movies and stuff
I've been restricted to dialup here, so I didn't think it was really worth it to try to write before. Today I got to see LotR finally. It was as good as I'd hoped, although once in a while I found myself confusing the minor characters and places a bit. I never finished reading the third book so I forgot some of the names, which made it hard to keep track of a few characters. I'd gotten farther than I thought though...apparently I made it more than halfway through the third book. I need to go finish it now, even though I know in general what happens. Maybe I'll get the love story straight...it didn't seem very clear to me in the movie, although the ending was clear enough.
I've seen way too many movies with fighting in them recently, and not in a bad way, either. Oh yeah, I brought pie to my friend before break and he made me watch Kill Bill with him because nobody came to his party. That one had lots of (bloody) fighting. The anime scene in the middle was weird because the art style seemed really old. But the scene with the sword was cool and the Japanese in it was cool. One scene late in the movie seemed really odd too because the two American assassins or whatever, one Chinese by blood and the other European by blood were having a conversation in Japanese, and both of them had definite accents.
Yesterday I saw Timeline (based on the Michael Crighton book) and that was pretty good too except that they spent too much time on the battle between the French and the English and not enough time on the time travel itself and its effects. I think deceiving the characters in the movie about what was really going on ended up deceiving the audience too, and people who haven't read the book aren't going to really understand what the machine was intended to do. Also, they didn't spend nearly enough time at the end on the effects of their trip. The only thing was the sarcophagus, and they changed that from the book anyway.
So all these movies with fighting have made me really want to get back to learning some form of martial arts. Even if I have to start over which I probably will since it's been so long, I still want to. Also what I did before was a mixed tradition, not a "pure" tradition so no matter what I do it won't be quite the same as what I was doing before. I'd like to do some pure Japanese art like pure karate or something though. And I really hope that whoever the sensei is, he uses the Japanese numbers and can pronounce them properly. (One group I tried to join in high school had a sensei that pronounced the numbers oddly...I ended up not practicing with them for more than a couple sessions because of scheduling and transportation problems, not because of that though.)
I've seen way too many movies with fighting in them recently, and not in a bad way, either. Oh yeah, I brought pie to my friend before break and he made me watch Kill Bill with him because nobody came to his party. That one had lots of (bloody) fighting. The anime scene in the middle was weird because the art style seemed really old. But the scene with the sword was cool and the Japanese in it was cool. One scene late in the movie seemed really odd too because the two American assassins or whatever, one Chinese by blood and the other European by blood were having a conversation in Japanese, and both of them had definite accents.
Yesterday I saw Timeline (based on the Michael Crighton book) and that was pretty good too except that they spent too much time on the battle between the French and the English and not enough time on the time travel itself and its effects. I think deceiving the characters in the movie about what was really going on ended up deceiving the audience too, and people who haven't read the book aren't going to really understand what the machine was intended to do. Also, they didn't spend nearly enough time at the end on the effects of their trip. The only thing was the sarcophagus, and they changed that from the book anyway.
So all these movies with fighting have made me really want to get back to learning some form of martial arts. Even if I have to start over which I probably will since it's been so long, I still want to. Also what I did before was a mixed tradition, not a "pure" tradition so no matter what I do it won't be quite the same as what I was doing before. I'd like to do some pure Japanese art like pure karate or something though. And I really hope that whoever the sensei is, he uses the Japanese numbers and can pronounce them properly. (One group I tried to join in high school had a sensei that pronounced the numbers oddly...I ended up not practicing with them for more than a couple sessions because of scheduling and transportation problems, not because of that though.)