Letter from home & Neighbourly re-Porting

So a family member just wrote asking for advice for dealing with a cousin of mine. Seems she heard through the family grapevine that he may have been offended by the Christmas gift she gave his daughter and she's wondering whether she should write him to explain, wait for it to blow over, or what.

My reaction is that said cousin is a total douchebag who misled me constantly back when I tried to reach out to him, who told me our conversations were confidential while at the same time sharing them with his crazy mother, who got me to open up about my sexuality and, in return, blatantly lied about his, and I could give a flying fuck about what he thinks about the goddamn dolls his daughter got for Christmas.

Then I did my best to translate this all into nicey-nicey talk so as not to upset the more delicate-natured enquirer, meanwhile thanking my lucky stars that I have as little to do with my mom's family--who are such dysfunctional communicators that they make Fisher family of fictional funeral home fame look fully-actualised by comparison--as I can get away with.

In happier news, I found myself with a large tray of marzipan sweets which I really, really shouldn't eat all myself (they were intended to one of the Epiphany parties that I failed to show at) so I decided to share them with a neighbour, who--alas!--does not care for marzipan. But she was so touched by the gesture she gave me a bottle of port that she got as a gift and opened thinking it was red wine. Wow, talk about nasty surprises! I'll have to come up with a nice bottle of Rioja to reward her with down the line.

No actors were harmed in the making of this film, only egos

At least being home feeling crummy gave me a chance to catch up on some reading and film watching. Years after first hearing about Bruno Schultz, I've finally read some of his work. You know that feeling you get when you pick up a paticular writer for the first time and realise you're dealing with a singular talent? Yep, it was like that. A lot of people can write a short story recalling a roof-rattling gale and make it poetically beautiful, but it takes a visionary to preface it with an account of atticfulls of cast-off saucepans and empty bottles congregating under cover of darkness to call down the gale in the first place.

Saturday night, we watched 霍元甲 a.k.a. "Jet Li's Fearless". It was odd to see the featurette with Ronnie Yu talking about how they wanted to do something "different" with a wushu film when the only real twist to the founder-myth plot was killing off the hero. I must confess, I was taken aback to find that all the hype about it being "based on a true story" wasn't simply guff. The life of Huo Yunjia is so perfectly suited to HK cinema, it's amazing I haven't already seen a couple versions of the story.

But then, I guess Hong Kongers were satisfied enough with their local analogue, Huang Feihong, that there wasn't much appeal to a Shanghai-based fighter until political realities had shifted a bit. Sadly, it looks from the capsule summary of Huo's life that it could've made a far more interesting movie than what ended up on the screen. Why take a farmer who moonlights as a caravan guard and make him into just another martial arts schoolmaster?

One thing that did impress me, however, was their devotion to "keepin' it real". For maximum contrast, we ended up watching part of X-Men and all of Spider-Man 2 on Sunday night. As soon as the CGI-overload kicked in, my interest waned. I remember in particular a scene were an obviously computer-generated Spider-Man caroms through the interior of a train car and back out one of the windows. It wasn't one tenth as exciting as that moment in God of Gamblers where Charles Heung (a.k.a. "Dragon Five") whips his body around the inside of a metal post faster than you thought humanly possible in order to fend off a pair of thugs.

I'm not saying that Spider-Man 2 was an inferior film; at another time in my life, I probably would've identified powerfully with the players in the unrequited love affair. (Certainly more than I could ever have with the hokey village-wisdom subplot crammed into the middle of Fearless.) But whereas Fearless came alive during the fight scenes, the superhero films became so dead it made me ready to swear of CGI films for good--or at least until the technology improves to the point where it becomes seamless.

(no subject)

The good news on the ride in this morning is that made my connexion, if just barely; the bad news is that so did everyone else apparently. As I was standing there trying not to get battered by satchels and backpacks, I noticed a man standing in the doorway with the character 势 on his neck. It was immediately familiar and I racked my brains for a little while trying to decipher it until it occurred to me: Oh, I know what that says. The same thing that any ready-made American kanji tattoo says: TOOL.