ROCH 2006: She left me again! Oh noes!

Still watching the 2006 mainland adaptation of Jin Yong's "Return of the Condor Heroes." Some of it's all right. Then it all collapses into another attempt to convince us that Yang Guo and Little Dragon Girl are really, truly, deeply, forever, seriously, in love love love. I'm sorry, but the chemistry between the two actors is just not there, and these music video scenes do nothing to convince me otherwise. The time would be better spent showing us their character by their words and actions. If I wanted to stare at someone's face, I'd buy a damn poster.

Lu Wushuang: the actress who played her was ok, could have been better. In the book, I always felt that she and Yang Guo could have been a nicely matched couple. Both have sharp wits and sharp tongues, can be playful, but have hair trigger tempers and can hold a grudge. Too bad they cut much of their interaction. And I missed the ox! They had Yang Guo do all his LWS rescuing on foot. And there wasn't as much with the Beggar Clan.

Cheng Ying: wore a freaky "human-skin mask" through most of this. When we finally see her face, she looks all right. I suppose they must cast this show with Little Dragon Girl as the most beautiful, then Guo Fu and Huang Rong. At any rate, Cheng Ying, unlike her cousin, is much more of a traditional demure maiden with some martial arts skills.

Yelu Qi, Wanyan Ping et all: Decently acted. This little subplot has Wanyan Ping seeking revenge for her family's death on Yelu Qi's father, but unable to, and Yelu Qi's father explaining how his actions were in turn vengeance for Wanyan Ping's family's slaughtering of /his/ family back in the day... at the end of it, she can't kill Yelu Qi after all, and maybe that feud can end. It's something for Yang Guo to reflect upon...

Li Mochou: There she is again! The actress needs to work on her evil laugh. It wasn't terribly convincing. It's almost as irritating as Yang Guo's silly laugh. Gah!

Hua Shan (the mountain), Hong Qi Gong, and Ouyang Feng. Damn, they cut out almost all of this section. I was looking forward to seeing HQG's centipede feast. No sign of the bandits known as the Five Tibetan Clowns (though they were mentioned in passing later.) Ok. Now this is going overboard. Hong Qi Gong can TELEPATHICALLY (through some manipulation of his inner energy, I suppose) transmit the Dog-beating Stick methods to Yang Guo? That was just silly. At any rate, here we have the end of another old feud... I found it very touching in the anime version, but here it left me a bit flat.

The horse! They cut all the cool parts from the scenes on Huashan, but elaborated for many minutes of screen time on Yang Guo and the horse? Sheesh. It was the Yang Guo/Little Dragon Girl loooove goop all over again.

Hero's Meet: Aha, here we are with Guo Jing, Huang Rong, Guo Fu, and the rest. Guo Jing finally finds out that Yang Guo hasn't been safely stashed away with the Quanzhen (Taoist) sect all this time. Yang Guo hangs out with the other kids for awhile. Then here's the meeting and the Golden Wheel monk (they all seem to have turned into Mongols in this version) and the big fights. They cut out one of the combats in the contest, too bad. Yang Guo has a magic nose! Apparently, just /seeing/ Little Dragon Girl isn't good enough. Here, he sniff sniff sniffs...while the LDG Enya-esque leitmotif starts playing. Please. Just. Stop.

Guo Jing: I liked the actor, but I felt they should have cast someone bigger, with more of a physical presence. I always pictured him as something of a brute, with his 18 Dragon Subduing Palms. Here he almost looks smaller than Yang Guo.

Huang Rong: What's with the unnaturally wide eyes? It looks distractingly strange. Other than that, I liked her. She is supposed to be clever, seeing what GJ can't, and using words to separate YG and LDG. Which this actress pulls off pretty well.

Guo Fu: GJ and HR's spoiled daughter. Pretty actress. Sympathetic so far.

Wu brothers: Guo Fu's foster brothers (in effect, though technically, they're just Guo Jing's students.) About what they were supposed to be, that is, chasing after Guo Fu, not too clever, with middling skills in martial arts, and generally resentful and contemptuous of Yang Guo.

Huo Dou: the Mongolian prince. I liked the actor they cast here. He plays him as an arrogant princeling, slightly effete (after all, he does use that fan as his main weapon!), quick to take advantage and not terribly honorable.

Golden Wheel Monk: the strongest of the "enemy" here. Powerful inner energy (demonstrated via CGI, but relatively tasteful CGI). Looks good. Telekinetically controlled wheels o' death! Had some decent fight scenes between him and Little Dragon Girl (what happened to the golden bell/sphere thingies on her white sash o'doom?) and Yang Guo. Speaking of telekinesis, I'll try to erase from my mind that earlier parasol fight (Parasol fight!) between Little Dragon Girl and Li Mochou.

Fight scenes...apparently no one ever moves their feet or legs anymore to move around in a fight. That's so passe. Instead, they slide around magically, or simply fly like Superman. (In the old days, when people jumped off roofs and they just ran the film backwards, at least we some idea that they had to use their own muscles.) Oh yes, and in keeping with genre tradition, no one ever bleeds or even gets bruised. They show their injury by spraying blood from their mouths. Originally, this happened when the characters had internal injuries, but now, it's universal. But they didn't do the Jedi mind tricks from the 9 Yin Manual...awww...too bad. It would have been funny to watch the big monk (Da Er Ba) copying Yang Guo and tricked into whacking himself in the face.

Fight scenes...now they're telekinetically tossing huge boulders around! I suppose the mystically confusing rock formation business was never going to be convincing, but this... Ha, it does look cool. Nice effects. Big rocks whizzing around at the enemy. But...still stupid.

Yang Guo and Little Dragon Girl openly declare their love for each other: Shock! Horror! The shame! The crowd is squicked by the master-student couple. It's like incest. Theoretically. But in the story, she's only about 4 years older, and she looks about the same age. Well, every romantic couple needs some obstacles. They walk out and plan to live quietly in the Ancient Tomb forever, avoiding the censure of society. Of course, this is not to be.

"Gu-gu!"

"Guo-er!"

"Gu-gu!"

"Guo-er!"

Potato Chip Man

Scenes from the driveway: spring

"Hi, Bailey." It's a warm, sunny afternoon. The boy is sitting at the end of the driveway, next to the mailbox, not saying anything, not playing with anything, just sitting there, legs out, feet bare. His little sister sits next to him, glancing at him now and then to make sure that she's copying him right. "What are you guys doing?"

"Waiting for potato chips." He looks intently out towards the road.

"You're what? What potato chips?"

"Not telling."

"What, you're getting potato chips in the mail? The mail already came today. Is the UPS man bringing you potato chips?"

"No?" His voice rises at the end of the word, but it's not really a question.

"It's going to rain potato chips?"

He doesn't even look at me. He knows better. And so do I. His father promised him potato chips last night, if he did his homework. And he did his homework. So here he is. I didn't even know he knew how to read the clock, but he's right, his father does usually come home about now.

He's waiting for the Potato Chip Man.

Doctor Who, deja vu (spoilers)

I wasn't going to watch it yet, but I succumbed to tempation. So now I've seen the first five episodes of season three, and... it's the first season (of "new" Who) all over again.

"Smith and Jones": here we go with a new companion, Martha. So far she doesn't seem as heartless as Rose, but she's fallen into the making goo-goo eyes at the Doctor thing all too soon. Look, the Sontarans have gone in for a bit of cosmetic makeover and hired out as galactic police thugs! Oh, they're "Judoon". Riiiight. Not that bad, overall. I enjoyed it while I was watching it.

"Shakespeare Code": and here's our trip of a few hundred years back into British history, meeting with a literary genius while foiling the attempt of some quasi-magical aliens to break into our world. Yay. I actually liked this much better than "Unquiet Dead". This Shakespeare was more fun than that Dickens (despite a few lame jokes...some were amusing.)

"Gridlock": and here's our trip to the far future. Where once again, I'm reminded that Russell T. Davies has a sadly limited imagination. I don't think he can truly grasp just how long ten thousand years is, let alone five BILLION years. Only about 15 New New Yorks in that time? That's an average of one only every 67 million years. Please. RTD, do you even know how long ONE million years is? And we get the cat-headed people from the second season "future" episode again. And look, it's the Face of Boe again! Come on, if you have some big secret, why wait until you're on your dying breath to spill it? What was the big deal that he couldn't tell the Doctor before? It makes it look dumber, not more dramatic. But I did like it better than "New Earth" from the second season. First of all, Rose wasn't in it, so it wasn't so insufferably smug. Second, there weren't stupid disease zombies running around. Saving the last human/catfolk population of the planet by having them drive around in circles for years was an interesting concept (ultimately full of holes, but not as badly as the concepts behind "New Earth".)

"Daleks in Manhattan"/"Evolution of Daleks": The Dalek AND the pig-person and aliens invading Earth story for season 3. Didn't we already have the last Dalek? And the last Daleks again? No, wait, this time it's really truly I mean it the very last Dalek in the universe. Oh, Daleks "tainted" with human DNA (thus making them emotionally unstable yadda yadda yadda) again. Why am I watching this? I can't stop myself! The Doctor makes one of his rare trips to
to America, landing in New York in 1930.

Quit mentioning Rose every damn episode! GAHHH! Gah!!!! No, she's NOT your one speshul twue wuv, dammit.

The real romance story is between the Doctor and the Daleks. They've known each other for hundreds of years. A very INTENSE relationship, considering all the times they've nearly killed each other (I count the Daleks more or less as one entity, with a few mutations and Davroses here and there). Now they're both the last of their races. And no matter who the Doctor kisses, and no matter how many humans flirt with him, it's only the Daleks that he's actually mixed his genes with to create new life forms (on screen, anyway.) Poor kids. Killed within ten minutes of their introduction. Very tragic.

So, enough with the emergency time shifts. Clearly the last of the Daleks should team up with the last of the Timelords as companions. As the show girlsaid, "There's someone out there for everyone", even, presumably, Daleks.

ROCH 2006: Ballet with Swords and Flowers!

"Gugu!"

"Guo-er!"

"Gugu!"

"Guo-er!"

[cue sappy luuuuv music]

And there's what, thirty-plus more episodes of this to go? Damn.

Still, it's picked up a bit now that the "adult" Yang Guo has been introduced (in the middle of a "training montage" at the end of episode 3.) My impression? The actor is a bit too old to play the "teen" Yang Guo, so he makes it up by acting especially silly and idiotic. Yeah. Guess it won't be much of a difference when he pretends ("pretends"?) to be an idiot later. This is an inherent limitation of live action, though, when the story spans many many years. The actor has to "age" somehow.

Speaking of "training": what's with all the flowers? Sheesh. Next time I'm in a fight, /I'll/ swoosh a bunch of colorful petals in the air into sword shapes. I'm sure that will be very helpful. And aren't they supposed to be buck naked or something? Cheats... and those puny little flowers aren't hiding anything anyway...

So we have more with the two evil Taoists: the obsessed/stalker one seems rather sad and almost sympathetic in this version (I could forgive him!). We have the return of Li Mochou and her Fly-whisk o'Doom. We have the first onscreen appearance of West Poison Ouyang Feng. He doesn't walk around upside down in this version, more's the pity. (I actually thought that was rather cool in the other versions when he did that.) The Hama Gong (toad stance) looks ridiculous. Way too literal with the croaking and the computer-enhanced toad hopping.

At least they're out of the Ancient Tomb now. It bugged me that all the characters had perfect darkvision (as they call it in Dungeons and Dragons): no visible source of light, yet everything is lit and they can see fine. I found all the training (sparrow catching! Wall carvings! Goofing off in the water! Flowers!) scenes a bit dull.

So now we're on the road with Yang Guo the flirt (with Lu Wushuang), on the run from Li Mochou. (Lu Wushuang's stolen LMC's poison manual --- the one that has the formulae for the antidotes!) This part is fun to watch, except when they slow everything down for a little music video of Yang Guo remembering his Gugu. All right, all right, we understand! Some more fight scenes... hmm. I miss the old days, when fight scenes bore a vague (if stylized and unrealistic) resemblance to fighting. Oh well, it could be worse.

All this makes me want to reread the book. Yang Guo isn't nearly so irritating in text as he is on screen (much of the time). I didn't need to see all those urination gags, no I sure didn't...

Popcorn with ham!

Ok, so maybe you don't care for "instant natural jellyfish" (I admit, it palls by the third time you eat it in the same week). And you're allergic to peanut butter. And chips and candy are still boring, and you're not in the mood for fruit or (gods forbid) celery sticks.

Well, try some popcorn with ham! That's right, don't waste your money on the pre-mixed nasty stinky butter-flavored (or worse, cheese-flavored) popcorn you get in the microwaveable bags, at about a measly three per box. Get some nice cheap popcorn (I like the white kind, personally. It looks prettier with the ham), a brown paper bag (lunch bag does nicely), and some ham (the thinly sliced rectangles people put on their sandwiches: say 6 slices --- more if you're feeling greedy). Put some popcorn in the bag (a couple of generous handfuls, maybe. If you mess up, try again, the popcorn's cheap), fold down the top of the bag a few times, then stick it in the microwave (folded bit down), and microwave on high for a few minutes (about 3-4 minutes on mine, until the popcorn is only popping about once per second).

Meanwhile, slice up the ham into shreds, about 0.5 cm wide by 5 cm long. Put it on your plate. When the microwave goes BEEP BEEP BEEP, take out the popcorn and add it to the other side of the plate. Enjoy the freshly nuked popcorn aroma. Then pick up a piece of popcorn, a piece of ham, and wrap the ham around the popcorn. Mmmm!

I'm serious.

Try this.

This meme must spread!!!