Monthly Archives: November 2022

Miscellany

Miscellany

Cinematic Vocabulary

If you happened to read one of my older posts, you’d know I’m a fan of Yimou Zhang’s Shanghai Triad.

And if you know anything about me, you know I also like to classify things – perhaps to a dubious level sometimes.

By chance, I recently saw a newer film titled The Wasted Times.

One review on IMDb probably describes it best:

There is not a shot out of place, not a word uttered or note of music that is not just right in this film. I admit I had to watch it twice to get all the nuances. You must listen for when they are speaking Shanghainese or Japanese and you must understand a bit about what was happening in china and shanghai in 1937. There are family ties, triad ties, Japanese secret society ties and love ties. There is betrayal of all these ties. Jumping back and forth in time makes the plot unravel slowly and like a game of mah-jong the final betrayal is revealed when all the tiles are exposed at the end. This is a great movie. It does not have any kung-fu or wire-work or epic slow motion gunfights and white doves – but it is a truly original masterpiece. I recommend it to anyone who wants to see a thoughtful movie and be challenged by what a great piece of cinema is.

So what is the relationship between Shanghai Triad and The Wasted Times?  Well, Hollywood has started to develop a vocabulary for this, and it includes terms like reboot, remake, and re-imagining.

But The Wasted Times doesn’t seem to really match any of those terms.  I’d contend The Wasted Times is a spiritual successor to Shanghai Triad, where a spiritual successor would be one or two levels beyond a re-imagining.  It’s adopting the environment, the general context, and the era, but not any of the specific characters, relationships, or plot lines.

If you enjoyed Shanghai Triad, do yourself a favor and see The Wasted Times.  I have to admit, I was touched by the final scenes – complete with an alien form of chivalry.  It was extremely well done.  In fact, everything was very well done, and it tends to suggest the setting in these two films (1930s Shanghai) really lends itself to a cinematic rendering.  Something about 1930s Shanghai tends to be very crisp, and very compelling, with plenty of surface area for an artist to work with.

Although I probably wouldn’t agree with all of the director’s viewpoints, it’s very hard to argue with the quality of the film.  The Wasted Times is a very worthy and a very formidable spiritual successor to Shanghai Triad.

Still from Er Cheng's The Wasted Times (2016).
Still from Er Cheng’s The Wasted Times (2016).

And now for the dubious levels of classification.

This film incorporates a creative device that I have never seen any vocabulary for: At the end of the film, the main characters briefly meet in a completely different setting for the final resolution.

I think my mental shorthand for this is a Point-Break-style ending, although there are obviously other films that have the same device.

In The Wasted Times, as in the original Point Break, this style of ending works because it further pronounces and embellishes key traits for some of the characters.

Miscellany

Miscellany

Languages Inside Languages

Back in the era of the Iraq War, it was often repeated that Arabic was a “valuable” language to know, in terms of government recruitment efforts.

In the post-Iraq-War era, Arabic remains highly relevant to America, but it seems like America may have new strategic challenges ahead.

It kind of depends on whether you see the glass half full or half empty.

If you think the glass is half full, the USA and China will cooperate on everything and there will be blinding economic prosperity, for many.

If you think the glass is half empty, the USA and China will repeatedly butt heads, and increasing levels of confrontation will be the order of the day.

And here enters the subject of Cantonese, a Chinese language much older than Mandarin (the language favored by the government of China).

Cantonese happens to be spoken by many Chinese dissidents, and it’s currently being used to disseminate anti-government messages inside China.

One could characterize it as the “language of resistance” inside China, and abroad by older generations of the Chinese diaspora.

If the glass is half empty, it makes me wonder if Cantonese might soon be one of those “extremely valuable” languages, in terms of government recruitment efforts.

Weighing in its favor, it’s more of a greenfield language right now.  If you’re applying for a relevant government job, you’re less likely to be competing against an entire room full of Cantonese experts for that job (as compared to Arabic).

Weighing against it is the fact that many Cantonese speakers tend to also know English (technically, the same can be said of Mandarin).  Thus, the necessity isn’t quite as high.

But also weighing in its favor is the fact that the severity of the potential conflicts between the USA and China is quite high – probably a lot higher than conflicts where Arabic was relevant.  This fact alone sort of promotes the value of the language up several notches.

I know next to nothing about Cantonese, but several things in that article fascinated me.  One of them is that Cantonese can be expressed very similarly to Mandarin, while retaining a completely different meaning.  This almost suggests a degree of steganographical potential.  Furthermore, it suggests that automated censors will not be able to handle this.

Great Design

Great Design

Flawless Recall: Memorizing Spanish Days Of The Week, For Students And Teachers by Alexander Van Berg

Flawless Recall: Memorizing Spanish Days Of The Week, For Students And Teachers has just been published, and this book is interesting.  The paperback version is short, it’s $10, and it’s full color.  It’s roughly 38 pages and mostly pictures, so you could almost call it a “picture book”, but it’s for all ages.  In my opinion, it’s the sort of thing that’s perfect as a small gift for new students of Spanish – for Christmas or any other gift-giving occasion.

The book description probably has the best summary:

Flawless Recall: Memorizing Spanish Days Of The Week is a refreshing and highly effective take on a very old subject: English speakers memorizing the days of the week in Spanish.

Part educational and part mnemonic insight, part riddle and part whodunnit, part comical and part cautionary tale, part celestial and part sinister, and part quixotic and part horrifying, you will never look at Monday morning the same way again!  Most importantly, once and for all, you will remember the days of the week in Spanish!

As a minor rest stop in the Flawless Recall series on the Spanish language, you will analyze the same simple story, forwards and back, several times over.  Afterwards, your mind will thank you as it sinks its teeth into the extremely tractable content.

Memorization is involuntary once you read this short, easy, breezy, and unforgettable Flawless Recall book!  You are now one step closer to conversational Spanish!

Right now the book is working its way to the different marketplaces.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BLFYBHNV

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BLPBB7TT

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/flawless-recall-alexander-van-berg/1142630724

https://books.apple.com/us/book/flawless-recall-memorizing-spanish-days-of-the-week/id6444242339

https://books2read.com/daysoftheweek