clever people like me who talk loudly in restaurants
I'm feeling kind of unfocused and random lately. Not sure why. Well, right now it's probably lack of sleep since I was up at 6am today to do 2 hours at XDU and then had to go to work as well. At least I got time-and-a-half so if I have to labor on Labor Day, I get a little somethin' somethin' back. And it's not like anyone held a gun to my head and told me to take a job in the food biz (i've heard of these things you call holidays, i think...)
Not much else exciting happened over the weekend, other than buying the car, which is probably enough. Finished cleaning the gutters. Boy that's some good times. And fixed the window and door screens in the kitchen so now maybe only half of the mosquito population of the backyard will end up inside the house.
XDU (see above) was a fun way to start the day, as ever. Only totally ganked up one segue. For months now, the sound on the MCR speakers cuts out completely when you go to cue/preview another song, making it all too easy for me to lose track of where I am time-wise and let song A end to dead air while cueing up track B. There's some particularly good stuff on playlist right now, including: Matthew Dear, Rough Guide to Brazilian Hip-Hop, World Groove (a surprisingly stompin' new comp from Putomayo), and Mouse on Mars (which is just insanely good -- it kicks way harder than most of their earlier CDs and more in line with their live sound)
Saw Hero tonight. Outstanding! Having been watching mostly Japanese swordplay movies recently, it took me a while into the movie (unfortunately including part of a big set-piece fight between Donnie Yen and Jet Li) to adjust to the rhythms of Chinese movie fighting, which are very different from Japanese in general, and Zhang is taking a particularly "artsy" (for lack of a better word) approach to the Chinese style. Gorgeous movie. Zhang's use of color will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen his earlier movies such as Raise the Red Lantern or Ju Dou. Same for the tone of the ending -- again, very Zhang. Great work by Jet Li, Tony Leung, and (especially) Maggie Cheung. Zhang Ziyi has less of a part to work with than she had in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. She mostly does a great job here but I thought in a couple of scenes she went way over the top, more so than was necessary. Although that could be the fault of the director, or even the script for not getting me, as a viewer, down enough with the character to stay with the intensity and to end up seeing it as almost campy melodrama.
My only complaint? Not enough Donnie Yen.
Lots of complaining floating around the interwebnet about the politics etc of Hero. To which I say, hey, it's a Zhang Yimou movie. I'm not an ardent supporter of the auteur theory but I think to beat up on Zhang because he didn't make an Ang Lee movie is kinda pointless. Zhang's movies are full of glorious visual film-making but they're not usually much fun. And this would hardly be the first of his movies to have message/themes that are basically in sync with the gov't/party line. Which makes him different from most successful commercial directors how exactly? Not many people have the ability to speak truth to power. More's the pity...