Doctor Strange

I've just seen Doctor Strange - the new Marvel movie starring the very British Screen God Benedict Cumberbatch. It was mildly jarring to watch a film about holy men studying the eternal verities so that they could learn how to kick someone's nose out through their earholes, but then things went boooom and i remembered that this was a Marvel movie - these fellows weren't holy men, they were doorkeepers!  And the fellows knocking on the door burned with manifest destiny and carried nuclear weapons. With the safety off.
            (I wonder if any of the 21st century Americans involved in the project picked up on the irony of that?)
            Mr Cumberbatch plays a bossy white guy who thought he knew everything, and then found out he didn't, and then he did, and then he saved the world.
            And there are three whole women in the cast! Really! And two of them even have speaking roles! One of them is a very nice white lady who was the Supreme Sorcerer, and she gets to say lots and lots of portentous wisdom things that clearly looked better on the cue cards than they sound being wrestled around a set of actual tonsils (portentous wisdoms are all right in their own time and place, but two or more characters standing gravely in a mostly-Tibetan-temple taking it in turns to drop fortune-cookie truth-bombs does not cinematographic conversation make) and the other is the love interest!
            She gets to say things too, whenever Doctor Strange needs an emotional reaction beat. She also gets to sigh, and be sad, and look worried, and look determined. She even gets to tear up!!
            The very best bit was learning just how the studio rationalized turning the Very Tibetan character of the Supreme Sorcerer into a white lady:
            "Well, the character is traditionally a Tibetan male, but Tibet won't play well in China, and we didn't want to make the Supreme Sorcerer a "26-year-old leather-clad fanboy dream girl" because we wanted diversity."
            True story.
            That somebody gave decision-makers of this caliber a whole movie's worth of budget to play with tells me a lot more about the pharmaceutical industry in Los Angeles than I ever wanted to know.

The wonderful Benedict Wong was stuck as the Ur-librarian with the original humorless biblio-funk, but Chiwetel Ejiofor did his very best Royal Shakespeare, and he and Cumberbatch between them have more charisma in their little toes than a whole summer's worth of blockbusters.
            It was boom-boom, popcorn, a little snark, with action sequences so deliriously kaleidoscopic that they must have needed heavy medication to even visualize - as for story-boarding them, possibly migraines and a rest-cure.
            It was pretty.  It was fun. And the climax of the whole fun-house upside-down mirror-ride was a privileged, 1-percent white guy flying into the heart of absolute evil, and standing nose to nose with the face of scorched-earth selfishness and telling it to GO AWAY.
            He died for it, of course. And then he got up to die again. He went down over and over and over, dying in a million terrible, painful ways, and every single time he got back up - doggedly, tirelessly, willingly-
            Until he wore down even the embodiment of ego and "I want," and then Doctor Strange took back the world. All of it.
            I'm almost certainly reading too much into this, but right now it's an image I need right now. I'll take it and I'll keep it. It was a good movie.

Trapeeze!

Right now I'm watching a movie called Trapeze! It was filmed in 1956, and stars Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida and another fellow with a jaw like a ball-peen hammer. 
            Trapeeze is Technicolor and CinemaScope and dancing girls on elephants! It's about two trapeze artists trying to perfect the triple somersault, and the scheming woman who wants to be a star and comes between them. 
            The woman has a chest like the front of ship and a waist you could pour through a hose - even when she’s wearing leotards. When she walks, her hips sashay like she's a hula dancer going for the All-Hawaiian-Islands trophy and her eyes roll about like they're on gimbals pointed due man-flesh. 
            Nobody speaks. They declaim. Crouched like boxers in a ring, the men square their jaws and stretch clawed hands up to the heavens: 
            "I'm tryin' to give you somethin' pure! Pure, you unnerstand? A flying act like the woild's never seen! But for you it's all about the money! You've got no soul - no soul, I tell ya!" 
            At the top of the circus tent, the Woman wriggles her hips and rolls her eyes and purrs "come fly with me, love" and whispers to the love-sick trapeze artist at her feet that "you don't-a need 'dat man down 'dere. In here -" she presses her palms to her voluptuously corseted chest, "you 'ave all the talent you need!" 
            Far, far below, the cynic is scrunching his face and roaring "Dames! All of ya the same! Born to destroy every thing and every man ya touch! Born cold, born to break a man and destroy his woild!" 
            The cynic is on to something, all right. High above, his puppy-eyed partner rolls over on the platform and wags his tail and you, the viewer, are waiting, just waiting, for Her, a dreamy smile on her painted lips, to reach out one pointed toe and push him off. Off of the side without the net. 
            Any man over the age of twelve who lets himself fall for all that cantilevered engineering (anyone who'll wear a corset on a flying trapeze is clearly planning something not in the training manual) deserves everything he has coming.

Volcán Villarica

One of the biggest reasons to come to Pucon is the opportunity to climb the Villarica Volcano. Volcán Villarica has one of the world's most accessible lava lakes in its caldera - and when the conditions are right, you can climb to the top and look right down into it.  The main shopping street in Pucon is lined with sports outfitters and touring companies - all of similar degrees of reputability - all of whom  will outfit you with a full cold weather climbing kit and lead you on a climb up to the volcano caldera. The tour leaves extremely early in the morning and is not an easy climb - five to six hours slogging up a snowfield, climbing at an angle often above 45 degrees.  



On a scale of tourist-wranglers, the Pucon fellows are extreme professionals. My dad and my sister have both made the climb and reckon that it was a positively exciting and majorly memorable experience. Their group took five hours to climb to the caldera, but the return trip took scarcely more than an hour – the climbers all slide down the trail on the seats of their pants! Dr Tabubil even saw one guy climbing up with a snowboard on his back, prepared for a seriously awesome return trip.  There's an excellent description of the climb here on the Go World Travel blog. As for Dad and Dr Tabubil, their only regret of the climb was that the day they climbed Villarica, the lava pack was too low in the caldera to be seen.  Like any volcano, Villarica plays by its own rules.  Some days the lava glows brightly, some days it does not - but always, the view from the summit is spectacular.    
            The lower reaches of Volcán Villarica belong to a small ski resort - when the lifts are running, they cut an hour off of the climb. One evening, Mr Tabubil and I drove up a deeply graded road to the base of the ski lifts, and turned out onto a rutted service lane.  



We'd passed through a conifer forest into a lava field - a land of ash and stunted twisted trees and low, badly-growing bracken.  The weather was close and clammy - and we found it an almost sinister experience, as we drove the vegetation petered out and we were driving through  a wrecked and shattered landscape; cold and damp, gray ash underfoot, and the only foliage scattered spikes of livid orange flowers.  Our imaginations were boundless.  The flowers were like flames, licking out of the ground. Thick mists curled and wraithed. It was a landscape straight out of Tolkein. We'd driven out of life and into Mordor; nowhere could be more like Mordor than the slopes of that  volcano,  not even the landscapes inside Tolkein's own head.
            Abandoning the car, we climbed on foot.  I sat down on a small rise and let Mr Tabubil go on ahead.  He disappeared into the mist and I imagined that I was sitting outside the Gates of the Dead, watching the Dead armies pass before me as shapes in the murk - and heard, behind me, a sharp crack. I turned. Mr Tabubil stood about 5 feet away, frozen in mid-stealth. He had spent a good ten minutes, crazy man, working his way silently back toward me across the moss, planning to sneak up behind me, gargle “Got you, my Precious!” and hopefully watch me jump off my rock  and fall into a ravine.
I do wish he hadn’t stepped on that twig!

Vitamin E Oil Works as Advertised

Winter, with the electric blankets on the beds and the kerosene heaters in the living room, is a drying sort of season. Skin cracks and pulls and breaks out in eczema and weird localized rashes.  
            Winter, however, doesn't bother me. I have my secret Australia weapon - my little orange bottle of Vitamin E oil. This stuff is so very moisturizing that doctors recommend it to make scar tissue fade, and on winter spots it works like summer sunlight on snow.

            Mr Tabubil has a small red winter spot on his left calf.  He's not fussed, but I am good at winter spots, and take care of them whether the owners want me to or not.  I started small, doing it up overnight in layers of moisturizer cream and Vaseline  but it didn't vanish, so on Saturday night I decided to pull out the big moisturizing guns and dug out the little orange bottle.  

            Mr Tabubil sat on the bed, looking martyred, but I am strong-minded and I ignored him.  I held the bottle over his leg and squeezed - and the dropper top of the bottle popped off and pinged sideways off the nightstand, and while we were giggling, an entire bottle's worth of Vitamin E oil dropped in one quivering mucilaginous blob onto his leg and slid all over the sheets. 

            A little of this stuff goes a long way: a drop the size of a pearl pinhead does all 10 of my cuticles AND my lips. One 100 ml bottle lasts me all year.  

            It's nasty stuff when it comes by the bottle. Mr Tabubil gagged. I reached down and started scooping, but that ropey, viscous, goop just plain wouldn't scoop.  How it all came out of the bottle in the first place I still can't figure out.  I scraped and pawed and rubbed until half of the stuff was on me rather than the sheets, and then I went into the bathroom and pulled out a bar of soap - 

            And here, we seemed to enter some sort of obscene sci-fi slasher flick. It wouldn't wash off; the more I scrubbed, the worse it got. My arms grew thick and tacky with  translucent goo -down my fingers, across the palms and the backs of my hands and up to my elbows.  Muffled swearing from the shower indicated that things weren't much better for Mr Tabubil's leg - soap and water seemed to help it MULTIPLY. 

            It was very "Killer Jellyfish from Outer-Space!" - suitable for a mid-afternoon matinee at the drive-in where your boyfriend's best friend is hiding in the backseat with a cup full of jell-o - a film like that might get to the heart of it. 

            We worked it out, eventually.  Dawn dish soap was what it took.  A whole bottle.  And only piecemeal. I couldn't touch shiny surfaces till half-way through Sunday. The sheets spent two days soaking in a heavy Dawn solution, and there's a zone the size of a car tire on one of them that looks like the spill sheet under an oil pan.

            On the positive side, as of Wednesday evening my arms are soft like velvet from shoulder to fingertip, and Mr Tabubil's legs are as silky as a head of waving hair in a Pantene Ad.

            But I'm not allowed to touch his winter red spots any more.  He's quite emphatic about that.

There Possibly IS No Business Like Show Business

On account of being sik, I spent my evening on the sofa, snuffling pitifully and watching old Hollywood musicals.  I started out with There's No Business Like Show Business because it has Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe AND Donald O'Conner in it, but the film didn't seem to do much with any of them.  There was a great deal of noise, but not much music.  There was a great deal of technicolor drapery and swirling, but not much dancing or choreography.  Lots of jokes, not much humor, and a great deal of Marilyn Monroe wearing not very much at ALL.   Her character sings in nightclubs, but her costume has chrome nipples on tips of its spangled pneumatic front and that's all I have to say about that.  Poor Donald O'Conner was forced to dance the highland fling to a New Orleans Blues version of Alexander's Ragtime Band - and Ethel Merman?  She had precisely two speeds - full throttle and off, and no-one seemed to be able to get near the off button.

            After ten minutes and six musical comedy numbers, Mr Tabubil looked up from his book and said "You know what?  This is just like porn.  A tottery, badly acted plot to give a thin string of connection to the noisy bits.   And the noisy bits? They're an aesthetic abomination.  And the apparent sincerity of the actors?  Yeah, they're faking it."

            So we put on Broadway Melody of 1940 with Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell instead, and Mr Tabubil forgot that he isn't supposed to approve of movies that aren't in color, and we watched happily until bedtime.

Twilight, the Feel-Good Movie Fix

Dr Tabubil called me on the way home from work this evening.
            "I have" she sighed dreamily "an overwhelming compulsion to watch Twilight tonight."

            "Please."  I said.  "I know you're under a lot of pressure, but there are other ways to end it all.  Is there anything you need to talk about?"

            "Have you even SEEN Twilight?"

            "I am perfectly capable of being a snob without having had that pleasure."  I said, with dignity.

            She sighed again.  "It's such a feel-good movie."

            "Uh?"

            "When I saw it the first time in the theatre- "

            "Whoah.  Unpack.  You've seen it more than once?"

            "When I saw it the first time in the theatre, I went with Abby Conroy.  You remember her, right?  She teaches middle school.  And we were SURROUNDED by her students.  All her female students, anyway.  And we couldn't hear anything anyone said on the screen because for the ENTIRE movie her students were squealing 'EeeeEEEE!  PATTINSON!'  And when they weren't squealing 'EeeeEEE!  PATTINSON!'  They were squealing  'Miss Conroy likes Twilight!  She is soooooo cool!!!!!!'  Tell me, Tabubilgirl.  HOW does that not make a fabulous feel-good film?"

            "So she went for the street cred.  Why'd you go?"

            "When I went to see New Moon in the theatre" She said, ignoring me, "It was me and a friend from med school, about three hundred thirteen year old girls, and one boy.  He was there on a date.  All the girls were squealing 'EeeeEEE!  PATTINSON!', and halfway through the movie, the boy spoke.  Just once.  He spoke when the audience actually silent, for, like, five seconds, and he said, right into the silence: ' But you said that there'd be werewolves!' 

            He sounded Sooooooo betrayed.  So wounded.   How can you NOT love a movie that does that?!  It's, like, pure warm fuzzies.  And feel-good pleasure.  I am going to watch Twilight, and then I'm going to watch New Moon, and I am going to cuddle the memory of that poor betrayed boy to my breast and I am going to laugh.  Mwahahaha.  Like that, evil-ly.  And I need that tonight after today.  So there.  Goodbye."

Vancouver is a Movie Set

Huh.  I wrote this back when I was blogging my North American trip, but it wound up in the drafts folder instead of being posted.

Well, I had fun that day.  I'm posting it now anyway, belatedly.

***************************

I spent this particular afternoon prowling around the lobby of the Four Season Pacific Rim Hotel.  It was raining outside, and I rather like the architecture - I think it's quite successful at what it does.  It's sufficiently monumental, and plays nicely with the aggressively angular geometry that seems to be required to give cutting-edge cred at the moment, but simultaneously it's quite cozy -which is what you WANT in a city where it mostly rains all year round.  The architects have used the asymmetry and angularity to catch a lovely balance between big public spaces and small, inhabitable nooks and niches - even crannies.  I like it.

I was mooching about on the third floor, trying to catch a glimpse inside one of the function rooms (how do you balance modern angularity with those requirements?  You don't.  You slap a nifty contempo veneer on the walls, and let Big Function Room do its thing.  Pity.) when I saw a man falling past the window.

That got my attention.

I sprang to the nearest window and saw a second man falling down after him.

And then, as I stared after him in stupefied horror, they bounced back up past my window - and  fell down again - and bounced back up - and down - and up again -

HUH.
They were riding bungee cords.

I trotted downstairs and out onto the street.  Someone was borrowing the hotel's exterior to shoot a commercial.  A man clutching a steering wheel was thrown off a 15th floor balcony, then the pusher jumped out after him.  It was raining Vancouver bucket-loads, and they did it  all afternoon.

There are time when this whole city feels like one giant movie set  Every day there are streets blocked off and building lobbies blanked out, and catering trucks set up along the sides of whatever street you're walking through.  When we drove up to Cypress Mountain, we found the  entire lodge was blocked off and marooned in a sea of trailers and caravans.  Scenes for Final Destination 5 were being filmed inside.  A few days ago mum went to a downtown restaurant to book for a large lunch party.  Because it was such a large party, she was asked to come back the next day and talk to the manager.  She went back the following day, but couldn't get inside because  it looked like this:

I rather enjoy it.  Such 'scope for imagination,' as Anne Shirley would say.  When things familiar are chosen to stand in for things exotic, it adds a spark to the everyday.  A little bit of potential for the fantastic. 

Stealth!

Yesterday afternoon, Mum watched the movie Stealth.  It's a dreadful waste of celluloid, but she seemed to genuinely enjoy it - enough to rent it after she saw most of it on TV this weekend.

She spent the rest of the weekend saying things like "Those swallows look like stealth fighters!" as they swooped across the park or, "Those seagulls are like stealth fighters" as they hovered overhead, and by Sunday afternoon "Everything is like a stealth fighter!  Isn't life great?"

She watched the movie on Tuesday because Tuesday is "One Dollar One Rental - Any movie for a dollar!" day at the local video shop.

We meant to rent only Stealth, but when I went to the counter to pay my dollar, the dude winced and, looking at me warily, said "Are you aware of our rental policy on Tuesdays?"

            "Sure am!" I said cheerily, thrusting the video toward him in an "ante up" sort of maneuver.

            "Yeah." he said lugubriously.  "We've had to change it a little.  We advertised one dollar rentals on Tuesday, and people started coming in and renting movies.  Lots of movies.   Lots of people.   We lost MONEY on it.  People are just - "  He glared at me, representative of the great horde of rapacious Tuesday opportunists.

            "Anyway.  Now you have to spend at least five dollars on Tuesdays or you can't rent anything."

            "How MUCH" Mum asked "would this movie cost on any other day of the week?"

            "Four ninety five."  He said, somewhat smugly, under the circumstances.  "You want four more movies or d'y'wanna buy a few chocolate bars?"

On the other hand, we DID get five movies for the same price it would have cost to rent one under normal circumstances.  On the OTHER other hand, all but one (the one no one else would have rented in a fit) of the weekly rentals I was interested in had gone ("Geez, I'm sorry.  That one went out the door half an hour ago.... Geez.  That one too.  Just bad luck, I guess.") and we wound up with a pile of overnighters and three-day rentals  that we've been hard-pressed to do justice to.  In fact, it would probably have made more sense just to rent that one movie and pay the five dollar charge and  -  hmmm.... say... d'you think?

Saturday Matinee

Yesterday afternoon we chanced the new Toy Story movie at the local movie theater. 
            Mr Tabubil wanted to know: "Can we bring in our own snacks?  Only if we can't, I need to wear a larger jacket."  
            Mr Tabubil is the Lord High Acolyte of smuggling food into a movie theater - and his friend Gordon is the Grand High Priest.  Back in Canada, where the weather was cold and the coats were heavy, he would walk into a cinema with a 2L bottle of soda in each pocket, and Gordon would be carrying a whole KFC chicken dinner.

We were the littlest bit trepedatious about taking in a matinee.
            Mr Tabubil wanted to know: "Are we going to be able to see the screen for all the flying popcorn?"
            I took his hand and told him that whatever happened, it couldn't be worse than the time we went to see The Lion King in suburban San Francisco on opening weekend in 1994.  We went together - Mum, Dad, my sister, and me.  The popcorn was flying like a salty white blizzard, babies were screaming like tin whistles, parents ran up and down the aisles chasing hysterical toddlers with voices like piccolo foghorns and then the lights went down and the noise level rose.
            A shaft of light broke the darkness - the door at the back of the theater opened and we could see a father stumbling down the aisle, hugging Jumbo-sized tubs of popcorn and buckets of soda to his chest.   He stopped, blind in the dark, halfway down to the screen.
            "Vera?"  He quavered.  "Vera?!"
            On the far side of the room, across two aisles and a storm of pre-teens, a hand waved vaguely through the popcorn gale.
            "Simon?"
            "Vera?   I can't see you!!!" His voice cracked and he swung his head desperately back and forth, squinting into the murky, popcorn-scented darkness.  His nerve broke, visibly, and he looked ready to bolt.
            The four of us smiled nastily at each other and settled back in our seats to enjoy the show.

Our matinee was almost an anticlimax- only one shower of popcorn - barely a drizzle, really, and I didn't even notice the comings and goings of the bathroom breaks - possibly because I had napkins from the snack bar jammed into my ears trying to reduce the sound of the film track down to a manageable level.
            I've heard dire stories about our sweet little cinema, but as most of ones about spiders come from the same source that told me Not to Drink the Water or I'd DIE of Red Earth, I tend to discount the more extreme reports. ("And that was when the giant huntsman crawled onto the back of my chair-")
            Nothing chewed its way out of the armrest.   Nothing fell out of the ceiling.  It is simply a pretty little country cinema that specializes in blink-and-you-miss 'em runs of major hollywood blockbusters and midnight marathons of the Twilight movies.  (They know their demographic.)  With the occasional managable hitch in the screening room.
            And the movie was awful sweet.  Do go see it.

Dreams of Twilight

 I have not read one of the Twilight books, nor seen any of the movies (the wikipedia summaries don't count), but my students are right in the prime demographic and last night the publicity barrage caught up with me and I dreamed about Twilight.
            Edward the Sparkly Son of Darkness lurked around corners looking glum and jaundiced, but this time out the worm turned: the pouty heroine (me) found a glittery emo boy with unexpectedly large incisors skulking about behind her to be rather alarming and called the sheriff to ask for a restraining order.  Two blocks distance, minimum.
            The sheriff picked Edward up and read him the riot act and Edward's stock expression of disdainful ennui deepened until he looked as if he wanted to bite the entire universe in the neck.  Didn't anyone realize that he had a literary imperative to Be With Me?  He didn't think much of it either, thank you very much - what sort of immortal being would enjoy skulking around after a teenager with about as much joie-de-vivre as a melted popsicle?  But did we see HIM going against canon?
            Well, DID we?!?
            The sheriff sighed, and apologized to Edward and told him to get right back to it, and told me to go talk to the author if I thought I had a problem.

When I was in university, vampire stories meant a young woman who stood up for herself, spent most of her life on the OFFENSIVE and took no BS from nobody.  Buffy was a role model.
            Today, vampires mean getting knocked up by your high school sweetheart, who will take care of you for ever and ever and ever and you will never have to worry about a thing.  Even when he hurts you.
            He loves you so VERY much that he crawls through your window at night to watch you sleep because daylight stalking just isn't enough - he just can't BEAR to be away from you for even a little bit. 
            We all know how well that sort of co-dependency works out in the real world. Buffy would have told him to grow up - right before she pitched him off the roof.

Drowning in the Blue

We have bought Avatar on BluRay. We popped it into the player this evening, and only twenty minutes in, I am reluctantly forced to face facts:  this movie is completely idiotic.

In the theatre I was seduced by all the 3D pretty, but on the small screen, where the all the gorgeous bioluminescent travel journalism doesn't loom so large over the writing, the movie was suddenly EXACTLY like that boy back in college who had the most INTENSE eyes -

You know the guy.  His eyes looked right THROUGH you, and when he stared deep into your own basic hazel specs he saw right into your SOUL and you just melted.  Positively melted.

And then, four night later, over dinner at Subway, the restaurant he picked out specially for this big date because it had the best cuisine in North America, you found out that he thought Thomas Kinkaide was the world's greatest artist and that Jim Carey was the greatest comedian in the history of cinema - particularly in his seminal work, Ace Ventura Pet Detective.  And he absolutely LOVED being on this date with you because wasn't it COOL to be dating someone foreign - Australia, right?  That's not even in Massachusetts!

And as he leaned in to kiss you over the remains of your tuna melt, you looked into those magical  eyes and you realized, with dawning horror, that there was nothing behind them looking back at you.  Just air.  And you knew inside your soul that there was never going to be a third date; there might not even be the remains of this second date because as he kissed you, you felt nothing.  Absolutely nothing.

That's what Avatar is like.  With even worse dialogue.

Raaarh.

Last night Mr Tabubil watched the film Wolverine while he built himself a photographic lightbox.

The plot goes like this: Raaaaarrgggghhh! Raaarrrrggghhhh! Raaarrrrggghhhhh!

And then Hugh Jackman jumps on somebody.