Mar 13
Nagabonar (Jadi) 2 or Nagabonar (becomes) 2. It’s a unique sort of sequel naming. It brought to my mind the smartness of such titles as Too Fast and Too Furious (which plays the sound /tu:/ meant to mean “too” with the fact that it is the sequel or the “two-th” (2nd) movie to Fast and Furious) or Unforgiven II (which, again, uses the play of the sound /tu:/ of the word ‘too,’ meaning ‘also,’ and ‘two’). Well, I hope you don’t find it confusing. Essentially, this kind of naming is cool.
Anyway, in this very dream, I’d like to talk about some issues concerning the novel version of Nagabonar (Jadi) 2 (henceforth, NJ2). I think I need to talk first about Nagabonar itself, the movie as well as the character. Nagabonar is one of few greatest movies in the history of Indonesian movies. It was published in 1987, starred by Mr. Deddy Mizwar (a senior Indonesian actor), scriptwritten by the late Mr. Asrul Sani (an author, movie director, and cultural thinker). The first movie made headlines and took Deddy Mizwar to win Citra Award (a prestigious movie award) somewhere around 1987 or 1988. Almost all adults (who live in cities or have access to TV networks) Continue reading »
Mar 13
Alright, brothers and sisters anywhere on Earth, listen up. I’ve got something to say here. I’ll play scholar now. Hehehe…And you, you and you, the shy one, please be nice. If you wanna go to the john, I’ll give you a minute. Okey then if you’re all ready. Lo and behold!
I just read a cool book by Dr. DJoko Saryono. This guy is a Doctor in Indonesian literature in the State University of Malang. The book is Pergulatan Estetika dalam Sastra Indonesia (or, let’s say, Twists and Turns in the Esthetics of Indonesian Literature). It could be that you, who live in Euro-austro-merican countries, have no ideas about how unique Indonesian people were in the past. I bet you don’t.
Look, Indonesian people were categorized as the so-termed ‘Oral Society’. By this term, Djoko wants to say that Indonesian people–or, archipelagic people, since the name Indonesia was not used until around the second decade of the twentieth century, hehehe…–lived with sense of literature kept alert in their mind. They were closely related with literature. In that age, the kind of literature which was pervasive was oral literature. People knew shadow puppet–the stories of which were commonly only written in the head of its puppeters–or parikan–a kind of poetry created, uttered, and modified by rural communities. Both kinds of literature, along with several other kinds, were created by some people, and then uttered by firsthand Continue reading »
