I mentioned a long time ago (perhaps in my first review) that it didn't take long to get tired of those books written about "my year(s) in Japan as an English teacher." They should all be read before or very shortly after arrival. But once you have been here for a while, I highly recommend finding books about "my year(s) somewhere else as an English teacher." In this case, China.
When my father sent me Iron and Silk, I almost gave it to someone else without reading it (like I did with Sophie's World—sorry Dad). But the short blurb on the inside cover hooked me, and I plowed though the rest of the book in under a week (It's pretty short). It describes a scene where the author is trying to board a train with a 7-foot-long bag containing enough weaponry to storm sevral castles while playing the Chinese bureaucracy's favorite game: Let's Maka a Rule.Salzman becomes interested in China as a kid when he discovers their various martial arts. Purely as an offshoot of his training he becomes fluent in Mandarin Chinese and gets a degree in classical Chinese literature. Then, like many of us in Japan, he discovered his native language as his only marketable skill, and went to China to teach in a medical college.
Like any of us, Salzman has all kinds of hilarious misadventures in his adopted homeland, but what kept me reading was the completely different character they have from my own demesne. The Japanese may have adopted many of their cultural artifacts—writing, art, music, etc.—from the Chinese, but one thing they did not take on is the general Chinese approach to living. To give you an exmaple, China and Japan both have terrible, corrupt bureaucracies with too much power. But Japan's works because poeple rarely fight it. China's works because it fights harder than the people.
The cast of characters Salzman meets are mostly through his continuing martail arts training. My favorite is "Ironfist," a famous fighter and teacher who has a hand like a block of wood from punching a sheet of iron every day. He also decides to learn English by memorizing sentences over and over, though he is not by far the weirdest person in the book.
In a nutshell, this book is easy, entertaining, and even a little bit educational. Read it.
Yes, I read the Spidey Comics as a kid. But I am neither a purist, nor terribly sentimental. In fact, I am in a way antipure and antisentimental. I don't see the point in making a Spiderman movie if it is exactly like the comic. And I think it is a travesty of filmmaking that a director would have to work under the thumbs of a million whiny, stuck-in-adolescence comic hard-liners. On the other hand, it is satisfying to note that in the end, the biggest thing the movie and the comic have in common is their target audience of 10- to 13-year-old boys.
That said, overall I enjoyed the movie. Actaully, I laughed almost continuously. Sometimes the movie was genuinely funny. Other times it was so cheezy I had no other recourse but to laugh. Some of the lines between Peter and Mary Jane were so classic I should have written them down. However, I do not fault the screenwriters; this is how comics are actually written. But they made one mistake: comic dialogue is generally kept short enough that it will not get mired in it's own lameness. Peter's (indirect) declariation of love to Mary Jane, for example, should have taken about a third of the time it did. I also could have done without the spoonfeeding of post-9/11 patriotism. I don't have any problem believing that angry New Yorkers would throw bricks at troublemakers, but the movie lays it on a bit thick.
And if the editors are worried about filling the extra time, I would happily have watched a few more web-slinging scenes. I worked in computers for a number of years before coming to Japan, and I don't impress easily by anything they can do. Realism in particular is painfully boring—even uncreative. Why spend a million dollars reproducing on a screen exactly (but not quite) what you can see with your own eyes? But the scenes of Spidey swooping willy-nilly though the streets of manhattan are really, genuinely cool. Plus, they have stylistic realism rather than technical realism. It is much more fun to see Spidey twist and flail like a person actaully swinging from an 80-story building than it is to see (or rather to know) a zillion individually animated strands of hair, vis. Final Fantasy
I will also commend the movie for its acting. Tobey Maguire Cider House Rules) makes a great nerd-cum-hero, and works the transition from goof-in-glasses to stud-in-spandex very well. But even better than Tobey Maguire is William Dafoe as the Green Goblin. Dafoe is a vetran actor (Platoon, Shadow of the Vampire, The Last Temptation of Christ) with an impressive range, and he is the only person in the movie who manages not to sound cheezy. Unfortunately, even he could not save that absurd constume. This is the one case where I will say that director Sam Raimi should have gone by the book. The comic Green Goblin is actually a little green man dressed like a Christmas elf in S&M gear. Perhaps they were shooting for more believability by making him a normal man in a crazy green suit, but the effect was abysmal. I have a strong suspention of disbelief for movies, and will swallow just about anything for the purpose of entertainment, but to think that lame-ass outfit was produced under a military contract is too dumb even for me. And even worse is the fact that it brought Dafoe's natural screen presence down by half at least. On his own he is capable of some serious scary-bad-guy mojo. But because that preposterous suit ruined all his big dramatic moments, his best scene is at home talking to himself in the mirror. In that mask he might as well be chasing the Power Rangers with a poorly dubed voice track.
In retrospect, and despite the advice of those I saw it with, I am not going to call this a bad movie. I will call it a movie that requires you to lower your standards a bit before you can enjoy it.
I recently saw Memento, hands down the best suspense movie I have seen since Bound. In fact, it is so good that I am not even going to presume to review it. I will mention that the memory problems of the main character are a real, if rare phenomenon. Certain kinds of damage to the hippocampus can prevent people from forming new memories without destroying any of their old ones. Try to imagine what that's like. And absolutely watch this movie.
