NDK 10: Closing Ceremonies

The official end of the convention is the Closing Ceremonies and Charity Auction. All of the guests and usually about 1,000 people gather in the Main Events hall to have one final hurrah before going their separate ways. A lot of people don’t care for this, but I love it. The con directors get up on stage and just have a good time. We cheer for the guests (there’s a lot of clapping) and acknowledge the work that the staff members put in to make the con a success.

The second half—the Charity Auction—is the most fun, though. Every year, Nan Desu Kan chooses a charity to which it will donate the proceeds of its auction. Last year it was the Red Cross Hurricane Katrina fund. This year, because the convention fell on the same weekend as the Denver Race for the Cure and a lot of us on the staff would have otherwise been there instead (my mother is a breast cancer survivor), the benefactor was the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

On top of the bid amounts, Nan Desu Kan always matches the winning bids dollar-for-dollar, doubling the original donation amount. But on top of this, Piano Squall pledged to match, I believe, 50 cents for every dollar bid, making the total donation 2.5 times the original bid amount.

Among the prizes auctioned off was a set of the first five discs of Fullmetal Alchemist signed by the director, Mizushima Seiji, which my friend won with a winning bid of $240. But that wasn’t nearly the most expensive item up for bid. The last two items up for bid went for astronomical sums.

The second-to-last item up for bid was an autographed custom drawing by the Madhouse Studios artist Umehara Takahiro. A similar item had sold earlier in the auction for just $300 (for which Mr. Umehara was quite pleased) but the bidding on this skyrocketed to a final bid of $2,000. When the bidding was over, Mr. Umehara ran over to the winning bidder and gave him a great big hug (there was a lot of that going around). It was easy to tell how excited he was that his donated drawing just made so much money for charity.

The final item was a poster that two of the artists (a husband and wife team, Robert and Emily DeJesus) used as an eye-catch for their table. It was about two feet wide and six feet tall with about two feet of white space on both the top and bottom. During the course of the convention, they had gotten nearly every guest invited to NDK to sign the poster, including all of the artists in attendance. The bidding started high and quickly became a bidding match between two people. The bid hit $2,000 within two minutes and at that moment, the Japanese guests from Madhouse Studios jumped on stage and all three signed the poster. The bidding, which had slowed a bit, was reinvigorated and the final bid was $2,800—the largest price ever spent on an item at an NDK auction. When the DeJesuses wanted to thank the bidder, Emily was too choked up to say it herself (she, too, had a family member who’s a breast cancer survivor). This was a really moving moment for me.

In an awesome display of kindness, the Nan Desu Kan directors gave the two big winners free NDK passes for life, and Keith Burgess, the representative from Manga Entertainmant told them he would give each of them the entire Manga anime library (which isn’t huge but it has some great titles).

All told, the winning bids from the main auction (not counting the silent auction proceeds or the donation box, which received several hundred dollars in donations from the guests during the auction) was around $7,800. They decided to call up Piano Squall with this number on speakerphone, and he was genuinely thrilled that they’d just cost him about $4,000. All told, the donation to the Komen Foundation is approximately $20,000. Not bad for a bunch of geeks at an anime convention.

NDK 10: AMV Contest

One of my biggest disappointments at NDK this year was that I never got to see the AMV contest all the way through. Part of this disappointment was the overall quality of the contest entries. The contest had room for about 30 AMVs but over 130 were submitted. (To give you an idea of how big this is, other, larger conventions received fewer than 100 submissions—the number of submissions that NDK rejected.)

Not surprisingly, I worked through the main contest. Not that it would have done me much good to have the time open, though. I’m told that the Main Events hall (which seats 1,500 and has standing room for 300 more) was so crowded that one of the directors of the convention was turned away at the door because there wasn’t even standing room available.

By popular demand, they decided to re-show the AMV contest on Sunday morning at 7:00. I missed this showing because I worked until about 4:00 AM Sunday morning and I slept right through the reshowing. Not a problem. It wasn’t advertised but there was a third showing of the AMV contest.

Every year after the convention, the con directors throw a party for the volunteers and staff who worked the convention. Without us, there would be no convention, so the party (called the Dead Dog Party) is their way of saying thanks, and giving us all some time to relax. Starting last year, they replayed the AMV contest near the end of the Dead Dog Party. I planned to watch this showing. Indeed, I even got to watch some of it.

Then Murphy’s Law struck me hard. I was planning to give one of my (underage) friends a ride back home from the convention. This was fine until his parents called near the end of the Dead Dog Party and demanded that he head home immediately. Being his ride, and not wanting to get him into trouble, it meant I had to leave early. I got to watch about 20 minutes of the two-hour contest.

I’m still not pleased that I didn’t get to see the contest entries. Luckily there’s this list of AMVs that were played at the convention. I’m hoping that all of the submissions eventually make it onto AnimeMusicVideos.org so I can see them all, but I’m sure I’ll miss a few of them.

Next year I’m going to schedule time off for me to attend the main contest. The atmosphere of having 1,800 people cheering great videos is something you can’t beat. It beats the experience of seeing a movie on opening night in a crowded theater. I’m not going to miss it again.

NDK 10: Madhouse Guests

Every year, Nan Desu Kan tries to get at least one guest from Japan to come to the convention. Usually this is a person working in the anime industry but sometimes it’s a J-pop artist or another random Japanese personality. This year, the guests from Japan were Sato Yuzo, Umehara Takahiro, and Mizushima Seiji from Madhouse Studios. For the uninitiated, Madhouse Studios is one of the largest anime production companies in Japan. They’ve created such classics as Cardcaptor Sakura, Gungrave, Jubei-chan, Lensman, Metropolis, Ninja Scroll, Tenjho Tenge, Unico, and Vampire Hunter D to the more modern BECK, Chobits, Di Gi Charat, Galaxy Angel, Gunslinger Girl, Milennium Actress, Monster, Shingu, The Gokusen, Tokyo Godfathers, Trigun, Trinity Blood, and X. And that’s just to name a few! (Phew!)

Of the three guests, the biggest was Mr. Mizushima, who’s best known as the director of Fullmetal Alchemist and Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa. FMA is one of the hottest anime out there right now and scoring Mr. Mizushima was a big win for NDK.

If it wasn’t enough for Mr. Mizushima to be there, he brought with him a special edition of Conqueror of Shamballa that hasn’t been shown in the United States before (it won’t be released until November). They showed the movie in Main Events on Saturday afternoon to a crowd of about 800 people, after which Mr. Mizushima had a Q&A session. I missed this session because I was busy working in the video rooms (damnit!) but I heard that everyone had a great time.

The Madhouse guests also did two Q&A panels over the weekend and I managed to attend the second one. Unfortunately, Mr. Mizushima was busy at the time but Mr. Sato and Mr. Umehara were both there. It was an interesting panel and I learned a lot about Madhouse Studios and about how they approach their work.

Of all the guests I’ve seen at NDK, they were the most interesting to me because they’ve been directly involved with many shows I’ve actually watched. With my limited anime viewing, it’s rare that there’s a guest that’s been involved with producing something I’ve seen (especially since the guests tend to be English dub voice actors and I watch mostly subtitled anime) and these guys have made some of the best stuff out there. All I can do is cross my fingers that we get more guests like them in the future.

NDK 10: Piano Squall

One of NDK’s guests this year was Piano Squall, a semi-professional pianist that plays music from anime and video games. He travels around the country playing at various conventions dressed as Squall Leonheart from Final Fantasy VIII.

Something I greatly admire about Piano Squall is that since his grandmother died earlier this year from multiple sclorosis, he’s donated all of his profits from his convention concerts to the National MS Society. For his NDK appearance, Nan Desu Kan matched this donation dollar-for-dollar. Piano Squall’s alter ego’s employer, EA matched the total of Squall’s and NDK’s contributions, for a grand total of $4,148. Not too shabby for a small anime convention along the Rockies.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to go the the Piano Squall concert. Luckily, he’s got a devoted following and I found a video of the concert the day after the con ended. I watched it all the way through and I was mighty impressed by his skills. I only hope that he comes back to NDK soon so I can catch his concert live.

NDK 10: Symphonic Anime Orchestra

Last year at NDK 9, a local college band director took the initiative and started a group called the Symphonic Anime Orchestra. Comprising Nan Desu Kan attendees, they played music from anime and several video games.

This year on Sunday was their second concert. Like last year, there was a decent crowd of about 200 listening to them play. But like last year, they only sounded OK. It’s hard for me to criticize these musicians when I consider all of the aspects of the event, but even so, they sounded good at best.

Most of the problems are not fixable, unfortunately, because they are a result of the nature of this particular beast. As I mentioned, the SAO wholly comprises con attendees, which means they see each other once a year. This doesn’t give them much time to practice together. While they apparently received their music to practice in February, they had to all practice solo and bring everything together at the last minute. Not even the London Symphony Orchestra would sound very good working under those conditions.

But even worse than not being fully synchronized, there were at least two bad musicians in the group. I don’t want to point out anyone in particular, so I won’t say what sections these musicians were in. But watching them play, I could easily recognize who was hurting the group more than they were helping it. Again, this isn’t something that will likely change in future years primarily because of the composition of the group. Being a group of attendees, most of them paid their way into the convention and they weren’t being payed to play in the SAO, which makes it both difficult and rude to ask someone to leave because they aren’t very good. Were this a group of professional musicians, it might be easier to cut someone from the team, as it were.

Still, despite the problems, I enjoyed listening to the SAO play. They only played for about 45 minutes and I found myself disappointed that the concert didn’t last longer.

NDK 10: Video Rooms

Being the new Video Coordinator for Nan Desu Kan, I spent the majority of my time not in the video rooms but rather running between them. With the way the convention is arranged at the hotel, we have two video rooms on the mezzanine level on one side of the hotel and one larger video room on the opposite end of the hotel on the ground level. The hotel is probably an eighth of a mile long, and I walked back and forth between the rooms perhaps a hundred times during the convention.

I arrived at the hotel around 10:30 AM on Friday. My plan was to help my staff set up the video rooms, hauling equipment from the truck to the rooms and connecting and testing everything. It didn’t turn out this way. I learned pretty quickly why my predecessor never helped set up the video rooms. It’s not because she didn’t know how or that she was lazy; there was too much else to be done.

I had to track down the DVDs that we were going to show during the weekend, find or buy anything that we were missing, and work out staffing problems. I was prepared to do more of the same from previous years but the work turned out to be anything but.

We eventually got our little problems worked out and two of the rooms opened on time, the third missing the 2:00 deadline by just five minutes. This was unprecedented, I’m told. In most of the previous years, at least one video room always opened over an hour late.

Once things got going, everything ran smoothly. We didn’t have any equipment meltdowns (again, a first). With few exceptions, we started titles on time or just shortly after the times for which they were scheduled, which is ideal.

We had quite a few special events held in our video rooms. These included the wildly popular AMV Hell 3, Super Fanboy Attack! by the Custodians of Otakudom, Mystery Anime Theater (basically MST3K with a bad anime movie), and the annual Insane Counting Contest. By far the most exciting (if not the most packed) event was the showing of Fullmetal Alchemist: Conqueror of Shamballa. We showed the movie in two of our three video rooms at midnight on Saturday night and nearly packed them both.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see any of the aforementioned showings because I was too busy helping to get them set up or working crowd control to keep the doors from being crowded because more people wanted to watch than could fit in the room.

Two of my favorite events that we held were the AMV Overload and AMV Coordinator Playlist Favorite events. The first of these was basically showing a bunch of AMVs that were good but not quite good enough to make the cut into the main AMV contest (there were 136 submissions and 32 openings). The second event was the showing of the personal favorites of NDK’s AMV Coordinator, Scottanime. The room was beyond packed for the two full hours of these events.

There was also an industry panel hosted by Lance Heiskell of FUNimation. I missed this event (we had it scheduled opposite the AMV events) and from what I’m told, it was a spectacular panel. I heard a lot of laughs from the room and quite a few people told me they had a great time. I originally didn’t expect it to go over as well as it did. Knowing how good it was, I’m hoping Lance comes back next year and runs another panel so I can be there.

And finally, there was an experimental panel featuring the voice actor Darrel Guilbeau. He provided the voice for the main character in Overman King Gainer and he wanted to have a panel about what goes into dubbing anime. He first introduced himself and then we played an episode of Gainer, after which he wanted to do some Q&A. Unfortunately, the audience wasn’t as participatory as Darrel had hoped and things kind of fell flat. We played another episode of Gainer and again he tried to do some Q&A but the audience didn’t make a peep. It was really unfortunate because Darrel was a great guy and I know he had a lot of interesting stuff to talk about. Because the Q&A didn’t really pan out, we decided to play two more episodes of Gainer and a few of the fans went to talk to Darrel while the episodes played. They got a good discussion going with the seven or eight of them, so I’m glad it wasn’t a bust. I guess it just goes to show you how introverted a lot of anime fans really are (I’m no exception here). In hindsight, I could have really helped this panel just by asking a couple of questions myself. I’ve seen other panel hosts either start the discussion or continue past a dull spot with their own question and maybe if I’d spoken up I could’ve sparked the questions from the attendees.

I’m not even covering 10 percent of what went on during the convention in the video rooms, but I’m happy to say that everything went so well on the whole. Several of my staff members (many of whom have been working the video rooms twice as long as me) told me this is the best year they’ve had working in video, and that made me very happy.

Next year, we’re going to get an earlier start on our preparations and the stress level will be much lower. I see nothing but good things happening in the future of the NDK video rooms.

Nan Desu Kan 10

Last weekend was Nan Desu Kan 10, an annual anime convention in Denver. This was my third year attending NDK and I had a pretty good time. I would have had a great time but I was too busy working. And as usual after a con, I came home exhausted and bummed that the weekend was over.

I’ve been working at NDK since I started attending two years ago. The first year I was a volunteer working in the video rooms, where they show anime around the clock. The way volunteering works is that you still pay to get in your first year but if you work at least 16 hours during the con, you get two free passes for the next year’s convention (one for you, one for a friend). I easily fulfilled this obligation watching anime for eight hours a night.

Last year I was promoted to staff, which in truth just means that the rest of the staff thinks you did a good job. The responsibilities of staff members aren’t much different from volunteers, though they do get to choose their hours to work before the volunteers and they get a few other perks.

This year, however, I was the Video Coordinator, in charge of the three video rooms where I first started working just two years ago. It’s pretty unusual for a person to be a section head in their third year of attending a convention but the circumstances surrounding the video staff this year were unusual, to say the least. To avoid any hurt feelings, I’ll refrain from detailing how this all came about.

Anyhow, in my first year in a position of such responsibility, I wanted to make sure things ran smoothly. That meant I wanted to be present for all of the special events we hosted in our video rooms (look for a later post about these). Unfortunately, this meant I missed out on a lot of the other goings-on around the convention during those times.

In hindsight, my staff was more than able to cover the special events without my intervention and I could have enjoyed myself more during the convention. Next year, I’m going to schedule time off for myself and make sure I have a great time.

I’ll be posting several more entries about specific events around the convention. Stay tuned.

Oops

I committed the ultimate blogging sin: I stopped. Initially, this was only supposed to be for a short time as I transitioned from my old job into something new, but I just never quite got back onto the blogging horse. But I’ve got a lot to write about now and I’m ready to start.

During my absence from blogging, WordPress.com added several new themes. I’ve changed to the Cutline theme by Chris Pearson. It’s simple, clean, and gorgeous. It even validates (not that I’m supposed to care about that anymore). I need to come up with a custom image for the header so it’s at least somewhat personalized, but I’m quite pleased with how this blog looks now.

Look for a lot of new stuff coming from this direction.

Superman Returns

It’s rare when I don’t have anything to complain about after watching a movie. As some of my friends will tell you, I like to complain about movies. If you read my Brokeback Mountain review, you already know this, too. Superman Returns is one of those rare movies that did everything well enough that I can’t say anything bad about it.

Unlike Batman Begins, which retold the genesis of Batman, Superman Returns does everything it can to maintain continuity with old Christopher Reeve movies. Director Bryan Singer—a comic book geek—went so far as to use archive footage of Marlon Brando as Jor-El, Superman’s father, from the first movie.

Singer put a lot of effort into maintaining the idea that it’s the same Superman from the four Christopher Reeve movies. Not only does Brandon Routh look vaguely similar to Christopher Reeve, he also channels Reeve’s Superman voice startlingly well at times.

Even the opening title sequence pays homage to the original movie series. The names fly towards the audience the same way they did in the original movies, and composer John Ottman—a longtime collaborator with Singer—used John Williams’ original Superman theme before segueing into the wonderful original score for the movie.

At the beginning of the movie, we learn that Superman has been missing from Metropolis for five years. He didn’t say anything when he left and the world is just learning to live without him. Lois Lane just won the Pulitzer prize for her article “Why the world doesn’t need Superman.” She’s engaged to Perry White’s nephew, with whom she has a small boy.

Then Superman crashes to Earth in a crystalline spaceship at the Kents’ farm in Smallville. He went to Krypton—his home planet—to see if there were any remnants of his race left, but Krypton was destroyed when its star went nova. So Superman, as Clark Kent, returns to Metropolis and to his job at the Daily Planet. He wants to leave Superman behind and live out the rest of his life as the boring, normal Clark Kent. That is until Lois’ life is in danger. He rushes into action without skipping a beat and saves the day in a very public way.

After that, Superman is back and with gusto, saving people around the world. From that point on, the movie focuses on the ramifications of Superman’s return. Specifically, it revolves around Lois and her lingering feelings for Superman. To make matters worse for Lois, who honestly tries to separate herself from Superman, she’s constantly being pushed towards him by her role as a reporter. Superman is also doing everything he can to be close to Lois, going so far at one point as to become Creepy Stalker Superman—he follows Lois home and peers into her house with his X-ray vision and uses his super-hearing to listen in to her conversation with her fiancé about Superman.

And this is one part of the movie I loved. Instead of the characters being carbon copies of their comic book personas or even the characters from the previous movies, these characters have changed. These major character shifts for Superman and Lois are not paradoxical to the continuity of the previous movies. They are the same people but their experiences have changed them over the last five years.

Lois, once the single-minded ace reporter, now has a fiancé and a child to worry about. She’s settled down—somewhat. Superman, on the other hand, has learned that he’s alone in the universe so he’s desparate for companionship, despite the reassurances from Martha Kent and Jor-El that he’s not alone amongst the humans. Even knowing that Lois has a family, he still pursues her romantically. Instead of Superman’s usual black-and-white sense of morality, he’s putting himself in a morally questionable situation with Lois.

Lex Luthor, now played masterfully by Kevin Spacey kept most of his original traits. He’s smart, devious, and pure evil. Unlike with the other movies, however, Luthor’s evil is palpable at times. He nearly kills Superman with his own hands. He’s no longer a cartoonish villain. He’s a real bastard.

Although I’ve never been much of a fan of Parker Posey before, I loved her in the role as Kitty Kowalski, Lex Luthor’s female companion. She’s got some great one-liners and she plays off of Kevin Spacey like a pro. Her character also shows some emotional depth and moral conflict around the climax of the movie, which was pleasantly surprising to see.

Lex Luthor’s plan to create a new continent out of Kryptonian crystal and Kryptonite (killing billions in the process) is just contrived enough to be an authentic comic book supervillain plot but not too ridiculous as to detract from the story. It makes for some spectacular visuals as well—the crystals grow to form the land mass, and any time someone (whether Superman, Lex Luthor in his helicopter, or Lois and family in a seaplane) flies near the crystals, you can see them still growing. It’s a subtle effect but it assures us that the director didn’t forget any details just because the plot was moving along.

Combine all of the aspects of this movie and they make for a teriffic movie and one of the best superhero movies ever made—which is actually quite an accomplishment now that we have Batman Begins, Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, and X-Men and X2 to compare against.

Brokeback Mountain

Here now, a review for a movie that everyone else saw many months ago.

By all rights, I should have liked Brokeback Mountain. I mean, a movie about gay cowboys eating pudding (actually, gay shepherds eating beans, but why split hairs?)… what’s not to like? But for all of the hype surrounding this movie, it was terribly underwhelming.

I suppose I should give the filmmakers a bit of credit for at least making realistic gay characters. For quite some time, most gay characters in movies have been stereotypical charicatures either playing the role of villain, plucky comedy relief (aren’t gays hilarious?), or one-dimensional space-filler. However flawed, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist are multidimensional characters.

But the characters themselves are part of the reason I didn’t like this movie. Ennis, played by Heath Ledger, deserves no admiration or respect. We’re supposed to feel sorry for his character because of the hardships he faced as a teenager. But he emerges from the situation broken and bitter, and he carries that misery into his new family. He’s neglectful and a drunk. And when Ennis and his wife get divorced, he stays in his daughters’ lives. But even outside of his marriage he’s a terrible father and disappoints his children frequently. I got the feeling that his family would have been better off with him out of the picture; being there but being hurtful is worse than not being there at all.

A lot of the critics out there justified Ennis’ actions by saying he was caught up in an intolerant society and that it wasn’t his fault. But let’s say the love of his life was a black woman instead of another man. It would be just as salacious in those times as a gay relationship. Would his behavior be excusable then? I think those who would defend Ennis are promoting a double standard because the movie is about two gay men. But just because the movie is “groundbreaking” doesn’t mean the characters get a pass on anything they might be doing wrong.

For all he does in the movie, Jack—Jake Gyllenhaal—might as well not have a life outside of his relationship with Ennis. His marriage is a total sham. Unlike Ennis, whose homosexual feelings extend only to Jack, Jack is a gay man living a double life and his publicly-facing life is pretty uneventful. We see some friction between him and his in-laws but it doesn’t make him any more interesting of a character.

Because Ennis is unlikable and Jack is uninteresting, it’s hard to feel anything when something happens to them. I felt no emotion during the climax of the movie. What happens isn’t shocking, though it does come out of nowhere—partly because we don’t see what happened, we’re told about it. This violates the cardinal rule of storytelling: show, don’t tell. If you don’t experience what’s happening as it happens, you might as well be reading a newspaper. And, unfortunately for this movie, director Ang Lee violates this ever-important rule many times.

The movie suffers from a lack of flow resulting from telling instead of showing. There are a number of scenes in the movie that don’t add anything to the story. The movie seemed less a cohesive whole than a series of vignettes intended to depress the viewer. There are a lot of beautiful landscape shots of the Wyoming Rockies. It shows all of the drudgery of shepherding for the first 45 minutes with a little bit of plot thrown in here and there. The movie was based on a short story, and I have a feeling it would have been better served as a shorter movie—perhaps 90 minutes—rather than the tedious 134-minute film it turned out to be.

Another thing that bothered me about the movie was that at times I couldn’t understand what the characters were saying. Heath Ledger mumbled through many of his lines, which, combined with his deep voice and adopted Southern accent, made it very difficult to pick out everything he said. I was tempted at times to turn on the subtitles just so I could understand what he was saying. Maybe I’m being a little unfair to Ledger here. His thick accent and deep drawl were spot-on. And I know that there are people that don’t enunciate well (I’ve been known to mumble), but it doesn’t make for very good cinema when you have to adjust your volume and rewind the movie just to hear the dialog.

There wasn’t much for me to like about Brokeback Mountain. One thing I did like was the music. An acoustic guitar gave it a very Western sound, but it added an orchestra without feeling forced or awkward. The love theme, a melancholy but catchy guitar melody, provided more emotion to the screen than any of the characters. It may not have deserved the Oscar, but it did deserve its nomination.

Plus there was the bonus of Willie Nelson singing about gay cowboys during the end credits. That’s not something you hear every day.