Hero and WoW

[thorfinn]

Hero

Watched Hero (the Jet Li one) at Moonlight Cinema with seedy_girl, kirmish, another MUCSter, her friend from uni, and a few hundred other quiet individuals. Sponsorship ahoy this year... Booth people handing out all sorts of stuff, a "SMS to win" competition, all sorts of bits. Anyway, that's not really the point...

I've seen the movie before, in the cinema, and loved it then. Loved it this time too. I've seen a fair bit of commentary about this movie, people liking and people not, for a variety of reasons. I think the biggest one boils down to "it's not a standard western story form", usually expressed as "it's not got much of a plot". Really, it does have a plot. Plenty of plot. For the story form that it is, which is a quite common form of Chinese morality tale.

There are a few random of things of note. The warring states period is historical, and the Qin emperor does, in fact, go on to conquer China, creating "Zhong Guo" (Middle Kingdom). He also does standardise the written language, and Mandarin is still the official language of China today. Interestingly, although all the myriad different spoken dialects are verbally incomprehensible, they are mostly bound to the written form of Mandarin, such that if you write down Hokkien, you are writing in Mandarin...

The fight sequence between Broken Sword and the King of Qin takes place accompanied by what I recognise as the Chinese New Year drumming sequence for the Lion and Dragon dancing. It's a pretty distinct rhythm, and although I'm sure it's used intentionally, I'm not completely sure of the symbolism that's intended.

I love the Chinese mythical conceit of being able to be so skilled/powerful that you can just run across the surface of the water... or strike it hard enough with your weapon that you bounce off... Plus, what I really like about the fights in this movie is that they're done well enough to fool my eye if I'm not trying hard to pick holes. Even though they're pulling ludicrous acrobatic maneuvers, they feel realistic enough to me in the moment that I don't automatically go "argh, that's not how you do that." A lot of it is that most of those actors move like real martial artists... They don't waste motion, and every motion is poetry and a kind of mutual flickering dance of probabilities cutting across each other. So, although what they do do on film has a reasonable amount of wire-fu and acrobatics, it's still done with the grace that it would be done with if the human body was really capable of that action. Lovely to watch, and lovely to know that those guys can really fight, if they want to.

And, in the end, it's just visually and aurally gorgeous. Utterly. Beautiful. The whole thing. Every moment packed with gorgeous detail. Nice.

World of Warcraft

Well, okay. I wasn't going to get this game, but then, I read some reviews, and also decided that Blizzard, being dedicated to bi-platformness (MacOS and Win32) since forever, deserved support. So, I'm Thorfi, Thorf, and Thorfy, on servers Proudmoore and Bronzebeard. Mostly playing Thorfi on Proudmoore, a human female priest, currently Level 23... I use CosmosUI and CTmod simultaneously, as well as having written my own semi-automatic spellcasting aide interface. The latter is not actually useful to anyone except me yet, because it's non-trivial to configure (as in, you have to get down there and hack any logic for new spells into the raw LUA code - hrm, another language to put on the resume), but I'm making improvements as I go. I have an Orange Tabby purchased from a Crazy Cat Lady, that follows me around and watches amazedly at the ultra-violence being perpetrated around me... I have a 10 Pound Mud Snapper that I keep in the Bank Vault, but which I sometimes take out and wield in my off hand as a shield, just for kicks... And earlier today I got chased by my first Horde aligned NPCs (Tauren Barrens Guards), as well as now being in a zone (Ashenvale) that is filled with lots of Horde PCs too. I've joined a guild with patchworkkid and blithespirit... Generally, it's quite a lot of fun. Oh, and yes, I extracted the game music out of the MPQs and have loaded 'em into iTunes.

Comments

[gayathri.livejournal.com]

I totally have to agree with how much I loved Hero. Mr Pat hated it, 'cause he said, "its an inscrutable oriental film!"

and I said, well, i'm kind of an inscrutable oriental! I loved it. :)

I'm gald to hear a martial artist thought it was beautifully done.

[thorfinn]

*grin* That's a v. cute response. And likely one I would've made too, along with stroking the beard and putting on the Evil Asian Overlord accent.