Step Show

Last week we had the fellow who created paintings of food that were so realistic it was hard to tell them apart from photographs. But check out this artist in France who makes gigantic designs in the snow -- by walking.

Simon Beck says that problems with his feet mean he can't run for exercise anymore, but he can walk. So with special snowshoes, he tramps specially-designed paths in the snow that, when seen from above, make fascinating geometric designs and -- of course -- snowflakes. Sometimes he has to change the design if overnight snowfall obscures the work he did the previous day.

And I thought I was doing good time management by listening to sermons on my iPod when I'm on the elliptical...

From the Rental Vault (2008 & 2009): Red Cliff

Realistically, if you want to know that the Oscars are lame all you have to do is watch the show. But if you'd like some more proof, watch John Woo's two-part masterpiece Red Cliff and realize that since its different parts were released in two separate years, there are two successive Best Motion Picture winners that didn't really earn their honors.

Thanks to the vagaries of the Academy nominating system, five (or recently, ten) of the movies released in the United States compete for the top award, but only five out of the every movie from everywhere else not released in English will compete for the Best Foreign Language Film. None of those movies are considered for Best Picture and none of the actors make the acting award categories. A piece on CNN's international site a couple of years ago noted that the omissions are even more apparent if we focus on solely Asian movies. If you don't want to read it all, I can sum it up in one sentence: Akira Kurosawa only has two Oscars, and one was for "lifetime achievement." In other words, ol' Oscar omits most of the movies released in the world in a given year, and that means that Slumdog Millionaire -- certainly a pretty good movie -- and The Hurt Locker -- which was above average -- went home with John Woo's statues.

Woo made his name directing high-octane crime movies in Hong Kong, essentially establishing a genre of his own that one movie writer called "Heroic Bloodshed." The lead characters may be criminals whose consciences instill in them a code of ethics that puts them afoul of less ethical conspirators or bosses, or they may be law enforcement faced with similar problems. Sometimes characters on both sides of the law will find common cause in their shared honor, but the price of their honor may be very high, in terms of personal sacrifice and violence. Woo moved to the U.S. in 1993 and continued to direct, but found the top-heavy control system of Hollywood moviemaking harder to deal with. His U.S. movies have not had the success of his Hong Kong and Taiwan-based productions.

Red Cliff was Woo's return to Chinese-language moviemaking and his first historical epic -- in Woo fashion, he dove headfirst into the deep end. The Battle of Red Cliffs (or the Battle of Chibi) was a decisive battle in 208-209 AD that moved China from the Han Dynasty period to the era of the Three Kingdoms. A fictionalized telling of the story is a part of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the Chinese culture's most important classic novels.

Prime Minister Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi) has manipulated the weak emperor into declaring war on two southern provinces, led by warlords Liu Bei (You Yong) and Sun Quan (Chang Chen). Cao Cao's armies defeat Liu Bei, but Liu manages to retreat with most of his soldiers and many refugees. They seek an alliance with Sun Quan to rally and throw Cao Cao back to his lands in the north. Strategist Zhuge Lang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) meets first with Sun Quan but realizes he will need to persuade the viceroy Zhou Yu (Tony Leung) to his cause in order to convince the young and uncertain ruler. Even united, the two southern armies are outnumbered by the massive land and naval forces at Cao Cao's command, and they must use every bit of wit, cleverness and heart at their command as they make their stand at the Red Cliffs along the Yangtze River.

Reading that, you may wonder how Woo could make a four and a half hour movie from it. Some of the expansive story comes from the director's fictionalizing of the battle, introducing elements and characters who may not have actually existed. But the bulk roots in Woo's refusal to create characters without dimension and his expertise at adding those layers. The rousing speech before a battle is kind of standard in these stories but Woo puts his in the mouth of the villainous Cao Cao as he rallies his sick troops. They respond, even though what we know of Cao Cao makes us wonder if he even meant the words he said.

Woo also takes as much time as he needs to show us things we need to know, rather than tell us. Zhuge Lang and Zhou Yu develop a deep and respectful friendly rivalry that begins with a shared love of music. Rather than have the pair talk about that, Woo shows it, starting from a scene where both play the guqin, an ancient Chinese musical instrument that can produce sounds not unlike a slide guitar. As two Chinese nobles go down to the crossroads sixteen and a half centuries before Robert Johnson, they play in both complement and competition to each other and we see that these two men will be rivals as well as friends.

We know Zhou Yu is on the side of right when we see one of his generals bow to a peasant whose stock was stolen by soldiers as the property is returned. He and his allies see their power as their way to protect those who have little else to protect them, while Cao Cao sees it as a way to gain what he wants. The more powerful army will have to struggle to overcome the arrogance of its commander and the obstacles it creates.

All of this happens thanks to an excellent cast, with the stalwart Leung and and wry Kaneshiro as standouts. Their top-notch work, combined with the nuance of Zhang Fengyi's Cao Cao and the grace notes of other cast members with smaller but no less vital roles mean that Red Cliff's acting takes no back seat to its action, which is as usual superbly conceived and visualized by Woo.

Red Cliff isn't perfect -- there's some excess in the number of great fighting heroes who serve under Liu Bei and that means we get a couple more battle sequences than it really needs. But those missteps are rare and they don't erase the impression that we're watching two of the best movies of 2008 and 2009 -- whether Oscar saw them or not.

And the Winner Is...I Dunno!

The good folks at Public Policy Polling have determined that a bunch of us dislike California, but we love Hawaii.

In an opinion poll, 44% of the respondents disliked California while only 27% liked it. But 54% liked Hawaii, as opposed to only 10% who disliked it -- and you've got me on what those ten percent would like, since everything I've heard about Hawaii except for the cost of living says it's a pretty nice place.

We Americans are a pretty easy-going bunch on our countrymen and women, as there were only five states in the whole survey with a net unfavorable rating -- the aforementioned California, Illinois, New Jersey, Mississippi and Utah. In fairness, Utah's scored a 24 percent like and a 27 percent dislike, so the margin's pretty close. What about the other 49 percent? Well, they had no opinion. A link on the story will take you to the online full survey results where you can see that.

My own fine state of Oklahoma is viewed mostly favorably by those who have an opinion -- 40% like us, 16% dislike us. But 43% don't think about us one way or the other, and I imagine that, had I been among the respondents, most of my answers would have been the polling equivalent of a shrug.

I think favorably of states where I know people, but that really means I think favorably of the people I know. I have family and friends in Illinois, so I think favorably of Illinois, despite the fact that the drive from St. Louis to Chicago is the longest five hours in the known universe and the state has a host of economic problems that would make some aspects of living there not nearly as much fun as my own abode. I've got family in and a favorable view of Oregon, too, even though they won't let you pump your own gas and most of the parts of the state that I've ever visited were damp, cramped and on a hill and the whole town of Portland looks like it just donated blood.

But I'm glad most people liked us, although I'm curious about where that 16 percent came from. The most logical suspect is Texas, but Texas' 25 million people make up only about 8 percent of the total U.S. population so there's a missing eight percent in there.

Unless they voted twice? Those sneaky Texans...

Sunken, Treasure

The U.S.S. Seawolf is one bad piece of equipment. Ultra quiet, armed to the teeth, and able to stealthily trail and track almost any other seagoing vessel you could name, the nuclear submarine is one of the prides of the United States Navy.

Too bad author Patrick Robinson decided to abandon it a third of the way into his 2000 naval thriller U.S.S. Seawolf and switch to a by-the-numbers covert action operation weighed down by a confusing list of characters, inexplicable and wrong-headed actions by supposedly veteran military personnel and periodic tantrum-throwing by Robinson's series star, Admiral Arnold Morgan.

The Seawolf has been ordered to shadow a new Chinese submarine that has been built using stolen U.S. technology. Without good information on the sub, it's possible that Chinese missiles could be launched within reach of Los Angeles or other vital points on the California coastline. The sub's crack crew dares the waters almost within sight of the Chinese coast during a time of high Sino-American tension and military gamesmanship with Taiwan. A fatal error means the Seawolf and her crew are captured, and Chinese authorities plan on stripping Seawolf of her secrets and torturing the crew, if need be, in order to get the information they want. Morgan, now the National Security Advisor, develops a plan for a special operations team to land, rescue the crew and make sure Seawolf is destroyed so the Chinese can gain no information from her.

As mentioned above, Robinson has written several books featuring Morgan as his lead character, and although he's not one of the sailors he is the driver of the main part of the book's action: The rescue and sabotage mission. He's a bigoted, vulgar opinionated bully -- all qualities that he will probably need in order to make sure the mission succeeds. But Robinson manages to run all those same qualities into the ground before Morgan makes his fourth or fifth appearance, and the author's desire to smack the Clinton administration's laxity with military secrets gets tired just as quickly. His moves to rehabilitate Reagan-era policy implementers who signed off on things like the arms-for-hostages trade at the center of the Iran-Contra affair didn't even make a whole lot of sense in 2000.

In the end, Morgan is something like Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan becomes -- the only intelligent man in the room, the only one who sees the Real Threat and has the Guts To Do Something About It. Robinson has a lighter touch than Clancy and manages to include humor in his story, which is something that has eluded Clancy for most of his career. But he trades that off with some implausible conduct on the part of some of his military protagonists that just derails important storyline developments.

And not to mention, as noted above, that he wrote a submarine book named after a submarine and he spends two-thirds of it nowhere near the submarine. That's just bonkers.

That Toddlin' Town

A new study by political scientists at the University of Illinois-Chicago claims to show Chi-town is the most corrupt city in the United States and has been so, more or less, for quite some time.

The first recorded conviction of a Chicago alderman for corruption happened in 1869 -- he accepted a bribe to rig a city contract. Since 1973, 31 aldermen have been convicted of corruption and about 100 different people have served as Chicago aldermen. This means that over the last 40 years, almost a third of Chicago aldermen have been convicted of corruption or, in Chicago terms, "gotten sloppy."

Illinois will become the first state to have the distinction of having back-to-back ex-governors serving time simultaneously. George Ryan (1999-2003) is doing a stretch for a 2006 conviction for his role in a scheme that handed out truck licenses to people whose qualifications consisted of a donation to the Ryan campaign fund. His successor, Rod Blagojevich, will report to lockdown in March to serve his conviction for using the Illinois governor's power to fill a U.S. Senate vacancy as his own sort of fund-raising tool. Ryan and Blagojevich along with two others make four of Illinois' last seven governors who were convicted of some kind of bribery or corruption charge.

The City Council corruption has some "only in Chicago" themes. Eighteenth Ward alderman William Carothers was convicted in 1983; his son Isaac served the 29th Ward and in 2010 was convicted on similar charges. Some wards have had several aldermen convicted at different times; the same zoning scheme got 23rd Ward aldermen Joseph Potempa and his successor Frank Kuta convicted in 1973.

The link comes via a story on NewGeography.com here, in which the writer suggests that one of the problems academic folk often have when they study or theorize about political systems is a belief that all politicians within those systems are people "that rise above petty self interest to promote the common good." This would make politicians unlike any other group of people since Australopithecus afarensis decided their hands worked better grabbing than walking.

Although folks studying politics in Chicago don't have the luxury of presuming a uniformly noble class of public servants -- they're studying politics in Chicago, after all -- one would hope they don't measure only by that yardstick. I may frequently refer to politicians as of lower than average intelligence and of greater than average greed, primarily because the consequences of their errors ripple a lot more widely than most folks' do. But the truth is that they are much like every group: A few good, a few bad and many many more who are a mixture of the two.

Plus, when we voters make our choices based on which candidates promise us the most goodies for free (or at least at someone else's expense), can we really claim to be all that separate from their corruption?

Unspoiled

Science fiction author Harry Turtledove found he had a terminally ill fan who would probably pass away before the author finished his current alternate history series The War That Came Early, about a version of World War II that began in 1938 when Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, rather than with the 1939 invasion of Poland that happened in the real world.

So Turtledove sent the fan a copy of the next book in the series, due out in July, and promised to tell him how the series ends. Not only is that a cool thing to do, it's also kind of refreshing to hear an author admit he or she knows how things will end, rather than that kind of weasely conceit that some writers use to dodge that question, like "I don't know how it ends because the characters haven't said yet," or "I'll know when I get there" or some such. Bravo, Mr. Turtledove.

From the Rental Vault (2005): Death Trance

Bear with me. Way back in 1984, Walter Hill directed an odd sort of movie called Streets of Fire. He called it a "rock and roll fable" and used the license implied by the word "fable" to mix elements of 1950s and 1980s culture in ways they never existed in real life. I've no idea if Death Trance director Yuji Shimomura ever saw Streets of Fire, but he owes a lot of his movie to the concept of mixing modern mythologies together to create something with parts of each.

A man named Grave (Tak Sagakuchi) steals a mystic coffin from some monks because he believes it will grant his wish to fight against the most powerful warrior in the world. He drags it after him around the countryside, fending off those who try to steal it and accompanied by a strange little girl. The monks send one of their few survivors, Ryuen (Takamasa Sugi) to retrieve the coffin, because what will actually happen when it's opened is that the Goddess of Destruction will emerge and destroy the world. A wandering fighter named Sid (Kentaro Seagal -- yes, he's Steven Seagal's son) also seeks the coffin because of his belief in its wish-granting power. Different dream spirits appear to the different men during the movie as well, communicating their own strange messages.

Although the characters mostly dress like they lived in feudal Japan and most of the fighting is done with swords, we also have a variety of guns employed against opponents, including a rocket launcher. One group of marauders owns a motorcycle. Sid sports a pompadour-mohawk hairdo that would have looked just fine in a Bow Wow Wow video, but the strange young girl accompanying the coffin wears traditional Japanese dress. The way the characters slip in and out of old-fashioned stylized dialogue into more modern speech patterns is amusing, and everyone does look like they're enjoying themselves. But that's probably limited to their side of the screen. 

Death Trance is three-fifths martial arts movie, one-fifth Mad Max and one-fifth A Canticle for Liebowitz, dropped into Quentin Tarentino's blender and served up with some dynamite cinematography, haunting images and first-rate fight choreography. But like Tarentino's own hyperbolic mix of movie genres, Kill Bill (vols. 1 and 2), it is at the same time almost wholly a stylistic exercise only lightly seasoned with real story. Characters, ideas and themes both visual and plot-related appear and disappear without much warning or reason.

Some of that's probably on Shimomura's tab. Death Trance is his first movie as a director. He was previously the action sequence director on the move Versus (also starring Sagakuchi) and the video game Devil May Cry 3. He may have been too used to having a movie's primary director carry the storytelling part of the job and simply not recognize when that hasn't been done. Watch Death Trance and you'll probably wow at some of the way it looks and moves (as well as sounds -- Japanese metal band Dir En Grey gives it a soundtrack pretty much unique among martial arts movies that rely on swordfighting scenes). But you'll probably forget pretty quickly what story or idea tied any of those images together, since it was lightweight at best and more than likely nonexistent.