#134 Broken Flowers

Jim Jarmusch's latest underscores just how uncompromised the director's work has been and probably will remain. There's a mystery at the core of Broken Flowers, but Jarmusch doesn't give us the satisfaction of naming the killer in the drawing room on the last page. No, Jarmusch's film is deliberatlely vague with the whys and wherefores of the whodunnit -- in this case, who caught main character Don Johnston's baby batter back in the good old days, then taunted him 20 years later with an anonymous note warning that the son he fathered is on his trail.

The film retains many of Jarmusch's familiar touches. Scenes, often episodic feeling, fade like unfinished sentances abandoned by their speaker. Music plays an important role again. The languid grooves of Ethiopian composer Mulatu Astatke punctuate the film on a mixed CD that Murray's character totes from rental car to rental car as he combs the country for the lover that might have mothered his child.

Bill Murray delivers another world-weary performance. He did, after all, sign on to read more voice over for the Garfield sequel. Your shoulder would develop a slouch too.

The half-full theater I screened the movie in seemed full of shaking heads when the lights came up. I wonder how long it's going to take the American public to figure out that Mr. Murray's name on the marquee is no longer a guarantee that you'll be rolling in the aisles.

#133 Densha Otoko

Seeing that The 40-Year-Old Virgin, the story of a geek triumphant, is rocking the U.S. box office it's as good a time as any to turn you all on to how dorks are faring in the land of the rising sun.

The story of Densha Otoku (Train Man) began as a message board thread. Our hero, while riding the subway, inadvertantly saved a beautiful woman from being groped a drunken lech. The woman thanked him profusely and insisted on taking down his address so that she could send him a gift in return. This may not seem all that strange until you consider that Densha Otoku rarely, if ever talked to women. He was an otaku after all; a member of a chaste Japanese underclass who spend their time playing video games, worshiping anime characters. They don't get out much, hence the literal translation of otaku: "in the house."

Train Man had a hunch that the woman he'd rescued would contact him, so he rushed to his message board buddies to beg for help. And an Internet-centric take on Cyrano De Bergerac begins. The resulting message board thread became a best-selling novel, then a movie, four different manga and an exceptional television show (torrents here).

The Densha Otoku phenomenon is so pervasive that Napoleon Dynamite, a film with little chance to translate to Japanese audiences, is being released there with the title Bus Otoko.

But not all Japanese are pleased with this often saccharine story of the nerd who becomes a swan. Toru Honda, the author of Denpa Otoko (Radio Wave Guy), thinks that ditching your dorky ways for a woman is a cop out. His book posits that otaku live a near priestly lifestyle and that their love for anime characters and Jpop idols is a honorable expression. Densha Otoko`` is an otaku's surrender to love capitalism," he says. "What the main character should've done is turn the girl into another otaku and bring her to Akihabara.''

Either way, my people are getting their day in the sun. Maybe someday we'll merit our own super-cool neighborhood here in the states.