"If you're me, who the hell am I?"

This seems to be a popular trope this year. At least, it happened in both of the TV shows I am currently following. I think I first saw it on screen in a movie from 1987, where it was done with black magic, and the Devil was involved. It comes up often enough in SF/fantasy, what with alien sleeper agents, clones, android duplicates, shapeshifters, etc. And it's especially popular in TV shows involving secrets, mysteries, and conspiracies. Even the identity and nature of the main character(s) is in question.

One of the shows is "This Is Not My Life", one of the best SF series I've ever watched (so far...one more episode to go in the season). It's set in what seems to be a dystopian near-future. A man wakes up and has no memory of his life, though people claim to be his family, neighbors, etc. At first everything around him seems fairly normal (a pleasant, peaceful suburb), but as the series goes on, the paranoia and SF elements take over. It's a bit like the "Prisoner" or a reverse "Nowhere Man", except it's real and the hints do build into something that makes sense (as opposed to being a metaphorical surrealistic question with no answer). I love the characters, and the ambiguity of whether they will help or hinder the protagonist. Things happen, people change... unlike some other shows I could mention. It's very tightly written. I don't get the sense of some episodes being mere filler.

"Haven", on the other hand...

"Haven" is the other show I'm watching. Supposedly based off of a Stephen King story (or at least using it as a starting point), it does involve supernatural events in a small town in Maine. So far so good. And the opening credits sequence is wonderfully creepy. But then it devolved into a boring Freak-of-the-Week/X-Files ripoff formula. Gah! And too many characters played the "I won't tell you anything useful because then we'd have nothing to do for the next season" card. No no no no no! What's sad is that it really does have potential. Towards the end of the season, it did start to get better. I'm glad it got renewed for a second season, but they really need to focus on the interesting elements. The protagonists have to take a more active role in investigating What the Hell is Going on Here!!! part, rather than go chasing after yet another semi-innocent person whose weird superpower is killing people. And they have interesting supporting characters. We need to see more of them (besides having them drop cryptic hints or giving each other meaningful glances). Well, here's hoping...

So it's October already! 10-10-(20)10! Argh! Yeah.

Miracle Healers

Just finished watching "Miracle Healers" (神醫俠侶 / Shen Yi Xia Lu), also known as "Magnificent Healer", "Immortality", or "Genius Physician Ti Ying". It's a 40 episode TV series produced by CTV, the Taiwanese TV network. It came out in 2004, so hey, I'm only 6 years behind this time! Anyway, great series, best I've watched in awhile (I certainly enjoyed it more than ROCH 2006 (with Huang Xiaoming) or "Legend of Dagger Lee" (with Vincent Jiao)). Zhao Wenzhou (Vincent Zhao) stars as Liu Xuan and Alyssa Chia as Ti Ying.

Historical Setting, plus a dash of Sci Fi

The Qin dynasty (remember? Good old "First Emperor of China" and all that) has been overthrown. The Liu clan (Han kingdom) and the Xiang clan (Chu kingdom) had a big fight to see who would rule after that. The Liu clan came out on top, with the Xiang clan driven into exile (to be the subject of tragic operas thereafter...or something...remember the famous opera scene in "Farewell My Concubine"?). Now that the first Han emperor is dead, his widow has taken over (in the name of a boy emperor) and is plotting to replace all the Liu old guard with members of her family, the Lu clan. Not only that, the Empress wants to get ahold of the Immortality medicine (which turns out to actually work!) and be Empress forever. Naturally, the Liu clan objects...violently...

Plotting a Coup d'Etat iz Serious Bizness!

The Liu elder (Liu Yuan) is a wily old fox. He's planted our hero, Liu Xuan, next to the Empress. In order to gain her trust, Liu Xuan has to commit all sorts of atrocities. Everyone hates him and calls him the Empress's running dog. (Ok, it doesn't have the ring of "capitalist running dog", but there you go, the common Mandarin word for "lackey" can be translated as "running dog".) Liu Xuan also has sibling rivalry issues with his older brother (General Liu Xiang). They've had a love triangle going with Princess Qin Zi (the Empress's niece) since childhood, and their little sister Liu Shan is caught in the middle as Qin Zi's friend and bodyguard. You just know this isn't going to end well...

Commoners! The wellspring of the LULZ!

On the other side, we have respected elder physician Chun Yu Yi, his two daughters, and his gaggle of apprentices. Ti Ying is the younger of the daughters, better at treating animals than humans. She also has sibling rivalry issues, as her sister (too greedy for her own good) keeps trying to get rid of her. Ti Ying has a childhood sweetheart, too, in the hapless Tang An. Is he in this just to have a character who babbles even more than Ti Ying, and makes her look clever by comparison? Anyway, he's basically there for comic relief, and vanishes halfway through, before appearing again towards the end.

Immortality is a curse!*

What if someone really did come up with a way to live forever? (Barring accidents and violent deaths). And what if (reasonably enough) "not dying" and "staying young" were two entirely separate problems? So now we have two 200+ year old people wandering (or being locked up in attempts to extract their secrets) around the story, plus an apprentice immortal who's merely in her 40s or 50s. The ancients only managed the "not dying" part, so one of them, unhappy with looking her age, sends her apprentice to acquire the "staying young" medicine, which Empress Lu also wants. Wacky hijinks ensue!

* sorry, obligatory "Doctor Who" reference (from "The Five Doctors").

My thoughts:

• Story: Good! Interesting, engaging, with a good blend of drama, comedy, and romance.
  
• Characters: I liked most of them (and loved to hate the villains). They did a good job with making the villains three-dimensional enough that I really did sympathize with them as people even when disagreeing with their choices. Liu Xuan would have been insufferable if not for his (suppressed) sense of humor. Ti Ying was annoying at times, but she really was very cute and lovable, and honorable. The princess, Qin Zi, I didn't like so much. She overplayed the whiny "damsel in distress" thing, but they subverted it somewhat by showing that it was a reasonable strategy for someone in her position (nominally important in the court, but with no real power).
  
• The cast: Everyone was well cast, I thought. I thought Vincent Zhao had a lot of charisma in this, and really suited the part. (I haven't seen him in much else, but now I'm tempted to watch the "Wind and Cloud"/"Stormriders" series starring him.) Liu Xuehua/"Leanne", who played the Empress, was brilliant! Scary and pitiable in her desperation. Women in power are almost always portrayed as evil in these stories (damned sexism!), but in this case, we had a very human monster, and she wasn't the most evil by the end...
  
• Action, scenery, and costumes: all good! This series isn't mainly about the fighting, and who has what special martial art, but the action scenes were excellent. I'm not saying it was "realistic", but it wasn't too over-the-top nor a stupid looking CGI-fest, either. It probably helped that Vincent Zhao really is a martial artist. He moves well and looks damn good in the fights! And the series looks decent, but not spectacular. I hate it when it looks like everything was done in a studio, with fake rocks. The costumes are good. They didn't go crazy with the Stupid Weird Hair (as I've seen in some other movies and TV series). Ok, Mo Niang (the apprentice immortal)'s swarms of bats looked really fake. It's not a big deal.
  
• Pacing: decent. It felt draggy after Liu Xuan finally makes his assassination attempt, but then picks up again towards the end. And then zoom! Everything was tied up rather quickly in episode 40, but it was a good ending, so I was happy. Unlike some series, I kept on wanting to watch. (Some I've abandoned for months, or even dropped altogether.)
  

So, not the best ever, but a highly enjoyable series. I'd give it an 8 out of 10.

Is this what they call a "meet-cute"?

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"The Return of the King" (1980 version)

I recently bought this DVD in a fit of nostalgia. What a terrible cover! It's nothing that appears in the movie (and are those dwarves!? The dwarves don't even appear in this movie) and in a completely misleading style.



What about the movie itself? Well, I've always had a fondness for these old Rankin/Bass animated productions. "The Last Unicorn" is still my favorite fantasy novel adaptation (and maybe my favorite fantasy movie, period.) "The Hobbit" is a close second (if you accept it as a musical!). For me, "The Return of the King" comes in somewhere behind "The Hobbit". For Rankin/Bass, it's both a sequel to "The Hobbit" and a sequel to Ralph Bakshi's completely unrelated "Lord of the Rings" animated movie covering the first half of the story. Nowadays, of course, everyone thinks of the Peter Jackson trilogy when you mention the "Lord of the Rings". Perhaps surprisingly, I actually prefer the Rankin/Bass animations in many respects!

For Rankin/Bass to attempt to make a 90 minute animated movie of (basically) the entire "Lord of the Rings" trilogy as a fun musical for little kids was COMPLETELY BATSHIT INSANE! That they succeeded as well as they did was a miracle. Obviously, they had to chop out major sections of the plot and dump most of the characters and skim quickly over what remained. They chose to focus on Sam and Frodo's quest to destroy the Ring, with the battle of Minas Tirith in the background. Not a bad decision. (Now, choosing Glenn Yarbrough to be the "Minstrel of Gondor" and warbling "Frodo of the Nine Fingers" in that irritating way...THAT was a bad decision.)

So. I think the best way to view this is NOT as a movie, but as a selection of set pieces punctuated by amusing musical numbers. Keep the books in the back of your mind and ignore the narration where it's forced to make up some kind of coherent story and find something for Merry and Pippin to do. Then you find that this movie in fact presents many scenes word for word straight from Tolkien! In fact, many of the best ones, the very ones I was hideously disappointed about when Peter Jackson choose to leave them out/distort in his version! (For example, Sam and the Watchers at the tower at Cirith Ungol, Denethor's death, Gandalf vs the Witch King, Eowyn vs the Witch King, Sam and Gollum, Frodo's "I have come. But I do not choose now to do what I came to do." at the Crack of Doom, etc.)

Voice actors: On the whole, pretty good. The accents were all over the place, and many of the names mispronounced, but it could have been worse. Orson Bean is fine as Frodo, and Roddy McDowall does a great Sam! John Huston is good as Gandalf (who serves as the narrator here). And Theodore returns to play Gollum. Ever since I watched "The Hobbit" as a kid, he will be THE Gollum to me.

Art: The visual design is good. Not as good as "The Last Unicorn" or "The Hobbit", I thought, but still impressive. Minas Tirith! Mordor! Mount Doom! The scenery was all excellent. The characters were mostly good, too, except for Frodo's eyes, which I found irritating (especially when you see him next to Sam). Worst design: Skeletor Nazgul on flying black horses?! No no no! This is especially egregious when you see the Witch King himself finally riding the big reptilian/draconian creature, and you realize they did the horses ON PURPOSE. I just feel it was a bad idea! The animation itself is obviously low-budget, and you can see them re-using bits over and over.

Music: Not bad. Again, not as good as in "The Hobbit" (which they did re-use some music from) or "The Last Unicorn", and the minstrel's songs were especially grating, but it's all made up for by the "Where there's a whip, there's a way!" song! YES! That one! It's hilarious! It's wonderfully catchy! Highlight of the whole musical! And "The Bearer of the Ring, the wearer of the ring" isn't bad, and the Men's Chorus of Mordor has a few decent songs. Although "Dooom...the cracks of doom!" was a bit generic.

My thoughts as I watch the movie:

• Gandalf's "This is an epic" voiceover and segue to Bilbo's birthday party at Rivendell: Not bad as a framing device. Takes away some of the suspense (you know everyone survives) but probably reassuring for little kids as things do get grim later. And this was even in the book (sort of) with Bilbo asking "what's become of my ring, Frodo?" But I want to strangle that minstrel already.
  
• Time to summarize the first two books! They "had many brave adventures" indeed! Ha ha ha! Stop saying "Ssseeerith Ungol!"
  
• Take a drink every time Gandalf says "festering malignancy"! The tower of Cirith Ungol looks good, though. Right. Time for another song and the opening credits. And yay, show them walking down the map. Yeah, they sure did a lot of walking in the books!
  
• Why is the Ring just lying there on the ground? Never mind, I'm sure Sam will pick it up after he's done hammering at the gates. Oh look! There's Sting and Frodo's "hero's cloak" (his what?) also on the ground. There's webs on the tunnel walls suggestive of Shelob, but they never actually mention any giant spider.
  
• "The Bearer of the Ring, the wearer of the Ring": Is Sam getting anywhere yet? No, wait, time for Sam's temptation. I think they had to condense all the Ring's evil corrupting effect onto Sam and Frodo, hence the extended hallucinatory scenes. (No Galadriel, no Boromir, no Faramir, etc. means it's down to the hobbits and Gollum to show the power of the Ring.) "Beware, the power that was simple now has grown"...to explain why the lifesaving tool of "The Hobbit" now has to be destroyed!
  
• DID THAT ORC JUST TURN INTO A LEMUR!? It's little touches like this that Peter Jackson would never in a million years have put into his version! And some may deride the little hobbit babies as the antidote to the Ring, but Sam has a point: the Ring grants immortality in its way, but it's not life, in contrast to living on by having descendants.
  
• Minas Tirith and the lands by the river: Beautiful! Oliphaunts! No! Not the flying horses! *facepalms*
  
• "Denethor?" "He's gone loony, I tell you!" says Pippin in one of the most ludicrously un-Tolkien lines in the movie (but still the sort of thing Pippin would have said, if he had been an American hobbit in the book). And Denethor has indeed gone loony! And he DOES have his lines from the book, one of the most memorable death scenes in it! "Soon all shall be burned. The West has failed..." "Ash! Ash and smoke blown away in the wind!" "Pride and despair! Didst thou think that the eyes of the White Tower were blind?" Wow. Just wow. Even without Faramir, this was a striking scene. (Ok, so they have to explain the Palantir quickly as a crystal ball, but still...) "So passes Denethor, son of Ecthelion. And so pass also the days of Gondor, for good or for evil."
  
• The stone watchers at the gate of the tower of Cirith Ungol! Yes! I'm really glad they put that in as I loved that bit in the books. Nice design on them, very spooky, and they managed to convey the psychic force-field effect...though the phial was pretty random... "Hey, what's this in my pocket? How conveeeeenient!" And they skip all explanations by claiming it loses its power if explained! LOL.
  
• The whole sequence where Sam goes up in the tower and rescues Frodo is lovely. And Frodo's reaction at Sam having the ring: that's it! That's how it was! But "malevolent trickery" doesn't exactly roll trippingly off the tongue.
  
• Sam and Frodo trudge endlessly through Mordor. Their weariness and the bleakness of the landscape come through very clearly. But don't despair...it's time for...
  
• The song! "Where's there's a whip *whip cracks* there's a way!" I never knew orcs were such talented musicians! Sam says "I'd rather be singing a good old hobbit song myself," but what does he know? But I like the scene where he eggs on the orcish leader to fight the Men! All those stomping orcish feet!
  
• Grond the battering ram! Another excellent set-piece, the breaking of the gates and Gandalf's confrontation with the Witch King. "Go back to the abyss prepared for you!" "Old fool! This is my hour! Do you not know death when you see it? Die now and curse in vain!"
  
• Frodo's nightmares and dreams: I love the orcs giving the hobbits a cheery wave as they walk by. It's so silly it's brilliant!
  
• "Who causes the minutes to fall dead, adding up to no passing hour, bringing no change from day to night, as the unseen sun fails to filter into the ever-present shadows? Who is this dark lord who turns starless nights into sunless days? How does his piercing eye see through the ever-present darkness? Seeing all and nothing. The Restless Eye, in his dark tower, wearing a veil of protective shadow he has woven from fear. And yet he fears, too. In the security of his protective realm, he fears the winds of the world are turning against him. Tearing aside his veils and troubling him with tidings of bold spies that have passed through his fences." --- Gandalf. Best original (i.e. not by Tolkien) bit of writing in this movie. Amazing stuff, from a writer (Romeo Muller) probably better known for "Rudolph" and other holiday specials!
  
• "Wicked master! Cheats us. Mustn't go that way. Mustn't hurt Precious!" It's Gollum! No, it's not really explained in the movie, but as we already know the story, we don't care! As long as we get all his Gollum-y goodness! And Frodo. "Begone and trouble me no more! If you touch me ever again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom!" And Sam sparing Gollum's life. "Let us live. Just...a little...longer. Lost! Lost! We are lost. And when Precious goes, we'll die. All of us, die. Into the dust. Die. Into the dussssst."
  
• "Begone, foul dwimmerlaik!" EOWYN! It's Eowyn! "Come not between the Nazgul and his prey!" And the Witch King! Another of the highlights of this movie. Great scene! (But of course there's insufficient information in the movie itself to justify it!)
  
• The timing is completely off. They definitely messed up here. Sam and Frodo hang out inside a volcano for days and days (weeks!?) while the Gondorian alliance marches slowly around Mordor to the Black Gate, where...
  
• ...they are greeted by the Mordor marching band and men's chorus! "Win the battle, lose the war. Choice of evils lie beneath your feet. Retreat! Retreat! If you win then you will lose! Choice of evils yours to choose. Retreat! Retreat! You are standing in the eye of the storm. Move an inch and you'll be dead. You are standing underneath the Towers of the Teeth and the Eye blazes red!"
  
• The Mouth of Sauron! Looking very Grand Moff Tarkin. "It needs more to make a king than a rabble such as this!"
  
• "I am glad you are with me, here at the end of all things, Sam." *wipes away a tear* Awww.
  
• Gondor's army airlifted out of a collapsing Mordor by a flock of giant eagles! Either a tiny army or a much much larger population of giant eagles than seems ecologically likely.
  
• Let's see, does the ending go on and on and on for as long as it did in the Peter Jackson movie? Let's join them in song: "The end of the ring, the return of the king!" And back to our frame story with Bilbo, in which we learn that this all "really happened", but the elves went over the sea and the hobbits turned into humans! Which is close enough to Tolkien's idea of making up a "mythical past" for England, I suppose. And we say good bye, the elves and Gandalf and the Ring-Bearers sailing away on a rainy day.
  

In conclusion:

Strictly speaking, it doesn't stand up on its own as a movie, the animation is clearly low-budget, too much story is crammed into too small a space, it's torn between being a happy kiddie musical and a serious epic adventure, and there's plenty to quibble about. On the other hand, if you watch it as a sequence of dramatized scenes from the book linked together by dodgy narration and music, it's great. The art is lovely, the voice actors are good (mostly), and it's all surprisingly respectful of the original work by Tolkien. Don't tear your hair out because it throws out 90% of it. I'd rather they depict 10% of it well than depict 80% but distort it to turn it into a Movie (well, I'll enjoy the Movie, too, if it's good, but it's not the same kind of experience.)

You call this a snack food!?

So I was shopping at (one of) the local Chinese supermarkets today, looking for some snacks to bring in for my daughter's preschool's "International Day" when I realized (as I do every time I attempt to do something "ethnic" for the kids' schools) that the Chinese just have very strange ideas on snacking. And dessert.



Exhibit A: "Crispy Dried Crabs"! Look at them! They're tiny little crabs (VERY cute) fried up or something with lots of salt...and licorice, is it? Good grief. This is just one step up from eating the big fat cicadas that overrun Maryland every 17 years (the difference being, someone ELSE cooked and packaged the crabs for me). These are from Taiwan. They also have similar things with fish, cuttlefish, shrimp, etc., some salty, some sweet. The label on the back is also very amusing:

"...All of the "TA YUAN" products will supply high quality of cuttlefish with wonderful ethnic taste for you [we'll see after I try them...]...If the products look strange, to you before or after you open the package please contact us A.S.A.P. to exchange for you [ROFL. For what, a bag of potato chips?]"

And then there's the bizarre misconception that sweet bean paste makes a good pastry filling. Or a good dessert dumpling filling. Red bean paste, black bean paste, in everything except beans on toast (ok, the English are weird, too. Is that what they eat instead of peanut butter?). Yeah...whatever... I hate moon cakes, too.

Then there's all the various spicy dried bean snacks. The wasabi peas seem to be Japanese, but they're very popular among the Chinese, too. (Actually, I love the wasabi peas. It's just that lately I've preferred my cashew/dried cranberry combo.) And of course peanuts go in here, too.

And not content with dried beans, they also have all kinds of dried fruit. The classic being the evil sour balls of death, erm, some kind of dried plum pits. NOT the (actually edible) dried plums you might at Trader Joe's, but REALLY dry little hard wrinkly balls that make your face scrunch up in pain. My mother used to feed me these when I got car sick.

But then again, my mother also insisted that duck gizzards were one of her favorite snacks when she was a kid. DUCK GIZZARDS. She tried (unsuccessfully) to recreate them for me when I was growing up. Perhaps there's some secret to their preparation...

Well. A bit more success with the seeds. Watermelon seeds and pumpkin seeds, mostly. Yes, I eventually learned how to shell and eat the watermelon seeds. And these days I do save the seeds from the Halloween pumpkins and roast them. Even my kids will eat them.

Then there's the various rice cakes, barley cakes, etc. Not exactly Rice Crispies treats, but there you go. I could almost like them, if I liked that sort of thing at all.

And pork (or is it beef?) jerky...I think they make that stuff in Canada these days. Big red boxes of it. Haven't had it in awhile, but I seem to remember liking it.

And bean curd pudding...I wonder if you could sell it in little cups and market it in the U.S.? There seems to be a market for soy products. I mean, the "soy milk" really took off (for which I am very grateful. I much prefer it to cow's milk.) Hmm.