dustinkdye

I once heard a Chinese fable that went something like this:

A man found a strong horse and brought it home. His neighbors claimed he was so lucky, but the man replied, "Who can say what is good and what is bad?" The next day his son rode the horse and was thrown from it, breaking his leg. His neighbors lamented his bad luck, but the man said, "Who can say what is good and what is bad?" The following day, the army came through town to conscript soldiers, but the son was not taken on account of his broken leg.

That story encapsulates the spirit of the film Avalokitesvara, particularly that of the character Little Lotus (Chun Li). As the outcome of an action can't be known, it is better to act forthrightly on principles and accept the consequences than to give in to baser motivations or impulses. Doing such will lead to infinitely better outcomes than acting without principles. At least, that is what I took away from the film.

As for the quality of the film itself, I found the CGI dubious and the wire-fu sequences confusing. However, this was a character-driven drama rather than an action/adventure, and didn't rely solely on action or special effects. The action was purely in service to the story (they way it should be), so overall, this was an effective film, and will appeal to broader audiences than the Buddhist images or message would suggest.

For Prison Circle, director Kaori Sakagami obtained an unusual level of access to a Japanese prison to document an innovative rehabilitation intervention, known as the TC program. Participants in the TC program take time out each week to meet and talk in a structured setting. Topics included what led them to commit their crimes, their relationships, their victims' perspectives.

We learn the backgrounds of four TC subjects in some detail. Two common themes are mother issues and bullying. While all the offenders had a different mother-son relationship dynamic, all their relationships were maladaptive. I can't determine whether there is a causal relationship between dysfunctional mother-son relationships and crime, but it would seem such relationships don't produce well-adjusted men. Bullying is endemic in Japan, so it is not surprising the offenders were both bullied and bullies. As bullying is endemic, it must have been functional in Japan's not-too-distant past, when cooperation in an agrarian society was a matter of life and death, and one person doing their own thing could sabotage an entire village, but in today's modern economy, it is clearly pathological.

I had a couple questions watching the documentary. 1) How did the TC staff know their intervention would work? Was there research supporting the specific types of workshops they conducted? Or was the simple act of talking in a structured setting what worked, rather than the specific content of the conversations? Has there been a long-term program evaluation? It's stated the recidivism rate of the TC participants was half that of general prison population, but can that be attributed to the program itself? Or were the program's administrators cream skimming? Or was there a self-selection bias in the participants? Does this conclusion suggest the program can/should be scaled up? 2) How trustworthy are the subject themselves? Knowing the prison population has a disproportionate number of psychopaths, who are often adept liars, should we take their words at face-value? How do we know the director and ourselves aren't being had, a la Truman Capote in In Cold Blood?

Prison Circle is a unique look at uniquely Japanese prisons.