Hollywood has made yet another movie about Hollywood! It’s also about compromises, almosts, and might-have-beens; strangely, this Hollywood movie doesn’t quite have a happy Hollywood ending. Worth watching unless you’re one of those people who can’t abide musicals.
Your Name (2016)
How many body-swapping movies have you seen?
I’ve seen…
- Freaky Friday (1976) – mother/daughter
- Big (1988) – boy/older self
- Freaky Friday (2003) – mother/daughter
- 13 Going on 30 (2004) – girl/older self
- Just Follow Law (2007) – male/female co-workers
…but there are lots more I’d never even heard of.
This one’s different. It made a ton of money and earned praise from critics. I’d say it’s worth watching even if you’re not a teen or an anime fan. The story is deeply emotional and surprisingly complex.
SIN > NRT > ATL
My trip to visit my parents in Atlanta looked like this, more or less. It took me over 24 hours to get there.
I watched two movies on the way from Singapore to Tokyo and another two and a half on the way from Tokyo to Atlanta.
I made the map using http://myflightbook.com.
Chinese and Japanese Gardens
When we visited the gardens in February, we arrived too late in the day to climb to the top of the Chinese pagoda or even set foot in the Japanese Gardens. This time, we arrived earlier.
See below for 29 photos. My favorite is the spiral one pointing up towards the top of the inside of the pagoda.
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
It’s tough to put The Stepford Wives into a genre. See below for my attempt to do so. (No spoliers.)
Zero-inflection plurals do not include cucumber.
This package of Japanese Kyuri from Malaysia says:
Rich in nutrients, Cucumber are excellent in salads, sandwiches, stir-fry and sushi.
Here, the fact that the singular is being treated like a plural makes it sound as if cucumbers are exotic animals like bison or buffalo.
Recently, though I don’t have a photo, I saw a sign in front of some model planes (in the Tin Tin shop strangely located on Pagoda St in Chinatown) that was advertising “aircrafts for sale”. Ack. No.
For a variety of historical reasons, English has many kinds of nouns that are annoyingly difficult to pluralize, and Wikipedia helpfully lists them.
Interestingly, the cucumber package shows ‘salads’, ‘sandwiches’, ‘stir-fry’, and ‘sushi’ all in the correct form, even though ‘salad’ requires an ‘s’, ‘sandwich’ requires ‘es’, and ‘stir-fry’ and ‘sushi’ are uncountable.
Why, then, was it so hard to give ‘cucumber’ its plural ‘s’?
And why is it capitalized?!
Visit to Gardens by the Bay Supertrees and OCBC Skyway
My husband and I returned to Gardens by the Bay to go up on the Skyway.
Below are 18 photos from our visit.
Continue reading Visit to Gardens by the Bay Supertrees and OCBC Skyway
Thor: The Dark World (2013)
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.
Downstairs vs under
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.
Big Hero 6 (2014)
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.
