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What I've been watching (and reading)
A couple of days ago I finished ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
cindypon's Silver Phoenix. It's a YA fantasy set in a world based on mythical China, about a young woman who sets off on a quest to find her missing father and who runs into creatures and situations from story and myth. Er, that's a lousy summary and why I hate writing them - I can't distill a book down into a couple of sentences. Go to one of the links below and read those. Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot, although it had some pacing problems, most likely do to first-novel syndrome. :) I felt that I never quite got time to sit down and know the characters other than Ai Ling, so that I didn't have the proper emotional resonance when things happened to them, and when (oh, hell, spoiler code) we learned about Ai Ling's past life as Silver Phoenix, I felt I didn't know enough about that to really get the enemy's motivation - he came across as rather flat. At any rate, I've done reading here and there in Chinese collections of strange stories such as In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record, which I've mentioned a couple of other times but didn't tag well so I can't find them, and WANT MOAR. Any book that handles such things well, like this book, I'm going to like. :D
(Amazon link
| Powell's link)
Just watched the Chinese movie Shower last night. It's a 1999 movie taking place against the backdrop of modernization. Da Ming is a successful businessman who comes back home for a few days to visit his father (whose name I never caught) and his mentally disabled brother, Er Ming, who run a traditional bathhouse in an old neighborhood. I really enjoyed this movie, although I wouldn't call it a comedy (it's listed in Netflix in the 'foreign comedies' section). There are funny bits to it, but it's mostly a story of a community and a family, how modernization is destroying the community, and how the family strengthens itself in the face of that. I loved the relationship between Er Ming and his father, and the cranky and eccentric men of the neighborhood who socialize in the bathhouse. There were a couple of points where the story lost me - it went to a story-within-a-story at those points - and I have no idea if it's because I wasn't following properly, the translation was wonky, I was missing some cultural cues, or the filmmaker was being so subtle that he was incomprehensible. Still, recommended.
I really wanted to like the movie Mongolian Ping Pong, but I only got halfway through. The Netflix summary makes it sound like The Gods Must Be Crazy set in Mongolia, and I was a bit leery of the potential portrayal of Mongolian tribesmen as innocent naifs as the !Kung were portrayed in Gods, but it sidestepped that quite nicely. The general story is that a ping pong ball comes floating down a stream and is picked up by a young Mongolian boy, who tries to figure out what it is, and eventually travels to Beijing to return it. I stopped halfway through because the movie is sloooooooow. If I were in the right frame of mind, I'd probably stuck it out, but I was falling asleep.
The danger of patronizing the people who find the ball is averted - by the halfway mark the kids figure out it's a ball used in a sport, although they're not quite sure what the sport is as the old TV the boy's father has requires an elaborate metal antenna contraption to work, and the Ping Pong competition they tune in to can only be heard, not seen due to static. And before that point, they spend a lot of time trying to work out what it must be - the boy's grandmother says it's a dragon pearl, but that hypothesis is eventually rejected. I quit watching about the point the kids learn that the Ping Pong ball is the national ball of China, and so they think it must be very important and start to set off for Beijing (although they don't quite realize exactly how big China is), because the story was developing so slowly that I couldn't stay awake.
Lots and lots of Mongolian landscape porn, however, and (if it depicts this correctly), a fascinating look at Mongolian semi-nomadic life in the modern era, where horses mix with motorbikes. It's a View On Demand movie at Netflix, so I may eventually watch the rest.
cindypon's Silver Phoenix. It's a YA fantasy set in a world based on mythical China, about a young woman who sets off on a quest to find her missing father and who runs into creatures and situations from story and myth. Er, that's a lousy summary and why I hate writing them - I can't distill a book down into a couple of sentences. Go to one of the links below and read those. Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot, although it had some pacing problems, most likely do to first-novel syndrome. :) I felt that I never quite got time to sit down and know the characters other than Ai Ling, so that I didn't have the proper emotional resonance when things happened to them, and when (oh, hell, spoiler code) we learned about Ai Ling's past life as Silver Phoenix, I felt I didn't know enough about that to really get the enemy's motivation - he came across as rather flat. At any rate, I've done reading here and there in Chinese collections of strange stories such as In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record, which I've mentioned a couple of other times but didn't tag well so I can't find them, and WANT MOAR. Any book that handles such things well, like this book, I'm going to like. :D(Amazon link
| Powell's link)Just watched the Chinese movie Shower last night. It's a 1999 movie taking place against the backdrop of modernization. Da Ming is a successful businessman who comes back home for a few days to visit his father (whose name I never caught) and his mentally disabled brother, Er Ming, who run a traditional bathhouse in an old neighborhood. I really enjoyed this movie, although I wouldn't call it a comedy (it's listed in Netflix in the 'foreign comedies' section). There are funny bits to it, but it's mostly a story of a community and a family, how modernization is destroying the community, and how the family strengthens itself in the face of that. I loved the relationship between Er Ming and his father, and the cranky and eccentric men of the neighborhood who socialize in the bathhouse. There were a couple of points where the story lost me - it went to a story-within-a-story at those points - and I have no idea if it's because I wasn't following properly, the translation was wonky, I was missing some cultural cues, or the filmmaker was being so subtle that he was incomprehensible. Still, recommended.
I really wanted to like the movie Mongolian Ping Pong, but I only got halfway through. The Netflix summary makes it sound like The Gods Must Be Crazy set in Mongolia, and I was a bit leery of the potential portrayal of Mongolian tribesmen as innocent naifs as the !Kung were portrayed in Gods, but it sidestepped that quite nicely. The general story is that a ping pong ball comes floating down a stream and is picked up by a young Mongolian boy, who tries to figure out what it is, and eventually travels to Beijing to return it. I stopped halfway through because the movie is sloooooooow. If I were in the right frame of mind, I'd probably stuck it out, but I was falling asleep.
The danger of patronizing the people who find the ball is averted - by the halfway mark the kids figure out it's a ball used in a sport, although they're not quite sure what the sport is as the old TV the boy's father has requires an elaborate metal antenna contraption to work, and the Ping Pong competition they tune in to can only be heard, not seen due to static. And before that point, they spend a lot of time trying to work out what it must be - the boy's grandmother says it's a dragon pearl, but that hypothesis is eventually rejected. I quit watching about the point the kids learn that the Ping Pong ball is the national ball of China, and so they think it must be very important and start to set off for Beijing (although they don't quite realize exactly how big China is), because the story was developing so slowly that I couldn't stay awake.
Lots and lots of Mongolian landscape porn, however, and (if it depicts this correctly), a fascinating look at Mongolian semi-nomadic life in the modern era, where horses mix with motorbikes. It's a View On Demand movie at Netflix, so I may eventually watch the rest.
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(Patronization aside, I really liked The Gods Must Be Crazy.)
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(I loved TGMBC when I first saw it and a few times after that - it was only later that I realized the portrayal of the !Kung was problematic. Yeah, it's a stupid comedy, but it's possible to do that without falling in to the "tribal characters must be both innocent naifs and Fonts of Natural Wisdom" stereotype all over again.)
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Called Forbidden Warrior (http://www.amazon.com/Forbidden-Warrior-Marie-Matiko/dp/B000BCKFHA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1242424593&sr=8-1)
If you can get a hold of the DVD, which I got mine for about $1 on Amazon resellers, I'd advise watching it, even if just for the fact of laughing at all the plot holes.
And there is a BLIND FLYING MAGICAL HIPPIE :)
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