Years of Poems and Spirits

Song is leaving for Beijing again. We thought it would be nice to spend a day in the city instead of being stuck on the east side.

Dinner at Waterfront Seafood Grill: Great sound view, spectacular sunset, pricy menu (the burning-through-your-wallet kind), excellent Lamb Rack.

Seafair Torchlight Parade: The lamest street fair I’ve ever witnessed. Where the New Orleanians turn funeral parade into a festival, the Seattlites turn a festival into a funeral parade. There was even a large contingent of Fa Lun Gong band: a wierd sight that left me … 哭笑不得 (or “not sure to frawn upon or to laugh at”).

The Simpsons Movie: for an long time fun, the movie is hardly any more entertaining. But it didn’t ruin the brand either. The really fun part was the experience of watching it: as different people picking on different jokes, it reminded me watching an episode with a group of guys in a bar. There is “solitary” movie and “social” movie. The Simpsons certainly belongs to the latter.

Saw The Last King of Scotland last night. Here is what I thought: it is a good, serious movie. Yet its artistic richness cannot overcome the story’s hollowness.

The movies uses a fictional character to paint a picture of Idi Amin who, perhaps more than anyone else, defines the term “African dictator”. Although the movie raises several good points, such as the peril of blind liberal allegiance with the downtrodden, or how terrible Ami was as a ruler (especially for the younger generation who have never heard of him before), I was struck by how Euro-centric the movie is–”not there is anything wrong with it”, but that is what I mean “hollow”.

The whole story was told by the young doctor from Scotland, who escaped from a bourgeois future to seek excitement and adventure. He was soon secuded by power, statue and charisma and became a unwilling servant of Idi Amin. It is really odd to look at Idi Amin this way because he meant so much more to his people, his neighbors and to history than he could ever have been to a lone Westerner.

In the movie, Amin, played by Whitaker, invoked his tribe, his agenda against colonialism, Libya and the PLO during conversations. Those names, each saturated with historical significance, matters a lot to everyone else except the young Scot who was engaged in a passionate affair with one of Amin’s wives. Therefore, the enormity of Amin’s crimes came to the young Scot’s–and us viewers’–consciousness only through the terrors he cast upon the two adulterers. I thought this arrangement errorneously aggrandized western individualism (I doubt even Satre would object to an Ugandan dictator torturing a green-eyed hunk for screwing his wife behind his back. If so, then what Amin did wrong?) but trivialized the suffering of the victims–after all, hundreds of kids starved to death before they are old enough to play Paolo and Francesca!

Another issue I have with this movie, and the portrait of African politics in the West in general, is that the picture is too simplistic: it is either “he’s his people’s savior” or “he will turn the country into his personal checkings account”–as if there is no shade of grey in between. After all, nationalism was invented in the West, when Amin keeps saying, “my country”, what exactly does he mean? Does he equates a head of state to a chief of a tribe? If so, where is the evidence? If not, where are the nuances? It is always the subtlety that tells a more complete story. Unfortunately, all the subtlety The Last King of Scotland has is the flirtacious eye contacts between the young Scot and his black beauty. What a waste of time!

Just watched two movies on DVD last night: Babel and The Departed

I certainly like Babel much better than The Departed, particularly knowing the latter is the movie of the year. What a M.F.S. (or Martin F$#*%&! Scorsese) fraud!

Babel is one of those films that has a simple story but leaves a lot room for acting/performance and imagination/internalization. In other words, it builds a narrative that invites a viewer to interpret for himself. For example, other than those obvious good and bad things, there is a lot that is neither-or and the implied fatalism, serendipity leaves a very chewy sentiment and to a certain degree, a sense of hopelessness (I have never seen so much crying from a Latino person until this movie). I have certain bias against Japanese cultural products but I have to give it to the Japanese actors in the movie. The deaf girl’s (Rinko Kikuchi) performance is just soooo good. The casting director must have some talent picking the right actors across so many countries.

The Departed is rather lame in comparison. If extravaganza meant peanut-like muscle groups for Michelangelo, or exotic customes for Puccini, to M.F.S. it is profanity and violence. Unlike Tarantino, M.F.S. still thinks P&V is means to an end, not the end itself. But the story pales in comparison to the P&V. Acting was so so: it seems DiCaprio wants to be DeNiro but turns out a mixturer of DeNiro and Pesci. Damon is never comfortable in a leading role. He probably makes less eye contact with his audiences than an average MBA interviewee.

Anyway, Babel 5 and The Departed 3.