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jhameiaI'm in the transit hotel at Incheon. It's been a few travel full days. My computer says it's 1pm, and the clock on the wall says it's 5pm. I got in around 6pm local time, checked into the transit hotel, and crashed.
As soon as I got back from Clarion, I was out having dinner with Birgit. S came over on Wednesday to hang out--we went to lunch and watched Ghostbusters. (Leslie Jones was underused; Katie McKinnon was annoying except when she was talking science and even that was tiresome; Melissa McCarthy is good; Kristin Wiig's character was so incompetent I couldn't stand it.) Stopped by JoAnn's so I could get some jewelry things for my new piece of tree sap (which I saw on a tree in Balboa Park and made my classmate Derek get for me). It looks really good. Then the next day, I hung with Maurisa and Eric, and then Maurisa and I met with Nalo in the evening. Maurisa brought her friend and we went to Haagen-Daaz to get some icecream and listen to the live band playing in Uni Village.
The Amtrak to Oakland was some 11 hours; I missed the 6.50am train to LA because taxis are unreliable. But the 8.10 train got me to the train tracks, right on time for the Coast Starlight. I lugged my luggage to the Bart station, found Claire's place, and was greeted by Tempest.
Spent the whole Saturday with Tempest! We had breakfast with one of my classmates, and then worked in Borderlands for several hours before heading out to dinner with Chris. Then Joyce and Randy came out to hang and play Pokemon Go so we went to Dolores Park for it. So many Pokemon in SF!
Sunday morning, Maurisa came to get me and we went to dim sum with Emily.
Airport airport airport. The flight was 11 hours long so I watched the following:
MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING 2: This was AMAZING and I am SO glad I got to watch it. It picks up 17 years after the first movie, and since the characters have been established, there is SO much more going on alongside the main three plotlines. Paris is annoying as a teen as can be expected, but adorable all the same (especially her face when she discovers her date is a nice Greek boy, and I also like that he doesn't show up at the end); Toula and Ian are still sqwooshy. I was VERY pleased to see the continued involvement of Ian's parents, who were taciturn and a bit nervous in the first movie, in the whole family drama. It took me a while to realize that yes, they were in the family group, actively volunteering to help out. There were subplots involving family reunions, and as usual I really love how the men of the family act so macho but it turns out to not be a kind of toxic masculinity ("It's not good to keep secrets from your family," said Nick and I BAWLED when I realized what happened). Mama-yaya's character got really fleshed out in a really beautiful way; she was used mostly for comedy in the first movie, and she got a lot more moments in this one that's interestingly, uh, symbolic. Things have changed for Toula and Ian, like Toula losing her travel agency job due to the economy, but it was so believable, and the ups and downs of the family are trite but WHO CARES, it's a story about a family, with attendant suffocation and all. It was a satisfying, satisfying movie that hit all my buttons.
ZOOTOPIA: I see why this movie is good--it's got an ambitious scope and the plot twists and turns are really great. Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde are also really competent characters, which I like. I, uh.... I don't buy the worldbuilding, really. I think the scale is great with multiple climate types in a single city to have multiple types of animals, but what are the predators eating? Seriously. This bugged me all through the movie: WE NEVER SEE THEM EATING. Except donuts and popsicles. But it moves right along, each act feeding into each other really well.
THE MASTER: I watched this because I saw it playing on someone's screen ahead of me, which had two main characters having an intense conversation about their marriage while the husband is beating up thugs, and she's all like "we got married with the understanding that we would separate" and had great lines like "With or without a gardener, flowers die regardless. With or without a man, a woman would still live her own life."| It's not very coherent as a movie: a Wing-Chun master comes to Tianjin to establish a school (translated as dojo in the subs) but apparently the rules are that he needs a disciple who is a local to defeat at least 8 of the schools, and the disciple afterwards must leave Tianjin. Then there's the whole business where he marries a local woman (who's unmarried because she had a baby out of wedlock) for reasons unclear to me. Then there're the machinations of one of the leading schools (led by this woman who never does any actual martial arts, she's the wife of a former Grandmaster, and she's always really well-dressed), some double-crossings by a current grandmaster and the military gets involved and also a dual love story involving the disciple and a local noodle seller who I think is supposed to be coded as an ethnic minority due to her costume and aaaaaaaaaaaaaa what is going onnnnnnn. Like I felt like the movie was shot just so everyone could look cool (and to be fair, everyone does look cool)--it's so artful and posed. I also have never seen a Chinese movie with SO MANY random white people in the background before: the wife worked in a Western restaurant, seemingly the only local there; the grandmaster likes to watch performances of that Russian folk dance where the dancers seem to float across the floor. But really one would watch it for the escalating fight scene, especially the last part where it looks like the protagonist is making his way through a series of final bosses.
THE TALE OF TALES: This movie is hella fucked up and I watched it because I like fairytales but as far as fairytales go, this got hella dark and the bodycount was really high. It has about THREE stories in the one movie, and they never really cohere together other than, sometime at the beginning the characters come together for a funeral, and at the end the three courts come together again for a coronation. But you don't really see the characters from the different threads ever really talking to each other otherwise. And it's super fairytale because it's lush and gorgeous but apparently each kingdom really only needs like the ONE town to sustain it. it's based on a collection of Neapolitan tales, everyone is a one-note character, and it's made to be beautiful and lush and gorgeous, not to make any sense.
THE JUNGLE BOOK: This was pretty meh. There's still hella anthropocentrism up the wazoo; Mowgli is a special snowflake; I don't understand why the animals have American accents. It was entertaining but in the end I didn't care.
I played a lot of Phlinx, and now am in a transit hotel killing time trying to sleep some more. It's 7am, I only need to check out at 9am. So I'm gonna try to be horizontal a bit more.
As soon as I got back from Clarion, I was out having dinner with Birgit. S came over on Wednesday to hang out--we went to lunch and watched Ghostbusters. (Leslie Jones was underused; Katie McKinnon was annoying except when she was talking science and even that was tiresome; Melissa McCarthy is good; Kristin Wiig's character was so incompetent I couldn't stand it.) Stopped by JoAnn's so I could get some jewelry things for my new piece of tree sap (which I saw on a tree in Balboa Park and made my classmate Derek get for me). It looks really good. Then the next day, I hung with Maurisa and Eric, and then Maurisa and I met with Nalo in the evening. Maurisa brought her friend and we went to Haagen-Daaz to get some icecream and listen to the live band playing in Uni Village.
The Amtrak to Oakland was some 11 hours; I missed the 6.50am train to LA because taxis are unreliable. But the 8.10 train got me to the train tracks, right on time for the Coast Starlight. I lugged my luggage to the Bart station, found Claire's place, and was greeted by Tempest.
Spent the whole Saturday with Tempest! We had breakfast with one of my classmates, and then worked in Borderlands for several hours before heading out to dinner with Chris. Then Joyce and Randy came out to hang and play Pokemon Go so we went to Dolores Park for it. So many Pokemon in SF!
Sunday morning, Maurisa came to get me and we went to dim sum with Emily.
Airport airport airport. The flight was 11 hours long so I watched the following:
MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING 2: This was AMAZING and I am SO glad I got to watch it. It picks up 17 years after the first movie, and since the characters have been established, there is SO much more going on alongside the main three plotlines. Paris is annoying as a teen as can be expected, but adorable all the same (especially her face when she discovers her date is a nice Greek boy, and I also like that he doesn't show up at the end); Toula and Ian are still sqwooshy. I was VERY pleased to see the continued involvement of Ian's parents, who were taciturn and a bit nervous in the first movie, in the whole family drama. It took me a while to realize that yes, they were in the family group, actively volunteering to help out. There were subplots involving family reunions, and as usual I really love how the men of the family act so macho but it turns out to not be a kind of toxic masculinity ("It's not good to keep secrets from your family," said Nick and I BAWLED when I realized what happened). Mama-yaya's character got really fleshed out in a really beautiful way; she was used mostly for comedy in the first movie, and she got a lot more moments in this one that's interestingly, uh, symbolic. Things have changed for Toula and Ian, like Toula losing her travel agency job due to the economy, but it was so believable, and the ups and downs of the family are trite but WHO CARES, it's a story about a family, with attendant suffocation and all. It was a satisfying, satisfying movie that hit all my buttons.
ZOOTOPIA: I see why this movie is good--it's got an ambitious scope and the plot twists and turns are really great. Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde are also really competent characters, which I like. I, uh.... I don't buy the worldbuilding, really. I think the scale is great with multiple climate types in a single city to have multiple types of animals, but what are the predators eating? Seriously. This bugged me all through the movie: WE NEVER SEE THEM EATING. Except donuts and popsicles. But it moves right along, each act feeding into each other really well.
THE MASTER: I watched this because I saw it playing on someone's screen ahead of me, which had two main characters having an intense conversation about their marriage while the husband is beating up thugs, and she's all like "we got married with the understanding that we would separate" and had great lines like "With or without a gardener, flowers die regardless. With or without a man, a woman would still live her own life."| It's not very coherent as a movie: a Wing-Chun master comes to Tianjin to establish a school (translated as dojo in the subs) but apparently the rules are that he needs a disciple who is a local to defeat at least 8 of the schools, and the disciple afterwards must leave Tianjin. Then there's the whole business where he marries a local woman (who's unmarried because she had a baby out of wedlock) for reasons unclear to me. Then there're the machinations of one of the leading schools (led by this woman who never does any actual martial arts, she's the wife of a former Grandmaster, and she's always really well-dressed), some double-crossings by a current grandmaster and the military gets involved and also a dual love story involving the disciple and a local noodle seller who I think is supposed to be coded as an ethnic minority due to her costume and aaaaaaaaaaaaaa what is going onnnnnnn. Like I felt like the movie was shot just so everyone could look cool (and to be fair, everyone does look cool)--it's so artful and posed. I also have never seen a Chinese movie with SO MANY random white people in the background before: the wife worked in a Western restaurant, seemingly the only local there; the grandmaster likes to watch performances of that Russian folk dance where the dancers seem to float across the floor. But really one would watch it for the escalating fight scene, especially the last part where it looks like the protagonist is making his way through a series of final bosses.
THE TALE OF TALES: This movie is hella fucked up and I watched it because I like fairytales but as far as fairytales go, this got hella dark and the bodycount was really high. It has about THREE stories in the one movie, and they never really cohere together other than, sometime at the beginning the characters come together for a funeral, and at the end the three courts come together again for a coronation. But you don't really see the characters from the different threads ever really talking to each other otherwise. And it's super fairytale because it's lush and gorgeous but apparently each kingdom really only needs like the ONE town to sustain it. it's based on a collection of Neapolitan tales, everyone is a one-note character, and it's made to be beautiful and lush and gorgeous, not to make any sense.
THE JUNGLE BOOK: This was pretty meh. There's still hella anthropocentrism up the wazoo; Mowgli is a special snowflake; I don't understand why the animals have American accents. It was entertaining but in the end I didn't care.
I played a lot of Phlinx, and now am in a transit hotel killing time trying to sleep some more. It's 7am, I only need to check out at 9am. So I'm gonna try to be horizontal a bit more.
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Date: 2016-08-09 06:24 pm (UTC)