Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

Watching Valerian and the Movie with the Ridiculously Long Harry Potter–esque Title was a strange experience. I can’t say I liked it overall.

I think what grated most was the absurd idealization of the beautiful, innocent, peaceful aliens. They’re harder to relate to than gods or robots! In religions across the world, supernatural beings (with the notable exception of Cthulhu) always have some human behavioral characteristics that help us understand, admire, and/or emulate them. In Asimov’s science fiction stories about robots, even the robots are more complicated (and thus more interesting) than these aliens, because even with only a scant handful of unbreakable rules to follow, conflict is inevitable.

Yes, the innocents are aliens, so we could imagine that they have a society infinitely freer of conflict than any we’ve ever come across, but there’s really no point putting them in a human story if they are impossible to identify with. Nevertheless, not only are they in this story, they are the story. If it’s not possible to care about them, then why would anybody want to watch this movie?

Well, Valerian contains a lot of surprising, inventive, and beautiful, uh, stuff. As this guardian review puts it:

Valerian has the courage of its fearsome convictions, and if you’re willing to overlook things like acting, plot, characterization, dialogue, character arcs, pacing, structure and leads, as many science fiction die-hards are willing to do, then Valerian is a nifty spectacle that excels as eye-candy even if it comes up short in every other respect.

In other words, maybe it’s cult-classic material, albeit not for my particular kind of cult.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/valerian-and-the-city-of-a-thousand-planets/id1254728550

More opinions below, with SPOILERS.

Continue reading Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)

The Social Cancer (Noli Me Tangere) by José Rizal

I love books. I love languages. I built welovetranslations.com. 

You can read this post on that site!

I posted some background information and opinions on The Social Cancer (Noli Me Tangere) in my Backlist books post on Asian Books Blog.

Below are some quotes from the book and explanations for why I chose them.

Continue reading The Social Cancer (Noli Me Tangere) by José Rizal

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

I saw Thor: Ragnarok. It was lots of fun, even if I could see some of the jokes coming a mile away.

Thor: Ragnarok sign at We Cinemas at 321 Clementi.
At first I thought Thor was holding a saw. But no. Actually, it’s a helmet. That makes much more sense.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/thor-ragnarok/id1298386140

National Gallery Singapore

My husband and I visited the National Gallery.

We went through DBS Singapore Galleries 1, 2, and 3 on Level 2. We saw the Chief Justice’s Chamber and Office, as well as UOB Southeast Asia Galleries 1, 2 and 3 on Level 3. We’ll have to go back another time and see galleries 4 to 15 and the Wu Guanzhong Gallery.

I especially liked:

After visiting the gallery, my husband and I crossed Anderson Bridge, where this photo was taken, and got drinks at Starbucks at the Fullerton Waterboat House.

The round, spiny buildings are the famous Esplanade Theatres.

Calvin and Hobbes in Translation

I love books. I love languages. I built welovetranslations.com. 

You can read this post on that site!

This collection of translations of Bill Watterson’s The Revenge of the Baby- Sat probably got started when I went to Italy in 2002 and chanced upon a copy of the Italian translation.

Undoubtedly I bought the Portuguese one in Portugal in 2004 and the German one in Germany in 2008. My husband fetched me the French one from France at some point or other, having somehow determined that the contents were the same even though the cover was different. A neighbor kindly brought back the Chinese version for me when she went to visit family in Beijing recently.

Seeing Calvin’s words in other languages that use the Roman alphabet is one thing; seeing them in Chinese characters is quite strange.

Below are images of the six different book covers: French, Italian, Portuguese, German, English, and Chinese.

There are translations available in other languages, including Spanish (ISBN 9786075271170), Dutch (ISBN 97890542562), and Czech (ISBN 9788074490798), as well…

Continue reading Calvin and Hobbes in Translation

Coco (2017)

I thought I disliked Olaf the snowman because he falls apart all the time, but I didn’t dislike Miguel’s skeleton ancestors in Coco when they fell apart (over and over again) in the oddly godless land of the dead, so it must be something else about Olaf that rubs me the wrong way. Sadly, the creators of Frozen made him the central character in the animated short Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, which played before Coco.

Coco was totally worth the wait, however. The storytelling was crystal clear, emotional, and well-structured, with appropriate foreshadowing, lots of call-backs, and some stunning visuals. I couldn’t believe that a couple of adults next to me in the theater found it hard to stay awake; I found it hard not to cry.

Coco is the story of Miguel, the youngest in a long line of Mexican shoemakers. Coco is Miguel’s ancient great-grandmother. Coco and her mother were abandoned by an aspiring music man, so no one in the family is allowed to sing or play an instrument. They’re all fine with that… except Miguel. He wants nothing more than to be allowed to develop his musical talent. Eager to prove himself, he tries to steal the guitar from the tomb of a famous local musician so he can enter a competition being held as part of the town’s Day of the Dead celebrations. The theft doesn’t go as planned, and Miguel finds himself on a quest that teaches him about the dangers of ambition and the value of family.

Watch on Amazon

See below for a plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.

Continue reading Coco (2017)

Olaf’s Frozen Adventure

It was pretty weird seeing a story about European winter traditions in a theater in tropical Southeast Asia, where Chinese New Year is a more important family holiday than Christmas. Here, if Christmas is commercialized, it’s at least partly because many people aren’t actually Christian.

This Christmas featurette stars Olaf, who I never liked, being just as annoying as ever. His broken-fourth-wall deadpan comments failed to amuse. Meanwhile, Anna and Elsa were so perfect as to be utterly boring, and Christoff was milked for awkward gross-out humor. I didn’t like the feature film Frozen much to begin with, but Olaf’s Frozen Adventure was terrible.

I’m not the only one who didn’t like the short. The reasons mostly seem to be that Pixar usually produces shorts that are surprising, cute, and clever, whereas this one was dull and obviously commercially motivated, and not even all that short.

I did catch Elsa saying “I’m sorry”—which she never does in the entire movie where she’s kinda (but not really) the villain. So there’s that.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/olafs-frozen-adventure-includes-6-disney-tales/id1318611806

“This special collection also includes 6 winter-themed tales (46 min) featuring classic Disney characters—Donald Duck in The Hockey Champ, Goofy in The Art of Skiing and Mickey Mouse in the holiday treat Pluto’s Christmas Tree—as well as Once Upon A Wintertime, Winter and Polar Trappers.”

Old Singapore coin: It’s a lucky day when you find one of these!

Singapore has only been a country since 1965. It has only had its own coins since 1967. This ten-cent coin is from 1968, and belongs to the first series of Singapore coins, which featured sea animals.

The second series (introduced in 1985) featured flowers. There were two versions of the coat of arms, one with the banner bowed upwards and one with the banner hanging down. Supposedly the coat of arms was changed for better feng shui, because when the banner is hanging down, it looks like a smile rather than a frown. The octagon inscribed in the circular one-dollar coin is thought to be lucky.

The third series of coins (introduced in 2013, after I came to Singapore) involved changes in the metal composition and size of the coins as well as the designs, which are now more architectural.

The new coins have mostly displaced both second series designs, though I still get some mixed in with my change. It is quite rare to see a first series coin in circulation now.

Learn more about Singapore’s coins:

Asian Civilisations Museum

My husband and I went to the Asian Civilisations Museum.

We walked through all the exhibits that were open. We saw the Tang shipwreck exhibit, the Chinese scholar exhibit, the Chinese ceramics exhibit, the performing arts exhibit, the trade exhibit, the Islamic foyer, and the ancient religions exhibit.

Below are notes on a couple of the things we saw.

Continue reading Asian Civilisations Museum