So I saw the new Jackie Chan movie Shinjuku Incident, where Jackie plays a Chinese villager who sneaks into Japan as an illegal immigrant on the trail of his girlfriend. While he initially only scrapes by, soon he hits a pivotal moment when (like in Mr Canton and Lady Rose), he saves a Yakuza underboss who's been betrayed by his Taiwanese cohorts. Naturally, he gains the underboss' confidence and gets a foothold in the power balance of the community. The movie started off pretty promisingly, even though it made it clear early on that this was a move away from insane stunts. It came across as pretty authentic, what with the switching between Japanese and Chinese - especially how Jackie and the other immigrants only manage fractured Japanese at the beginning.

However, it really doesn't deliver - for one, Jackie doesn't really have the chops for serious acting. There's one scene where he's supposed to tear up at the plight of his friend, and it ends up pretty comical. Another strike is that the plot turns out to be pretty cliched at the end - they've got the 'power corrupts' theme, and not much else. Finally, they try to wrap up too many things in the last 15 minutes and leave a few loose threads lying around. While it's not enough to justify a move away from Jackie's strong points, it's still a half-decent effort and also memorable for...


Alan Moore's Promethea was a bit heavy in certain places and outright kickass in others. The overwhelming cheerfulness at the end was a bit cloying, though. Overall, very satisfying in both concept and execution.

Finally went through the whole of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics - a fantastic book for anybody remotely interested in the subject matter, and I would think, mandatory reading for anybody who wants to get into the craft. Quite a few of his conclusions, I'd already arrived at (or near) on my own, but it was still great seeing them presented in such a lucid and well thought-out fashion.

Watching the current season of Top Gear (S13). Terrific entertainment, and I'd say around 60% of it can be appreciated by someone who doesn't give a shit about automobiles.

Finished the horror story collection Masters of Darkness III (ed. Dennis Etchison). For up to almost halfways you could have sub-titled this Wanking Off into Darkness because the stories were uniformly unexciting. One of the bad things about being a writer for your bread I guess is that you want to sell everything that can be sold. I honestly can't think of any other reason why these authors would think that their contributions (even the better written ones, like Jack Vance's The Secret have ideas so hoary it's barely worth the bother of reading) were worth sending out. There are some good ones by Chetwynd-Hayes (Doppelganger), Clive Barker (In The Hills, The Cities), Joyce Carol Oates (Family, my overall favorite)...that's still a damned small portion of the overall book.

Started off on the Quantum of Solace James Bond story collection. This is entertaining and the stories are set pretty low-key as opposed to the unconnected and completely overblown films of the same name. It will make for an excellent dinnertime companion and friend Prachit will probably be horrified to see his gift with the occasional page bearing stains of oily fingerprints. I apologize beforehand [:D]

I am watching the BBC Life of Birds series with old man Attenborough. The first episode dealt with the relative dominance of mammal and bird species and how particular areas have different proportions of those. The second one dealt with flight and the various modes of take-off and flight that different bird species have. Good fun, although the video quality of the series is somewhat grainy, definitely not in the same ballpark as the latter-day series.

Saw The Fall by Tarsem and boy, the film is jaw-droppingly brilliant! It's among the best films I have ever seen with a terrific interweaving multilayered plot and gobsmackingly good visuals. Splendid performance by the girl too.

Saw No Smoking by Anurag Kashyap, which was a pretty interesting and bold movie, and I thought John Abraham did quite well given his limitations as an actor.

The performance from the girl in The Fall was pretty damn good. How do you get an 8-year old to act their age in a movie, I wonder? Most child actors come across somewhat precocious and mess with the immersion of the story.

Rahul Chacko wrote:
Finally went through the whole of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics - a fantastic book for anybody remotely interested in the subject matter, and I would think, mandatory reading for anybody who wants to get into the craft. Quite a few of his conclusions, I'd already arrived at (or near) on my own, but it was still great seeing them presented in such a lucid and well thought-out fashion.

Watching the current season of Top Gear (S13). Terrific entertainment, and I'd say around 60% of it can be appreciated by someone who doesn't give a shit about automobiles.

A couple of years ago, I was hunting for Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics but ended up buying Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art. You might find Eisner's work quite instructive as he presents some great ideas on the comic as an art form, particularly panelling.

Absolutely agree with Top Gear being terrific entertainment- it's well executed all the way. And I'm one of those people who don't give a shit about automobiles.

watched Mean Machine last night...

Quick Gun Murugan a couple of days back. Nicely made, but not a very engaging second half. Watched Murder by Death at JP's place the same night, and that was some classy whodunit spoof from the 70s.

trix wrote:
A couple of years ago, I was hunting for Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics but ended up buying Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art. You might find Eisner's work quite instructive as he presents some great ideas on the comic as an art form, particularly panelling.
McCloud freely admits that a large part of his book is inspired from Eisner's seminal work. But the depth of his coverage is awesome - passage of time, transitions between panels, art styles, art-text relationship and a bunch of other stuff. I'll be reading Eisner's book when I get my hands on it, as well as Alan Moore's Writing for Comics, which is a bit on the heavier side (more words, less pictures).

The Perfect Sleep is a modern neo-noir that tries very hard to be cool and self referential and has the narrator talking to the audience and also admiring some particularly cool shots "even if they are cliched." Lots of style, some bits of great writing and dialogues but overall sloppy acting and the story about what seems to be the Russian mafia is pretty basic and silly. Worth watching if you like the whole noir thing but not otherwise.

what is noir? !something like the Black genre of Metal? then Fatty should have a whole lotta movies downloaded! lmao!!!!

Saw District 9 and thought it was great. Thankfully, the social commentary doesn't stop it from being a slam bang action flick. Awesome special effects that you can actually see in the middle of all the shaky cam techniques unlike Cloverfield. Overall had a lot of fun watching this.

Saw Brick most recently - and despite being a quirky-ass film, the atmosphere is totally engaging with some very believable performances by the cast.

Saw Knowing over the weekend. Pretty good film about Aliens sending out messages on every major disaster to have occurred on Earth in the last 50 years through a little girl who writes it all down in the form of numbers and then hands the paper over to be sealed in a time capsule. Nicolas Cage is a professor of something or the other at MIT and his son gets that piece of paper with the numbers on it when the time capsule is opened. Cage figures out what it means and after that the movie settles into part sci fi and part sci fi adventure as Cage is trying to figure out what's going to happen next and part guilt and longing over the death of his wife who he could have saved if he'd only got hold of that piece of paper a little earlier. Over all quite a good film and manages to be tense and suspenseful in spite of a very outlandish plot.

THE STAIN IN THE SNOW by Georges Simenon, the second of his non-Maigret novels I've read so far. A very dark tale about a dissolute young man testing the limits of morality in German-occupied France. Highly worthwhile if you like noirish narratives, although this rather goes beyond the genre, stripping away even what ragged glamour it has to wallow in total human degradation a bit like a latter-day Zoya.

ROYAL HIGHNESS by Thomas Mann. A relatively minor novel; suffers from a deflating lack of conflict in the last 3rd of the book. Not recommended for Mann newbies.

THE SI-FAN MYSTERIES by Sax Rohmer. An enjoyable romp, but the end sequence is framed by an overly fortunate coincidence - that the Si-Fan's secret lair should just happen to be hidden away in caves below the very place where Petrie and his friends go to rest up after a big confrontation in London. Still, super fun and a must-read for anyone into old-school pulp adventure.