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| Thursday, November 12th, 2009 |
robin_d_laws
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9:20a |
Overheard
 When a US studio snaps up remake rights to a foreign film, it’s often hard to picture the elements that made the original special in the first place surviving the translation into the Hollywood style. The piece might depend on cultural specifics that won’t work with American characters. It might succeed on the basis of a delicately sustained tone that seems impossible to capture a second time. The impending Hollywood version of Let the Right One In comes to mind. For similar reasons I've always been glad that the long-bruited American version of The Killer never made it out of development.
Overheard [HK, Felix Chong and Alan Mak] is, on the other hand, the kind of movie Hollywood should be remaking. It’s a plot-driven thriller with a fresh premise that could occur in any country with a stock market. The film makes diverting hay of its basic concept but doesn’t knock it out of the park, leaving room for the hypothetical remake writer to improve on the original.
Three underpaid cops from an electronic surveillance division enter a slippery slope of danger and corruption when they decide to cash in on the insider trading scheme they’ve been assigned to listen in on. Lau Ching Wan downshifts his charisma into a lower key as a passive guy secretly seeing getting another chance with his supervisor’s estranged wife. Daniel Wu is a young officer pressured by his rich fiancee’s father to increase his earning potential. The truly memorable performance comes from Louis Koo, who deglamorizes to play a disaffected working-class schlub facing a family medical crisis.
Of structural interest is the way that the film shifts through different cop sub-genres for each of its three acts. It starts as a stylish techno-procedural, becomes a noirish guilt spiral in the middle, and then rounds its final turns in typically doom-laden HK fashion.
Ragged in spots and perhaps failing to wring maximum juice from its original core idea, it’s still worth a gander if you like the actors or are a diehard Hong Kong cinema fan. Like most HK movies you can safely assume that it will show up as an import DVD in fairly short order.
I caught this at the gala opening of the Reel Asian Film Festival, which meant that it was proceeded by a punishing twenty minutes of welcoming speeches. Yikes! |
arhyalon
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8:14a |
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gapersblock
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8:31a |
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| Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 |
muckefuck
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10:37p |
SSC: "First of all, I'm not Martin Gore"
First a little context for the title: Many many years ago now, I read an article in some newspaper talking about Depeche Mode's relationship to their young and emotionally fragile fan base. A recurring theme was their persistent habit of addressing whichever band member they happened to corner as "Martin Gore". In any case, for whatever reason I've been listening to a lot of early Mode on YouTube lately. (Far from the most embarrassing thing I've been watching there, but that's irrelevant.) Apparently there's a new documentary retrospective thingo just out on British television, because I ended up playing a clip of it. While watching, I was thinking, It's Martin Gore speaking, so why does the screen say 'Dave Gahan'? And now that it's the weird one with the unruly blond mop, it says 'Martin Gore'. I wouldn't have expected BBC to make a boner like that! |
m_francis
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11:17p |
The great day on Nov. 11
The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Monthwhen the guns fell silent.  It was on Sept. 26 wen the big drive started in the Argonne Forest and I saw all kinds of things that I never witnessed before. We started out on the night of the 25th. At 9 o'clock we commences a tank road and worked our way almost to the German's front line trenches, At 2:30 one of the greatest of all barrages was opened. It was said that between 3500 and 4000 guns, some of them of very large calibre, went off at that hour, just like clock work. We worked on this road under shell fire until about 3:45 and then went back until the infantry went over the top at 5 o'clock. We followed with the tanks. That is the way the Americans started and kept pounding and pushing ahead until the great day on Nov. 11. ... That is where I saw my first German prisoners and dead soldiers, sights I shall never forget. It took the Americans only two days to go through the Argonne Forest and capture the next two towns... We kept going day and night. ... I was a little with sneezing or tear gas. It made me sick but I remained with the company for I did not like to leave my detachment at any time, for if something would happen, I thought, there would be plenty of help. ... It was some life. I am proud that I went through it, for nobody on the Hill will have anything on me. I was with my company every day, too. ... With love to all I remain as ever your loving son. Banty (My grandfather, Harry Singley, of the 304th Engineers, AEF, to his mother, 14 Jan 1919.)
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arhyalon
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11:17p |
Ping-Ping Turns 14
Today is Ping-Ping's 14th birthday....it's amazing to think that just a month and a half ago, I was still worried we might not get her in time...for today was the cut-off day after which she would have been too old to adopt. Now she's been with us just a day or so over a month. While it has not yet reached the point where we feel as if she had always been part of the family, that day grows closer. I am particularly grateful for how well she gets along with her brothers. She is developing a relationship with each one, and all three are very pleased with her. What a sweetie she is, and how lucky we are! |
orderofthestick
[ stevemb ]
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7:48p |
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gapersblock
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11:41p |
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gapersblock
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9:50p |
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gapersblock
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9:40p |
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gapersblock
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9:16p |
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gapersblock
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9:05p |
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twoeleven
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4:11p |
three from science
nifty things from the 23 oct issue. yes, as usual, i'm way behind on my reading. also as usual, the links go to the abstracts of the articles, since the full text is only for AAAS members. 1) glow in the dark 'shrooms:  not much more to say about these, 'cept "glow in the dark 'shrooms!". ok, i should say that the species is mycena luxaeterna, and the that the science story just refers people to an article in the september/october mycologia. which, alas, isn't open to the public yet. 2) huge telescopes. much to my surprise, it looks like the both the american and european science organizations are thinking about building some tremendous new toys for their astronomers. these are the american contenders:  on the left is the prosaically named "thirty meter telescope", whose eponymous 30m mirror (about 90' amuricin) is made from 492 smaller segments, and on the right is the "giant magellan telescope", whose seven 8.4m mirrors will act like a 24.5m mirror. the europeans wanna build the "overwhelmingly large" (OWL) 'scope:  with a 42m mirror. as the article notes, another expansion of "OWL" is "originally was larger", as the original pipe-dream called for a 100m mirror. that was the last i'd heard of it, when its size led astronomers to believe the europeans would never pony up for it. buried lede: The resolution provided by E-ELT's [european extremely large telescope, the official name of OWL] collecting area of 1200 square meters—nearly twice that of TMT [30m telescope] and three times that of GMT [giant magellan telescope] —will enable a lot of exciting science, says Spyromilio. "A nice example might be the power of imaging exoplanets[!!]. Here the E-ELT will achieve a contrast about an order of magnitude better than the next best telescope," he says, adding that E-ELT in principle will be able to detect exoplanets as small as Earth. right, not merely detecting exoplanets, by jiggles in the light curve of their parent sun, but actual pictures of them. man, we live in such a golden age of science... (yes, i know there are already some extremely low resolution images of "super-jupiters" in the infrared. that's not what i want, and that's not what you want either. :) ) ( edit: well, maybe not actual pictures, actually. if i've pushed the numbers correctly, i get a diffraction-limited feature size of 60,000km at a light-year with a 42m scope. poo!) 3) another nail in the coffin for biofuels: irrigation waterthe summarize a detailed story, turning plants into liquid fuels requires an embarrassing amount of water:  except in areas of rain-fed agriculture, this means lots of irrigation. and even in rain-fed areas, farmers will probably continue to irrigate some (as they currently do for food crops) as water is one of things that limits crop yield. consequence: additional demand for corn and soy for biofuels will increase demand for irrigation water, which is already in short supply, and will probably lead to more cultivation of marginal land in dry areas, with the usual results (dustbowls, soil salting, gullying, &c). while the article doesn't discuss the "white knights" of biofuels -- cellulosic plants such as switchgrass -- in any depth, the smart money is that if there's a demand for them as well, farmers will also water them for higher yields, so they'll probably be no better. otoh, the article does have a sidebar laying into the evil genetic engineers at french-named company (and their competitors at, um, "monstersanto") for having the gall to meddle with mother nature and develop drought-tolerant corn (maize). such vile fiddling will only serve to reduce food prices in the rich world and save millions of lives in the poor world, as fewer harvests will be lost to drought. |
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gapersblock
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12:31p |
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gapersblock
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7:59p |
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gapersblock
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7:33p |
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twoeleven
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2:22p |
fortune cookie say
"emptiness is the mother of all things." gee, that's almost actual chinese thinking! compare: thirty spokes share a wheel's hub;
it is the center hole that makes it useful.
shape clay into a vessel;
it is the space within that makes it useful.
cut doors and windows for a room;
it is the holes which make it useful.
therefore benefit comes from what is there;
usefulness from what is not there. dao de zhing, ch 11 |
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gapersblock
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5:05p |
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gapersblock
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5:02p |
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johncwright
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9:58a |
Wright's Writing Corner: Crosspost
This is John and I really do talk in this fake deep voice... Okay, this is not John. John is asleep, having written all night on his latest Work In Progress (he has today off.) Here's a crosspost for my latest Wright's Writing Corner. Hope you are all doing well, Mrs. John C. Wright |
arhyalon
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9:30a |
Wright's Writing Corner: Writing the Breakout Novel, Part One.
It is Wednesday, and I finally get a chance to write about what I have been itching to write about for months now, my favorite writing book: Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass. I have looked at many writing books. Normally, I do not find them to be helpful. The majority of them seem to be: “I found it useful to write this way, so you should to” books. All find and good if you happen to write the same way as that author, but writers approach their work in many different ways. If that author’s style is not yours, such books are really not much use. (They can even be damaging, if you try to replace your natural way of writing with someone else’s style that does not work for you.) There is a second group of writing books I have found useful. These are books written by someone who has dealt with quite a number of writers – someone who has had plenty of time to discover that what works for one doesn’t necessarily work for the next person, such as a teacher or an agent These books can be quite useful, because the author knows what kinds of things are specific to some and what are general to all writers. (Example: some people do well with outlines. Other people cannot produce a good story if they use an outline. But everyone needs a plot and readable grammar. A good writing instructor knows the difference between these things.) Interestingly, what this means is that successful authors do not necessarily produce good writing books. Teaching writing is a different skill from entertaining the reader. ( Read more... )Also, check out Danielle Ackley-McPhail's weekly Wednesday column on writing at : http://damcphail.livejournal.com
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robin_d_laws
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9:20a |
World Eater
London food critic Jay Rayner’s The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner is part foodie text and part travelogue. Rayner travels to major centers of food and money, not always in that order, to sample the highest of high-end restaurants. He heads to Vegas, Moscow, Dubai, Tokyo, New York, Paris, and his home town, London.
Fans of the exquisitely turned, often caustic descriptive phrase will find much to savor here. For the first half of the book, Rayner delivers everything I want in travel writing: he assures me that places I won’t be going to are also places I would never want to go to. This does not apply to New York or London, which I’ve been to and like. Otherwise unable to successfully portray Paris as a hellish wasteland, he manfully attempts to render it unendurable with a high-end imitation of Morgan Spurlock in Super Size Me.
For a surprising number of the over-the-top restaurant experiences, he similarly describes the meals as ones I do not want to eat, which is definitely an added bonus. Only a couple of the spots he describes induced out-of-reach fantasies of jetting about the world dropping four figures for a meal.
If you want this to be a gaming resource, you could do worse than to use the astounding details of Moscow, Dubai and to a lesser extent Tokyo and Vegas as background detail for a high-rolling espionage campaign. That Russian restaurant with the sturgeon swimming underneath its glass floors surely has to become the setting for a Feng Shui shoot-out.
This book is not to be confused with the equally wonderful The Man Who Ate Everything , by Vogue food writer Jeffrey Steingarten which was recommended to me by (name drop alert) Jack Vance, back when we spoke about the Dying Earth roleplaying game. That book is an experiential tour through the science and gastronomy of various ingredients, including a smatter of restaurant talk and plenty of dedicated kitchen experimentation. |
vingkot
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1:25p |
Preorders for buying Sartar Kingdom of Heroes at Dragonmeet 2009!
The worldwide premiere of Sartar Kingdom of Heroes will be at London Dragonmeet on November 28. We will be bringing a limited number of the new books for sale - AND THEY WILL SELL FAST! Your only guarantee that you will be able to get a copy of the book is to preorder your copy now. Go immediately to our website and reserve your copy!!! Save on the shipping costs of a book weighing a full kilo! Get your copy before anyone else. Sartar Kingdom of Heroes is the first book of the new Glorantha Renaissance - the Third Age begins NOW! Jeff Moon Design LLC |
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gapersblock
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6:33a |
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gapersblock
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6:00a |
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