Just wanted to recommend Explosions in the Sky – First Breath After Coma. It seems to be quite popular but I just started listening to it this year. I put it on whenever I’m reading, so it’s one of the most heavily played songs on my playlist at the moment.
The song lets me relive my youth 9 minutes at a time.
I woke up today thinking it was a Tuesday. It stemmed from a dream I was having where I had fallen asleep on a Monday (the day it was in my dream world, if you want to put it that way), so when I woke up I thought I had the whole week to get stuff done. Turns out I wasted another week.
When it was actually Tuesday this week, I woke up and found out that it was the 10th, which meant my softball meeting (the 11th) was on a Wednesday, and not the Thursday like I thought. This changed quite a few things. I was supposed to meet up with my friend to watch The Raid on Wednesday, a day that I picked solely so it wouldn’t interfere with my meeting. I told her that Wednesday was either going to be really rushed for me, or we could go on Thursday instead.
“Hey, sorry, can we go on Thursday instead? This softball meeting is messing things up.”
“I thought you could go on any day but Thursday!”
“That’s because I thought my softball meeting was on Thursday…”
I’m lost in time somewhere. It’s as if I go to bed and wake up on a different day of the week, every day.
Anyway, it what may be the worst segue (a word I just found out this year was pronounced “segway”) into a review ever, as if my years of schooling and a degree have taught me nothing about writing, let’s have a look at The Raid:
The Short and Quick
- Fast-paced, smooth, brutal action sequences
- Cheesy story/dialogue (expected)
- Nothing special for those familiar with Asian action movies
- A nice treat for people accustomed to Michael Bay
7/10
- Scenes where people weren’t fighting are pretty terrible. Thankfully, there aren’t many of those in the movie.
A slightly more detailed look
While most trailers I saw billed it as The Raid, it has been released in North America as The Raid: Redemption. It’s really an unnecessary change and makes it sound like a sequel. Did the first raid end unsuccessfully? Are they going back now? I know I’m nitpicking, but they didn’t need to change the name. I showed up about 5 minutes late to the movie but I joked with my friend that at most, we’re going to miss a few scenes at the beginning that set the protagonist up as having something to lose, and the reason they’re going into the building. It…played out exactly as I joked. We walked in to see a small training montage, followed by our hero kissing his very pregnant wife goodbye and her telling him to be safe. I would have bet my house at that point that he will have a flashback later on in the film going back to this very moment where he kisses his wife (spoiler alert: he does). The character development is also piss poor because they establish the three main villains as a boss with two distinct henchmen. One, who is “Mad Dog”, and the other called “Genius”, the brains that more or less keeps Mad Dog in check. Only both seemed quite calm, and Mad Dog didn’t really do anything terribly irrational to warrant his name. But it’s ok! None of us watched that trailer wondering how good the story would be. We saw crazy action sequences and hoped that the rest of the film would be just as good. It delivers.
None of that gimmicky slow-mo, speed-up crap, and shaky camera that plagues western cinema, The Raid feels as brutal as the violence on the screen. Some of the falls the stunt men were taking didn’t look soft at all, you see them slamming into the edge of the tables all the time. It’s fast and it’s fluid which gets bonus points from me. I hated Ong Bak because the stunts were so contrived. Look at Tony Jaa running down a street and, oh, surprise! Two guys just happen to stop and hold something for him to jump through. Fuck off! Praise him all you want for his athleticism, but the choreographer for his movie needs to be fired. The characters should look like they’re interacting with the environment and not running through set pieces.
So it gets points for originality and fluidity, but I have another small nitpicky complaint about the consistency. Sometimes, our protagonist will be wielding a knife, and while he’ll slash the legs and arms of one assailant, he’ll do the same to someone else and slit his throat too. If they’re all trying to kill you, why does he disable one guy, but flat out murder the other? It…doesn’t really matter. There’s not much of a story so I can’t say this ruins anything. It’s probably done this way to provide variety in the action.
I walked away happy, but without a good story or characters, people who watch the fights via youtube clips can probably enjoy it much more than I did having to sit through the forced dialogue.
My friend got me a journal! This is coming from someone who I don’t talk to as often as I used to, and who I’m almost certain has never read my blogs or tweets (she thinks that stuff is stupid, and I tend to agree but participate anyway). I usually just write in my old notebooks (seeing as I was never in class to take notes) and have been looking for a journal for ages, but never really mentioned it to anyone. I also enjoyed the fact that she got one specifically for people who stay up into the wee hours, which is when I tend to do my writing. She just knew what to get me!
I don’t read books that are hyped (maybe after all the hoopla, but not at the height of the craze). If a book is good, it will be good regardless of when I read it. When Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code came out, it was a massive sensation and quite a few people were telling me to read it. Now the popular opinion of him seems to be that while the plot was interesting, his writing was dogshit. I’m not surprised to hear those same people who recommended those books to me backtrack and parrot these same criticisms. Now his writing is not good enough?
It’s that hive mind talking. It’s when people are afraid that they missed the point of the book, so they just go with the crowd and tell you it’s good anyway. That’s why I don’t believe the hype. Besides, it’s much more fun going out there and finding a book for yourself. I love getting lost in the shelves, figuring out the mood I’m in, then trying to find the book for it. It’s a much more fulfilling experience than reading something just because it’s popular.
Growing up as the only Chinese kid in elementary school made me a pretty easy target when I was in England. Thinking back, my years in England were particularly rough and aggressive. I don’t know what it was about kids over there, but I remembered there being much more fights and scuffles than when I went to school in Canada. It usually happened after lunch because the lunch ladies did not give a shit at all.
This one particular kid used to give everyone in my grade a hard time. I can’t really say for certain he was a twat, but when I was 5 I certainly didn’t like him. So we’re going to run with my memory of him when I was 5 and assume that he was a twat. He’d routinely cut in line, not because he didn’t know how to line up, but because being the first in line was a big deal in my elementary school. It was a game we all played and when the bell rang we’d all race to be the first one in. I don’t remember what advantages that gave us, but this asshole ruined it every time by cutting in front after everyone had already started lining up. He’d then turn around and make faces.
One day, he cut in front of this girl and she just looked at me and pouted. I, being the chivalrous bastard that I am, decided to cut in front of him too! You had to be there to see how badass this was. Anyway, he obviously gets upset, and grabs me and shoves me out of the line in front of all the parents and teacher. He gets into massive amounts of trouble for this and bawls all the way to the principal’s office. I…still got in trouble for this. I don’t know how that happened, but I lost my playtime for a bit which was pretty shitty.