April 27, 2006 Archives

Re-posting from an Angry Asian Man news story of yesterday, because the thing actually happened in the Montreal suburban area where I live: A Filipino second-grader in Canada has been repeatedly punished by his school for eating with a spoon and fork (link). A stab at my wronged belief that differences would be understood and accepted. Some things like these push me out of me. To a lesser extent, people who think that manga/anime is a marginalized sub-culture. Cultural misunderstandings take a pinch at my arm skin and twists it 360 degrees x 10. I guess it's because of how something so anodine as eating the way your ancestors have always eaten was singled out by a near-sighted educational system tool as a deviant behaviour, even after adults have been involved. >:O

Had a nth rewatch of Chungking Express last night. This time without the subtitles, since by now I know the story by heart, I can pretend to understand Takeshi Kaneshiro's bits of monologue in Mandarin. I guess that this time, I really made an effort to see all the inconsistencies that were so apparent from the fact that the movie was shot in about less than a month in the middle of shooting another movie (a wkw thing - see In The Mood For Love), like the chef pretending to cut an apple, people obviously not extras looking into the camera, and the *up* the mid-levels escalator to get to the airport ('cause, as far as I know, to get to the old Kai Tak airport from mid-levels, you take the MTR at Central or a taxi, but down the stairs). Chungking Express is by far the favourite of all wkw movies, b/c it is so feel-good and populated with delusional characters. The critics here mostly remember In The Mood For Love, and as far as I was concerned, it would seem that the foreign press just shrugged off 2046 (maybe it was because I wasn't "here" for the whole time 2046 was up and running).

And since I had so much time between ridding our stairs of its carpet (all the nails and staples...) and doing nothing at all, I also went for a re-watch of 2046 on Monday.

Smething I can't fully realize is that CE is alredy 10 years old (12 years old, if you take into account that it was shot in 1994). HK didn't change very much - eventually, I made the link between the mid-levels escalator and the old police station in Central, and pinpointed the location of agent 633's (663?) flat, which I think now houses a Pacific Coffee on the ground floor.

I was told by relatives that 2046 was partly shot in Causeway Bay, in a flat near Lee Gardens, where the minibuses stop. That's probably unverifiable; unlike in CE, nothing currently existing is shown in 2046. As I watch 2046, I also get it more as a well-grounded movie. From reviews, and previews, I was expecting some sort of very unreal film like Fallen Angels (cold-blooded shootings out of nothing in small sleazy HK eateries...), but that wasn't it at all. Except for Chow Mo-wan's realizations at the end that were open and obscure (as you would want to be, for sake of preciousness), it was a quite normal, err, succession of sexloverelationships, where all the restraint found in In The Mood For Love suddenly gets loose in a fiesta of colors.

It's also interesting how wkw managed his cut with Takuya Kimura having left the set midway through the century-long shooting. Having Tony Leung voiceover repeated shots of Faye+Takuya while pretending to be her Japanese boyfriend, clever! Could wkw even have not "planned", if there's such thing as artistic planning in wkw's work, the late Faye-Tony flirt?

A film review on The Hand.

(While I bought the DVD of Chungking Express in HK (at HMV, shame on me), it would seem to be the American release, which is slightly different from the VCD HK version - there are deleted scenes added back in the American version, notably a longer sequence in the drug-hiding operation at the beginning of the movie.)

Hmm, in some countries, censorship is certainly a more serious issue than this.

But one of the more famous profs we have at the School of Computer Science, Luc Devroye, (if you went font-hunting one day, you'd end up googling him out) posted a page to scans of the Playboy feature on best party school involving McGill (so that we all finally get to see it for ourselves), and ended up getting his page at McGill yanked out from the domain completely by university authorities and forced to relocate to Carleton (not him, just the page, less the Playboy stuff - see explanation [link removed]). And as my former schoolmate says, "McGill, one of the top ten party schools in North America, and one of the least human administration." It turned out that a PGSS exec (perhaps through a student contact?) initially got wind of the page, and created the situation by asking the dean who asked the dept chair to take down the page.

Anyways, take this as the latest of a number of funny/embarassing anecdotes on McGill...