Lunch with Leo and Movie Opinions

2141 4-28-10

How can one resist Barry White?  But I digress…

So today I just kind of wallowed around in my room.  I did some things though, mopped the floor, started prepping for my case interviews that I'll hopefully be taking in Nov/Dec, and went on a nice walk.  But still I felt pretty mobile-impaired today.

I guess the highlight of the day was going out to lunch with Leo, the Chinese guy I met at Yiyi's wedding (who drives a Cadillac, it's very swanky).  He took me to a local mall (the one with Carrefour inside) to a really nice restaurant and treated me to some awesome food.  I think we had ever kind of major meat except maybe deer, there was some chicken fried rice, slices of goose, duck, pork (with some nice mustard sauce), and then a pot full of spicy beef.  Along with this we a veggy plate that an assortment of… well vegetables but it included broccoli, which made me super happy!!  Also had some pretty interesting tea, had like sugar cane, carrots, and some other stalk like plant, served cold and over all pretty tasty.  And in typical Chinese fashion he paid for everything!!!!! The whole meal was like 210RMB, $30, a massive tab in China, though more common in Shanghai.

Anyways he's pretty cool, his English isn't too bad either (on the edge of conversational), and he's rather funny.  As I suspected he told me that Yiyi had reached out to him at the wedding and asked if he would be willing to talk with me, which I think is really sweet, if I was in her situation I don't know if I would have the mental/emotional capacity to worry about some foreign kid that I invited to my wedding, I know she was super preoccupied.  He also mentioned that she referred to me as her "best friend" which means a lot.  He's also convinced that a good life decision would be to get a Chinese girlfriend… maybe not this trip, if I get a long assignment here though it'll certainly become a strong priority. 

No worries, he suggested I try and find one that only spoke Chinese which would force me to learn the language, but I knew how much that would piss my family off and insisted that she would in fact have to know English so she could have a relationship with my family.  Though running the scenario of a non-English speaking wife through my head did make me chuckle.  I can see my parents in 10 years having this convoluted smattering of Chinese in their vocabulary.  Phrases like "WE WANT GRAND CHILDREN!!", "STOP SPEAKING CHINESE!!", and "It's your fault we never see our poor son" are the first things that come to mind.  Just joking. :P

Let's see… oh ya so I've been watching movies (about one a night or so) and I figured I would post some recommendations and a quick blub on my thoughts.  I'm not really going to give a summary, you can look on IMDB for those.

1.       The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus – I consider this a kind of an art film in a weird way. It took me a little bit to buy into it but once I did it was a nice little ride.  Not a film that's going to alter your life or anything, but a good way to spend an hour or two.

2.       Beowulf – I love the story, I really didn't like their attempt at CG.  The art style was semi-realistic with this odd cartoony outline to the characters.  This movie might have been better if it had a bit more of a 300 style to it.

3.       Shutter Island – MUCH better than I thought it would be.  A very nice psychological thriller, with a nice twists and turns.  I had thought it would be a horror flick but instead it was just pleasantly disturbing.

4.       Summer Wars – An anime movie from the creators of A Girl Through Time, great artistic style that breaks away from the stereotypical "every girl has massive tits" that plagues the genre.  I also really like their idea of the World of OZ, a nice futuristic environment, like a modern MMO/Facebook taken two steps forward technologically.  Sometimes what they were able to do in the World of OZ kind of bent the limits of how much information one can input into a computer via a keyboard, but honestly, just enjoy the ride and don't worry about it.

5.       Thirst (Bakjwi) – a Korean vampire film that one of my friends called "mind blowing."  I'm not sure I would go that far, but it was good.  I haven't see any Korean films so this was an interesting first time experience.  This film is certainly not a happy one, but an odd mangled love story that might make you wonder about the suffering that goes on behind the day to day mask we all wear.

6.       Swordfish – this came out in 2001 and I remember wanting to see it but never got the chance.  I liked the experience, a little over the top, certainly when it comes to any scene involving hacking.  It should be noted that hackers don't have nice 3-D representational graphics depicting their code, it doesn't matter how awesome your code is, or what super encrypted data base your breaking into, code is code is code.  Anyways nice actions flick with a tried and true story line.

I'll be watching more I promise and from time to time I'll post an update on it.

Night.