May 11, 2008
Mother's Day
Jean gave me a list of plants that she thought Renee might get her for Mother's Day. So after the movie we drove to the local garden store and ran through the list with a helpful employee. We returned home with a banana plant! Jean was surprised, despite the fact that she'd suggested it herself. Turns out she had been thinking about a dwarf house plant, and we brought home a 'bush' that the garden store employee said should reach eight feet in height. The literature says more like fifteen feet. It is planted out back in Jean's garden now. We'll see how it fares in the summer, and the winter. 
Posted by dpwakefield at 09:18 PM | Comments (0)
Speed Racer
Renee and I went to see Speed Racer, the Wachowski Brothers' live action adaptation of the old anime series, at the local IMAX theater this morning. Even though we went to the first showing of the day on a Sunday, the theater was near 70% full. I've read a couple of reviews, which were not very flattering.
I didn't watch Speed with as much devotion as Astro Boy when I was a wee squirt, but I watched enough to have all the salient plot points down, and to understand the general pattern of the show, it's 'story mechanics', if you will. And from those remote memories, I have to say that the live-action adaptation was pitch-perfect. It was not a slavish imitation. No, that would have worked less well than the current incarnation.
For instance, in the original American adaptation of the Tatsunoko Productions series, American voice actors adopted a frenetic style of delivery to keep up with the rapid Japanese scripts. There is a single scene in the live-action movie where the primary villain delivers a speech to Speed with that headlong machine-gun style, and it works well as a call-out to the original corny series. But the brothers do not attempt to sustain this dialogue style throughout the movie. And that was the right decision.
I won't start enumerating all the little ways in which the series was captured in the movie, or the ways in which the movie struck out on its own, but only observe that they did a great job of fusing the memories of my childhood with the more modern technological and pop culture elements of the world expected by the majority of their audience.
See it. Really.
Posted by dpwakefield at 09:00 PM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2008
Mugi
Last year for my birthday we drove all the way into Hillsboro to eat at Syun Izakaya. This year I decided to stick closer to home, so we ate at Mugi. Sushi again! Boy is that a fun restaurant. Renee and Jean both had cooked meals, but I had the raw fish, and of course, yamaimo. Yum, yum!
Posted by dpwakefield at 08:35 PM | Comments (0)