Let the Right One In

Eli, the vampire next door.

Let the Right One In is not a horror film. It really isn’t. Sure, there’s a vampire. You’ve got me there. And people get killed. And it isn’t pretty. Still. Let the Right One In is less about horror, and more about finding someone who will stick by you. No matter what. It’s about connections between people that transcend everything.

Let the Right One In is a Swedish film based on a 2004 novel of the same name by John Ajvide Lindqvist and centers around the budding friendship between Oskar, a bullied twelve year old, and Eli, the vampire who moves in next door. The film is shot on a stark, snowy Swedish landscape, creating a heightened sense of isolation throughout.

I’ve heard a lot of folks say that Let the Right One In is what Twilight should have been. That’s pretty much bulls**t. Twilight is what it is–a teen romance starring sexy, romanticized vampires. It’s a fantasy. And it’s pretty damn good fantasy at that.

Oskar considers the school bully.

Let the Right One In is something else completely. Sure there’s a vampire. That’s about where the similarities end. The relationship that forms between Eli and Oskar is not idealized. It is not romanticized. It is not sexy. I can’t even say for sure that it’s beautiful. But it is real. And it is honest. And for that reason, the film transcends the trappings of the vampire genre. You don’t have to be into vampires or horror to love this movie. And the cinematography and score alone are enough to make any film lover drool. Combined with a fantastic script, and brilliant acting from the two leads, and it all adds up to something quite special.

Let the Right One In is available on DVD and Blu-ray.

Zombie, Run!

The T-Mobile G1

Okay. I recently purchased a T-Mobile G1, kind of T-Mobile’s answer to the iPhone. It is integrated into Google (uses Gmail, and Google calendar etc) and runs on the Android platform. So far I love the phone! The keyboard is great. Lots of free apps, such as weather, Phoneflix, Bank of America, a cute pink squid called Astrid who makes sure I’m on task, and one I game I played for the first time yesterday.

It’s called Zombie, Run! and has to be the most entertaining video game for a phone I’ve ever played. Here’s how it works. You go outside. Yes, you have to play outside. Why? Well, the GPS needs to know where you are. And also, you’ll have to run.  Once outside, you start up the game. You input a few settings: the overall concentration of Zombies in the area and how fast they move. You give the phone a few seconds to put you on the map, and then you tap your destination on the map so the game knows where you’re headed. Then the fun (terror?!) begins.

Once you start the game, zombies appear on the map.  The goal is to move to your destination before the zombies catch you and eat your brains. I played one game by myself yesterday, and one with my wife. The one with my wife was a pretty short trip, but it had us swiftly cutting through church parking lots and taking roundabouts throught a parking garage to arrive safely at our destination, both of us out of breath.

It’s great fun, and good exercise to boot–probably most suited to urban areas where you don’t have to cut through people’s yards, but also could be fun in a rural setting, as long as there’s no chance to plunge into the woods and get lost!

Anyway, if you have a G1, check out the game. If you’re thinking of getting a smart phone and can’t decide which,

The G1 uses the Android platform.

consider the G1. As far as I know, it’s the only phone you can use to play Zombie, Run!  Cost of this awesome app? Not a dime. Most Android apps are still free, althogh for a lot of games you have to shell out dough for the full version. Not so with Zombie, Run!  At least for now.  Using the GPS will zap your battery, which is the only downside. But walking from one place to another will never be the same again!

Yowza! Owies on the pushups

So I’ve completed week one on the hundred pushups plan. It was pretty hard to finish. But now I get two days of rest. I’ve been pretty sore all week, so the two day break will be nice. Today’s pushups were complicated by two things:

1) I got a pull up bar and may have overdone it on the upper body.
2) I’m a little wheezy today–I’ve been coughing and I’m a little short of breath. Maybe getting a cold?

Anyway, the two day break will be nice. We’ll see how it goes on Sunday!

Push-ups report

Well, I did my first push-ups work out from HundredPushups.com yesterday. No biggie. It wasn’t too hard, and I was wondering if it would be enough to increase my stamina. However, today my pecs are pretty sore, so even though the workout didn’t seem too difficult at the time, it must have done something!

100 Push-ups

A few months ago I stumbled across the website 100 Pushups. I thought, hey, that would be fun to try. Now that it’s January and I’m supposed to have some kind of goal for the year, I’m going to give it a shot. It should take me six weeks. I will report back at the end of each week to share my progress. If I make it, I will post a video of me doing my 100. Wish me luck!

Underground Martian Microbes FTW!

Water carved channels on Mars. Photo courtesy of NASA.

Today at 2PM, NASA scientists will discuss the presence of methane in Mars’s atmosphere. Methane could be produced in a couple of ways on Mars: through geologic activity, or by LIVING ORGANISMS!!!! I kind of hope it’s living organisms. Just want to put that in writing, in case the obnoxious use of all caps and extraneous punctuation didn’t make that clear.  How could methane mean life? Well, a type of single-celled organism known as a methanogen produces methane as a part of of its metabolic process.  It is possible that this type of single-celled organism is alive and well on Mars, living in ice under the planet’s crust. We’ll hear more on the matter today from NASA.

Life. So close to our own planet. If it really exists, life on another planet has the potential to change everything about the way we view the universe and ourselves.  If life has gone undedetected for so long on our neighboring planet, what other wonders await, right in our own solar system? How does God fit into this new equation? What ethical dilemmas will we face as we continue to explore? Premature questions at the moment. But in a year…who knows?

Gran Tarino

Vintage car. Vintage Eastwood. Go see it.

Let me start out by saying I loved this film. I really did. Now that I have that out of the way.

This film is not perfect. In fact, it has some fairly irritating flaws, flowing mostly from a script that could’ve used another round of revisions. Clint Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski is a grizzled, old, racist, Korean War vet with about the crappiest family on the planet. They’re over the top stereotypical, overindulged, self-centered  middle class jack asses–completely one-dimensional without any hint that they’re anything more than a plot device. Clunky as hell.

Then there’s this big info dump in which one of the Hmong characters, Sue, explains to Walt, and the audience who the Hmong are. I get that most people probably don’t know, so some info along those lines is necessary, but the script dumps in all in one place–an annoying piece of exposition in the middle of an otherwise well-paced story. A nit pick I suppose, but it ripped me right out of the movie.  The script just can’t keep from getting in the way of itself. It seems to allow for complexity of character in some places, and then falls flat by reverting to one-dimensional caricatures in others. It’s fairly uneven, and helmed by a less skilled director/lead actor, I think this film falls flat on its face.

But on to the good lest you forget I actually liked this movie: Eastwood is brilliant both in front of and behind the camera. Behind the camera, he gets fine performances from his Hmong cast members, many of whom had never been in a film before. They’re not awesome performances, but they’re pretty solid. I really liked Sue, portrayed by Ahney Her. Her performance was a little wooden in parts, but she managed to be endearing, and extremely likeable as she treated Walt  like a person rather than treating him like a category of person. Bee Vang, portraying Sue’s brother Thao, also performs admirably, suitably capturing the awkward teenager who doesn’t fit. He actually manages a steady evolution throughout the film that can be tracked through his body language alone. If you watched the movie without the dialogue, it wouldn’t be too hard to figure out what was going on with this kid.

Asian Cinema!

So I’ve been watching lots of Asian cinema recently. Not sure why it’s been such a heavy concentration lately. But there you go. Here’s a quick run down:

Hard Boiled. Always heard it was an action masterpiece, so I decided I better watch it. The film is directed by John Woo and stars Chow Yun-Fat and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai. Chow Yun-Fat’s character is a trigger happy cop nick-named Tequila whose parter gets killed during the investigation of Triad gun runners. In the course of the film he hooks up with Tony Leung Chiu-Wai’s character, an undercover cop named Alan, who’s in deep with the gun-running underground. That’s the setup, and I don’t plan to give another single thing away, because if you like action films, you have to watch this movie. John Woo demonstrates how it’s done. But kick-butt action scenes aside, what really works about this movie is Alan. Undercover work hasn’t been kind to him. He’s a guy who’s had to compromise everything he stands for to sell his cover. And it isn’t pretty. Hard Boiled is an action extravaganza with a substantial body count. But it’s also the story of a guy who got in deeper than he would have liked, and the toll it takes on him.

In the Mood for Love. Not an action film. Quite the reverse. Directed by Wong Kar-wai and starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (yes) this film is set in Hong Kong in the 1960′s. The movie follows a romance that blooms awkwardly and a bit painfully after the two main characters discover their spouses are having an affair. Together. They vow never to behave like their cheating spouses, and even as they fall in love with each other, keep their relationship chaste. What I loved most about this movie was how it’s shot. Kar-wai shoots the film so that we end up being voyeurs, peering at them from inside a closet, or through a door. I felt as if I was viewing something personal and private, and it connected me to the characters, while at the same time heightening my discomfort over their awkward situation. The actors contribute an achingly subtle and understated performance, which combined with a stunning soundtrack amount to a beautiful film that explores the often complicated and dissonant relationship between the emotion of love and the social institution of marriage.

Lust, Caution. I meant to see this film when it came out, because I heart Ang Lee. But I was, frankly, stupid, and I decided to wait to get the DVD because I got wind of some less than stellar reviews. Pish Posh. That usually does not stop me, and I don’t know why it did in this instance. At any rate, I watched it recently and was bowled over by how completely entranced I was watching this film. Set in China during the Japanese occupation, the larger plot of the film follows a resistance cell as they plot to assassinate a high-ranking official in the collaborationist government. We follow this story through Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei), a young college student who becomes involved with the resistance. She is to lure the target, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, surprise!) to an unguarded location where the resistance can kill him. Easier said then done. In the course of infiltrating Mr. Yee’s home, we watch Chia Chi (now posing as “Mrs. Mak) descend deeper and deeper into a troubling relationship with Mr. Yee. And while Lust, Caution is, on the surface, a film about espionage and resistance, it is also about the transformation? destruction? liberation? of Chia Chi. Which is it? Is it all three? I will be adding this film to my DVD collection. I hardly noticed the long running time (although most negative reviews gripe about it) and highly recommend the film.

Grave of the Fireflies. This film is Japanese, and does not star Tony Leung Chiu-Wai. But that’s okay! All I have to say about this film is: Just see this movie. Show it to your kids. It’s heartbreakingly sad, but its intensely personal portrayal of the horrors of war make it a film everyone should watch. Written and directed by Isao Takahata, adapted from the semi-autobiographical novel by Akiyuki Nosaka, Grave of the Fireflies is an animated tale about a young boy and his sister who are left to fend for themselves after their town is firebombed in a WWII air raid. The animation is not as stylized as most anime, favoring more realistic renditions of people and the environment. The animation adds a strange realism to depictions of bombers flying overhead, dropping incendiaries on various towns. Perhaps it’s because seeing that kind of thing for the first time must seem a bit unreal. So the animation capitalizes on that fact, and every time I saw a shot of the bombers flying over head, I felt fear, and even found myself wondering what it would feel like to see bombers flying over Salem. That’s not something a film has ever made me stop and think about. This film is kind of a kick in the chest. On the one hand you watch this young boy (Seita) looking after his little sister (Setsuko) and you get what love is. The film is a tear-jerker for sure, but there are a lot of moments where the film will make you feel genuine happiness and overwhelming joy. On the other hand it takes place during a war. A nasty one. And on a large scale, we all know why war sucks. But it’s the small scale consequences of war that are easy to forget, and sometimes, when faced with them, the hardest to bear. Because on a small scale war isn’t about the ideologies that that nations fight over. It’s about the people who are trying to survive. So add this film to your Netflix queue. You’ll blow through a lot of tissues watching the film, but in the end you’ll probably be glad you did.

And finally, I might as well give a short mention to Samurai Champloo (roughly meaning Samurai Mash-up). It’s a 26 episode anime series written and directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, who also directed the anime hit Cowboy Bebop. It follows a young woman who, after saving a reserved ronin (Jin) and a extroverted loose cannon (Mugen) from execution, presses them into helping her find a samurai who smells of sunflowers. I’m about halfway through, and so far it’s pretty hilarious and has had some great fight scenes. Although I usually recommend Cowboy Bebop or Wolf’s Rain to people who want to try a little anime, I think Samurai Champloo would be a good starting point as well. Like Cowboy Bebop, the characters are fun and the soundtrack is always great!

Coming up: 2046, a sequel to In the Mood for Love. I hear it features time travel, which I would normally be into, but find strange since In the Mood for Love did not feature any such sci-fi mainstays. But Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, that stud of Chinese film, reprises his role. He is pretty dreamy. And a damn fine actor. So that’s a big plus. We’ll see how it goes. Until next time!  (Also posted on a film blog I contribute too, Closet One Films. )

Go Humans! The LHC is coming online!

And I feel like it’s the second coming. Why? Because I like to know how stuff works. And this pretty much applies to everything. A combustion engine makes my car go. Sure. But how? What’s a gear for? How does a plant live off sunlight and water? How does my food get turned into poop? How does my computer get online without being plugged into anything? I know a lot of people just don’t care to know, but I do. I can’t help it. I want to know how stuff works. All stuff.

An engineer checks out one of the collider magnets. (Image copyright CERN)

Which brings us to THE UNIVERSE. Now, human beings have come a really long way in figuring out what makes the Universe tick. But we still have significant gaps in our knowledge. For example, we still haven’t quite figured out how to make Einstein’s General Relativity agree with quantum mechanics. String Theory has become to the fore as a possibility, but many of our theories have exceeded our technical ablitity to test them. Thats where the Large Hadron Collider comes in. First, what the heck is a “hadron?” Simply put, its a group of quarks held together by the strong nuclear force. Protons and neutrons are both hadrons. So the Large Hardon Collider (among other things) will collide streams of these particles to simulate the energy levels present when the universe was very young. Which could finally answer some questions for us.

For example, scientists might finally be able to find evidence of the extra spatial dimensions suggested by String Theory. Scientists might be able to observe a Higgs Boson, a particle predicted by the Standard Model of Particle Physics but never observed. Scientists even have the opportunity to create a state of matter called quark-gluon plasma, which is postulated to have existed when the universe was 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. At temperatures that high, its possible that quarks would be freed of the strong nuclear force and scientists would be able to see how matter forms as the plasma cools.

Anyway, I’m no physicist. I just dabble. But I’m stoked that one of humanity’s greatest feats of engineering is being switched on tonight. Sometimes its easy to look at humanity and become depressed by our shortcomings. But on days like today, when human innovation and curiosity are about to pay off in ways that could reveal the very nature of the reality we inhabit, I say “Go Humans!”

Acupressure FTW!

Okay. I got this acupressure book: Acupressure’s Potent Points by Michael Reed Gach. I read about it on

Acupuncture chart from China around 1340

another website and figured I’d give acupressure a try. I’ve always wanted to try acupuncture, but it’s kind of expensive and I’m pretty skeptical about its efficacy. Still, I was excited to give it a try.

It came in the mail a couple days later and I flipped through it during the evening. The book basically gives you specific points on your body (potent points) to press or stimulate in order to relieve a specific ailment. The book covers things like headaches and indigestion, but also emotional woes. It even has a potent point routine to relieve hangovers! I usually don’t sleep very well, so before bed, I decided to try the recommended points for a good night’s sleep. The points were located on the back, wrist, neck, head, and ankle. It took me about 15 minutes to go through them all.

Right away my skepticism about acupressure started to vanish. While pressing one of the sets of potent points (located on the back of my head), my sinuses sprung open. They weren’t overly swollen, so I hadn’t really noticed that I was stuffed up, but when they opened up I sure did. I kind of chuckled and wondered if the book listed that point in the cold and flu section. Pressing another point made me yawn a couple of times. Overall I didn’t notice much else except that I was maybe a bit more relaxed. But I did sleep pretty well. I had to get up to use the bathroom, which would usually ruin my night. But I remained really groggy the whole time and fell right back asleep. I felt the routine had been pretty successful, although I wasn’t quite ready to jump on the bandwagon. Sometimes I do sleep pretty well.

My next opportunity to try out acupressure came a few days later when I got a headache. It was coming on pretty fast and I took some Excedrin Migraine, because I knew it was going to be a doozy. But immediately after taking them, I kicked myself for not trying acupressure first. Then I decided to do it anyway because it would take twenty minutes for the pills to kick in anyway. I blew through the routine pretty quick, and the headache was greatly reduced. It wasn’t completely gone, but mostly.  And I have no way to know how long it would have stayed mostly gone, because I took pills. Again, I was surprised, but not completely sold.

Then today I had to clean out my mouse’s cage. Now, I have asthma, and I’m allergic to mice, so this operation normally ends with me covered in hives and wheezing up a storm. So my normal routine is to clean the cage, pop a few hits off my inhaler, and then take a shower and change my clothes. Today, I decided I would try the acupressure routine for asthma and see if it helped at all. The answer is a resounding YES!

DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A DOCTOR. THIS WORKED FOR ME. IT MAY NOT WORK FOR EVERYONE.

So I went through the routine listed in the book, which included points on my wrist and thumb, leg, chest, and shoulders. I noticed my wheezing subsiding some as I went through the whole routine, and by the time I was done, my breathing was much improved. The wheezing wasn’t completely gone, but I didn’t feel like I needed my inhaler. By the time I finished up with my shower and got dressed, my breathing was completely normal. That was a good five hours ago, and the lungs are still completely clear. Unfreakin’ believable!! I’m sort of bowled over by the experience. I bought the book expecting the stuff not to work, or to only work a little bit. I kind of want to shell out some money for acupuncture to see if I can work on more permanent issues. But no rush. I’ll stick with this book a little longer. For anyone interested in acupressure I’d recommend giving the book a try. I wish there was a little more explanation of why the stuff works,  but this book is all practical, so there’s very little (maybe 10 pages or so) that isn’t part of the potent points routines. Still, it was a well-spent twelve bucks.