Mobile Suits Gundam: Ultimate Operation U.C.0079
25 Sunday Mar 2007
25 Sunday Mar 2007
23 Friday Mar 2007
Posted Biography, Comics and Mangas
in09 Friday Mar 2007
Posted Comics and Mangas, Movies
inSTARRING: Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, David Wenham, Dominic West, Rodrigo Santoro, Vincent Regan
DIRECTOR: Zack Snyder
SCREENWRITER: Zack Snyder
STUDIO: Warner Bros.
Let me come straight out and say it, I love the movie. The movie followed closely the Frank Miller’s comic even to the narrative. “SPARTAN…come back with your shield –or on it.” Great send of if your husband is going to war. Its shades of gray lighting, with virtual background gives me the feeling that I am watching the comic.
The battle sequence is exciting with slow motion frames, cutting, thrushing and lopping off of body parts. Gerard Butler looks like King Leonidas in the comic. He also looks like a younger Mel Gibson. 300 Spartans against a million Persians. When the Persian archers shot their arrows, the sky blacken. The Spartans with distain says, “Then we shall fight in the shade.”
Steven Pressfield wrote a novel, Gates of Fire, which is worth reading.
09 Friday Mar 2007
Posted Comics and Mangas
in300 by Frank Miller is one of the best comic I have read. Published in 1998 in five issues, it was collected as a hardcover in 1999. It was published by Dark Horse Comics.
Frank Miller’s drawings are his classics, portraying human bodies, not in its ideal Greek form but as functional tortured souls. Lynn Varley did the coloring. It reminds me of his classic, Batman:The Dark Knight Returns. The story is based on an event in Greek history.
The Persian army of one million soldiers under Xerxes were on the way to invade Greece. It is said that the earth shook when the Persian army marched. This attack of the Persians took the Greek city states by surprise. They needed time to gather their forces. The initial attack had the Persians franked the Greek army.
Knowing this, King Leonidas of Sparta decided to lead 300 of his elite force to try to stop the Persians at a narrow pass called the Hot Gates or Thermopylae.
According to Herodotus, Leonidas had been warned by the Delphic oracle that either Sparta would be destroyed or their king would lose his life. Leonidas chose the second alternative. All the Spartans died, including Leonidas.
However the 300 Spartans managed to hold off the one million Persian army long enough for the rest of Greek army to escape. Their courage and their death became the inspiration for the Greek nation states to fight against the Persian.
I have reread the comic. Now I am ready for the movie.
09 Friday Mar 2007
Posted Comics and Mangas, Culture, Movies, Soo Inn
inMy friend and dear brother Soo Inn shares with me the love of the Lord, mentoring younger people, teaching, preaching, movies and comics. Here is his take on movies. Reproduced with permission, of course.
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GRACE@WORK MAIL 10/07 [March 9, 2007 Edition]
“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
(Ecclesiastes 1:2)
[Note: If you haven’t watched the movies Ghost Rider and Protege and intend to do so you may want to skip today’s column.]
Commentary: At The Movies
Caught two movies over the Lunar New Year holidays.
Ghost Rider was fun. Directed by Mark Steven Johnson, it worked while his previous efforts (Daredevil, Elektra) failed because Ghost Rider doesn’t take itself too seriously. (Catch the Nicolas Cage character trying to sterilize a needle with hell fire.) I left the theatre feeling like I had read a comic on the screen. Cultural soda pop on a hot afternoon.
As is often the case in movies that feature the supernatural, God doesn’t make a direct appearance. And as is often the case, Christianity is portrayed as ineffectual and weak. Check out the priest, well meaning but helpless in the face of evil. I believe in a God who says that it is possible to move mountains even if you have faith the size of a mustard seed.
Still the plot presupposes a battle between good and evil with evil losing in the end. Here is the perennial human hope. The real contours of this battle are recorded in the bible not in popular celluloid and when we reach the book of Revelation we know the good guys do win in the end. But salvation comes not from heroism or romanticism but through the conquering love of Christ on the Cross.
Christians see this movie? Depends. If you are particularly vulnerable to images of supernatural evil then seeing them may give real evil a foothold to trouble you. You should give Ghost Rider and other movies that feature the demonic a miss. But if your faith is strong enough then go if you want to. But go with others if possible. And always go with discernment.
The other movie I saw recently was the Hong Kong production, Protege. Now here is a parade of images of real horror as the movie deals with the destructive power of heroin addiction. Directed by Tung-Shing Yee, Protege has promise but is let down by the unnecessary gore and slapstick that we sometimes find in movies from Hong Kong. (Did we really need to see the Customs officer’s hand bludgeoned off?) And at times the movie felt like a National Geographic documentary, documenting the decline of the heroin trade.
But the primary question raised by Protege is profound. Why do people take drugs to begin with? The answer could have come from the book of Ecclesiastes. People take drugs to escape the emptiness of life. The root problem is not drugs. The root problem is that life has no meaning. This was portrayed well by the two protagonists in the movie.
The drug lord, played by Andy Lau, has worked hard all his life in the drug trade. The onset of kidney failure causes him to realize that he ought to retire so that he can have time to tend to his health needs and to enjoy life. So he chooses a protege to take over his business. But his protege turns out to be an undercover narcotics agent who betrays him. The drug lord is caught before he can leave the country. He ends up taking his own life. All is meaningless.
The narcotics agent played by Daniel Wu, succeeds in what he set out to do. He gets to bring down the drug lord. But success is hollow. He gets a perfunctory clap on the back by the powers that be. He loses a girl he has come to care for. He is no longer capable of living a normal life. And he has to live with the guilt of having betrayed a man who had come to love him and trust him. All is meaningless.
As a movie Protege is uneven. Nevertheless it portrays well the central question of life. Does life have meaning? And if it does not why shouldn’t I lose myself in drugs? Or take my own life? What a great starting point for some good conversations with friends Christian and non-Christian.
I minister to many young adults and college students and I have long come to realize that the movies are a key feature of their lives. They are a key feature of my life. Therefore I hear Peter Fraser and Vernon Edwin Neal when they tell us in their book ReViewing the Movies that “…the time is at hand for Christians to engage our movie-made culture courageously, and this means we have to struggle with real issues and tell the truth.” (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2000, p. 20)
They go on to remind us:
“For too long we Christians have feared the corrosive influence of film and so avoided approaching it thoughtfully. We need to shift to the offensive and intentionally discuss film as a way to illustrate and apply the truth. And we need to appreciate film for its artistry and praise our Creator who gives such gifts to men.
It may be useful to recall that Jesus never reduced life to simple platitudes, and He never chose the safe, sanitized road. He embraced each person uniquely, and He got his sandals dirty. If films had existed in first-century Israel, it just might be that His tastes would have surprised people. His tastes in people seemed to surprise people, after all.” (p.22)
Fraser and Neal end their book with some guidelines for Christians and the movies. They include:
*Christians must get involved in all aspects of the film industry and find ways to use that medium to honor God and advance the Gospel.
*Individual Christians who watch film should find the means to educate themselves and their children about film.
*Films need to be evaluated according to the twin standards of artistic excellence and truthfulness.
*The popularity of certain kinds of film reveal as much about the longings of the human heart in general, as well as particular cultural and historical moments.
*The wide range of films produced in the past hundred years offers manifold opportunity for Christians to enter into dialogue with the larger culture.
(pp. 178 – 179)
If you haven’t seen Ghost Rider or Protege, well I think you can give Ghost Rider a miss unless you are an old time Marvel comic fan like me. You may want to see Protege but be warned. The true to life horror in Protege blows the cgi horror of Ghost Rider away any day.
Your brother,
Soo-Inn Tan
Email: sooinn@graceatwork.org
23 Friday Feb 2007
Posted Comics and Mangas, Culture, Movies, Theology
inI watched the movie Ghost Rider today. It has a starling cast, Nicolas Cage as Johnny Blaze / Ghost Rider; Eva Mendes as Roxanne Simpson; Wes Bentley as Blackheart; Sam Elliott as Caretaker / Carter Slade and Peter Fonda as Mephistopheles. I always like to watch Nicholas Cage acting. He has permanent confused, and conflicted look. I have never read the comic so I was hoping the movie will be a treat.
Johnny Blaze, carnival stunt motorcyclist sold his soul to the devil, Mephistopheles so that his father will be cured of his lung cancer. After signing the contract, the devil cured his father but killed him in an accident. Johnny however was bonded to the contract to be the devil’s bounty hunter, the Ghost Rider. Apparently, the devil needed a Ghost Rider to catch souls that have escaped from hell. Johnny turns into the Ghost Rider in the presence of evil. His lethal weapon was the “penance stare” with which he will show the bad guys the evil they have done in their life which in turn will kill them. The baddie is Blackhart who has an ambition to absorb as much evil souls as possible so that he become “Legion” and take over the world.
The movie was slow moving and the special effects was poor. I was expecting more spectacular pyrotecnics. The costume design was like matrix meets incredible hulk. The fighting was uneventful and straight forward.
Two interesting thoughts went through my mind during the show. First is the concept of the contract with the devil. Apparently the devil sticks closely to the lines of the contract while Carter Slade, the former Ghost Rider speaks of God giving a second chance. The second is the concept of penance stare. One was punished by exposing to one’s former sins. Sounds like purgatory.
Reviews of the movies have not been good. Now I shall have look for a Ghost Rider comic so that I will know how it was supposed to be.
I do not recommend for children to watch it without parental guidance.
20 Tuesday Feb 2007
Posted Comics and Mangas
in04 Sunday Feb 2007
Posted Comics and Mangas, Culture
inOne of the sacrifices that the Batman/Bruce Wayne has to make is to master his emotions. Whenever the Batman leaves the bat cave, he reminds himself of some ground rules… “never go out angry”… “never go out reckless”… “never, never make it personal.” These are important ground rules if the Batman wants to stay alive.
The story arc starts with a depressed Batman asking himself, “Is there a darkness greater than death?” Janie Rutledge was kidnapped and Bruce Wayne was asked by her sister, Lilith Rutledge to help. In the process, Bruce fell in love with Lilith. Another girl, Miriam Hargrove also went missing. The story picked up its tempo when the Batman went in search of the missing Janie and during the process struggle with his love for Lilith. The kidnapper kept sending fingers of their victim to Lilith to force her to pay the ransom. In the meantime, the Batman tangled with Oswald Cobblepot (Penguin), Greasy Lee, Tiki Rivera (and her snakes) and Bedham in his effort to rescue Janie. In various stages of the story, the Batman find himself answering his own question, “Is there a darkness greater than death?” In…the darkness of peace…the darkness of defeat…and its name “love”?
In the end it turned out the whole kidnapping was a con planned by Lilith to steal money from Bruce Wayne. The fingers were not from the kidnapped victim Janie (who was part of the con) but from Miriam. Unfortunately, in the final confrontation, Lilith died in a car crash.
Is there a darkness greater than death? Yes. Greater than the darkness of loneliness… Greater than the darkness of peace, or fear, of defeat…The blackest darkness of all…the unending nights and restless unanswered dreams…of that which might have been.
This is so true. One of our frailties of being thinking beings is our ability to imagine the future and our past. Many of us are haunted with what might have being, a road not taken. Regrets of things not done, opportunities not seized and relationships not developed, now lost forever. In a way, there is a darkness greater than death.
This is one of the better story arc of the Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight. The questioning and the struggling of the Batman/Bruce Wayne of what it means to be human is a valuable background to the ‘slam/bang’ of the comic pictures. The drawings added a valuable visual assets as it shows a macho muscular Batman struggling with his emotions.
31 Wednesday Jan 2007
Posted Comics and Mangas, Movies
inThe Indiana Jones trilogy is among one of my all time favourite movies. Harrison Ford will forever imprint in my mind an idealistic adventurous archaecologist named Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. (Indiana is the name of his dog).
Of the three movies in the trilogy, the one I love the most is Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Sean Connery, another of my favourite actor, appeared as Henry Jones, Sr. I must have watched it at least 10 times. I have the DVD so I will be watching it again. The chemistry between the two were fantastic. Rumours had it that a fourth Indiana Jones movie is in the works.
After the movies, there was a number of novels and graphic comics published. I have read and enjoyed them all. There was also a television series, Young Indiana Jones which I did not like.
There were also a couple of Indiana Jones computer games which I have enjoyed playing.
The best graphic novel is Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis published by Dark Horse Comics in June 1992. It was written by William Messner-Loebs, Dan Barry and Mike Richardson based on the storyline by Hal Barwood and Noah Falstein from Luscasfilm Games.
The graphic novel was well written with non stop action like in the movies. The storyline was predictable with mixture of elements which were similar in a later animated Disney movie about Atlantis.
Atlantis always was a fascination of mine. Did it exist? Did Plato really described it? What was it like? Where is it? Endless questions but no answers. Another mystery to be added to the other mysteries in the Universe.
.
18 Thursday Jan 2007
Posted Comics and Mangas, Movies, Star Trek
in