Blake’s 7 [Redux] // S01E03 – Cygnus Alpha

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Trying to phase out the sleaze, but it keeps creeping back…

If you can’t be bothered checking the categories at the side, here’s where the other Blake’s 7 reduxes are:

The Way Back

Space Fall

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EXT: SURFACE OF PENAL COLONY, CYGNUS ALPHA

A man dressed like a monk raises a machete and chops a cooked animal in half. There’s a noise nearby and a woman also dressed like a monk appears, telling the man that the federation ship has arrived in the sky.

‘That shooting star up there?’

‘It’s a big ship.’

‘Well-lit, too.’

‘’tis true.’

The man frowns, wondering if any of the new prisoners are either a] bigger than him or b] sexier than him.

‘I guess I’ll leave dinner here and go tell Brian Blessed that the new prisoners have arrived.’

‘The new believers…’ corrects the woman.

‘Huh?’

‘They are believers, not prisoners.’

‘Right. What is it we believe again?’

‘Indulging Brian Blessed.’

The man rubs his nose bridge. ‘He did the Iago monologue last night.’

‘Soft then loud but never really soft?’

The man nods. ‘As if I  were at the back row of a stadium.’

‘You did the Lord’s work. Now go.’

‘Going.’

The woman swishes her hand leftwards and the man trots off in that direction. After staring up at the sky for a bit, the woman walks the opposite way, off the quarry set and straight into a barrage of ‘show us your crystal balls, luv.’

She shakes it off, reminding herself over and over that it’s not just here, it’s everywhere.

 

INT: PENAL SHIP COCKPIT, SAME ONE FROM SPACE FALL

The young lieutenant walks through a door with Flight Control Deck stencilled on it and tells the captain that the prisoners are all high as fuck and looking forward to Cygnus Alpha. Continue reading →

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Yeltsin Speaks Cantonese// the logic of messing up unexpected questions

It’s been about five days since the last dinner with the in-laws, but they were in the area to get their fingerprints done for the new HKID card, so off we went to the nearby shabu shabu place.

Shabu Shabu = 90 minutes of hot pot, all you can eat and drink

Unfortunately, I was the one who went ahead to get the ticket. Usually, when this happens, I’ll ask the staff in Cantonese how long we have to wait for a table or do they have a table straight away, but this time they sucker punched me with a ‘how long…’ question of their own.

Jung yau gei loi do?

Gei loi is ‘how long’, jung yau is something like ‘still have’, and do is a short way to say ‘arrive’…so I could understand what was said, the problem was, what did it mean?

My brain ran through the logical options: how long until the other people in your group arrive, how long are you willing to wait for a table, how long have you been in Hong Kong, how long does it take to arrive in places generally…

But none of them seemed to fit, so I replied, ‘gei loi meh?’[how long for what?] which was probably quite rude, but I didn’t have a clue what they were saying.

They said the same thing again, I stared back at them blankly, and then the ultimate frustration…a guy standing nearby stepped in and translated for me. They want to know how long your friends will take to arrive, he said.

Ah, that makes sense. Continue reading →

Blake’s 7 [Redux] // S01E02 – Space Fall

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It’s been a while, but you can find the first episode redux [The Way Back] here

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INT: SPACESHIP/BBC STOREROOM, ONE CIRCULAR WINDOW TO SHOW BLACKNESS OF SPACE, LOTS OF CONVICTS SITTING ON CLASSROOM CHAIRS, NO TATTOOS

Blake sits with his back to the window, restrained by a piece of ribbed plastic tubing curving round his torso.

He surveys the convicts in front of him.

‘Who wants to join my crew?’

Half of them raise their hands.

‘Who knows how to act?’

Hands drop.

‘Okay. Jenna, Vila, Gan, young-looking student.’

Young looking student grins. ‘Hi, I’m…’

‘Should be enough.’

 

SWITCH TO: SHIP COCKPIT/DRIVE ROOM/BRIDGE/ROOM WITH 3 CHAIRS AND CARDBOARD CONTROL PANELS

An old-ish guy tells his crew of two to say some random numbers and set course for Cygnus Alpha. They repeat the numbers for a few seconds then the youngest crew member, we’ll give him the rank of lieutenant, goes back to the book he was studying. Continue reading →

Araminta Spookie in Cantonese [via Taiwan]

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My wife says translations into Chinese are always a bit weird, but I liked the cover of this one and the first person voice, so I took it out.

In Hong Kong, you can renew a book 5 times at the library before they send Joaquin Phoenix after you. I think I renewed this one 4 times. Actually, I didn’t finish the first one, I got side-tracked by another book, maybe 3 Body Problem or Virgin of the 7 Daggers, but the second one hooked me a bit more and, despite a few troughs, I got through it.

Then I got through book 3, the one where their neighbour steals their frogs without getting punished for it at the end, and now I’m on book 4.

Each book starts at a gentle pace, with Araminta wandering around the mansion, either looking for a relative, looking for a ghost, looking for a secret door, looking for Uncle Drac’s old Shannon Tweed vids.

The voice is quite natural, and I can pick up a lot of good phrases, though half of them aren’t used in spoken Cantonese. Some of them are Taiwanese, too, as that’s the place it’s aimed at/translated for.

There’s about 17 different ways to say ‘usually’ and ‘even if’, I’m not sure why. Some of the ‘even if’ words double as ‘although’ or ‘even’, a lot of it is situational in Cantonese, and of course a lot of them you wouldn’t say in conversation. The trick is knowing which is which, and the supplementary trick is being able to not mix them up. Continue reading →

Not Another Mishima

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Gena Rowlands met with the scientists somewhere near Almeria, Southern Spain. She didn’t know this but they were the same scientists who’d brought back Pol Pot, the same scientists who’d predicted genocide holes = long distance space travel and the same scientists who would one day put the mind of a Japanese student into the body of an English lit student/gym instructor.

It was 1989.

‘Here’s what I want,’ said Gena, checking her watch. ‘My husband, John…you know him? He’s a director…was a director…he did Shadows and Faces and…Gloria. No? Doesn’t matter. The point is…what I want is my husband, alive again, via science.’

The scientists muttered something in Spanish.

‘I know, he’s dead. But only just. I mean, it happened a few weeks ago. But that doesn’t matter, right? From what I’ve heard of you guys, the science you can do, that doesn’t matter. Does it?’

The scientists nodded.

‘Cool. That’s cool. So the point is, what I want is…’ Gena paused, realising she’d said this part already. ‘Okay, you know what I want. Bring John back. My husband, bring him back to me.’

The scientists looked at each other.

‘You can do that, can’t you?’ Gena said, lighting up a cigarette. ‘I mean, I’m not just talking to a bunch of fucking actors here…am I?’

The lead scientist broke off from the others and led Gena to another part of the desert twenty metres away.

‘We can do it, of course. Explanations, however, are a different matter. Science is…it’s very complicated, the methods are…perhaps not so easy for you to understand.’

Gena breathed smoke on his jacket. ‘Try me.’ Continue reading →

Mandy [SPOILERS]

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Director: Panos Cosmatos

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roach, Bill Duke, a bunch of real life cultists, The Cheddar Goblin

Plot: Red and Mandy live a peaceful life in the Shadow Mountains, a place that is idyllic during the day and nightmarishly red and misty at night. One day, Jeremiah Sand and his cult get lost on the way to the recording studio and pass by Mandy, who chooses the worst possible moment to look interesting. Sand decides that he must possess her so sends his goons to summon some demonic bikers and kidnap her.

Subplot: An overweight kid has a gnawing sense of dread as he suspects his new friends don’t like him as much as they say they do.

Subplot 2: Bill Duke sits in a trailer, worrying that ‘Fuck Off’ isn’t clear enough.

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Is there nothing else out there like Mandy?

I don’t watch enough movies to make that claim, but it is weird, and slow-paced, and it does have those moments that transcend expectations and make you think, J J Abrams would never have done that.

Instead of reviewing it, I’m gonna point out all those moments, in no real order.

Calling the satanic bikers using the rock of ??

As with most of the film, there’s no exposition about what the rock of ?? does or how it works or how Jeremiah Sand came across it, the cultists just park their van in the middle of a blood forest and blow on it. Then wait.

While waiting, the blond cultist who always has his mouth open, winds down the window, looks out at nothing, winds it back up again, pauses, winds it down again, looks out at nothing etc. The cultist who blew on the rock is caught in the foreground slowly losing his patience and maybe what’s left of his mind. In most other films, there would’ve been dialogue. In this one, nope.

When they’re not glued to their leader, these cultists hate each other. Continue reading →

Suspiria 2

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‘Oi sing yan.‘

‘Mo chor.‘

‘Means alien?’

‘Yup.’

‘Okay…’ said Sila, looking to the left of his brain where he’d been told his language conduits were, ‘Oi sing yan hai…yee gah…chu lido…hai Heung Gong.’

‘Aliens are living in Hong Kong?’

‘Yup. Were the tones okay?’

The teacher smiled. The same way she’d smiled when he mixed up wife and grandma. ‘Some.’

‘I’ll take that.’

‘40% accurate.’

‘Ho geh.‘

‘Lei yau mo gin gwor oi sing yan?’

‘Huh?’

‘Have you ever seen an alien?’

‘Ah. Yau mo gin gwor. I knew that.’

‘Ho lak ju.‘

‘What?’

 

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The rest of the lesson carried on in pretty much the same way, the same way it’d gone for the last eight years since he’d first murdered ‘lei ho’, not realising he had to sing it, not say it, or say it but with elasticity, showing four tenths teeth and moving his mouth in an alien way, alien to the way he’d been taught while growing up, which wasn’t really taught either as sheep had once been geep, think had once been fink, and Batfink had probably always been Batfink. Continue reading →