I just got a special delivery from our friends at Vans! 


These are a limited edition Subcrew 'Canton Road' editions Vans! 

Let me preface this review by stating that I haven't watched many of Woody Allen's movies... at least not since 1973's 'Sleeper'.   But I had heard a lot of good things about 'Midnight in Paris' so I gave it a chance.


The story is that Owen Wilson and his fiance and her parents travel to Paris.  Wilson, a writer,  is a hopeless romantic who pines for the forgone era of Paris in the 1920s.  Somehow he stumbles upon a method to travel back in time to this period and meets all the classic writers that he idolizes. (Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc).


Its generally a well made movie... a nice cinematic tribute to Paris I suppose. But the premise and characters were just not that appealing to me.  Also this film reminded me a lot of the two recent Communist Party propaganda films "Founding of a Republic" and "Beginning of the Great Revival", which were a whos who of celebrity cameos playing well known historical figures.  In this case its not Jet Li or Jackie Chan playing communist generals, its Adrien Brody playing Salvador Dalí....   at some point it feels more like a gimmick than anything that helps move the story along.

Anyway, the film's moral lesson clubs you over the head pretty sufficiently in the last reel to make sure you get the point...   I think if you really like Paris or Woody Allen movies, you'll like this... if you don't,  you better not get your hopes up.   I'll give it a 5/10.

Etchy blog readers will recall that I didn't care for 'Contagion' very much....   so I was happy when I realized that 'Perfect Sense' would not be another 'Outbreak' rehash.   This one tries to be more 'human' and less 'science'....  rather than focusing on the disease and transmission vectors, it focuses on the impact on society and people's lives, specifically the lives of  Ewan McGregor and Eva Green are two people who happen to fall in love while the world falls apart.   In this case the mysterious disease makes people lose their senses one at a time, first smell, then taste, then hearing, etc.

Despite the sci-fi thriller premise, this actually is more of an art-house film.  That's a good and bad thing.... the scenes of society coming apart at the seams are shot very beautifully,  but as a scientifically thinking person,  the fact that they never try to explain how this disease is spreading or how to counteract it is quite frustrating.     But all the nudity from Eva Green distracted me from my nerdy concerns for a while... :-P

4/10. 

Its been a long time since I moved from the US to Asia.  The first two years were spent in Japan, a country that enjoys a lot of summer fireworks festivals throughout the country.  Hong Kong also holds official government run fireworks events every Chinese New Year,  western New Years Eve, on Chinese National Day (Oct 1) and on 'Handover Day' (July 1) too I think. 

But nothing could prepare me for what I have encountered here in Beijing this week after the Chinese New Year holiday...... 

Around town you can see a lot of these types of temporary kiosks for the last few weeks -



Somehow I immediately recognized it as being similar to those temporary wooden shelters on the side of the highway in rural parts of the US leading up to 4th of July.... yes thats right,  its called - DIY Fireworks!


I don't know what all of these things are,  but I'm sure they must be fun to shoot off...


In dangerously underregulated China,  these places must set a record for safety warnings...  (not that anyone necessarily listens...)  but notice the CCTV Headquarters building on the poster on the right.  missing from that photo is the Mandarin Oriental hotel complex which burnt down in 2009 after a fire started by illegal fireworks! (oh the irony). 

Ever since I got back to Beijing last week there has been a near continuous barrage of fireworks going off around our neighborhood.   Sometimes its firecrackers, sometimes its bottle rockets... 
Well today is 15th day of the Lunar New Year, which is called the Lantern Festival Day (元宵節). 

Apparently if you have any fireworks left,  you're supposed to set them off today.  So today (during the day time too, not just at night)  the cacophony is quite deafening.  It doesn't seem sound like a war anymore,  just a continuous rumble... 

The break in the background noises comes when someone decides to give you a front row seat for their pyrotechnics display.  Tonight some guys decided to stop outside my window and unload about 6 or 7 boxes worth of fireworks... and light them all off in sequence:


The pic above doesn't do it justice,  so instead check out the video below.  It shows an approximately 40 foot chain of fireworks that they lit off.

Video: http://youtu.be/O1gDPa2hEMA

Note the cars trying to drive by without getting set on fire...

They did about 3 of these plus some bottle rockets which shot up to about 20 stories high before exploding in a shower of sparks (which hit my building).   They finished it off with a big box full of sparklers which they left burning in the middle of the street when they got back into their cars and drove off (cause lighting the fireworks in front of their own house would be rude to their neighbors?)

Anyway, looking forward to this lesson in Chinese new year tradition to be over!

I am currently suffering from a mild fever so I spent the entire weekend at home... needless to say I caught up on a lot of film watching...  One of them was Mira Nair's 2009 film "Amelia",  a bio pic about Amelia Earhart starring Hillary Swank, Richard Gere and Ewan McGregor.