A lot of my favourite works of horror fiction--that is to say, the ones that stick with me--either involve ghosts ( Poltergeist)  or ghost-like entities (Sheridan Le Fanu's "The Green Tea"). I think it's the psychological element--a creature that you can see but other's can't, or that manifests itself in ways that shouldn't be possible--isn't just an attack on the body, but on the mind. Probably the movie that scared me the most was the 2015 documentary  The Nightmare, which is about sleep paralysis and the visions that may accompany it. I know what sleep paralysis is, and I know that the images that accompany it are just that--images. The shadowmen are not real and cannot hurt me--and yet I bought and started wearing a sleep mask right after watching it...

I was a huge fan of  The Simpsons  growing up. Then, shortly before I began high school, Matt Groening created a new show:  Futurama . I fell in love with it from the first episode, and eagerly watched it throughout its twenty-some years of irregular existence. I stopped watching  The Simpsons  over a decade ago, but  Futurama  has a special place in my heart. Still, I was cautiously optimistic when I heard it was being brought back again. I think that Futurama has been top-notch until now, but every show will eventually dip in quality if it goes on long enough. Would season 8 be the year that does Futurama in? The first episode of the newest revival, "The Impossible Stream," involves Phillip J. Fry's decision to set a life's goal for himself: to watch every TV show ever made.  Despite the daunting set-up, much of this episode focuses specifically on the FINAL show that Fry has to binge: the in-universe soap opera,  All My Circuits, which ...

Do you finish what you start? Do you read to the last word of every book, or sit through the credits of every movie? If you start a video game, do you finish it? I used to. I'm more flexible now, though; the older you get, the more you worry about time.  I still finish every novel I being, and I still don't like to walk out on movies--seeing these through to the end gives me a sense of closure. But I can read a book in a few weeks, and watch a movie in a matter of hours.  TV shows and video games are a much longer commitment, so my newfound flexibility is mostly to accomodate them. If I start to watch an episode of a TV show, then I finish that episode. I may or may not move onto the next. If I do, then how I proceed depends on what kind of show I'm watching. If it's something with a strong emphasis on continuity, like Arrested Development  or Breaking Bad , then I try to watch the show at least once a week, if not more, to make sure I don't forget where I am in th...