Virus. Blah

URTI is not a word you want to hear from your doctor.

I suppose its better than NSU but an Upper Respiratory Tract Infection is the suck.

Thankfully, it's mostly over.

A New Drug

A new drug indeed.

Athlon 3500+
2x LeadTek 6800GS
2GB DDR 400
700 GB HD space
Coolermaster Centurion case

Fear the drug.

A New Year's Resolve

So I'm still awake at 8am, having sobered my friend up from the comatose state I found him in outside the Marriott Haagen-Dazs.

I got a call from a friend who shall remain nameless at 2:40am, wishing me a Happy New Year and informing me that he was in fact very drunk. Very, very drunk. So drunk, he dropped his phone. Multiple times.

After talking for a while I realized that in his condition he'd never be able to get a cab, so I told him to wait at the Hyatt for half an hour while I took a cab down. At 2:45am. On New Year's Day.

I think if I hadn't called for a cab, I'd still be waiting downstairs for one to show up.

I got there after nearly an hour, and called his cell phone to find out where he was. And called his cell phone. Again. And again.

I decided that there were three things he could have done:

1) Taken a cab home and fallen asleep (in which case he would have been a real kubai)
2) Ran out of battery for his cell phone (in which case too bad I'd head home)
3) Passed out on a bench somewhere and unable to hear his phone ring (in which case he should do what I do and always set the phone to vibrate. Vibrating phone. Mmmm.)

No prizes for guessing which it was, especially since I gave it away in the first sentence of this post.

After slapping, prodding, poking and blowing cigarette smoke in his face, we finally got upright. My plan till then had been to get him awake so that I could put him in a cab to my place and have him sleep off the alcohol.

Neat. Elegant. Short.

Like all such plans, it was scuppered by inconvenient facts. Primarily that he had to pick his wife up from the airport. At 7am. In three hours.

So I modified my cunning plan to:

1) Get him upright
2) Get him moving
3) Fill him with water
4) Make him puke all the alcohol out
5) Get him back to his car
6) Send him on the way to the airport.

So off we went on a little 2km route march to breakfast, with me the sergeant and him the recruit.

Which lead me to one of life's little triumphs.

Making a regular MAJ do pushups. Me, a lowly 3SG. Telling the MAJ to drop and give me 20 pushups.

It made getting out of bed to fetch him all worthwhile.

ALL WORTH WHILE.

Along the route march, we came up with some interesting quotes (non verbatim, as I'm too tired to remember it all):

1) "I'm really drunk. Is it okay to make racist comments?"
2) "You see that girl over there? You grab the boyfriend and I'll grab the girl. It's called flanking, he'll never suspect a thing."
3) "I felt offended that a regular Singaporean couldn't get into that party cause it was full of rich ang mohs and Indonesians, so I decided to forge a pass and gatecrash it [and he did, it was a cunning plan]."
4) "No, I was pre-drunk." [when asked his condition when forging the pass]
5) "Walking around in the rain is better than choking to death on your own vomit." [when he complained that he wanted to sit down.]
6) "It's not the driving that kills you [when drunk], it's the long boring stretches where you fall asleep."

The night was well concluded (though he didn't pick up his wife in the end) when he got into his car at the Hyatt, dropped me off, and drove home. He's probably home and asleep by now.

And with any luck, in the next 5 minutes, so will I be.

More than a Promise

So I just saw "The Promise" by Chen Kaige, starring Cecilia Cheung, Jang Donggun, Nicholas Tse and Hiroyuki Sanada. Most people I know have hated this movie, for two main reasons --

1) The special effects are crap
2) Some sequences are literally unbelievable

But that's not the point of the movie. The movie's point isn't to be a narrative that takes you from point A to point B in the most logical route. It's meant to be a pure fantasy, with beautiful, beautiful imagery. It's easiest to think of it in terms of classical tragedy, with a simple story but complex subtexts.

It's like accusing the Illiad of being unbelievable -- who can believe that Αχιλλεύς was invulnerable except on his heel? Or of the Three Kingdoms having unrealistic characters -- when was the last time you saw a 6'11 Chinese (or taller)?

Of course, The Promise isn't anywhere in the league of the others, but it certainly tries to be. It's a simple story -- girl meets goddess, goddess curses girl with material happiness but spiritual desolation, general meets slave, slave saves general, girl meets slave (who's dressed as general), slave saves girl... and on and on and on.

Or maybe not so simple. But definitely gorgeous -- absolutely gorgeous.

What's especially not so simple about it are the subtexts which seethe under the surface of the movie. There are so many, so let's start with the first and easiest. Why would Chen Kaige cast Chinese, Japanese and Korean actors as leading roles? It certainly can't be coincidence - unlike reality, everything in movies happens for a reason. God knows there are enough good Chinese actors out there.

A mundane reason may be that the financial backers are partly Japanese and Korean, and would like to see their own actors included to expand the distribution network. But even so, there's a lot of other interplays.

Hiroyuki Sanada's character is clearly Japanese-inspired. His emblem is a cherry flower, he lives in a house with screens, futons and very little furniture, and he wears his face masked crimson armour with a samurai stomp.

Nicolas Tse's character is equally clearly Chinese. It's the classic evil nobleman full of plots, with the iron fist very clearly outlined through the velvet glove.

Jang Donggun's character however, starts out as a crawling slave, who rises to his feet when put in danger, who changes his abusive master for Hiroyuki Sanada (who still treats him as his slave), and who manages to get the beautiful Chinese princess to fall for him.

Is that clearly Korean? I'm sure it's not a very flattering image, but to my mind it pulled up how Korean culture is becoming particularly hot in China, at the expense of the Japanese...

I can't really go into all the details without throwing spoilers here and there, but there are interesting subtexts throughout the story about the relationship between the countries, using Cecilia Cheung as a stand in for the Chinese people...

This all could be hooey, but it's interesting to play around with mentally...

In any case "The Promise" is to my mind the best of the art-house gongfu genre, and is in part so because there's another leading actress than Zhang Ziyi.

Watch it for yourselves -- you'll probably hate it, but you will have to admit that it's damned beautiful.