Mind Journeys via Netflix: Japan

Let me just say up front that I am not a critical reviewer. Though I can be critical. But I tend to think of myself as an average person with an opinion, and I try to breakdown my opinions and provide some analysis.

Which is not to say that my reviews or opinions are objectively correct. Or even objective.

I may have mentioned that the purpose of these "reviews" (such as they are) is to study good, and bad writing or story-telling. And perhaps influence my writing.

That said, I also watch these series for personal interests, and because, this was late 2020 and early 2021, when the world was in lockdown, and there was not much travel between countries. And we have been travelling to Australia and Japan for holidays every year. So 2020 was a "lost" year.

And the only way to visit Japan, was via these shows.

I did not set out to find Japanese shows to assuage my unfulfilled need to travel. It just happened. And then these shows reminded me of times we were in Japan, and how much I miss travelling in Japan now.

Matrix's Truths

2014

The Matrix, Matrix Reloaded, and Matrix Revolutions were a series of movies that was mind-boggling at first, and then just boggling. It had such a profound effect that the Wah-Chow-Si brothers who made the movies, later became the Wah-Chow-Si siblings (one of them used the money he made from the movies to have a sex-change). But what does it all mean?

It took me more than 12 years of thinking about it, re-watching the movies, reading other people's critiques and over-analyses of the three movies, and I think I got it. And to save you 12 years of cognitive overload, here are the short answers.

Yes. Answers. Plural. Because Truth is never singular. At its purest form, Truth is at best a duality, yin-yang, positive-negative, matter-anti-matter, good-evil, light-dark.

Hyper-realistic paintings - critique (copying a photograph)

[This is a reply to a question about the painting ability of masters of the past and the "hyper-realism" painters. I thought it was an elegant reply, and the critique extends to other areas of art. For example dialogue. Sometimes you read an author and what jumps out at you is the realistic dialogue. And you try to write like him (or her). And then you realise actual conversations are horribly confusing and not very structured at all. What you mean by "realistic dialogue" is not that the writer was able to write detailed dialogue, but that he was able to capture the essence and spirit of what made the dialogue authentic.]

The biggest misconception among non artists and amateurs is that more detail equals more realism in art. 

Detail is not congruent with realism
 
The great artists of the past knew that detail without purpose was often the antithesis of realism. The “artists of today” that you speak of rely on it as a cheap gimmick. Copying pores on a face is not art. Anyone can blend an eye with ten thousand brush strokes. It takes true genius to convey realism with absolute economy of brush work. Art is about making executive decisions about composition, line, and mass

Realism is so much more than detail.