Trilogy of Wong Kar-Wai 2

"Fallen Angels" (墮落天使) (1995)，a movie depicting a set of interlocking and morbid relationships between people from different walks of lives. The leitmotif and many scenes are reminiscent of another Wong's production in 1994, ChungKing Express. The similarity between FA and CE was nicely summarized here.

 There are two major axes of relationship, that between the killer Leon Lai, his work partner Michelle Reis and the call girl Karen Mok , and between the mute boy Takeshi Kaneshiro and the heart-broken Charlie Yeung. A highly deterministic macro- atmosphere underlined the backdrop of this film. Leon worked as a hitman because he "doesn't have to make decisions". Who lives and who dies were pre-arranged for him by Michelle.  He is an executioner, not an executive or a judge. Takeshi was mute since childhood from food poisoning. He likes to barge into closed stores at nighttime to assume the role of the boss. Many comedic moments resulted from his repetitive coincidences with his "customers", yet his illicit lifestyle also shows his passivity to engage in pre-determined, pre-existing business without his own idiosyncrasy and decisions. Charlie was a desperate girl seeking out this "blondie" girl whom she believed to have stolen her boyfriend from her. Unable to extricate herself from an unrequited relationship, Takeshi discerned that Charlie was still in love with her boyfriend after some years apart. Karen was a paroxysmal ex-con indulging in one-night stands with Leo. Her desire "to be remembered" speaks to a flawed self-image that hinges on external appraisal for self-salvation. Consider the release date of the film, one possible reading is that the suffocating urban life and air reflects the mood of the impending reversion of sovereignty to People's Republic of China in 1997. Insinuating the inability and futility to make decisions and life choices, FA seems to imply that the future of HK is as uncertain and vain as the fate of the actors in the film.

A slit of silver lining is projected in the end of the movie, where Leo finally understands that he has to make decisions for himself before it is too late. Takeshi made a decision not to chase after Charlie as he found out that Charlie did not recognize him at all. Finally, the camera portrayed a close-up of Michelle, widely known as probably the prettiest Ms. HK. Her icy cold mood and ruminating look contrasted the hustling environ in the tea restaurant. She ran into Takeshi, who offered to take her home on his motorbike. Racing through an underground tunnel with her hair fluttering in the wind, she held onto Takeshi, and she confessed

"I haven't ridden a motorcycle for a long time. Actually, I haven't been so close to a man for a while. The road isn't that long, and I know I'm getting off soon. But I'm feeling such warmth this very moment."

 Urban fairy tales are fairly transient, but realizing ephemerality does not stop Michelle from enjoying the very breathing moment with a strange man.

Trilogy of Wong Kar-Wai 1

Wikipedia characterized the style of the award-winning HK director, Wong Kar Wai, in this way, "elliptically plotted mood pieces, with lush visuals and music, about the burden of memory on melancholic, misfit characters." Indeed, his movies are rich with metaphorical tropes, visual contrasts, and emotional subtlety. He is a master of the graphic representation of modern solitude, the emotional outcry of urbanites, and above all the social ambiguity and cultural juxtaposition of a society in flux.

"Days of Being Wild" (1990) (阿飛正傳) tells the story of a playboy whose failure to commit to any women stems from his familial history. Played by Leslie Cheung, he mastered the art of stealing girls' hearts with his artful lies ("I will remember you forever because of this minute") and his grasp of female psychological weaknesses. His womanizing capacity draws upon his troubled relationship with his adoptive mother who was a prostitute. Speaking with fluent Shanghainess and a set of typified fashion code of 50s/60s Shanghai, his adoptive mother was paid by his biological mother––a Filipino aristocrat––not to reveal her identity, much to the resentment of Leslie. His adoptive mother was engaged in bad romances with young men who approached her for her money. There is an important parallel between Leslie's treatment of his girlfriends (played by Maggie Cheung and Carina Lau) and his distaste of his adoptive mother. He saw how blind and self-deluding his adoptive mother was in bad romances, and he reconstructed these abusive relationships with other women (when Carina was desperately looking for Leslie as he left her, she unabashedly barged in the apartment of Leslie's adoptive mother. Carina asked if she was pathetic, the mother said "No, I was just like you when I was your age.") No matter how conceited he seemed to be in this hedonistic lifestyle, I think there's a part of him that knows something is wrong. The most revealing scene is the last moment before he was shot in a train in the Philippines in which the allegory of the flying birds without legs appeared again. As the core metaphorical thread weaving across the fabric of the film, the fable narrates the myth of a certain type of birds who are born without legs; incessant flying is necessary to keep them alive and the only instance of landing is the time they die. Leslie glorified this fable in the beginning of the movie, implying that his frivolous personality is as innate as this type of birds; standing in sharp contrast to his reflection on the allegory in his final breathing second, "I was wrong. The bird was dead from the start." Depriving of the ability of love, life is inane and hollow.

To be continued with "Fall Angels" (1995) and "Happy Together" (1997) in the next two posts.

Understanding and sympathy

"People who sympathize with us but do not understand us are naturally our good friends, especially during times of tribulation; while the words of those who understand us but do not sympathize with us deserve our special attention. The most precious, however, are those who both understand and sympathize with us, especially if their sympathy comes from their understanding." Fu Sinian 

How I come to love Proust

Virginia Woolf once said “My great adventure is really Proust.  Well — what remains to be written after that?” I am not going to pretend that I am an expert on Proust. French literature is never my strength. I had my first passing encounter with "In Search of Lost Time" in my all-time favorite movie "Love Letter" directed by Iwaii Shunji. It was a fleeting moment on the screen, but the book is the symbolic underpinning of the whole story (click here for a synopsis of the movie). 

I always want to get to know the nuts and bolts that make my favorite movie so divinely presented. I downloaded the first volume of ISLT–Swann's way–for free on kindle last month. I finished reading it and now I understand Woolf's compliment, as least insofar as the first volume is concerned. It is a quasi-autobiography of Proust's ill-stricken life where he spent most of the time in his uncle's residence in a fictional town called "Combray". It is not a novel with billowing plots and thrilling scenes and extraordinary characters. The majority of the body is about his perception of the world beholds him and description of natural landscapes. Proust's sensitivity and unparalleled textual mastery exudes from his captivating descriptive narratives. He captures the inner world of emotion for an introvert and a bibliophile. Reading him is reassuring, therapeutic and socially elevating because I feel that I am not alone. Some of the favorite excerpts from Swann's Way: 

"no one perhaps could have understood my feelings at that moment so well as he; to him, the anguish that comes from knowing that the creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot follow—to him that anguish came through love, to which it is in a sense predestined, by which it will be seized upon and exploited; but when, as had befallen me, it possesses one’s soul before love has yet entered into one’s life..."

“A book is the product of a different self from the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices. If we mean to try to understand this self it is only in our inmost depths, by endeavoring to reconstruct it there, that the quest can be achieved.”

"These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a few seconds; it often happened that, in my brief spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the various suppositions of which it was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscopy."

"even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people."

"And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die."

"it is only with the passions of others that we are ever really familiar, and what we come to discover about our own can only be learned from them."

Upgrading 13' aluminum macbook (late 2008 model) II

This post is the sequel of upgrading the hardware of my 13' aluminum macbook (late 2008 model). The last post is on the installation of new ssd hard drive and the cloning of data. The new Mushkin 4Gb RAM just arrived by the door today. Can't wait to dig in:

 To change the RAM, you need to open the case by removing the 8 philips-head screws on the circumference of the aluminum case 

 after the case is removed 

 the green slates are the RAM

 Remove the first piece of RAM by pressing the slots on both sides. Take out the second piece in the same way

 the new RAM to be installed 

 the backcover

 put the case and screws back 

 the good thing with the 2008 13' aluminum macbook is that there are basic instruction manuals on the back of the case covering the battery and HD. The diagrams from left to right show the ways to 1) remove the battery; 2) remove the HD; 3) remove the RAM. Very pragmatic guidelines for hardware upgrade DIY 

Want to know how the combination of 128Gb SSD drive and 4Gb RAM fare in boot test? It took around 27 second to boot the OS + running 3 programs on the startup manual. Not too bad for a 3-year-old laptop. Cost? I spent $219.99 on HD and $47.99 on RAM (free shipping and no tax off Amazon), and $6 on a husky 8-in-1 torx screwdriver set, totaled at $271.98 to perform this upgrade. A bit expensive but a great lift to facilitate the processing time. Think about how much time you spend each day staring at the monitor while running multiple programs. Less frustration and less cursing at the computer comes at <$300 is a good deal for me.

Upgrading 13' aluminum macbook (late 2008 model) I

After some research on Youtube and macforum, I decided it's time to upgrade the hardware in my 13' aluminum Macbook (late 2008 model). I ordered Kingston SSDnow V series 128 Gb hard drive and Mushkin 4Gb RAM on Amazon 2 days ago. The hard drive arrived yesterday (which is AMAZINGLY fast), so this post will focus on the installation of the hard drive and I shall continue the part on RAM as soon as I pick them up from mail.

With the new release of Kingston V+ series and bigger capacity (256 Gb or above), why don't I choose the latest version and go for the V series? Because my laptop is almost 3 years old now, I foresee some compatibility problems with SATA III interface. V series is still using SATA II interface which I know is compatible with my mb according the spec laid out on apple.com. For those of you who own a mbp released in 2010 or later, SATA III should run just fine.

                  Ready to upgrade! 

Front cover 

Backcover 

You need 00' Phillips screwdriver (yellow) + torx T6 screwdriver (husky 8-in-1 set costs ~$6@home depot) for this task  

Inside the box: hard disk, a cloning CD, USB cable, hard disk case 

For the late-2008 mb, you don't need to open the case to change the hard drive. Unhook a lever on the back, the hard drive sits next to the battery. Use 00' Philips screwdriver to loosen the bar which holds the hard drive in place

Next unhook the cable on the side.

Take out the hard drive. There are 2 torx T-6 screws on each side. Use torx T-6 screwdriver to remove the screws

Put the 4 T-6 screws on the new hard drive and place it back on the hard drive slot. Connect the cable and the holding bar. 

The next step is to transfer all the data from the old hard drive to the new one. I bought this Kingston upgrade kit (instead of OCZ vertex 2 hard drive) because it comes with a cloning disk. I assumed the disk can help me clone the data without the need to re-install the OS. I was wrong. The cloning disk only works on windows. After several failed trials, I realized that I need to follow the conventional way to backup (using time machine) -> verify new hard drive (disk utility, select new drive, then verify) -> reinstall snow leopard. I followed more or less the same step as shown in this youtube video, from 4:18 onwards to re-boot the computer. 

Done! It took 24 second to boot the system. It's not a huge improvement because I'm still using 2Gb RAM. I will run another test once I upgrade to 4Gb RAM. 

east, pray, love

A divine smell suffused in my room from the green apple flavored candle sitting in the bell-shaped candle holder. It was flanked by Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat,pray,love"and a jar of fleshly brewed jasmine tea. Gilbert is such a sensational writer. Yes, she exaggerates and is a bit hysterical, esp. on the personification of depression and loneliness creeping in her apartment during her stay in Rome but she's so talented. I shared most of her spiritual experiences in Ashmere. Just stay put, don't flip your mind and be a slave to your fleeting thoughts and tempting emotions every second. And when you can get over the emotional fantasy and drama, you'll find peace with your mind. When I stop wandering aimlessly from one page to another, I finally anchor my soul. This place, this apartment in the middle of the desert is the best place for introspective contemplation, for figuring out what I want to do, and stop torturing my mind with hasty decisions.

One small step towards reflexive examination is a march to self-mastery. It's an internal promise you made to yourself that if you can finish this one little task and exercise self-control, maybe you can reclaim your life and stop worrying all the time.