I’m not sure what the theme was, but the fantasy/action plot was suitably, um, suitable for a superficially fun fantasy/action movie, there were some good laughs, and although the dialog was somewhat predictable, it didn’t sound cardboardy—except when it was describing the evil magical stuff.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/thor-the-dark-world/id731796731
Keep reading for a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.
When my husband took me to a squinchy Japanese restaurant that had high chairs at a bar-style counter, the server laconically instructed me to put my bag “downstairs”, which meant “on the shelf under the seat of the chair”.
I have heard English teachers eager to hold students accountable for their spoken language deride this common Singlish use of “downstairs”, but it’s wonderful (and typical) in its succinctness.
If you use the preposition “under”, you have to include a noun for the preposition to be, well, positioned in front of. If you use the adverb “downstairs”, you’re just saying something needs to go below something else, and letting context do the work of indicating what the something else is.
Chinese has a phrase approximately meaning “down side” which can be used the way the server was using “downstairs” to adverbially indicate “under something”. It also has phrases meaning “up side”, “behind side”, “opposite side”, etc., and you can say “located opposite side” without needing to say “located opposite the hotel”, for example, the way we can say in English that “the receipt is in the bag” or just “the receipt is inside”.
I get the sense that Chinese relies on context more than English, or at least relies on context in ways that English doesn’t, since a large proportion communication in any language is always shared context.
This was at least the second time I have watched this movie. Here are some scattered thoughts about it (no spoilers).
I like it. It’s fun. Some young people get superpowers because science! (Cue the Arthur C. Clarke quote about sufficiently advanced technology and magic.)
I liked the alternate universe of San Fransokyo.
I keep wanting to call the inflatable healthcare robot “Betamax”, even though his name is “Baymax”.
The scene where Baymax emerges in Hiro’s room for the first time really made me laugh.
The whole movie dances knowingly on the border between parody and wry self-reference: not only does the audience know that the characters are in a superhero team’s origin story, the characters do, too.
The choice of bad guy was a pleasant surprise, and the motivation they gave him made a lot of sense. He wasn’t just evil for the sake of being evil.
Hiro goes on a believable emotional journey. The movie has real heart.
Anything with an airborne joyride in it gets a thumbs up from me.
Singapore is tidy.
Most of the time I take the tidiness for granted, though I immediately remember whenever I go just about anywhere else.
Still, once in a while, something in Singapore astonishes me. This temporary footpath diversion on Clementi Road is a prime example.
My husband and I visited the Cloud Forest and Flower Dome at Gardens by the Bay.
Below are 77 of the 246 photos I took.
This is not the kind of thing I typically watch, and it is creepy. Very well done, very thought-provoking, but in the end, creepy as all heck.
Tomorrowland was a cheerful attempt to show technology as ultimately good, which is not a popular thing to do, and might not have succeeded. Ex Machina is an attempt to show technology as ultimately scary, which is maybe also not easy, but more often succeeds—certainly it succeeded in this case.
There are only a handful characters in the movie, but their interactions are fascinating. The dialog does a better job of exploring the “ghost in the machine” theme than either of the Ghost in the Shell movies. The movie tackles the nature/nurture debate from the standpoint of art, using a Jackson Pollock painting as a metaphor for choice. The setting, which serves to underscore the contrast between man and machine in the movie, is a supermodern forest retreat which (as I surmised) actually exists.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/ex-machina/id983488795
Below are some thoughts on this movie and other android movies, as well as a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, because even indie movies have a rising-falling plot structure.
This sign in the Kent Vale lift says:
For children between 6 to 16 years
When you have two numbers, you need “between… and”, or “from… to” not “between… to”.
For children from 6 to 16 years old
For children between 6 and 16 years old
I’ve seen this problem before.
This sign in the lift at Kent Vale says
Pre-loved Items Collection
Which sounds weird to me because I would have said
Pre-loved Item Collection
even though obviously they will be collecting more than one.
It’s an example of a tendency to pluralize nouns being used as adjectives, which I’ve posted about already, twice.
This advertisement (which was designed to be hung on a horizontal pole on a bus or a train) says:
West My Golden Ticket?
The idea for this jokey name is that the word “west” in Singlish has the exact same three sounds as the word “where’s” in Singlish.
Yep. They’re both pronounced “wes”.
Below is some explanation of what the advertisement wants you to do (spend money, duh) and how the math works.
Continue reading Spot the homophone (plus a lesson in contest statistics)
Here he is again, in the basement at OG at Somerset.
