Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Injury of the day/week/life
"Scuba back" I dub thee. A lingering condition all apprentice scuba divers are afflicted with after a weekend spent weighed down by far more gear than strictly desirable. Sunday night I was okay, but when I woke up Monday morning I felt like someone nefarious had bolted a small anvil to my left shoulder blade. After a hot shower I prevailed upon my dive buddy from some elbow-related assistance, and felt far better. Unfortunately, the sore spot returned on Tuesday, and though much-diminished, it lingers on even into Wednesday afternoon.
Malaya's got a matching area of concern, but hers is on the right, and it's up higher, just above the scapula.
Fortunately/tragically, we're going to get a while to rest and heal up, since after spending Sunday night, Monday morning, and most of Tuesday feeling like she had water in her ears, Malaya went to the doctor Tuesday evening and found out that... she did have water in her ears.
Swimmer's ear, they call the condition, and it's basically a bacterial inflamation that must be treated with antiobiotics. And obviously enough, you can't go back into the water until it's all gone. At least two weeks, Malaya's doctor told her.
If you're wondering, wearing ear plugs or something like that is not an option when scuba diving. You have to keep your ears open since you are constantly equalizing the pressure in them (usually by pinching your nose shut and blowing hard), and if you don't do that you will rupture your ear drums, as well as experiencing agonizing pain due to the pressure changes in the air inside your head. And that's just one of the many playful aspects of immersing your body beneath more than a few meters of liquid!
Since we were supposed to finish our (initial) scuba training this weekend in Monterey, and Saturday arrives in slightly less than two weeks, that's off. Happily, our two dive instructors are very nice guys and they say it's no problem. We can finish our training with another instructor, or come along with them in a month or two when they next take a group through open water training. I would have liked to get it over with this weekend, but I must admit some relief at the prospect of not having to get up at 5am this weekend. And now that we'll be home this weekend, we might even have time to finally go see
V is for Vendetta, as we've been itching to do for the past two weeks.
Labels: scuba
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Scuba, writing, and more unnecessary words.
Now that I'm feeling better (Sat and Sun we were too tired to think; Monday we felt like survivors.) I remembered a few things I forgot to mention in yesterday's scuba-related complaint-fest. For one thing, I forgot to mention another fun reminder of the weekend. Sunburn!
There's good news; I'm nearly as fish-belly white as I was before the weekend, since we spent 98% of or time in the pool in a full body wetsuit, including booties (they're needed for the fins we own) and usually gloves as well (to get used to fastening/opening staps and buckles with them on). My face was uncovered though, and since most of our time was on the surface, I got a pretty nice rosy red glow. This despite the fact that I had a scuba mask on most of the time. Drawback of the nice, high-visibility, transparent plastic it's made from, I suppose. I was a bit red Saturday evening, enough to smear on some aloe vera (just cut a spear of the plant on the back patio; fresh stuff is sorta smelly, but far better than any lotion made from its extract). I thought Sunday would be no problem though, since we were supposed to wear the extra hooded addition to the wetsuit. That and it had been cloudy and drizzling on and off all day Saturday.
So of course Sunday was clear and bright and sunny all day, and we didn't have to put on the hoods and such until the second session of the day, and even then most of us didn't wear them all the time, since they were so hot and constricting. Thus leaving me more time to sunburn.
I'm not really red anymore, but I'm peeling a bit, and the white dots all over my face are combining with my stubble to make me look quite rugose. It's not my best look.
Also, as you could probably have predicted, my hopes of spending a few hours a day working on the novel were dashed. Kinda hard to write when you spend 95% of your waking time either learning to scuba dive, eating before and after scuba diving, or driving to and from the scuba diving destination. I did get an hour's work done Saturday morning, when I woke up at 5 and had some time before our 7am wake up, but other than that I hardly even had time to surf a bit in the evening before crashing gratefully into the bed. Yesterday was pretty much a recovery day; Malaya had to run some errands and spend some time with her mom, while I mostly just laid around the house, doing a bit of work but mostly catching up on Internet news and blogs and such.
Today though, things can get back to normal. I went to bed with Malaya around midnight, we slept pretty well, and after I woke up at 7 I dozed in bed for 45 minutes until the alarm went off, thinking about the scenes I'm about to write in the novel. It's kinda fun; I'm very near the end when all the plot threads come together and the biggest scenes of the book are all about to take place, bang, bang, bang. I wrote the opening chapter to this novel (in a modified form) nearly 4 years ago, and I've always known how the story was going to end; it was the middle that needed work, to get characters from point A to point X, with numerous stops in between. Now that I'm finally to the end, with the big payoff scenes I've had in my head for years, it's strange. I'm reading notes on images and events I wrote and dated in 2002.
Not so long by some standards; Stephen King went what, 30 years between Dark Tower 1 and Dark Tower 7? But it's the longest I've ever gone between writing down story notes and then actually getting back to expand and finalize them. I'm just happy to see that I still like most of the ideas, and that I managed to write the novel without changing the characters so much that my initial ideas for the ending were ruined. I seldom make it through a chapter without that problem, when the last 1/4 of the plot outline becomes useless due to changes in details I made while fleshing it out.
And yes, I'd hoped to be finished with this novel in December 2005, but better late than never, and I'm actually sort of looking forward to being done and being able to go back to the start to rewrite the first few overlong, rambling chapters. I'm going to have to clip out literally 200-300k words from chapters 2-4, which would be oh, 600 pages or more in manuscript form. That's pretty much discarding an entire novel of minor plot events and digressions, if you can belive it. No wonder this thing has taken me so long to write, with at least a third of it basically dead space. Not that I'll admit that in a decade, when it comes time to publish some sort of cash cow of an unexpurgated trilogy-length version of the novel. *cough*
Labels: scuba, the fantasy novel
Monday, March 27, 2006
Scuba!
Scuba Diving!
Or more accurately, "scuba sinking" since you don't go down headfirst, you descent slowly and under control so you can equalize your ears on the way down, etc. I won't get technical, at least not this time, but yeah, we were in the pool pretty much all day Saturday and Sunday, practicing all of the unfun, emergency exercises you've got to learn to get certified to go into the actual ocean and have actual fun.
They say that scuba isn't a sport that requires a great deal of strength or skill or endurance, and that may not be true for certified divers, but when you're learning it all at once... whoof. I have never been so tired as I was this weekend.
My weekend sleep times:
Friday: midnight - five am. Couldn't sleep any later.
Saturday: 9 - 6 am. In bed as soon as dinner was finished. Could have slept right beside the pool, if there had been a bed.
Sunday: 8 - 5am. I'm not sure I even lasted until 8. I could have gone to bed as soon as we got home and showered, but Malaya wanted a celebratory dinner out, and I managed to stay awake through that thanks only to free Pepsi refills.
We had to get up each day at 7am to get to the dive store by 8am, and we made it, more or less. Saturday we spent the first hour and a half getting ready. Trying out and renting wetsuits, BCDs, tanks, etc, and then learning to hook up the air to the tank to the vest, reading the pressure gauges, putting on all the wetsuit stuff, adjusting our masks and snorkels, etc. We were in the water until around 2pm to finish the first two sets of exercises, then after 30 minutes for lunch we got back in until nearly 6, and took all of our suits, air tanks, etc home, since we were due back Sunday at 8 and the shop didn't open until 11.
Saturday night though, we thought we knew what tired was. (We'd learn more about that Sunday, when we could add sore backs to fatigue.) Dragging home from the dive shop pool that evening, we tried to figure what was so tiring about it. We hadn't been to firefighter training, busy running up six flights of stairs with 50 pounds of hose on our shoulders. We were even standing in four feet of water most of the time. Scuba training is just slowly and steadily exhausting, thanks to the 25 pound weight belt, 40 pound tank, constricting wetsuit, slow movements as you push through the water, and perform a seemingly-endless litany of unfamiliar scuba skills, all of which must be concentrated on and done correctly before the instuctor will move on to the next item.
We got home after 7pm on Saturday, and I was literally in bed by 9, and asleep by 9:05. I stayed there, quite happily, until 7am Sunday, when we got up and ate and headed back for day two of the pool exercises, which ran until nearly 4pm. After that we came home, showered, washed our hair twice, went out for a celebratory Mexican dinner, and came back home, after which I promptly went to bed, this time by 8:30. *snore*
Sunday was even more tiring than Saturday, thanks to added fun of cold water gear. Our full body wetsuits were augmented by a second layer, which covers you from the knees up over the chest like a vest, and includes a hood that fits tightly enough that your hair hardly gets wet, even after ten minutes kneeling in the deep end. Everyone hated their hoods; they were tight, heavy, and basically made it feel like you had a weight on the back of your neck the whole time. I could hardly look down without fighting the stretching wetsuit, and that wears you out quickly.
We only wore them part of the time, since we were overheating in the sun on the surface in the heated pool, but it was plenty of time to learn how much we hated them. As the instructor said, "You sacrifice some comfort for warmth, in the Pacific." As Malaya said, "We're so going to Hawaii to dive."
In a perfect world, Sunday would have been done by early afternoon. In reality, there were delays galore as we all had to get more weights to counteract the added bouyancy of our extra suits, air tanks ran out, the more difficult proficiencies required multiple attempts, and so on. We ended up going from 8-4 without any break longer than a few minutes, and while the last 30 minutes were spent in the pool without any gear on, we had to swim 200 meters, and then tread water for 10 minutes as the final portions of our testing. Why they saved that for the time when we were all struggling simply to get in and out of the water, I couldn't tell you. I guess we now know we could swim that far or tread water for that long even after a really tiring day, though. And really, you don't need to be able to swim to scuba, since you've got floating stuff on, and even if you ran out of air you'd just drop your weight belt and float like a cork, in your highly-buoyant wetsuit.
We made it though, and a good thing, since this weekend the scuba training continues and concludes with 4 more dives into the ocean, down south in Monterey. The sleeping schedule fun will continue too, since we've got to be in the water at 8am both days. Which means we've got to leave here around 6 on Saturday, which means we've got to get up around 5am. On a weekend. This is recreation?
Happily, by this time next week we'll be registered and qualified sport divers, and will never need to take any scuba classes or exercises again, if we don't want to. (We probably will though, to get qualified for night diving, wreck diving, to learn to take underwater photos, qualify as rescue divers, etc.)
I can't really recommend scuba yet, since aside from a few minutes of floating weightlessly near the bottom of the pool, it's been nothing but expensive equipment and toil, thus far. We're sticking with it for now, with most of our training already done, and we keep telling each other that this is just the learning, and of course it's not much fun. It's all worst case scenario stuff now, with all skills being practiced that we will hopefully never use again. After all, there's no real reason you'd ever take off your weight belt, or rip off your mask underwater, or remove your BCD/tank, or run out of air and have to share a regulator with your dive buddy. You just have to learn and practice what to do in those situations, just in case disaster strikes.
It's exhausting and there's so much to learn, and it adds up. Nothing is that hard by itself, but it's time-consuming and tiring. Nothing is that individually challenging, you've just got to do it correctly, and when you're not used to being underwater, breathing from a tank, etc, it's a lot to manage at once. And you're doing one new thing after another for like 3 or 4 or 7 hours straight. It gets really hard to maintain concentration, and on Sunday, while we were standing around, sweating in the hot wetsuits, bent over with 60 or 70 pounds on our backs, I gained rapid insight into why the instructors take off their tanks and weight belts the first chance they get, and put them back on only when they absolutely need them on.
As for learning scuba, I definitely recommend that if you want to learn it, you do not do it as we're doing it. We took classes through a local college that does not have a pool or diving equipment to use there. So we did all the bookwork in advance, a chapter a week over 5 weeks, and then had all 5 units of water learning to cram into one weekend. Exhausting and stressful and sleep-depriving. The usual way to learn is at a dive shop, on a three week schedule. You do two classes a week that way, with a pool session after each one. So you're learning the skills as you read about them, and with just 2-3 hours in the water each time, you're not exhausting yourself with a full day in the water.
Numerous times this weekend, Malaya and/or me were quite ready to take all of that shit off and never think about scuba again. It's just so tiring to stand there in all that gear, or to kneel at the bottom of the deep end for 10 more minutes, sucking air and trying to keep your breathing slow while waiting for other people to get their weight belt recovery roll down, or manage to put their BCD back on under water, or whatever.
It should all be a lot more fun next weekend though, and then vastly more fun when we someday get to vacation somewhere warm and tropical, where we can dive in just a light wetsuit. Wearing the double layer stuff (as we were doing for testing, not warmth, at least not while in the heated pool) is like being a little kid in a heavy snow suit, where you hardly feel like you can move your arms, or bend over forward, and with maybe 60 pounds of gear on your back/around your waist, you can easily imagine falling over backwards and not being able to get back up by yourself.
Hopefully this weekend will be a lot less tiring, since we've already learned most of the hard stuff, and just have to prove we can do it in deeper water, with a current. The ocean should be a lot more fun too, with rocks and fish and stuff to look at, rather than just a dirty swimming pool. With any luck, by this time next week I'll be posting a raving blog entry about the joy of scuba, and discussing how eager we are to go do it again somewhere for real, etc.Labels: scuba
Movie Review: Escaflowne, the Movie
Escaflowne the Movie is a stand alone feature-length film based on/inspired by the 26 episode anime TV series. These and other facts about the film were learned
after watching the film, while skimming over the generally-dissatisfied
Amazon.com reader reviews.
I knew nothing about Escaflowne before I saw the film, but even from this one viewing, it was pretty clear to me that it was based on a TV series that had a great deal more depth than the film. Lots of characters pop up for a scene or two, then vanish, many characters clearly have relationships and back stories that are not shown or even hinted at in the film, and rather than a complete film, this one seems like a sort of rapid fire introduction to the world of Escaflowne, with an epic plot awkwardly shoehorned in. I think the film was designed primarily to appeal to fans of the series, since it tries to throw in a little of everything, but never includes enough of it to satisfy a new viewer.
To the scores, which are
explained here.
Escaflowne the Movie
Script/Story: 3
Characters: 4
Combat Realism: 6
Humor: NA
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 3
Overall: 4.5
Going into this film, I'd long heard of Escaflowne as one of the more popular Anime series, but had never seen it and knew nothing about it. Literally nothing; it might have been futuristic cops in Tokyo, Sci-Fi robots battling alien invaders, samurai fantasy from the 1200s, or damn near any of the other common anime world settings. So I was completely new to everything, and found myself liking the overall world and concept far more than the particulars of this story. The world and fiction and setting and magic and everything in the story were great. How they were used was very far from living up to their potential, unfortunately.
In an odd way, it reminded me of the other DVD I grabbed at the library when I got
Escaflowne the Movie;
The Chronicles of Riddick. In my initial review of Riddick
I gave it a 3.5/10, and said it looked gorgeous and had some good action set pieces, but that it was ruined by a completely worthless plot, an excess of unimportant sub-characters, and a generally wandering, plotless story line. A description that can be applied to
Escaflowne the Movie, unfortunately.
I love the world concept of the story, even though it's pretty cheesy. The story takes place largely on a mythical fantasy steampunk sort of world. They've got gunpowder and cannons and lots of dirigibles and steam machinery here and there, but no one has a firearm or rifle, and everyone fights with swords and magic, while riding horses. And there are giant combat robots like in every anime, except these are somehow ancient living suits of dragonarmor, or something like that, and they fight with swords, except when one uses a flamethrower sort of thing.
Basically the series creators threw together everything cool they could think of. They wanted huge flying machines, sword fights, cannons, air pirates, magic, gunpowder, half-human animal things, and mech battles. Rifles and guns aren't any fun in fiction since they're so impersonal and hit from a distance, so Escaflowne doesn't include those; just swords, since they're hella cool and close range.
Most of those elements are used pretty well, too. The film's weakness is from the characters, all of whom are painfully stupid in at least one way, and the story, which is weak and superficial and very unfocused.
Script/Story: 3Nice concept, lame execution. The film opens with a nice action piece as a little guy falls from the sky, lands on a gigantic dirigible, and cuts down most of the crew in vicious sword combat, before running down into the hold (not that a blimp that size could have one) and finding a gigantic suit of armor which looks exactly like a humanoid robot mech as seen in every futuristic anime ever. He begins chanting about reawakening it and saying his dragon blood calls to it, etc.
The film then cuts to modern day Japan, where Hitomi, a schoolgirl with legs as improbably long as her skirt is impossible short, is lying napping in the sun. Another schoolgirl wakes her and conversation ensues. Turns out Hitomi is super bored, mildly-suicidal, wants the world to just fade away, is cutting all of her classes, quit the track team, etc. She drives the other girl away after a bit, and then in a series of shots that are either dreams or weirdness happening, sees herself standing in a stadium as it fills with water, washing her away. Next thing she knows she's trapped inside a small space as the water drains, and as the viewer soon realizes, she's actually in the driver's seat in the giant robot the guy on the blimp was trying to awaken earlier in the film.
The blimp gets shot down, it crashes, the guy (who we eventually learn is named Van) survives, the robot walks out, and when he faces it the robot stops, the cockpit opens, and the very confused Hitomi is dumped out, after which the robot/suit of armor vanishes in a pretty show of lights. We soon learn that Hitomi is apparently a person of prophecy, the Goddess of the Moon, who will bring about the destruction of their entire world. (Which has both the moon and the earth visible in orbit around it, as if it's something like a sister planet to our Earth.)
From there many battles ensue, we learn that Van's the younger brother and was destined to be king until his older brother took power and drove him out, and that the older brother has built a huge army and destroyed most of their world. The older brother wants the suit of magical armor, which is called Escaflowne, to destroy the whole world, and that he and Van are both bored and lonely and that they hate the world, just like Hatori did before she got pulled into their world. The older brother just wants to awaken the suit of dragon armor so he can use it to destroy the world, like the prophecy says, and he knows he needs the Goddess of the Moon to do it. Van just wants to kill his older brother, and doesn't really care about the world one way or the other.
Characters: 4Mostly archetypes, and a weird bunch. Basically, all of the minor characters are much more interesting than the main ones. Hatori and Van are the two most-seen characters, and while Van is just the supremely talented 15 y/o impetuous good-hearted hero you see in every anime, Hatori is actively horrible. She does nothing during her opening scenes in Japan but whine about being bored, and then when she finds herself in another world she says little more than, "Where am I? I don't understand. I'm sorry." over and over again. She is so passive and so worthless it's impossible to root for her. I just wanted to shake her, and I think most modern females watching this film would hate Hatori with a passion. I know Malaya would, so it's just as well that I watched this film while she was not home, since she'd never have sat through it.
Eventually Hatori changes, shaking off her boredom and wanting to make other lonely people feel that they've got someone with them. Sadly, there's no real reason given for this change, other than that the plot requires it. And she's not much less-annoying once she's no longer morose, either.
The lesser characters in the film are all much more interesting than the main ones, though that might be simply because they're not seen enough to get boring. The older brother, Folken, is quiet and brooding and just flies around in his magical castle, speaking to some sort of prophetic elf woman. He's enslaved or conscripted lots of native species, including the last survivors of various half-human clans. Lion-headed guys, jackal-human things who are mad bombers, and more. None of whom ever get more than a few seconds of screen time.
The rebels, a group that Van hangs with and that Hitori falls into, are all quite colorful too. There's a knife-throwing guy, a screwy catgirl who loves animals, a confident and well-armed woman they all call the princess, a rebel leader who seems to be the best fighter in the film, an old fortune teller no one much cares for, and so on. None of these people get more than minute or two of screen time either, and none of them ever amount to anything in the larger scheme of the plot.
Combat Realism: 6Not really an appropriate rating for this anime, since all the combat is very stylized. Bit slashes with swords, robots fighting and knocking over cities, etc. There are some very cool flying scenes, and some magical battles that are nicely-done though, with fast "burn a trench through the earth on the way to the target" type spells thrown.
Humor: NAHorror: NAEye Candy: 8It's a very good-looking and well-drawn film. Much better than most anime, though they did overdo the fader tool a bit. There must be a dozen sunset scenes in the film, all with one end of the screen bathed in a glorious red/orange/yellow, and the other a deep purple/blue. The machines look nice though, the blimps are fun, the cities have nice architecture, the wildernesses are appropriately wild and untamed, and so on.
Fun Factor: 5A generous rating. I would be much more bored the second time though, and I didn't enjoy this one enough to make an effort to watch the original series.
Replayability: 3Not likely. It had good moments, but too few and far between, and most of them were very quick. It's not action porn along the lines of Ninja Scroll either, where you can count on a big action/fight scene every five or ten minutes. So I can't see watching it all again for the story, and the best scenes aren't really good enough to fast forward just to see, either.
Overall: 4.5It's not bad, but it's not good. A lot of this score is on potential, since you can see it's got a lot of good ideas and could have been a really cool film. They just needed to spend a lot more time on the epic struggle of the plot, and far less on the whiny teenagers, who never even do anything. They never even fall in love; just friends who walk along scenic paths together while muttering platitudes about always being there for each other.
A great script could have worked in enough of the minor characters to make them interesting, and could have given them some part to play in the grand finale. A grand finale that didn't suck would have been nice, too. As it is no one but Hatori and Van really matter over the last 30 minutes, and the Escaflowne vs. Escaflowne mech battle, and the big brother vs. brother showdown the movie seems to be building towards, are both total let downs. The brother vs. brother one especially, and the epilogue isn't even any good, with things just sort of ending, and Hatori apparently returning to Earth, though we never even get the seemingly-requisite scene of her making up with her girlfriend and living life with newfound purpose and desire.
Pretty disappointing, on the whole.
Labels: movie review
Friday, March 24, 2006
Book Review: Caught Stealing
Apologies for the sparse posting of late. During the past couple of weeks I've repeatedly gone two or three days without even once thinking about blogging, an experience I had not experienced for many, many months. I've been busy with some RL stuff, and some work on another website that's still far from ready for public consumption, but mostly I've just been lazy, and devoting all/most of my writing time/energy to my nearing-completion novel.
The sad part is that I've got like 5 reviews all written up, or nearly written up, and could have been pasting those in for free content. I just forgot. So anyway, here's one of those, and I'd like to say there will be more blogging soon, but it's unlikely. We're doing our scuba class pool testing this weekend, and we're going to be in the water literally from 8am-4pm both Saturday and Sunday, learning all the basic skills to keep us from not dying once we're 60 or 80 or 100 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. I'll more-than-likely blog about that experience afterwards, but since I want to still get a few hours of work done on my novel each day, I will probably be prioritizing.
Besides, how fascinating would it really be to read about noobs trying on wetsuits and fumbling with their BCDs and weight equalization issues in a swimming pool? It'll be much more fun once we're doing the same thing in the ocean in 3 weeks, and at that point I'll be able to (with any luck) look back on this and laugh.
Anyway, to the aforementioned book review:
A crime thriller I read after seeing it highly-recommended in Entertainment Weekly. I wasn't disappointed, but I certainly wouldn’t give it the A- they did.
To the scores:
Caught Stealing, by Charlie Huston, (2005)
Plot: 7
Concept: 7
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/6
Characters: 6
Fun Factor: 4
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 4
Overall: 6
I regularly see books recommended in the reviews of EW, and on the rare occasions that they overlap one of my areas of interest, I check to see if the Contra Costa County Library system has them, and if so I order them. The problem is that these books are usually brand new, and I therefore wind up on a wait list. And by the time the book finally comes to me, 3 or 4 months after I requested it, I seldom have any memory of the review, or even ordering the book at all. I always at least start reading them though, as much to fill my mind with the work of other writers as to enjoy the books themselves.
This one wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either, and I couldn't really say what would have made it better. It's supposed to be a thriller, but I never really felt much excitement, just a sort of sickness at the horrendous violence and regular scenes of torture and death. I never rooted for the main character, I didn't buy his slow turn from victim to slick criminal avenger, and the scenes that were supposed to be absurd, Tarentino-esque chases and escapes were so perfectly wacky and contrived that they didn't seem real.
The story is about Hank Thompson, a regular guy in NYC who agrees to take care of his neighbor's cat for a few days when the neighbor has to head out of town on an emergency visit to his sick father. Hank's a bartender and an alcoholic, and the day after he gets the cat he's beaten so badly by a pair of Russian mobsters that his kidney ruptures and he nearly dies. When he returns from the hospital he finds a key of some sort hidden under the blanket in the cat's bed, then gets so blindly drunk that he wakes up the next day unable to remember what he did with the key.
This becomes a problem when a bunch of low life gangsters turn up, led by a crooked cop who will do anything to Hank, or the cat, to find out where the key went. Hank and the cat are tortured (the cat torture scene probably caused umpteen readers to close the book and go no further), but Hank escapes and survives. Much madcap action continues, with Hank being repeatedly taken captive by two warring factions of criminals, working with one side and then the other, stalling and hiding the key, and so on. A huge stash of money eventually comes into play, Hank begins to harden and fight back, the impossibly-wonderful and doglike cat walks around in a cast, and plot twists ensue.
I think the raw story of this one had potential to be a noir masterpiece, and that the writing is what kept it from working, for me at least. I just never really cared about any of the characters, whether good or bad, and didn't sense much rising action. There is a climax, and a cute resolution, and the whole story takes place in just three days, as the baseball season ends and Hank's favorite team scratches and claws for a playoff spot.
Caught Stealing has a lot of nice elements, and the outline was probably brilliant; the author just isn't quite good enough to pull it off with a light touch, or gritty enough to make it sing with tension and thrills.
Or perhaps it's just me that never felt involved with the book or sympathetic towards the main character or much interested in the bad guy characters. Witness the book's
4/5 star rating from 30 reviews on Amazon.com, with most of the most-helpful reviews 5-star scores. Especially when you consider that most of the lower scores are from people who voted low solely because of the constant gratuitous violence.
As I scanned the reviews, I found myself gravitating most towards
this one-star review (link to the reviewer's page, since Amazon doesn't support direct links to individual reviews) since even though I don't agree with his score, I think his description is spot on.
A cartoon of a book, June 26, 2005
Reviewer: John R. Sumser
The level of violence in this book reminds me of Daffy Duck-Elmer Fudd cartoons, and the hero of this story (a child-man who can't get over high school disappointments) does a pretty good Daffy.
I get the sense the book was written in a week or two, by a bunch of people drinking beer in front of a computer, laughing and asking each other, "So, what should we make happen next?" Think, Jack Kerouac goes hard-boiled, and you'll have this book . . . which is quite a complement if you liked On the Road.
But I got bored by the whole single-sheet of paper challenge, and long before Caught Stealing was anywhere near resolved I gave up on the and-now-guess-what-happens approach.
It could be my problem. I read too many student papers with the first-this-happened-then-this-happened-then-this-happened as the structure to read it in my leisure time.
His last paragraph does a very good job summing up my reaction to the plot of
Caught Stealing, and in far fewer words. This book felt like a lot of imaginatively-weird, but loosely-related events that were all defensible on their own, but that didn't feel like a cohesive whole when grouped together, and that never felt like they were rising towards a climax. In part, I think the book's breakneck pace worked against it, since with a new crisis situation every chapter, there was never any time for introspection or cooling down. Readers/viewers need breaks from "action and more action" from time to time, or the impact scenes lose their impact. That definitely happened to me with this novel, since by the end I had no reaction at all to the escalating violence and drama, since that's all I'd read for the past 250 pages.
A feeling of cohesiveness and action that rises to a climax, rather than just bubbling along steadily isn't mandatory in a novel, or a film, but it certainly helps elevate the good ones above the average.
Labels: book review
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Weekend Activities
Not activities for us, unfortunately. I slept all day and worked all night, and Malaya was out at Kali or family-related events Friday night and pretty much all day Saturday and Sunday. When you get right down to it, our highlight highlight was eating frozen pizza late Friday night. And really good Chinese food Monday evening, after doing the laundry. Whee.
If we had gone out though, we would have seen
V is for Vendetta. Plenty of other people have; it made $26m for the weekend, and it's getting pretty good reviews too;
75% on RT, which is unusually high for a comic book/action movie. (Not that
Vendetta is really an action movie.) It's a surprisingly high review score for this film in particular, since it's quite radical and potentially polarizing, with an obsessed vigilante bomber terrorist as the hero. True, he's fighting against an evil, totalitarian government, but the concept that a government in a modern country like the UK could be controlling and dangerous enough that it would need to be fought against and bombed is pretty radical, for some.
And while most of the critics like the film, and had no problem with the imagery or metaphor, some reviewers dislike it exactly for that aspect. Like Rush Limbaugh reviewing a Michael Moore film, they're automatically going to hate it on ideological principles that have nothing to do with the film's actual content or style. Take
this review from a self-proclaimed conservative film site. Good luck reading through the entire screed, but the reviewer basically takes every aspect of
Vendetta, compares it to something current in the US, and says liberals are idiots for thinking the world is anything at all like what they think it's like. A quote to give you a sense of the review's argumentative brilliance:
Note: like all Left-Wing fear-mongering, this films likes to erroneously equate the extreme Religious Right with mainstream Conservatism, which would be like equating NAMBLA with mainstream Liberalism.
Yes, because you see Democratic politicians just lining up to speak at child molester conventions, the way Republicans do with the AFA and Christian Coalition, and all the rest.
Furthermore, and it's a pretty easy argument to make, but I'll make it anyway: if a fictional film set in the future, in the UK, with and evil, terrorism-hyping, freedom-destroying, madly-Christian, anti-gay, lying, manipulative, totalitarian government makes you crazy since you're sure it's all about your beloved Bush Administration... that says a lot more about you and Bush than it says about
V for Vendetta. And what it says is scary.
Elsewhere, some serious reviewers have taken a similar tact, but with a lot more subtlety, of course. David Denby of the New Yorker has been pointed out by some, for
his sniffy comments. I thought he was fairly balanced on this one, or at least did a good job of hiding his pro-Bush = anti-
Vendetta sentiments. His review isn't very honest, since he cherry-picks details to harp on and does it inconsistently. (He slags the comic for being overly-radical and divorced from reality when it was written, then slags the Wacky-brothers for making the updated version too close to reality.) But at lest he doesn't spoil the film.
I've seen a lot of that lately, and I wish I'd saved the reviews, but the practice seems to be to attack a film you don't like (especially one you disagree with ideologically) with not only a negative review, but with indiscriminate use of spoilers. Perhaps the logic is that since people like to read nasty reviews, even people who don't agree with your review will take a look, and perhaps be turned off to seeing the film once they know every last twist and turn of the plot.
In that light, it's ironic that the most-enthusiastic Vendetta review I've yet seen
is this one, by some guy with a super hero-themed blog. While he's got some good stuff to say about
Vendetta, I strongly recommend that you
do not read his post, since he not only kills the fatted spoiler calf, he slings its entrails like a steam-powered trebuchet. Every major plot twist (most of which you can discern from the trailer and the TV ads) is laid bare, and plenty of minor ones too; stuff I haven't seen mentioned in any other reviews. Since you know, they don't want to ruin the film for people who haven't seen it yet.
I did get a laugh from his post though, or rather from a comment, after I stopped reading it halfway down and skipped to the end:
The word you're looking for is "spoiler". Please don't forget it in the future.
I'll give the blogger credit for replying to this comment, even though his reply guarantees I'll never read a word about upcoming book/movie on his site again.
Spoiler, shmoiler.... I presume when I read or write a review of a book or movie that there will be a discussion of the plot, unless the plot is somehow irrelevent, in which case the book or movie is probably not worth reading or seeing.
Well of course. Every review has to give at least some plot detail, to ground the comments in some shared reality. But there's a huge difference between saying
Vendetta is about a mysterious vigilante fighting a corrupt and evil totalitarian regime, and telling us why he's fighting, how he meets Natalie Portman's character, what his methods are, whether he succeeds, what their relationship is, and how the entire film ends. If you can't handle a "discussion of the plot" without throwing the entire carcass on the slab, then you probably shouldn't be writing movie reviews; at least not ones without massive spoiler warnings.
Is it petty of me to now want to find out what films this guy is looking forward to, see them first, and send him stealth emails with bullet lists of every key plot point?
At any rate, Malaya and me still want to see
Vendetta, and hope we'll get the chance sometime this week. Perhaps at a matinee Wed or Fri. It's iffy though; she's been very busy with work and other things lately, and I've been working on a near-vampire schedule, getting a lot of fiction done but staying up until 8 or 9am to do it. So our overlapping awake/free time hasn't been real extensive.
We did get to see a film Monday night, but it was just a DVD. Serenity, which we enjoyed in the theaters, got for $10 used at Blockbuster, and really, really enjoyed. It was better the 2nd time, actually, since neither of us knew anything about Firefly going into the film, and therefore spent half the movie trying to figure if we liked their Old West talkin' style Western in space. The second time we knew where it was going and what was going to happen, but that just freed us up to enjoy the events and acting and dialogue. It's a damn shame that film wasn't a bigger hit, since we would love to see sequels. We might even buy the DVD of the original show, and I
never watch TV series on DVD. Or on TV, for that matter.
Elsewhere over the weekend, the college basketball tournament began. Aside from a year of slight interest in UNLV back in their Larry Johnson/Stacy Augman/National Championship prime, I've never given a damn about the collegiate game. And since my current interest in the pro game is also at an ebb, I'm paying little attention to "March Madness." I love college football, largely since it's so much more wide open and (therefore) entertaining than pro football, but college basketball seems to be almost the opposite. Like 9 of the 10 guys on the court always seem to be about 6 foot 5, the college coaches always seem to have an almost military fanaticism for control and discipline and order, and like one player in two hundred has the skill to dribble drive or break down the opposing defense. So you get endless possessions of 20 looping backwards passes before the shotclock runs down and necessitates a desperation drive/shot, followed by a mad leaping scramble of equally-tall guys fighting for the rebound. The only college games I ever have any interest in are ones with an underdog trying to pull off an upset, and even those are pretty much unwatchable, since the last minute of every college game features a minimum of 6 time outs, often called two or three in a row.
A great deal of modern sports coaching seems to be about looking like you're trying hard. Coaches all do the same thing, and all try to look intense doing it, so then even if they lose, it's CYA material. "But look how many time outs I called and how much I screamed during them? You can't fire me when I'm making such an effort!" The Phil Jackson "let them play through a bad stretch and find leadership on the court." style of coaching is just unheard of in the college ranks. And it's pretty uncommon in the pros too, for that matter. So you get overcoached teams running around in circles, all doing the same thing with players all about the same size/talent, and since I don't have any colleges I care about enough to root for (just against, in a few cases), why watch?
Especially when watching a #13 seed leading a #4 seed by 2 with :55 seconds left entails 20 minutes of TV time, of which 19 are spent watching commercials, coaches gesticulating, or illiterate 18 y/o's missing the front half of "1 and 1" free throws.
I do check the scores though, and sometimes watch a bit of the highlights on ESPN, and I enjoyed the Men's Tournament for all the upsets. None of the top seeds lost in the first two rounds, but it makes me happy when I look
at the bracket and see all of those #2 and #3 and #4 seeds going home after a round or two, tails between their legs, hopes and dreams running down their thighs.
#3 Iowa lost to #14 Northwestern State, #4 Kansas and #5 Pittsburgh both lost to #13 Bradley, #3 UNC lost to #13 George Mason, and more. This year some of the TV guys (who are obviously biased towards big name schools, since they get higher ratings) ripped the NCAA selection committee for picking a lot of #2 teams from small conferences instead of packing the tournament with the usual bunch of #3-#6 teams from big conferences. Wonder how that crow tastes?
It's pretty clear, unless this is just a one-year anomaly, that the talent base is spread very widely and very thinly across the nation's top men's college teams. In the old days top teams had seniors playing, with very good freshmen and sophomores on the bench. Now the best teams stay the best forever because they get the best recruits, but with every guy listening to greedy agents and bolting for the pros after a year or two, the turnover is so fast that any team can catch lightning in a bottle and have a great year or two. (Before their key players go pro/graduate/flunk out, and they have no All-American recruits to replace them with.) Last year's champs, UNC, lost their top 7 players to graduation or the pros, and were playing like four freshmen half the time this season. That made their second round loss somewhat predictable, though no less enjoyable. Ahh schadenfreude, my old friend.
On the other hand, there are clearly
not 64 quality women's college basketball teams in the US. Nor would you expect there to be, without a big money pro league sucking them away at 18 and 19, and far fewer women playing high school basketball than men. The women have yet to complete their second round games, but in the first round every single #1, 2, 3, and 4 seed won, with the biggest "upset" #5 NC State falling by 10 to #12 Tulsa, a team that actually had a much better record on the season: 26-5 vs. 19-12, albeit in a smaller conference/against lesser competition.
More tellingly, the gap between best and worst is even larger. In the first round the four #1 seeds play the four #16 seeds, the four #2 seeds play the four #15 seeds, and so on. All the men's #1 and #2 seeds won their first round games, but other than UCLA's 34 point blow out over Monmouth (?), there wasn't a game decided by more than 16 points, and most of them were around 10 points. #2 Tennessee sneaked past unknown Winthrop , 63-61. (And then lost to #7 Wichita in the 2nd round, making you wonder how they got a #2 seed.)
Check out these first round scores for the women. 75-51, 102-54, 95-54, 96-27 (
really), 77-53, 72-48, etc. I guess they've got to play the games, but really, is there a need for 64 teams, when you get first round mismatches like these? How about going back to 32 and a hope for some interesting matchups before the 3rd round? Or 48, and giving the top 16 a bye while the rest of the chaff shakes itself clean?
Personally, I could care. Given how I feel about the men's game, I can't imagine I'll ever watch a women's college basketball game, no matter who's playing. But it doesn't look good for the sport when you've got blowouts of this level in your championship tournament. It's like a team from the local rec center taking on the Lakers. Although, if the amateurs just doubled Kobe the whole game, that might not be such a bad matchup.
Next weekend promises to be a lot more interesting, since we'll be spending all day Saturday and Sunday in a swimming pool. Yes, it's still cold here, but since we'll be in wetsuits and scuba gear, I doubt we'll mind.
You see, we have taking a scuba diving class for the past month, and we'll have the book portion completely finished after Wednesday night, leaving just our weekend of pool classes, and then our open water test down in Monterey. After that (if all goes well) we'll be PADI certified open water divers, free to rent equipment and explore the watery depths anywhere in the world. (So long as we don't go deeper than 60 feet, or into any wrecks or caves, or at night, etc. They have other, more expensive classes to get that sort of training, you see.)
Though we've never been yet, we certainly hope we enjoy scuba diving -- with over $700 spent thus far, each, we'd better find a way to get out and use our damn equipment again. No, it's not a real affordable hobby, and our money only went for the class fees, and then fins, snorkels (prescription for Malaya), masks, booties, gloves, dive knives, weights, weight belts, and carrying bags. We get free rentals (for our pool and open water tests) on the wetsuit, hood, BCD, and tank from the shop we're taking the classes through, which saves us $50 a pop for the rental. If we actually want to buy, we're looking at $200+ for a wetsuit, and way, way more for the breathing equipment. Cheap BCDs (the vest/jacket thing that inflates with air, along with the hoses and other parts) run over $1200, with quality ones $2000 and up, and that doesn't include the tank, air refills, and yearly tank inspections. Not to mention plane tickets to Australia, dive boat rentals, and shark-related taxidermy fees.
I'll blog more on scuba stuff next week, I suspect. So far, the biggest thing I've learned in scuba class should come as no surprise to anyone. Pretty much every single thing you've ever seen divers do in a James Bond movie... is completely bullshit.
Labels: basketball, scuba, v for vendetta
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Scientology in the news.
I'm sure you've heard the news by now that
Chef has quit South Park, (presumably due to pressure from higher ups in Scientology) and the news that Tom Cruise pressured
Comedy Central to cancel a rerun of the Tom Cruise spoofing episode (downloadable in bit torrent
from Operation Clambake). Coincidentally, there's a long article about Scientology in the new issue of Rolling Stone, and happily
it's available online.
As I read that article, and skimmed once again over some of the very depressing Scientology articles on Xenu.net, I got to thinking. What's
the best way to rescue people from cults? And to keep them from joining up in the first place? Can anything really be done? After all, there will always be people with weaknesses and a need to be told what to do, or mentally unstable people, and there will always be controlling evil people who enjoy having power over others. In that light, aren't cults, of whatever scale, inevitable? They're almost symbiotic, in the relations they foster between controllers and controllees, and if good fortune (or time travel) had intervened and culled L. Ron "Leper Messiah" Hubbard back in the 50s, before he got the business of Scientology rolling, the people currently wasting their lives with its bad sci-fi bullshit would probably just be wasting their lives with some other type of nonsense. Besides, as far as cults go, Scientology is pretty harmless; they're a huge for-profit scam, and they fuck up your head horribly, but at least they're not stockpiling machine guns or marrying off 11 y/o's to some self-proclaimed prophet,
Branch Dividian style.
My question though, was what could be done about cults.
Postulate a modern, free nation run by enlightened atheists, or brights, or rationalists, or whatever you want to call them/us/me. So the leaders want to keep people from wasting their lives in thrall to various fairy tales. Who decides which cults/religions/superstitions are allowed? Is there a membership number cut off? Comparative evaluation of the potential legitimacy of their mythologies? Objective analysis of the positive and negative aspects of their belief systems and the behaviour of their adherents?
I don't see how any of those things would be remotely feasible, but just assuming that they were, and that dangerous cults were banned, and that there was some workable and legal definition of "dangerous" and "cult" ...how would it be enforced? You can't stop people from believing in something, so you'd have to go by their behavior, which would entail monitoring the movements of vast numbers of citizens, watching them to see where they went and who they hung out with, and making sure they didn't ongregate in unapproved locations. You'd also need an army of undercover operatives to infiltrate every organization, secret police to detain suspects for questioning, re-education camps to try and "cure" people of their delusions and illegal beliefs, etc. Congrats! You've just recreated Soviet Eastern Europe, and established every abhorrent aspect of a totalitarian regime, while trying only to help people.
To mangle a metaphor, when thought crime is enforced, only criminals will think.
In other words, there's not much any democratic government can do about cults or religions that's not being done now. Draconian crackdowns and controls on allowed beliefs are a greater evil than the cults themselves, and if you want to live in a free society you've got to allow free association and free belief/disbelief. You can obviously hold people responsible for their actions, and if a cult's stockpiling weapons and preaching race wars or armageddon, you can raid them and imprison their leaders. But how do you know what they're preaching if you don't infiltrate them with an undercover operative, and actually taking legal action is a very extreme case with a very high potential for disaster. Even assuming it doesn't turn into a massacre, and that they don't see you coming and blow away a bunch of inept ATF agents before holing up in their compound for a month or two. Besides, even if the raid goes off smoothly it might do more harm than good, as you decapitate the organization by arresting the leader, while inadvertantly sending his unbalanced disciples spinning off in a rage of persecution.
So yes, the central tenants of Scientology are even more ridiculous than those of other religions (though that's a fairly-debatable point), and it's a tragedy that tens of thousands of people have such a need to be told what to do and to think that they'll throw away decades of their lives and pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to receive the wretched imaginings of 4th rate hack of a sci-fi writer. But in a free society, that's their right. They're even allowed to bring up their children in a brainwashed state, evil and immoral though their actions might seem to the rest of us.
In closing, here's a pithy, unsourced, and tangentially-related quote I read recently. "Atheism is a religion in the same way not collecting stamps is a hobby."
Labels: atheism, scientology
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Not the best idea...
It sounds like about the worst reality show gimmick ever, and now it's the
most deadly too.
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay - Seven residents of a Uruguayan town were killed on Friday when they were run over by a train they were moving manually as part of a reality television show aimed at raising funds for a local hospital, police said.
Several hundred townspeople from Young, about 235 miles west of the capital of Montevideo, were hauling a locomotive and two attached cars down a track — pushing and pulling from different sides -- when some participants fell under the wheels, said a police department spokesman.
Several other people were hurt in Friday's accident, three of them critically.
Eyewitness Ana Portela told a local radio station that the train was moving when "somebody slipped and fell under the locomotive, and others were falling alongside it."
"There were shouts and somebody said 'my arm!'" Portela said. "Everybody was in a state of shock."
You've got to wonder who organized this stunt. How did they not consider that people might fall? Were there no human-catchers on the front of the train, to keep them from going under the wheels? Someone should do some prison time for this, IMHO.
Worse yet, people trying to help a charity get this in Uruguay, and
Joe Rogan's fine after eight years of
Fear Factor? There truly is no justice in this world.
Labels: reality tv
Friday, March 17, 2006
Atkins Health Risks... in Amber
News today of an article in a British Medical Journal that raises health concerns about no-carb diets.
LONDON -- The popular Atkins diet could be linked to a life-threatening complication which one woman who claimed to be following it developed, according to doctors who published a case report on it Friday in a British medical journal.
Doctors from New York University wrote in The Lancet journal of a 40-year-old woman who developed a dangerous condition called ketoacidosis, a dangerous buildup of acids called ketones in the blood which can lead to patients falling into a coma.
The patient, who was not identified, was admitted to an intensive care unit for four days after becoming short of breath. Before being hospitalized, she had lost her appetite, felt nauseous and was vomiting four to six times a day, the doctors wrote in the paper. Tests confirmed ketoacidosis.
Ketones are produced in the liver when insulin levels fall due to starvation or diabetes.
"Our patient had an underlying ketosis caused by the Atkins diet ... This problem may become more recognized because this diet is becoming increasingly popular worldwide," said Professor Klaus-Dieter Lessnau, who led the team from the New York University School of Medicine.
...some outside experts said the case is rare and does not reflect a major health threat associated with low-carb diets. "I think this is an isolated case. The idea that serious ketoacidosis could be triggered by a low-carb diet does not happen very often," said Dr. Paul Clayton, president of the forum on food and nutrition at the Royal Society of Medicine in London. Clayton said that the main problem of high protein diets is in the strain they put on kidneys and the risk of renal failure.
Okay, that's great and all guys but um... where were you three years ago, when anyone gave a damn? It's been over a year since Atkins declared bankruptcy, relabeled their food to allow some carbs, and pretty much vanished from the national prominence in the US, and
now you pop up with your isolated case health concerns?
I guess no-carbs are still popular in the UK? They're gone in the US though, and to quote myself from
a post last year:
as most dieticians predicted, the Atkins' forced ketosis thing did work for quick weight loss if you could stomach the super protein food plan, but hardly anyone could long term, and hardly anyone took steps to change their lifestyle (I.E. eating healthier and exercising), so hardly anyone kept the weight off. And thus does America turn to the next "sounds too good to be true" weight loss plan that doesn't involve any sort of sacrifice, hunger, or exercise. Hard to imagine why 2/3 of us are fat, eh?
Labels: diet, obesity
Rim shot time...
Not to rip off
ThingsMyBoyfriendSaid.com's gig, especially since this one is self-reported, but... Tonight Malaya and me we vegging on the couch and watching the
Jerry Springer Show. I don't watch much TV, so I try to make up for it in quality, you see.
Anyway, one of the guests was a one-armed woman, on there to scream at her boyfriend who was cheating with his baby momma, and to fight with said baby-momma. Also appearing was the guy's mom, who mostly shouted at everyone. The one-armed girl had a left arm to just below the elbow, and a prosthetic below that. She's wearing a sleeveless blouse though, so it's kind of pointless, but anyway, there it was. And the prosthesis was terrible, like 10 shades darker than the rest of her skin, and not good enough that she could fight with it. She was reduced to grabbing at the other woman's hair with her one good hand!
Anyway, the show goes on and we end up fast forwarding over most of the inanities, but as their segment was ending Malaya and me got to wondering about her arm. They never said how she lost the arm, but she was sort of skeletally-deformed in the back, so we figured it was a birth defect. But why was it such a bad color? I speculated that maybe she bought it used. I mean why not? Do they bury amuputees with their prosthetic limbs, or sell/donate them so that other one-handers can live a fuller life?
The question then was, well, where do you buy a used prosthetic arm? To which I replied, "At a second-hand store."
Yes, I laugh at my own jokes. Fortunately Malaya usually beats me to it, or at least has the decency to join me. She did tonight, at least.
Labels: humor
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Biggest Nude Girls Ever!
No, it's not a sneak link to TubGirl.com. While writing the previous post about that Playboy Centerfolds book, I clicked to Amazon.com to get a link for the book itself, and on my search page for "playboy centerfolds" I saw a link to a book called
100 Naked Girls, by Petter Hegre. I didn't care about the book, but I clicked the link because I'm always seeing links to "Hegre Girls" on various male-skewing blogs, and I'd never considered that maybe that was someone's name. Yes, it's obvious in retrospect, but apparently this guy Petter Hegre is sort of a famous photographer, one who used to shoot all sorts of stuff, but now does basically nothing but nude female photography. I wouldn't really call it erotic, since the girls are just standing/floating/lounging there and staring at the camera, but it's what passes for non-porn nude these days.
Anyway, from there I Wikipedia'ed his name and found
his rather brief entry; I think I learned more about him from the Amazon.com reviews of his 100 Nudes book. Anyway, Wikipedia taught me that he's won some photography awards, that he's published a number of books of nude photos, and that he looks like a poor man's Fabio. There are also links to
a nude magazine he does the photography for, and
his own site, and I clicked those of out curiosity and also, let's face it, to see some boobies.
The magazine site didn't strike me as noteworthy, but I found something worth blogging about (yes, I'm getting there) on his site. Check out the
free tour page, and yes, it's covered in nude women, which I feel pretty safe predicting will make it NS for your W. There must be 80 or 100 thumbnails of his magazine covers, all of which can be clicked and enlarged. What I found fascinating though were the thumbs with super gigantic viewing options along the right side of the page. None of the pics are especially fascinating, and I find most of the models birdie-thin and not very attractive, but I was awestruck by the image quality. I don't want Petter's job, but I would like his camera.
Check out any of the 4000 pixel size shots, and while they're kind of a RAM test on my machine, they look simply amazing. Not for the quality of the composition, but for the detail a photograph that large provides. It's like a Super HD TV an inch from your face, and is literally larger than life. Here's a tiny clip of one shot; click it to see it larger and nuder, but how about the detail in this one? Every hair, every goosebump... it's almost down to the cellular level. Click the shot to see the full, 2724x4000, 1.4meg image, which is obviously NSFW. Hell, just this clip of her belly button might be, depending on your job/boss. Bit late with that warning, wasn't I?
This one is interesting too; from the thumbnail or even the
1000pixel size you wouldn't think much of it. But at
the largest size the pretty girl suddenly becomes sasquatch, with countless tiny hairs curling across her back and arms. Since the shot goes to her knees (and yes, shows her flappy girl bits) you can see that the hairs curl down around her lower back, before ending above her butt, and extend further down her thighs. I assume she shaves her legs up to her hip bones, but I'm left wondering about her ass. Does she shave up to her lower back, or are her buttocks about the largest naturally-hairless expanse on her entire body?
Lots of other shots are interesting too, but I'll leave curious parties to click them on their own time. Generally speaking, this I found these photos sort of like seeing Teri Hatcher in HD.
Disturbing. Not only don't I think the poster-size shots at Hegre are sexy, I actually find most of them pretty unappealing, with the female eye candy rendered far less enjoyable than it would be at 1/4 the size. Hegre's photography is quite uninspired, his models are birdy-thin and less than ravishing, and the giant photos far too... humanizing. I didn't look at all of the shots, but most of the models I viewed were fugged by some aspect of their body that the tremendous image quality brought into view. Nasty veins somewhere, labial razor stubble like a clearcut forest, discolored callouses on their toes, etc.
The photos were fascinating to view for the level of detail, but very unsexy, at least to my eye. It's ironic; I always criticize the Playboy photo style for being so blurry and soft focused and airbrushed and cliched, but if this is the alternative... maybe Hef knows what he's doing after all? If HD TV and huge images on computer monitors have taught us anything, it's that most people are really quite ugly, if you look closely enough.
Labels: photography, pornography
Playboy Centerfolds Over Time.
I've posted about Playboy and their centerfolds a few times in the past, and generally been
negative about them. Fortunately, I'm not posting about that topic today, despite what this entry's title might lead you to believe. Instead, I'm blogging about a long and quite interesting New Yorker review of
a new book that presents every Playboy centerfold ever, with captions, follow up info about the girls, and more. The review talks a bit about the girls and the photos, but it's more about being analytical and tracking societal trends, as demonstrated through the evolution of the photos over the past fifty-three years.
A few quotes:
Taschen has just published The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds ($39.99), by Gretchen Edgren, a contributing editor to Playboy, and the book is a testament to Hefner's fidelity to his vision. Six hundred and thirteen women are represented, but there is one basic model. On top is the face of Shirley Temple; below is the body of Jayne Mansfield. Playboy was launched in 1953, and this female image managed to draw, simultaneously, on two opposing trends that have since come to dominate American mass culture: on the one hand, our country's idea of its Huck Finn innocence; on the other, the enthusiastic lewdness of our advertising and entertainment. We are now accustomed to seeing the two tendencies combined -- witness Britney Spears -- but when Hefner was a young man they still seemed like opposites.
Hefner said from the beginning that he was not producing a girlie magazine; Playboy was a "life style" magazine, of which sex was only a part. He was put off by the men's magazines of his youth, with their emphasis on riding the rapids and fighting bears. Why did virility have to be proved outdoors? Why couldn't its kingdom be indoors? "We like our apartment," he wrote in his editorial for the first issue of Playboy. "We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." Whatever one may think of DeDe Lind's interest in Nietzsche -- or Hefner's, for that matter -- this was the scenario he had in mind. He grew up in a comfortless Chicago family. His father was an accountant, his mother a Methodist disciplinarian. He has said that there was never any show of affection in his house. One suspects that there was likewise little evidence of jazz or hors d'oeuvres -- pleasure for its own sake. This is what he set out to sell: an upscale hedonism, promoted by the magazine’s articles and ads as well as by its nudes.
...
In the nineteen-seventies, because of competition from the new and raunchier Penthouse, Playboy made the decision to show pubic hair, and with this upping of the sexual ante a certain coldness set in. Now the makeup becomes very heavy, causing the women, who already looked alike, to seem as if they were clones.
In the nineteen-eighties and thereafter, the artificiality only increased, as did that of all American mass media. The most obvious change is in the body, which has now been to the gym. Before, you could often see the Playmates sucking in their stomachs. Now they don't have to. The waist is nipped, the bottom tidy, and the breasts are a thing of wonder. The first mention of a "boob job" in The Playmate Book has to do with Miss April 1965... But over time the augmented bosom became confessedly an artifice -- a Ding an sich, and proud of it. By the eighties, the Playmates’ breasts are not just huge. Many are independent of the law of gravity; they point straight outward. One pair seems to point upward.
Today -- or, actually, by the eighties -- one wonders whether sex, as it is experienced by human beings, is still the point. The current centerfolds, buck naked though they may be, communicate almost no suggestion of anything. In Playboy pinups, one is not looking for the note of the divine that one finds in the Venuses of ancient statuary, let alone for the pathos of Rembrandt's nudes. Nor should one ask for naturalness -- a real-looking girl. That is a sentimental preference, and one that many great nudes (Ingres's, Degas's) can refute. But what is so bewildering about the later Playboy centerfolds is their utter texturelessness: their lack of any question, any traction, any grain of sand from which the sexual imagination could make a pearl.
...
That, in the end, is the most striking thing about Playboy’s centerfolds: how old-fashioned they seem. This whole "bachelor" world, with the brandy snifters and the attractive guest arriving for the night: did it ever exist? Yes, as a fantasy. Now, however, it is the property of homosexuals. (A more modern-looking avatar of the Playmates' pneumatic breasts is Robert Mapplethorpe's Mr. 10 1/2.) Today, if you try to present yourself as a suave middle-aged bachelor, people will assume you're gay.
The review also talks about Hefner himself, 79, grateful for Viagra, and still banging plenty of Playmates, if perhaps not the ten or eleven out of twelve he managed to become "involved with" in the good old days. Other than overseeing most of the photo shoots, he's had almost nothing to do with the mag in decades, and is a complete absentee owner. This is probably to the good, since while the photo sessions and magazine on the whole are like weird fossils pulled from the tarpit of his own imagination, he doesn't interfere that much, and the old-fashioned style of Playboy, in this era of hyperporn, keeps it unique. The mag still maintains a subscription base of 3.5 million, and while that's less than half what it did in its 70s heyday, it's the leading men's magazine in the US.
I have no use for Playboy myself, but I guess it's nice that a relic of the old, quaint days of partial nudity still surives and thrives in these days when pornstars are often more famous than Playmates. And while I'd much rather read reviews of the centerfolds book than the book itself, I suppose it could make an interesting coffee table book. Gift it to someone you know -- preferrably someone with a son of about eleven, who can help the girls remember what it was like in the good old days?
Labels: playboy
Iraqi Irony.
This one comes straight from the "truth is stranger than fiction" category, and it's not exactly courtesy of a mainstream news source, but I had to repeat the
worst/saddest irony ever.
Two Iraqi women whose husbands and children were killed by US troops during the Iraq war have been refused entry into the United States for a speaking tour...
In a piece of painful irony, the reason given for the rejection was that the women don’t have enough family in Iraq to prove that they’ll return to the country.
I don't think anyone is under any illusions as to why the US government would refuse visas to Iraqi women who wanted to come here and talk about the human costs of this war... but given the situation, that has to be the worst excuse ever. Both women allegedly lost their husbands and several children to the sort of indiscriminate, "shoot anything that moves" tactics that US troops have used to so successfully lose the hearts and minds of the momentarily-welcoming Iraqi populace.
Putting aside the alleged how, what sort of heartless bureaucrat could refuse them visas for not having enough (living) relatives in Iraq, when US troops are the reason they don't have enough relatives?
Labels: iraq
Monday, March 13, 2006
Diamonds are for a pretty damn long time.
You will not often find me posting a link to a twenty-four year old magazine article. I'm doing so today because
I just read the article, and found it fascinating and completely timely. It's about the world market for diamonds, how it was created from basically nothing in the 1930s, how large and tiny karat diamonds have been marketed over time, how publicity and advertising has created and shaped the demand for diamonds, how De Beers had kept their stranglehold on the world's diamond sales, and more. A few quotes, and keep in mind that this was written in 1982; a fact both to factor in when you see dates, and to marvel at when you see how easily this article could have been in today's paper.
The diamond invention -- the creation of the idea that diamonds are rare and valuable, and are essential signs of esteem -- is a relatively recent development in the history of the diamond trade. Until the late nineteenth century, diamonds were found only in a few riverbeds in India and in the jungles of Brazil, and the entire world production of gem diamonds amounted to a few pounds a year. In 1870, however, huge diamond mines were discovered near the Orange River, in South Africa, where diamonds were soon being scooped out by the ton. Suddenly, the market was deluged with diamonds. The British financiers who had organized the South African mines quickly realized that their investment was endangered; diamonds had little intrinsic value -- and their price depended almost entirely on their scarcity. The financiers feared that when new mines were developed in South Africa, diamonds would become at best only semiprecious gems...
The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance. To achieve this goal, De Beers had to control demand as well as supply. Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life. To stabilize the market, De Beers had to endow these stones with a sentiment that would inhibit the public from ever reselling them. The illusion had to be created that diamonds were forever -- "forever" in the sense that they should never be resold.
...
Until the mid-1960s, Japanese parents arranged marriages for their children through trusted intermediaries. The ceremony was consummated, according to Shinto law, by the bride and groom drinking rice wine from the same wooden bowl. There was no tradition of romance, courtship, seduction, or prenuptial love in Japan; and none that required the gift of a diamond engagement ring... The campaign was remarkably successful. Until 1959, the importation of diamonds had not even been permitted by the postwar Japanese government. When the campaign began, in 1967, not quite 5 percent of engaged Japanese women received a diamond engagement ring. By 1972, the proportion had risen to 27 percent. By 1978, half of all Japanese women who were married wore a diamond; by 1981, some 60 percent of Japanese brides wore diamonds. In a mere fourteen years, the 1,500-year Japanese tradition had been radically revised.
...
Women were not totally surprised by diamond gifts: some 84 percent of the men in the study "knew somehow" that the women wanted diamond jewelry. The study suggested a two-step "gift-process continuum": first, "the man 'learns' diamonds are OK" fom the woman; then, "at some later point in time, he makes the diamond purchase decision" to surprise the woman.
Through a series of "projective" psychological questions, meant "to draw out a respondent's innermost feelings about diamond jewelry," the study attempted to examine further the semi-passive role played by women in receiving diamonds. The male-female roles seemed to resemble closely the sex relations in a Victorian novel. "Man plays the dominant, active role in the gift process. Woman's role is more subtle, more oblique, more enigmatic...." The woman seemed to believe there was something improper about receiving a diamond gift. Women spoke in interviews about large diamonds as "flashy, gaudy, overdone" and otherwise inappropriate. Yet the study found that "Buried in the negative attitudes ... lies what is probably the primary driving force for acquiring them. Diamonds are a traditional and conspicuous signal of achievement, status and success." It noted, for example, "A woman can easily feel that diamonds are 'vulgar' and still be highly enthusiastic about receiving diamond jewelry." The element of surprise, even if it is feigned, plays the same role of accommodating dissonance in accepting a diamond gift as it does in prime sexual seductions: it permits the woman to pretend that she has not actively participated in the decision. She thus retains both her innocence, and the diamond.
...
It is conservatively estimated that the public holds more than 500 million carats of gem diamonds, which is more than fifty times the number of gem diamonds produced by the diamond cartel in any given year. Since the quantity of diamonds needed for engagement rings and other jewelry each year is satisfied by the production from the world's mines, this half-billion-carat supply of diamonds must be prevented from ever being put on the market. The moment a significant portion of the public begins selling diamonds from this inventory, the price of diamonds cannot be sustained. For the diamond invention to survive, the public must be inhibited from ever parting with its diamonds.
Retail jewelers, especially the prestigious Fifth Avenue stores, prefer not to buy back diamonds from customers, because the offer they would make would most likely be considered ridiculously low. The "keystone," or markup, on a diamond and its setting may range from 100 to 200 percent, depending on the policy of the store; if it bought diamonds back from customers, it would have to buy them back at wholesale prices. Most jewelers would prefer not to make a customer an offer that might be deemed insulting and also might undercut the widely held notion that diamonds go up in value... For example, Brod estimates that a half-carat diamond ring, which might cost $2,000 at a retail jewelry store, could be sold for only $600 at Empire.
The article ends with some news about the recent discovery of vast diamond supplies in Australia, and floats the possiblity of DeBeers' century-old cartel finally crumbling as diamonds flood the market and send prices tumbling. This event would be met with horror by diamond merchants, since as the article explains, diamonds only remain expensive since people believe they are valuable and rare. People hold onto them with the dream that they will appreciate in value, when this is simply untrue for 99.9% of diamonds. And if prices drop people might not want to keep buying diamonds, and might start selling off their unworn diamonds, which would cause further price drops, and so the dominos would fall.
Since the article was written in 1982, and diamonds are still popular, expensive, and synonymous with romantic love, it's obvious that DeBeers somehow managed to stave off the sort of price correction that all other commodities regularly undergo. How they managed that and where all the diamonds are going is a good question, but unfortunately there's no update to the article. Perhaps more markets have been colonized? As of 1982, about 95% of the diamonds in the world were sold in the US and Japan, with Europe and the rest of Asia and South America not yet buying into the concept of that one type of stone being so much better/more valuable than all the rest. Has DeBeers' advertising taken hold since then, and turned diamonds into the
de rigueur engagement ring everywhere on earth?
I also enjoyed the bits in the article about wholesale prices and diamond thieves. A partial quote:
When thieves bring diamonds to underworld "fences," they usually get only a pittance for them. In 1979, for example, New York City police recovered stolen diamonds with an insured value of $50,000 which had been sold to a 'fence' for only $200. According to the assistant district attorney who handled the case, the fence was unable to dispose of the diamonds on 47th Street, and he was eventually turned in by one of the diamond dealers he contacted.
Since only the huge, multi-karat stones increase in price over time, and since those are all well known and essentially un-fencable if stolen, why would anyone steal diamonds? Sure, it's better than stealing nothing, and they're quite portable for the potential value, but who are you going to sell them to? The only people who buy diamonds in bulk are part of the DeBeers pipeline, and they've all got their established suppliers. A local diamond store isn't going to buy a pile of rocks, and even if they did, they don't pay cash for their merchandise; they take them on consingment and pay the supplier once they make a sale. Besides, since retail markup is 100-200%, you'd be lucky to get $200 for a $1000 diamond, and only that much once they sell the thing. The only people who pay appraised prices for diamonds are customers, and they're not about to pay that premium to some guy selling a black velvet pouch full of rocks out of the back of his station wagon. You'd get more mileage out of stolen diamonds by paying to have them mounted and giving them to your girlfriend/wife, thus at least sparing yourself the scalping you would otherwise take in a jewelry store.
I'm not serious, of course. Thieves in black ninja outfits swiping huge piles of glittering rocks is such a good cinematic image that it will never fade, and I would be surprised if DeBeers lets it fade. Their advertising agency in the US was one of the first to see the value in planting diamonds on the fingers of movie stars in the early days of movies and television, and since images of diamond thieves fuel the illusion that diamonds are inherently valuable and desireable, they probably do the industry as much or more good than those romantic commercials with the
creepy shadow people.
We're a bit unfair to diamonds too; it's not like we expect flowers or clothing or chocolate or other romantic gifts to be saved for twenty years and still have value. And those other gifts certainly wouldn't be something she could wear/use every day for twenty years. Just accept them as something shiny that costs a lot more than it should, and if you really hate to pay new prices, go to a pawn shop and see what they've got for a lot less than half what it would cost new.
The great irony of all this is that even though I think diamonds are a ridiculous scam, and I know they're worthless as an investment, and I own none and can't imagine ever wanting to wear one... I still want to give Malaya one far larger than I can reasonable afford when I ask her to marry me. And that's despite my frugal nature, and the fact that a $5k solitare platinum ring might be worth $1500, at best, the minute I leave Tiffany's with it. Such is the power of 70 years of well-targeted marketing. Hell, I'd probably be down for buying her necklaces and bracelets and such too, on birthdays and such.
Labels: diamonds
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Kali, shoe porn, and outlet stores.
Saturday we got up early and drove up to Davis to put on a quick martial arts demo. It wasn't anything special really; just Malaya, me, our gura running the show, and one other student from our school. We went or about an hour, of which maybe 10 minutes was actual martial arts by any of the students. Most of the time was gura talking about martial arts topics and Filipino issues, along with 15 minutes of audience participation, where they got to do some very basic Kali. Of the 60 people and 2 dogs in attendance, I was the only non-Filipino human, which was no biggie to me. It was ironic though, that I was one of the performers.
Demos are funny, since you'd think there would be pressure and nervousness doing martial arts in front of a large audience, but I've done two demos now, and didn't feel a bit nervous yesterday. I'm more nervous in class at times, or perhaps "excited" would be a more accurate adjective, since there I'm trying difficult things and I'm doing them in front of a knowledgeable audience. Demo'ing is easy in comparison, since we're only doing a few minutes of Kali, we're doing techniques we are well-versed in, and the audience can't tell the difference between good and bad anyway. Besides, the general public likes big flashy moves, which are often pretty easy and imprecise, and they don't even notice the difficult technical stuff that we concentrate on in class.
The best thing about Saturday's was the audience, which was about 98% Filipino sorority girls. Tiny, cute, hyper, coed, single Asian girls. As I whispered to the other guy in the demo, "I might find my next wife here today." Malaya would have kicked ass if any of the girls had started hitting on me. Subtly kicked ass, that is. And yes, she should probably kick ass on me for making this joke in print.
Afterwards we had a big lunch at a Thai place, talked for some time, then went our separate ways. On the drive back, Malaya wanted to stop in the alliteratively-named Vacaville, at the outlet mall, and since I've been looking unsuccessfully for some more cool sneakers for a while, I was game. And after navigating the single worst freeway onramp/offramp/surface street layout I've ever seen on a major California freeway, we arrived.
The factory outlet mall there is huge, almost too huge, since it's all outdoors. The stores are very large and gathered in clumps, each with a moat of parking around them. It's not like a mall, where you can walk around indoors and enjoy climate control and food courts and muzak. It's not even a strip mall, where everything is in a long row. It's like a mushroom patch, with no clear rhyme or reason to the arrangement, no organization by type, and no easy passage between stores. So in one corner's the Nike store, half a mile away is a Reebok outlet, at the other end of that parking lot is a Puma store, and so on, all of them built in clusters of luggage, jewelry, home furnishing, appliance, etc stores. Adding to the fun is a current burst of winter weather, so we were constantly leaving the overheated stores and stepping out into temps in the high 40s, with strong wind. No rain, at least, which would have made the half dozen dashes to the car, interspersed around quarter mile drives, a lot less fun.
Besides shoe shopping, we looked in clothing stores, the Wilson's Leather Outlet (of course, if only to smell the delicious cow skin products), some sort of chocolate store with gigantic walnut/pecan/M&M/etc coated-candy apples, the painfully-overpriced Coach luggage store, and several others. True to gender form, Malaya tried on a ton of stuff and sighed a lot, while buying nothing. Untrue to Flux form, I looked in most of the stores with her, and actually bought two pairs of shoes.
On the left you see
Nike Impax, in a lovely cool gray, with silver piping and a dark red swoosh. On the right is the
Nike ACG Takao III, in dark gray with orange. Both cost about $45, coincidentally, and the gray running shoes came from the Nike Outlet Store, while I picked up the orange/gray trail shoes at "Name Brand Shoes," a sort of glorified Payless Shoe Source.
There is definitely an art to taking photos of shoes. Unfortunately, it's a talent I do not possess, since I just took 4 shots of each pair, and got 2 useful photos, both of the Impax on the left. You see one of them above. All my photos of the Takeo III hiking shoes were blurry or blinding from the flash shining off of the reflective patches and they weren't any good because the flash turned the orange yellow. So I went to the Nike site and found the shoes and stole images from there, which aren't even exact since the strip of light gray above the orange insole inset is dark gray on mine.
I bring this up because 1) I'm almost as into shiny shoes as I am into shiny wicking clothing, and 2) I just visited 4 different athletic shoe outlets, and was amazed at the difference between them.
I don't know market sales figures, but as far as I can tell, Nike must be dominating the market in the US. The Nike outlet was much larger than the Puma, Reebok, or Adidas outlets we entered, and had easily four or five times as many shoppers as the other three put together. There had to be 150 people in the Nike store, so many that walking up and down the aisles was difficult. In contrast, there were maybe a fifteen total shoppers the Adidas and Reebok stores put together. It was downright depressing. Puma was doing better, but it was nothing like the Nike store, and they hardly had any clothing there, while Nike was doing a brisk business in anything you could wear.
I don't know about the quality of these company's respective shoes, so maybe everyone's an idiot as they buy Nikes that fall apart in a month while Adidas and Reebok last for years and wear in perfect comfort, but damn the styling is different. And while I hate to go with the masses on anything, I'm certainly with them on this one. Nike shoes look so much better than anything Reebok or Adidas are making. Puma I'm not really including since they don't sell much in the US, as far as I know. I never see any types of Puma shoes on display at Foot Locker or Champs or Finish Line or other places at the mall, but if they did they might sell some, since they've got some cool looking footwear.
Here's a big page of
current Puma styles (FYI, the official Puma site is horrible; script-heavy and very slow loading.), and I like
these and
these and
these enough to wear them in public. I don't own any, and I can't see buying them for those prices, (they're charging about twice what I'd consider reasonable), and I don't like them nearly as much as various new Nikes, but they're pretty nifty, albeit universally in the "colorful plastic moccasin" style. Is there even any padding? I don't think they'd be very comfortable if you were actually on your feet for a long time, unlike the marvelously-cushioned Nike Shox I prefer.
Also, I don't see them on that selection, but the coolest ones I saw today were about
like these, but the rubbery spike texture on the bottom wrapped around the outside of the shoe on top, up to the laces. Just on one side, though, and if you ignore how much they look like
doggy chew toys (and can convince your canine companion to do the same) they might be fun to wear.
Those Pumas fall under the category Malaya and I refer to as "pengu shoes." Why we call them that I'm not entirely sure, but it undoubtedly stems from the "
go little pengu" game I used to play. And since she's got little girl feets, and several pairs of flashy, brightly-colored shoes that look very fast, (like
these) they're pengu shoes.
Other companies make shoes like this:
Asics has a bunch, though they tend to be too "busy" in style, with all sorts of colors and lines running all over them. Adidas used to, under their
Daroga line, but fittingly-enough, they've been discontinued.
I say fittingly, because as we saw in the outlet stores yesterday, and I'm seeing on the Internet right now, Adidas shoes just suck. Here's
a full page of their current styles and honestly, there's not one on there I'd wear. I'm sure they're serviceable and give nice support and such, but they're just such boring styles. Like they're about a decade behind the styling curve, and sure, retro is in for some, but why make 500 versions of the shoes I wore in 6th grade? Nike has a line of
those type of shoes, but they don't limit themselves to a fashion that was at its apex when Run DMC wore it
in that video that brought back Aerosmith's career... in 1986.
Reebok isn't doing much better than Adidas in styling, and
most of their shoes look like they're new for 1994, and they seem to have a dangerous over-reliance on B-list "urban" celebrity models, but at least they're trying to modernize. Check out the
Pump Opus or
Mega Lux. Yeah, they're pretty clearly just a poor man's Nike Shox, but if you lived in a universe without new Nikes, you'd probably think they were pretty cool.
And yeah, taste is subjective, and lots of people just want plain sneakers. Hell; they're still selling those prehistoric
canvas Converse All-Stars that give about as much foot support as a paper bag. But judging by the crowds in the outlet stores we visited on Saturday, Nike might just be on to something with their whole, "make shoes that actually look cool" strategy. Malaya and I certainly like them, and honestly, if money were no object, I'd order just about one of every single shoe
on this page.
Those aren't all Shox, and I don't even like all of them that much, color or style or both, but they don't look like anything else, and they're very bold. And rather pleasing, to my jaded eye.
Most shoes I see are like
these Asics running shoes in the upper thumbnail. Not horrible, and some even have decent color schemes, though they're way too reliant on white. But I don't like any of their designs, since they're just so busy. All sorts of stripes and lines and textures run in every direction, overlapping, clashing, and diminishing each other. There are just too many colors and designs crammed into the same small space fragments the image. You've got $100 to spend on a new running shoe; which are you going to pick, if fashion even enters into the equation the tiniest bit?
I've never cared much one way or the other for Nike's swoosh logo, and when
I ridicule sneaker and other clothing purchases, it's based on brand lust and price. Most of my shoes are Nike Shox, (The Shox I have all fit great and offer great support, or I wouldn't keep buying them.) but that's because they look so cool, and are priced competitively. I'd happily buy Reebok or Adidas or other unknown brands, if they looked cool and felt good on my feet. Very happily, if they priced them under Nike.
The swoosh is a key to Nike's look though, simply because it can be any size, and located anywhere on the shoe. It can be the design, or it can get out of the way of the design. Compare it to the spiderweb of overlapping lines on all Asics, or the three-stripes on Adidas, which are recognizable, but which also dominate the design, greatly-limiting the styles those shoemakers can employ. Time for a redesign, guys. It's long overdue, at least judging by the crowds you're not getting in your Northern California outlet stores.
Labels: kali, shoe porn
Friday, March 10, 2006
Random things
Since I've lacked time/motivation to make any large posts of late, here are a few smaller things I've been enjoying.
Malaya saw the link to this one somewhere, and it's certainly worth a laugh. Dunno if it's really "real" but it's pretty funny. Guy sneaks into his roomie's room and catches him jerking off... to a night elf doing her stripper dance in World of Warcraft. No, it doesn't get much more pathetic than that. (Assuming he wasn't cybering with the hawt chick playing the character and dancing for his amusement, which would make it sort of cool... for masturbation at least.)
Jicama Eater sent me this link a few weeks ago, but when I finally got around to looking at it yesterday, I really enjoyed it. It's a forum thread in which people started posting Garfield comics with all of Garfield's dialogue removed. I've posted, with disturbing frequency, about how horrible Garfield has become, which makes is strange how easily the strip can be turned into something surreal and artistic. I approving mentioned the mirrored Garfield strips last year, and now these silent Garfield ones are even better. Funny how removing the second half of the strips, or most of the dialogue, greatly improves them. Garfield's body language comes to the forefront, his dialogue is revealed as irrelevant and redundant, and Jon turns into a lunatic, raving to his uncomprehending pet. A few examples:
On the other hand, Garfield isn't written for you or I; it's written at about a 4th grade level and is designed to amuse children and stupid adults who are entertained by the perpetual sameness and one-note jokes. The subtler charms of a silent Garfield wouldn't go over with the target audience, and besides, even if the actual art team behind the strip somehow decided to start doing Garfield as a silent character, they'd ruin it immediately. It works now because it's minimalist; if they were doing it on purpose they'd have Garfield gesticulating wildly, or dancing, or doing other big movements every strip. It works now precisely because their cut and paste art is so lazy, with Garfield's motionless behavior conveying a boredom and ennui far beyond words.
I'm not exactly day and date with this one, but the Academy Awards were televised last weekend, and if you're like me and didn't watch it or completely forgot about it until like 8:04 when you turned on the TV just in time to see Ang Lee and Crash win... check out Ebert's write up. I found it entertaining and informative, and he followed it up with an opinion piece the next day about the Crash vs. Brokeback Mountain controversy.
Controversy? Yes, controversy, for as Ebert says:One of the mysteries of the 2006 Oscar season is the virulence with which lovers of "Brokeback Mountain" savaged "Crash." When the film about racism actually won the Oscar for best picture Sunday, there was no grace in their response. As someone who felt "Brokeback" was a great film but "Crash" a greater one, I would have been pleased if either had won.
But here is Ken Turan in the Los Angeles Times, writing on the morning after: "So for people who were discomfited by 'Brokeback Mountain' but wanted to be able to look themselves in the mirror and feel like they were good, productive liberals, 'Crash' provided the perfect safe harbor. They could vote for it in good conscience, vote for it and feel they had made a progressive move, vote for it and not feel that there was any stain on their liberal credentials for shunning what 'Brokeback' had to offer. And that's exactly what they did."
Ebert begs to differ, and says that both movies were great, the vote could have gone either way, etc. I don't necessarily disagree, but I didn't follow the support bases before the Oscars, and I didn't see either film to have an opinion. Malaya saw them both and put Brokeback slightly ahead of Crash, for what that's worth.
I would like to point out, however, that Ebert always loves movies that have honest depictions of racism in them, and he always loves serious films by black directors. (Not that Crash had one.) Also, as he does not mention in his write up, his wife is black, which naturally leads to him being interested in black/white cultural issues, race relations, etc. He loves every Spike Lee movie, so of course he liked Crash best of all the films this year. I'm not saying it's a conscious ploy on his part; it's just that Crash was squarely in his area of greatest interest, or at least ahead of gay sheepherders. And the same surely holds true for people (and Academy voters) who are gay or have close friends who are gay, and were therefore much more interested in Brokeback. Hence the controversy and anger over Crash's victory.Labels: ebert, garfield, world of warcraft
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
I call shenanigans.
I hate to disparage any author's first book, given my own future career plans, but this is too fishy. I saw a random "ads by google" link that teased something about a brilliant first novel, clicked it, and wound up looking at a very highly-priced paperback version of a book called
Hidden Impact. All seems fine until you scroll down to the reader reviews, and note that there are 1) seven reviews, 2) all are 5 star scores, 3) six of the seven are the only reviews on the entire Amazon.com site by that reviewer, and 4)
all six of those are by seldom-seen "real name" reviewers. Why it's almost as if someone signed up a bunch of fake Amazon.com accounts just to post glowing reviews of their own book!
And what reviews they are. So like real reviews, written by real readers. A few quotes of the first sentences of three reviews:
A very well written thriller, with fully-developed, complex characters that jump off the page, and a plot that keeps you guessing as to what will happen next. A remarkable first novel. Recommended!
HIDDEN IMPACT has all of the makings of a great novel. The characters are brilliantly created, the setting is realistic, and the plot is entertaining and fresh. Charles B. Neff tells this story through the eyes of Jim Nordberg...
This well crafted page-turner is full of plot twists that keep you wide awake and thoroughly engaged with Jim Nordberg, the narrator, as he warily deciphers the roles of each of the other characters, many of them re-emerging from his past. Neff makes Nordberg an appealing person with whom to identify, someone with a history of convictions but not always the gumption to act on them, now returning from nursing failures back into a world that needs him.
What's up with every review throwing in the nerdy name of the narrator right away? Does anyone read the name "Jim Nordberg" and think, "Any book with a character of that name must be good!" Lots of authors overdo it with Dirk Pitts and Clive Steeles and such, but come on... Nordberg?
Or perhaps this is all just a coincidence, and these six people all just happened to register Amazon.com reviewer accounts in their real names, and all six just happened to review this novel first, and all six just happened to love it, while writing praise that sounds like something you'd see on a dust-jacket.
Seriously though, I hope these weren't done by the author. Especially not that last one. I defy you to make sense of the sentence that begins with, "Neff makes Nordberg..." and (eventually) ends with "...that needs him." If that's a sample of his writing, I hope he's better at fiction than reviews. Besides, he should just make a blog, cultivate a loyal readership that numbers well into the dozens, and then command that they all fill his Amazon page with blissful reviews, ideally ones that use their own words well enough to pass the laugh test. Of course that author would have to actually finish his damn book first, now wouldn't he? *cough*
Labels: writing
Monday, March 06, 2006
Movie Review: Ghost in the Shell 2
Ghost in the Shell 2 is widely considered to be one of the best Anime films ever made. It is the sequel to (take a wild guess...)
Ghost in the Shell. That film was released in 1995, nearly a decade before the sequel, though it was directed by the same man, and based on the same ongoing manga (comic book). Both films are very cerebral and intellectual, and both cover similar ground in their philosophy. This can be to their detriment, with far more words than action, but if you enjoy the words, that's not a problem.
To the scores.
Ghost in the Shell 2, 2004
Script/Story: 7
Characters: 6
Combat Realism: 9
Humor: 4
Horror: 3
Eye Candy: 9
Fun Factor: 5
Replayability: 6
Overall: 8
Both Ghost in the Shell films are set around 2030, in Tokyo. They both star anti-terrorist police officers as they battle crime and debate philosophy, in a futuristic world full of incredible technology, humans covered in cyborg implants, wielding new weapons, and dealing with incredible computer technology of all kinds.
In the first film, Bateau, a male human detective and Major, his female cyborg partner, chase down various bad guys while engaging in long, poetic and philosophic debates about what it means to be human, what are souls (the ghosts referred to in the title), do machines have ghosts, and where does the human end and the machine begin in cyborgs. The sequel is set three years later, and in it the Major no longer has human form. She has vanished entirely into the matrix of machines, and her former partner is still carrying on, while various injuries turn him more and more cyborg himself.
Both films are marked by incredible visual styles, but with the sequel being made 9 years later, it of course has much more technology. The visuals are frequently amazing, blending 3D computer generated art with traditional 2D characters in almost every scene. It looks odd at first; the flat hand drawn figures on top of the sharper 3D, but I got used to it quickly, and began to enjoy it. It's very well-blended; the 2D humans are drawn with lots of shading and depth, and the 3D is done expertly, with fuzzy textures and rounding; it's not the old, low-tech style where everything is hard and angular and sharp.
For example; the woman (doll, actually) is 2D art on top of the 3D CG background, but the style makes them mesh nicely. To my eye, after seeing the full film, at least.
The film is just chock full of awesome visuals, from incredibly-detailed background textures with thousands of individual moving humans or lights, to eye-popping and surreal 3D scenes, with flocks of glowing birds, or elephants made largely of neon lights. It's impossible to describe with words, so check out some examples. Here's
a decent gallery, though all of these shots look much better full size on your TV, especially because they are made up of moving parts.
This one, and
this one, for instance, both come from an incredible street parade sequence, and if not for the fact that it's far more vivid and visually-impressive than any real world event could be, you might think it video footage, rather than completely CG. All of the floats are made up of moving pieces, all of the people in the crowd are moving individually, the confetti is falling, etc.
The DVD itself is
quite reviled (due to the ridiculous subtitles and lack of extras), and for good reason, but in the one and only bonus feature, a short documentary on the making of
GitS2, one of the 3D artists talks about the work they had to put in on the film. Two short scenes take place in a corner store, and the director insisted that they map and plot and create every single item on every single shelf in the entire store. They couldn't just texture map a wall of boxes; they had to actually animate and plot the locations of every single individual box of dog food, and can of soda, and stick of beef jerky, etc.
That level of obsessive detail pays off when there's a shoot out in the store and half the shelves fall over, spilling their items in every direction. The physics are glorious; the random spray patterns of broken glass, the way the boxes fall at different rates and in different directions while bouncing off each other, etc. I didn't give this film a 9 in Eye Candy for nothing.
As for the plot and the philosophy... it basically worked for me. The movie is intelligent and full of quotes from classical literature, and they're worked in nicely. It's surprising that they do; quite often the two lead characters, both cops, simply
quote proverbs at each other. It would seem ridiculously pretentious in almost any live action film, but somehow it works here.
It's funny, since I saw
Ghost in the Shell 1 years and years ago, and I didn't like it at all. I liked the visuals and the infrequent action scenes, but thought the 90% of the film that was talking with pretty scenery was boring, I didn't get into the philosophy at all. I hardly remember it at this point, but my main recollections are endless scenes of the Major slowly pulling on body armor while spouting off about ghosts and machines and artificial consciousness while I just wanted them to get to the damn action.
My reaction aside, most people hold Ghost 1 as a true Anime masterpiece. I haven't seen it since, so I don't know if it would work for me now, or if Ghost 2 was truly different and better. At the time I saw Ghost 1 I knew nothing about it, and had recently seen and absolutely loved the action-packed Ninja Scroll. So I went into Ghost 1 hoping for and expecting more along those lines, and when it was very different; 90 minutes of philosophical talk and 10 minutes of action, of course I was disappointed. I'll have to watch it again at some point now, since I enjoyed the sequel so much.
You don't need any experience with the first film to enjoy this sequel though; Malaya liked it a lot and she's not a big Anime fan and had never seen a second of the first film.
Labels: movie review
Thursday, March 02, 2006
New Plan: Blame Everyone.
With Iraq seemingly sliding further down the greased slope
towards civil war, and popular support for Bush and his war
heading in the same direction, I'd been wondering what the die-hard Bush fans were going to do. Some Republicans are beginning to defect, and
being excommunicated for it, but plenty of noisy
apologists true-believers are "standing their ground." Which means finding someone to blame. Someone other than Bush.
But who? After all, Bush's party had control of both houses of congress, his war planners had a free hand in preparation and execution of the invasion and occupation, they had all the troops they wanted (if not all they needed), they had broad popular support (until bad news/reality wore it down over 3 years), the media coverage was fawning, etc. Yet despite that, it's all
gone going to shit, and since the central credo of the Bush Administration (and its most rabid/only remaining supporters) is passing the blame, who's it gonnna be? They can't point at the US armed forces, since they worship them and after all, they were only doing what Bush's boys told them to do. They can't blame Democrats in congress, since the Republicans have the majority, the Dems voted for the war in the first place, and every additional budget-busting spending extension has passed. Who then?
Need you ask?And this is (and has been) a crucial component of the war -- one that many on the anti-war side are loathe to admit: that their constant naysaying, though it is well within their right to voice, has objectively hurt the war effort...
...there comes a time when, having registered disagreement with the war, the war’s critics (and here I'm not talking about critics of individual strategical or tactical initiatives, but rather those who have been against the effort from the start) simply wait and-if things fail—rush to brag of their prescience and perspicuity. But in the meantime, actively working to undermine the effort by presenting our enemies with a rabidly partisan divided front (one of their chief aims, remember) -- whether it be through suggestions that we are in Iraq "illegally," or that the President "lied" to take us to war, or seemingly hoping, on a daily basis, that the whole thing devolve into a civil war -- matters. And not just rhetorically.
In other words, the people who said the Iraq Attack was a bad idea from the start, and who pointed out how horribly it was being executed over the past 3 years, are to blame for it failing. And even though it was their right to object to the war, they should have shut up the minute the shooting actually began.
You can read his whole blog post if you want (good luck, it goes on like
I do about bad movies), and yes, his argument attempts to be far more nuanced than the few words I've reduced it to, but I think my summary is more or less accurate. He (and lots of the other remaining Bush/war supporters) are saying basically the same thing; it's the media's fault for reporting bad news, it's the left's fault for opposing the war, if everyone had only practiced the
Tinkerbell strategy of clapped louder/believing harder, the Iraqi resistance would never have existed. Since you know, disorganized, starving Iraqi insurgents seething under foreign occupation do nothing but scan that morning's NYTimes to see if any Democrats have said anything less than kind about Bush's war policies.
The Protein Wisdom guy's argument seems patently-disingenuous to me, but I do understand why he and others of his mindset are making it. After all, what else can they say? The war was fought exactly as their guy wanted it to be fought, and the after-war chaos, the lack of WMDs, the slide into sectarian violence, etc, all are
exactly what the people who opposed the Iraq Attack said would happen, long before this whole mess got underway. What's the right wing going to do, admit they were wrong, resign their positions of power, and beg forgiveness?
You've got to admire their obstinacy, in a way. Lesser (well, better) men and women caught in such an ongoing derailment of duplicity and sliding goalposts would fold up their tents and vacate the public square until such time as their notoriety began to fade. But not this bunch. They're in it to the end, and hell, look on the bright side -- the further public opinion swings against them, the more people they have to blame.
Also, and this is entirely beside the point, but I tremendously
enjoyed the comments thread on the afore-quoted, "it's the liberals' fault" post. It would take you hours to read the whole thing, so here's a summary. Lockstep groupthink prevails for some time, until some outsiders show up, doubtless directed there (like I was) by posts on various naysaying blogs of the type I now realize are entirely to blame for our failing Iraqi occupation.
They do their best, pointing out (to me) obvious problems with blaming a few voices of dissent in an ocean of approval for a military failure based largely on wishful thinking, incompetent planning, and bungled execution. It doesn't seem that any of the faithful are swayed, though it's fun to watch them hop around as they compete to be the first to repeat the same "you liberals are to blame" excuses though. I wouldn't bring it up if not for one special poster, though. He (she?) posts under the name Marianna, he/she adds about a dozen (essentially identical) entries to the long thread, and he/she is either some sort of Karl Rove-programmed Bush-bot or a brilliant example of satire. I honestly can't tell, and that's after reading all of his/her comments in that thread, and looking over
his/her blog. A few quotes, just from the posts on the front page:
Question for discussion: why doesn’t George Looney just join Al Qaeda? Is it because he thinks he can hurt American more with his acting?
I'm always a bit bewildered when I try to figure out what it is that the Left wants Bush to do when it comes to the issue of Islam. I mean, to me it seems that containment of the problem combined with ruthless eradication of opposition seems to be the way to go.
The moonbats on the left are salivating over the possibility of a US defeat in Iraq.
Al Gore's inflammatory statements were designed to enrage our enemies. Through his hatred of President Bush, Gore is undermining the War on Terror. I'm surprised Al Gore didn’t join the Islamists in burning an American flag.
Seriously, that has to be parody, doesn't it? And if it's not all a huge parody of an ultra right winger, run by some left winger with too much time no his hands, it has to be sarcasm. No thinking adult human could say these things seriously, could they?
It's often remarked that humor and sarcasm are hard to convey with the written word, and it makes me crazy when people take what I think are obvious jokes and act as though I meant them seriously. But in this case, I certainly can't see any intended humor or sarcasm in Marianna's words. One or two or six posts I could believe were parody, but a whole website with dozens and dozens of long entries? ...and yet, some of them are just so relentlessly over the top. How could they be for real?
Read this one about the
American Taliban that is the AFA, for instance. A few excerpts:
I can't stress how important the American Family Association is to the fight to keep America’s culture and traditional family values intact. One simple visit to their website provides one with numerous opportunities to prove one's love of family and country.
I’ll never forgive myself for skipping it from my daily perusal for the past 5 or 6 weeks; work and church are no excuse for this sort of lax discipline in the great stuggle to defend America.
The AFA does for defense of American culture what the NRA does for the defense of American households. Two prongs in the same great struggle against atheist liberal socialism. Every weapon necessary to fight the homosexual, pro-abortion, pro-evolution, pro-Islamist left-wing agenda in America is available in this priceless online arsenal.
Okay, putting aside the opinions... who talks like that? The author has to realize how overblown and pompous and absurd his phrasing is. Right?
I hate to fall for a joke, no matter how elaborate, but at this point I'm leaning towards this being a real person who really feels this way. (Malaya agrees and says she's seen plenty of academic papers and other writings by over-educated people that are even wackier than this.) The phrasing and word choices make this conclusion almost impossible for me to choke down, but could someone really spend this much time on a parody? At this point I'm saying it's serious, but written by some socially-inept guy with oh, borderline autism. Some sort of mental issue that didn't keep him from educating himself, but that limits his ability to express himself as normal people do? At any rate, I've gotten many perplexed laughs reading his online comments, whatever their original intent.
Labels: bush, iraq, wingnuts
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Chop Socky Review: Kung Fu Arts
This film is set in the feudal period of China, when unarmed Kung Fu settled all conflicts. It's about royal intrigue, the murder of an Emperor, the fight for the throne, exiled daughters, marriages to chimpanzees, packs of attack monkeys, horse style kung fu, and much, much more. This is truly an amazing film, though not on purpose.
As with all my chop socky reviews, these scores are for the genre, and should not be compared to other films.
Kung Fu Arts, AKA (Kung Fu: Monkey, Horse, Tiger, AKA Zhui Ming Qiang, 1973)
Script/Story: 6
Acting/Casting: 1/9
Action: 3
Combat Realism: 4
Humor: 1/10
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 3
Fun Factor: 2/9
Replayability: 1/9
Overall: 1.5/8
What's with all the split scores? Those are actual/unintentional comedy scores. The first number is the real score, the second is what I gave it after spending most of this incredibly bad movie laughing at the horrible, horrible, horrible acting/directing/photography/special effects/etc. This is the fifth chop socky film I've reviewed, and the first one that really lives down to the worst reputation of the genre. It's astonishingly bad, in many, many ways. I'm talking MST3K quality stuff. In fact, I highly recommend this one for you if you're having those type of parties, where everyone watched a horrible film and makes snarky comments about it. This one is just comedy gold.
Production ValuesThese actually weren't that bad, originally. Everything's in focus, the costumes aren't horrible, and while the sets are pretty bad, with various supposed throne rooms and royal halls about the size of an apartment bedroom, it's not horrible overall. Unfortunately, I did not see the original film. I saw the English-dubbed release, with the wide screen cut down to full screen, and both were done horribly. The visuals were a wreck, with the sides of the screen chopped off and quite a bit of action and speaking faces simply invisible to the left or the right. The dubbing was astonishingly bad too, with the English voices in no way matching what the characters looked like, numerous voices done by the same guy with minimal effort to disguise them, and some of the most hilariously-awful dialogue I've ever heard.
If someone speculated that the acting in this film were the worst ever, I would not argue. And I don't mean the worst film acting; I mean the worst acting ever, like in the entire human history of publicly pretending to be someone you are not. It's truly awe-inspiring.
StoryAbsolutely brilliant, in its insanity. I could easily write twenty paragraphs just to summarize what happens, and twenty more deconstructing it. Whoever thought up this plot was some sort of mad scientist of movie scripts.
The film opens with a Kung Fu fight in the darkness. We can not tell who is fighting who, until eventually the two men wind up inside the first terrible royal palace set of the film, when the lights come on and we see them. The emperor wakes up and accuses the younger of the two men of attacking him, while the older one sneers. The young man looks shocked but says nothing, and when the other man renews their fight the young man is forced back into another room, where he eventually draws a poison dart and throws it at his opponent. It misses, and instead hits the pricess, who instantly collapses. The young man, who is now thought to be a rebel who wanted to murder the king so he could be king once he marries the daughter, escapes in the confusion. Inept guards are a theme in this film.
Cut to three days later, with the Princess in a poisoned state. No doctor can cure her, so the emperor has messengers proclaim that anyone who saves her life will be allowed to marry her. A healer is seen in the city square, but he is soon revealed to be the young prince in disguise. A terrible fight scene with city guards ensues, and ends abruptly when a baby chimpanzee (that is called "monkey" throughout the film) up on a roof grabs the poster-sized royal decree, and all the guards stop trying to catch the assassin in preference for shouting and begging the monkey not to rip the emperor's message. It's surreal.
The monkey is eventually persuaded to come down, (I'm talking 5 minutes of grown men shouting, "Please monkey!" while actually on their knees crying.) and they take the chimpanzee (it's been trained to walk on its hind legs, in rather disturbing fashion) to the palace where the vial of medicine on his hip is given to the princess. I guess they were desperate. She wakes up at once, and the emperor decrees that his word is law, and that she must marry the monkey.
It's a real chimpanzee, by the way, even in the film. It's not some fantasy type movie animal with voice over words coming from it; it's just a lightly-trained chimp who they clearly filmed all day so they'd have enough material to edit it into a "monkey sits on a cushion and throws a ball" scene, that they could then stick into the film. It's frankly appalling.
The plot gets more surreal when not only must the princess marry the monkey, but she must then be exiled, with her new husband. The budget didn't cover ocean scenes, so they stuck her and the monkey into a glorified canoe in a river, and away they go. They soon wash up on an island, which is then and ever after referred to as, "the island" and live there for... ten years.
When next we see the princess she's living happily on the island, but she's now got a 10 y/o son, who is dressed in a leopard skin toga, and who calls the chimp, "Uncle Monkey." Over and over again. The princess still looks exactly 20 years old, and she's still wearing perfectly clean and very elaborate silk kimono type gowns. How she keeps her clothing clean, and where she got a leopard skin for her son to wear is a mystery you're better off not wondering about. There's also no sign of what they've been eating for ten years, who built their shelter when the princess can hardly walk upright she's so delicate, or why they haven't left the island, or why no one has found them there over that time.
At the same time the young prince is seen practicing kung fu on "the mountain" where he basically kicks earthenware jugs hanging from ropes. He's evidentally been up there for the whole ten years, and has not spoken to a single other person, since when he goes back down to the palace and sneaks into the grounds, he meets an "aunt" (Of whom? Exactly.) and she tells him the emperor is dead and the general, the older man the prince fought at the start, has been named the new emporer. At that point we finally find out, through the use of mood-music-enhanced flashbacks, that the prince was actually trying to save the emperor a decade ago, and that the general was the actual assassin. The "aunt" belives this at once, and arranges to drug the guard's wine in ten days, at which time the prince can return and kill the emporer. He's cool with that, but when the auntie tells him the princess has been gone for a decade and that her boat was found wrecked on, "the island" he says he'll go look for her first.
Predictably enough, the would-be prince reaches the island in about five minutes, immediately runs into the chimp, who was his old pet. A surreal scene follows in which a python is shown on the ground, then in some bushes, and then we see the chimp rolling down a grass embankment with a rubber snake wrapped around it while chimpanzee screech-overs blast through the soundtrack. Through all this the prince watches emotionlessly, before saying, "Oh poor Koko. You're dead." I imagine Koko, whlie being suffocated and fighting for his life, watches the prince walk away while thinking, "Thanks for not pulling this fucking snake off of me, asshole."
The prince walks about five yards, enters a cave, and low and behold, there's the princess... folding clothing. She turns around, sees him, and immediately turns up her nose without a word. Yes, it's been 10 years, he's the first person she's seen in that time, and her first words? "Go away." She's still mad about the poison dart, apparently. Better yet, her Tarzan-outfitted son walks in a minute later, and starts whining about how he still can't find Uncle Monkey. Who was killed, but not eaten, by a python like two minutes earlier. Only after a minute or so does the kid notice a full grown man standing there, and what does he say when he sees his first living human? "Why are you being mean to mother?"
She says, "He's not. Go and get Uncle Monkey's body in the bushes." The kid cries, but apparently that's plenty of direction for him, since the next scene has the three of them standing in front of a wooden gravestone with hanzi that, like all the other hanzi in the film, is not translated by a subtitle. "Here lies Uncle Monkey." would be my guess.
Why the snake didn't eat the chimp would be a fair question. You might also wonder why no one else, in 10 years, has looked on "the island," located about an hour from the capital city, and found the princess and her son, given that they're you know, the heirs to the throne and all. It's also kind of a, "So, did the chimp knock her up, or what?" issue, since we only know the young man was the bridegroom to be in retrospect. There's nothing said early in the film about the princess being anything other than perfectly virginal, and certainly nothing about her being pregnant. Fortunately, once the son goes to look for Uncle Monkey in the bushes, the prince blurts out, "Am I that boy's father? Or is the monkey?"
Princess: "You are. Of course."
Even more so than in most chop socky, I wonder about the dialogue. The actual script and dialogue in Chinese simply could not have been this awful. It's not possible. An autistic 5th grader could write better conversations, and give the characters more appropriate emotions. Characters constantly see something horrible, or frightening, and then immediately turn around and act completely normal. Like when the guy sees his pet monkey after 10 years, recognizes it, watches it get attacked by a constrictor, doesn't seem to even consider going to help, and then walks off five seconds later as it if never happened. Or the kid doesn't even react to a living human male, something he's never before seen in his life.
Anyway, the prince leaves the princess and the kid there, since he's got to go back and kill the emperor. Before he goes, he tells them if he's not back in three days, they should live there forever. He fails in his attempt, falling victim to a cargo rope trap readied by the well-guarded emperor, who says, "I knew you would try something like this!"
So he's been waiting for ten years with squadron of extra, hidden guards to replace the ones the aunt drugged, but the aunt (who I assume was the sister of the ex-emperor) didn't know? And this is despite the fact that the prince has been secluded in the mountains for all that time? Well, you've got to admire the usurper's paranoia, I guess.
They take him down to the dungeon, tie him to a rack sort of thing, and immediately ask him about the princess. How the hell do they know about her, since she's also been presumed dead for a decade? They even ask about her son... how? The prince won't talk though, and soon enough the evil emperor sends guards to... "the island." They also have no trouble finding the princess, even without any ridiculous "death of a chimpanzee" scenes, and they immediately take her away, while somehow missing her loudly-singing son, who is wandering the island and shouting, "Mom, I'll be home soon." every three seconds.
He finds her gone and some of their stuff knocked over in the balsa-wood cave, and immediately resolves to head to the capital to rescue her. Here's where it gets really surreal. The kid's apparently half-Tarzan or something, since he runs out to some pack of monkeys, real ones this time, and kneels down with his back to the camera. He's obviously feeding them, as they run up and take food and turn around to eat, but as this happens there's a relentless voice over from the kid about how his friends must come and help him save mother. (I don't belive she or the kid are ever named; they're just son, mother, princess, etc.) So this kid is kneeling on some tree branches, feeding a frantic pack of monkeys, and his voice is over it all, giving them orders like a general. "You take the right flank. You climb on the roof. You stay with me." and so on. To monkeys! And meanwhile, the kid's never been off the island, has no idea where he's going, doesn't know what a palace is, has seen exactly 2 humans in his entire life, etc. Which should all be irrelevant, since he's got no boat and if he could swim off the island, wouldn't he have done so already?
Needless to say, he's soon at the palace, hiding on the roof, while his monkeys go to work, providing some of the best humor in the film. They proceed to piss on the guards, claw out their eyes, kill them with a bite to the ankle, and most memorably, bite off one guard's balls. The guard was taking a crap, and he proceeds to hop around, shout about his pain, and then lapse into a Scottish accent as he screams that his "wedding tackle" has been chewed off. How recent is this dubbing? That has to be an Austin Powers allusion, right?
The plot continues with the kid freeing the prince and princess, the prince fighting the new emperor/evil general, the "blood letter" the old emperor wrote as he was dying (with one finger, in his own blood, like 60 perfectly-calligraphied hanzis on a scrap of parchment, while he's dying too quickly for a doctor to come and save him) turning up and implicating the evil general, who the prince finishes off before the truly surreal ending.
After the evil general-turned-emperor dies, the film cuts to a throne room. The princess is in the middle, the would-be prince on the right, and her son, now dressed like royalty, on the left. Servant girls bring them gold-jeweled cups of wine, which the kid complains about tasting unlike fruit juice. The prince laughs and says it's wine and he'll get drunk, at which point the kid rushes outside and finds a flock of monkeys sitting around some tree roots and sniffing at an earthenware urn. The kid runs to them and starts feeding them some sort of sugar tablets, while his voiceover talks about how they should take these pills quickly, and how monkeys should not drink wine or the corruption of men, and how when they "hear no speak no and see no evil, they should not drink wine either."
It's just an excruciating two minutes of "what the hell?", all while the string-heavy music wails away; the music they play every time a monkey is onscreen in the entire film.
Mercifully, the scene finally freezes, and the film ends.
I honestly don't know if the film was supposed to be a comedy, or a tragedy, or an action movie. Malaya and me laughed non-stop during most of the scenes, but the characters seem to largely be playing them straight. I assume the monkey scenes are comedy, but really, who can tell? The special effects, mostly fake blood, were so poorly done they looked like orange ketchup, and every time someone got hit, a scratching type sound played, and then the hit character rolled over to display the scratch, or cut, or whatever. Never... never even remotely convincing.
Martial ArtsThis film has very little martial arts, and what's there is all empty-hand Kung Fu. Weapons are not allowed when you fight for your life, apparently. The actual fight scenes aren't good, but they're not horrible either. There aren't very many of them though, and they take up maybe 10 minutes in total, leaving a good 75 minutes of incredibly bad acting and wacky plot stuff. The last fight scene is the best or comedy, since during it the prince seemed to be remembering some sort of horse-form Kung Fu, and every time he starts clopping his hind feet or curling up his hands and waving them like a rearing horse, the movie cut to a scene of an actual horse rearing up and whinnying, at tremendous volume. Just a half second shot of the horse though, and during the fight scene they played that same clip literally half a dozen times. It got funnier each time, I assure you.
The horrible cinematography did its part to ruin the martial arts too, since quite a few scenes were shown in tight close up, and with that and the awful hackery of the widescreen to fullscreen transfer, numerous shots consisted of nothing but a couple of crossed arms, or a leg kicking with no sign of what it was aiming at, etc. That's on top of probably half the conversation scenes in the film cutting off most or all of one of the people talking.
There was also some very obvious stunt double use, when the prince would fight, then suddenly become partially obscured behind book shelves, low trees or bushes, etc, and at that point he always unleashed pointless gymnastics; flips, handsprings, etc, which would end with a return to a direct shot of the actor punching and kicking the stunt men. It was never less than hilarious, since it was so obviously a double, and there was no point at all in the doubling. His flips and such weren't integrated into the rest of the fight, and they never actually did him any good.
OverallIf you're looking for good martial arts action, put this one last on your list. Last. Like below
Kung Pow,
Gymkata, etc. On the other hand, if you enjoy unintentional humor, this is the best chop socky I've yet seen. I certainly laughed far more than I had at any other film of this type, and while my laughter was mostly of the "Oh Jesus that's bad." type, it was definitely laughter.
I can't imagine repeat viewing any of the other chop socky I've seen. This one though, I will definitely watch again sometime, maybe even when we're hosting some friends, since the comedy gold in these hills simply must be mined in the company of others.
Labels: movie review
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