Turbo (2013)

Well, race fans… What to say about Turbo. Not a favorite. Too many characters and subplots. There are comparisons one could draw between this movie and Pixar’s Cars (2006) and the less obviously related Ratatouille (2007), and Disney’s Planes (2013)… but none of those comparisons favor Dreamworks.

Among the Dreamworks disasters, I liked Rise of the Guardians better than Turbo; I vaguely think Sinbad and El Dorado were okay; I haven’t seen Mr. Peabody & Sherman or Penguins of Madagascar.

Turbo’s premise, which is proclaimed insane throughout the movie itself, is that a garden snail from somewhere in California accidentally gains superpowered speed (and miscellaneous other irrelevant attributes of being a car), finds a human sponsor, and goes to compete in the Indianapolis 500 against his childhood idol, a famous French driver. Throw in Samuel L. Jackson, a Latino, grown-up version of the charmingly oblivious fat boy in Up, more antagonists than you can shake a stick at, and a clip from the hit song “Eye of the Tiger” and you’ve got a mess of a movie.

I thought the filmmakers had passed up the world’s most obvious chance ever to make the old “look at that S car go” joke until I noticed that Turbo’s race number is ‘5’, which looks an awful lot like the letter ‘S’. Kudos, guys! I was expecting the joke and you still got me.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/turbo-2013/id666620766

Keep reading for more on what didn’t work and why, including SPOILERS. (Ha ha, get it? Spoilers!)

Continue reading Turbo (2013)

Brilliant Project Management by Stephen Barker and Rob Cole

Brilliant Project Management is a concise, general book with some good psychological insights in it.

What Stood Out

Some of the insights are more or less specifically applicable only to project management. For example, part of Chapter Six (Leading Effective Teams) is about the fallacy according to which people add manpower to speed up projects, with the result that the projects are actually slowed down, due to the extra work needed to bring the new people up to speed. (The Mythical Man-Month is a whole book about this one idea!)

However, other insights seem to have broader application. For example, the beginning of Chapter Nine (Making Use of Lessons Learned) reminds readers, in a manner of speaking, that a ship in the harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Mistakes, in other words, are inevitable. The chapter goes on to describe how best to learn from both positive and negative experience and from the experience of others as well as one’s own. The specific suggestions for interacting in offices could apply to a variety of jobs; the underlying insights could apply to personal life as well.

Chapter Four (Delivering Quality) reminds readers that a good solution to a problem is neither under-engineered nor over-engineered. Providing a more elegant, elaborate, or complete solution than is strictly required may not seem like a mistake but in fact wastes valuable time and money. In fact, it’s good to keep in mind that it’s generally a bad idea to put more effort into something than it deserves. Done ‘well enough’ is done.

Chapter Five (Resource Management) reminds readers that something that is “about 90% complete” is almost certainly not, chronologically speaking. As we know, the last 20% of the work often takes 80% of the time!

When and Why I Read It

Bought it cheap because it looked like it would be relevant to past, current, and possibly future job functions.

Genre: Non-fiction (business)
Date started / date finished:  17-Jul-16 to 18-Aug-16
Length: 154 pages
ISBN: 9780273707936 (paperback)
Originally published in: 2007
Amazon link: Brilliant Project Management

Words related to ‘receive’

recipient-receptacle
This is a bag of Persil laundry detergent. It says: “Keep product inside bag or transfer to another plastic recipient.”

The word ‘recipient’ sounds weird here because normally (I would think) a recipient is a person, and the instructions are obviously talking about a thing (a container or ‘receptacle’). The words ‘recipient’ and ‘receptacle’ are related but I think there’s good reason not to treat them as interchangeable.

See also: ‘recipe’, ‘receipt’, ‘reception’, and ‘receiver’.

I would say a ‘receiver’ is more typically a thing (a telephone receiver or a piece of audio equipment, for example), but in American football a receiver is a person. Go figure.

I’m told that in the UK there’s a school level called ‘reception’ that corresponds to Kindergarten. That sounds hilarious to me because I think of a reception as a fancy party, like the kind you have after a wedding, so my mental image of ‘reception’ doesn’t require or perhaps even permit four-year-old children.

This is the perfect cue for that variously attributed quotation about Brits and Americans being “one people separated by a common language”.

Types of futures in movies

In my post on Total Recall (2012), I said:

Perhaps because the future is like an exotic place, in American movies, the future is believably exotic when it’s Asian.

However, Asianness is not the only kind of exoticness that the future exhibits.

Sometimes, for example, the future is architecturally minimalistic (Gattaca) or brutalist (Total Recall 1990). Or it’s just the West in the present—or the 70s, as the case may be—but with better gadgets (Predestination), better weapons (Edge of Tomorrow) or “technology” you can’t help but call magic (Wanted). Or it’s a desert wasteland (Mad Max), possibly with flooded, buried, damaged, or overgrown skyscrapers (AI, Oblivion, Divergent, I Am Legend). Or at first glance it’s indistinguishable from the far past (Cloud Atlas). Or it’s not the future, it’s a magical parallel world that’s full of true-to-life European buildings but also has steampunk “technology” (The Golden Compass).

In The Expanse, interestingly, New York has walls to protect it from elevated sea levels. That’s an optimistic kind of future: we’ll have problems, but we’ll solve them in such a way that the past will be preserved rather than destroyed—or transcended and forgotten.

The Romance of Scholars’ Stones by Kemin Hu

Beautiful color photographs of scholars’ rocks and other Chinese scholars’ objects accompany a series of essays.

What Stood Out

Literally meaning “without action,” [the Daoist doctrine of] wuwei is best interpreted not as doing nothing but rather acting spontaneously, in accordance with one’s nature. A tree for example, was not seen as “trying to grow,” it simply grew because it was natural to do so. Likewise, Song literati attempted to incorporate this quality in both their lives and their aesthetic judgments. (2)

Oddly, this reminds me of Now, Discover Your Strengths, a book that says  people should spend more time doing the things they are particularly good at (the things that come naturally).

When and Why I Read It

My husband bought several books by Kemin Hu to learn more about Chinese scholar’s rocks. I’m interested in them, too.

Genre: Non-fiction (Asian history)
Date started / date finished:  9-Aug-16 to 13-Aug-16
Length: 148 pages
ISBN: 9781891640612 (hardcover)
Originally published in: 2011
Amazon link: The Romance of Scholars’ Stones

Related Books

  • Modern Chinese Scholars’ Rocks by Kemin Hu
  • Spirit Stones by Kemin Hu
  • Scholars’ Rocks in Ancient China by Kemin Hu

…and someone is selling scholars’ rocks on Amazon.

And another thing…

On the Singapore classical music station, I am hearing the phrase “as well as” used in place of “and” before the last item in a series.

…an opera full of passion, sacrifice as well as beautiful arias…

This misuse of “as well as” irks me at least as much as the host’s pronunciation of “genres” as “John Rez”, which I didn’t even understand the first twenty times I heard him say it.

Let’s look at another example with “as well as”.

I read fantasy, science-fiction, romance novels, as well as literary fiction.

This is just a list of four items. The sentence should just use “and”.

I read fantasy, science-fiction, romance novels, and literary fiction.

If the sentence is going to contain “as well as”, then it should say:

I read fantasy, science-fiction, and romance novels, as well as literary fiction.

Now the sentence isn’t just a list; it means, “Of course I read literary fiction. However, in addition, I also read fantasy, science-fiction, and romance novels!” The list of three surprising genres is followed by the one obvious genre separated by the phrase “as well as”.

Here’s another correct example of how to use the phrase “as well as”:

I, as well as my dad, am allergic to cats.

This sentence doesn’t just mean, “My dad and I are allergic to cats.” It means, “Not only is my dad allergic to cats, but guess what? I am, too!”

And yes, though maybe you think the verb sounds weird, coming, as it does, right after “my dad”, it should indeed be “am” and not “is” or “are”.

The upshot here is that the phrase “as well as” is NOT a fancier version of the word “and”. When I hear it used that way, the I feel like something is missing, unbalanced, and off-kilter.

But hey, don’t rely on my intuition. Ask the internet. Here is a particularly good set of explanations that adds a surprising note about -ing verbs, as well as upholding what I’ve already said:

http://site.uit.no/english/grammar/aswellas/

Total Recall (1990)

Despite my distaste for the sleaze, cursing, and blood in the Schwarzenegger version of Total Recall, I have to say that overall it’s a much better movie than the 2012 remake!

Viewers’ overall preference for the original seems to be widely attributed to nostalgia or fondness for Arnold’s acting, but in fact what makes the old movie better is that the characters’ actions and relationships just make so much more sense.

Arnold is an ordinary manual laborer of the future who’s so obsessed with going to Mars that not even his seductive wife can distract him from his dream of going there. He visits a business called Rekall that sells memories of perfect adventures and vacations that people can’t have in real life, but something goes wrong during the memory-implantation procedure and suddenly Arnold is being hunted. He goes to Mars, gets the girl and saves the planet. Or does he?

Feminism accounts for some of the differences between the original and the remake. The 1990 version has a feisty female rebel and a feisty female secret agent, but the rebel is a prostitute and the secret agent is also more or less hired out. Those roles had some ground-breaking elements but didn’t totally suit the sensibilities of two decades later. Also, the alien and psychic elements were dropped and obviously the setting was changed.

Interestingly, the original movie, I’m told, isn’t much like the story it was inspired by, Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/total-recall-mind-bending/id539413297

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

Continue reading Total Recall (1990)

Total Recall (2012)

This remake of the 1990 Schwarzenegger sci-fi movie Total Recall (1990) is flashy but far from amazing. I didn’t buy the sci-fi, I didn’t buy the romance, I didn’t buy the political cause. I heard clear echoes of Paycheck (2003), Upside Down (2013) and The Matrix (1999) but nothing really gripped me. Paycheck and sold the romance better. Upside Down sold the political cause and the romance better. Say what you want about Keanu, The Matrix sold the romance, the cause and the sci-fi better!

The premise of the movie, loosely based on the Philip K. Dick story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”, is that when some average Joe in the future can’t shake the feeling that he isn’t average, and one day goes to try out a recreational technology that can implant memories, and asks to live out a spy fantasy, he discovers that he is, supposedly, already a spy! Things spiral out of control from there. There’s lots of chasing, holograms, hovercars a la Minority Report (2002), sideways elevators, and explosions. In the end he saves the world and gets the girl, as per usual. In many ways, it’s a passable sci-fi/action/romance movie, but I can see why it’s been panned—it’s hard to care what happens to this guy.

Also, the hovercars aren’t the only things in the movie that are lifted (ha ha).

Watching the Total Recall remake proves about as inspiring as a trip to Costco. Every now and then something shiny and new catches your eye, but mostly you’re just eyeballing stuff you’ve seen a hundred times before.
—http://www.wired.com/2012/08/review-total-recall-remake/

One could also draw parallels with Vanilla Sky (2001) and Inception (2010). Or even the bizarre novel Sophie’s World.

The main actor, Colin Farrell, in this movie looked like a less boyish version of Brett Dalton, the actor who plays Grant Ward in Marvel’s Agents of Shield. (In a later and very, very strange movie I saw recently, The Lobster (2015), Colin Farrell looks more like Ned Flanders than Grant Ward.)

I think it was a nice touch that protagonist and factory worker Douglas Quaid is shown reading an Ian Fleming (James Bond) novel during his commute through the Earth. The internet says it was The Spy Who Loved Me.

The special features on the DVD weren’t so special. There’s a gag reel, which is okay but kind of unexpected since this isn’t a kids’ movie or a comedy. There’s a thing called “Science Fact or Science Fiction”, which is basically an interview with a guy who believes anything and everything will be possible eventually, if it isn’t already—an attitude I find unrealistic and somewhat poisonous. Finally, there’s a bit about how The Fall was designed which doesn’t shed much light on the thing at all, given how unintuitive and in fact highly implausible the technology is.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/total-recall-directors-cut/id559737629

Lots more thoughts below, including a detailed plot summary with SPOILERS in the form of a beat sheet in the style described in Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.

Continue reading Total Recall (2012)