Wednesday, January 8, 2003
Staff meeting. Addressed issues regarding the new OAR site which broke a lot of my site's links. Lunch with Joel at Nan King Road Bistro. We talked about craigslist and Queer Forum gatherings and his perceptions on boyfriend hunting in the gay community. "When it comes to interviewing potential Prince Charmings, there's a real difference between actually interviewing them versus testing them out," he says, with a smirk. In May 2000 while on a train ride in France, I jotted down this note-to-self: "Who is building the metaverse?" Nearly three years later, I find out by way of boingboing.com that the answer is there.com. Rodney trained me on the equipment in his lab for his 2-week wedding and honeymoon vacation. Finished watching the DVD from yesterday. Then we turned on the director's commentary and watched the first half hour. We wondered initially if the commentary dialogue would be in Chinese or English. Turns out it was Chinglish. Or, rather, English with a moderately heavy Chinese accent. The director, Kaige Chen, was not a very good commentator. We started counting the uhs and you knows and repeatedly burst out laughing after only a few seconds. If we were drinkers, it would have made a good drinking game: Drink once after every 5 uhs and every 5 you knows. Drink twice each time an uh is followed by a you know. Drink 3 times when the director says "scweenpway." Okay, so his English isn't perfect, but his film direction is quite amazing. The film is based on the true history of China in 221 B.C. in which an assassin is sent to kill a powerful king who may soon become emporer of all of China. Some of the film's writing is overtly patriotic and overly simplified, but the actors do an excellent job of carrying the film's grandeur and violence to visually poetic heights. We could have done without some of the repeated expressions such as sentences of death followed by "and kill his entire family!" It was unnerving to see practically every character in the film invite death and be proud of it. This film was almost as though someone said, "I need you to do a Chinese version of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers without digital effects." At least I don't think they used digital effects—none were apparant. No, that's not a fair comparison, but I'll leave it in here because it was (one of) my first thought(s).