From the Rental Vault (2001): The Warrior

When it was released in 2001, Kim Seong-soo's epic The Warrior (in Korean, Musa) was the most expensive Korean movie ever filmed. It featured an international cast of some of the top actors in both China and South Korea and was lauded for its historical accuracy to the period and the different peoples and languages involved. The Koreans spoke Korean, the Chinese spoke Mandarin, and nobody understood each other unless they spoke both languages or were using another common language.

It deals with the possible fate of an actual envoy sent from Korea to the representatives of the new Ming Dynasty rulers of China in 1375. The envoy never returned to Korea and the actual fate of the mission remains unknown. Kim Seong-soo's story is supposed to tell what happened to them.

In 1368, the Ming Dynasty began supplanting the Kublai Khan-founded Yuan Dynasty in China. Although the Koryo or Korean people had friendly relations with the Yuan, they decided to open diplomatic channels with the Ming as well, since it looked like they would eventually prevail. But the Ming reject and imprison the diplomats and their military escort, which includes the young General Choi Jung, the veteran sergeant Jin-lib and Yeo-sol, a slave to one of the envoys who is devoted to his late master. When Mongol raiders attack the prisoner caravan and slaughter the Chinese guards, they let the Koreans go where they wish. Choi Jung, now in charge of the group, originally decides to return to Korea but fears the ridicule he will face there. He and his soldiers find a Yuan company that has kidnapped the Ming Princess Bu-Yong and he decides that rescuing her will allow him to complete his mission to present diplomatic credentials to the Ming court and retain his honor and reputation. The group must make their way through hostile territory in northern China, pursued by the Mongol general Rambulwha, and slowed by the princess as well as native villagers fleeing Rambulwha.

The story of the group of fighters trapped in hostile country far from home is a common one, and The Warrior draws a lot on that vision to fuel its own plot. Think The Anabasis, if Xenophon happened to be prideful, not too bright and more or less a big jerk. Although several characters in the story make a point of blaming Princess Bu-Yong for their predicament since Rambulwha is only chasing them to recover her, it's Choi Jung's rash decision that brought the entire problem about. And he made it not for her sake, but in order to rescue his own reputation. Choi Jung is from the noble class and he treats the lower-class soldiers with disdain and disrespect, holding it back only in the case of Jin-lib because of the latter's experience, wisdom and obvious dignity. He scorns Yeo-sol in spite of the slave's skill, courage and loyalty. Over the course of the movie the young general does seem to learn his mistakes, but the lesson will come hard and the cost is great -- not only to him.

Although The Warrior is compelling and wonderfully made, it's not a particularly stirring movie because of the genuine unlikeability of most of the characters. Choi Jung's faults are listed above, but Yeo-sol himself is a grim and arrogant man -- not that you can blame him, considering how Korean slaves were seen in that time. The princess is imperious and no prize, seemingly unwilling to realize that since she is not in a royal court she can't have things the royal court way. Only Jin-lib seems to care about something more than himself, and while some of the other characters may come to that realization by the end of the movie, it's more or less too late to start liking them then.

The cast is very good at communicating these characters and emotions, especially Chinese box-office star Ziyi Zhang as Princess Bu-Yong and Sung-kee Ahn as Jin-lib. That's part of why The Warrior is definitely worth seeing once, but probably not at the top of anyone's list for multiple repeat viewings.

Get Me Rewrite!

Friday I mentioned I'd seen John Carter and pointed to my thoughts, which were not all that happy with the liberties that Andrew Stanton had taken with the original Edgar Rice Burroughs A Princess of Mars novel. Another fan offers some seat-of-the-pants story tweaking that would have simplified and considerably improved Stanton's movie while keeping a good portion of his take on the tale. I have to admit, I think I'd like to have seen that version.

Scrutiny of the Bounty

You may have heard that a number of the New Orleans Saints defensive players are themselves on the defensive about their pooling of money to create a fund from which bounties would be paid for hits that knocked an opponent out of the game, and paid more for hits that caused them to be unable to leave the field under their own power.

Some of the penalties expected from this discovery may start raining down as early as this week. Coaches and players alike will probably be hit with fines and suspensions.

And inevitably, someone now suggests that a law be passed against such kind of excessively violent activity in sports, as mentioned in this post at The Sports Economist. The Econ post quotes another blogger who maintains that There Oughtta Be a Law.

I'm not a lawyer, but I think there are already laws against deliberate attempts to injure another person as badly as the Saints' bounty scheme dealt with. Obviously battery laws are somewhat relaxed when you consider sports events, especially ones like football and boxing in which players deliberately collide with or strike other players as a part of the game. But if a hit is a blatant attempt to injure or maim, I don't believe those exemptions apply if someone wanted to arrest a supposed perpetrator. If that hit caused a career-ending injury, then I don't think someone who deliberately engineered it could hide from lawsuits under the cover of the natural violence of the game.

Nor do I think the natural violence of the game, agreed upon by everybody on the field, would protect against conspiracy charges if someone involved in an injury bounty scheme did cause a career-ending injury or permanent disability or maiming.

You could argue that current laws make it tough to sort between ordinary play in a violent game and deliberate attempts to injure. Maybe they do, but new laws would do no better and would just add to the confusion. The post referred to by the Sports Economist writer is a pretty good example of a legitimate problem not being addressed by systems that can already handle it, but by unnecessary new laws that allow some legislator to grab some headlines and some public goodwill for taking a stand on an issue of the moment. And I think we've got enough of those already.

What's in a Name?

This picture for Astronomy.com's "Picture of the day" feature (future readers, select March 10, 2012 in the archive) is interesting not so much for what it shows, but for the name of what it shows.

The Whale Galaxy (officially NGC 4631) in the picture is so called because it looks a little like a whale. Its other name is the Herring Galaxy, which has got to be one of the weirdest nicknames in modern astronomy. No word on what any inhabitants of the Herring Galaxy might think of the name, although a strange transmission from that region of space was recently received: "Ni, peng, nee-wom, ekke ekke ekke ekke ptangya ziiinnggggggg ni!" There are as yet no clues to deciphering this mysterious message.

A Trip on Mars

A century after publication, John Carter of Barsoom makes it to the screen. I went, and wrote a long post about it at the long post blog here.

How Are Ya Fixed for Candles?

Today marks the 80th birthday of Keely Smith, one of the few female singers who could match iconic vocalist Frank Sinatra swagger for swagger, letting him know by her tone that while he might be the man, he wasn't necessarily the boss. Check out the Sinatra-Smith version of "How Are Ya Fixed For Love?" off of Frank's 1959 Come Dance With Me as exhibit A.

Smith was best known as the wife and "straight guy" performing partner of Louis Prima, recording several albums with him while they were married from 1953-1961. She would generally sing her parts of their duets more or less deadpan while Prima went on one of his trademark manic performance schticks. Smith also recorded solo records during this time, as Prima had told Capitol Records that if they wanted to sign him, they had to sign her as well. Perhaps as a change of pace from Prima, Smith focused more on ballads and contemplative songs in her Capitol releases, although she did throw some swinging into a tune here and there. And working with arrangment/conducting aces Nelson Riddle and Billy May made sure her voice had all the foundation it needed for whatever she wanted to do with a song.

Following her divorce from Prima, Smith continued recording and some touring work -- including 1965's Keely Smith Sings the John Lennon/Paul McCartney Songbook, another piece of evidence that part of the Lennon-McCartney genius was marrying pop standard songwriting sensibilities to Chuck Berry riffs. She cut back on her performing and recording, focusing mostly on her family.

During the "oughts," Smith recorded and released a couple of compilation albums of some of the standards she had performed earlier as well as some she hadn't recorded before. The Swing, Swing, Swing collection in 2000 showcased exactly what the title promised, a high-energy dance party that ranged from pop standards to a couple of early rock numbers like the Lieber/Stoller Kansas City. In 2001, she released Keely Sings Sinatra, a collection of Frank's songs she'd actually recorded back for his last birthday in 1997-98. A longtime Sinatra friend, Smith held the release for awhile because she didn't want to be a part of the Sinatramania that followed Frank's death. She tackles Sinatra signatures like New York, New York and My Way with energy, phrasing and sincerity that shows why fellow Rat Packers like Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. called her "the female Sinatra." The 2002 Keely Swings Basie Style...With Strings sets some standards as well as some newer songs in Basie-esque arrangements and lets Smith use her skills and familiarity with the originator of those arrangements to create something that might very well have had the count tapping along happily.

Some YouTube videos show that even as of four or five years ago Smith had lost little of her vocal power and energy. Which means that whoever leads the birthday singing had best be in fine form unless they want to be outshone by the honoree.

Auntie Hydrogen

Scientists at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, took some more time off from creating the black hole that will destroy the world to talk about how they were recently able to analyze an atom of "anti-hydrogen."

All of the particles that make up atoms have an oppositely charged particle that is identical to them in every way except for that electrical charge. One of those particles, for example, is an electron. Regular hydrogen, the simplest atom that exists, consists of one electron orbiting one proton. The "anti-hydrogen" atom is made up of one antielectron, which is usually called a "positron," orbiting an antiproton. The positron is identical to the electron in every way except for its electrical charge, which is positive instead of negative. Since there is no moral value judgment connected to electrical charge, there is no way to determine which particle is the evil twin, and thus neither of the particles wears a goatee. The antiproton is identical to the proton in every way except that it has a negative electrical charge instead of the proton's positive one.

The problem with studying antiparticles and the anti-atoms that they would make up is that they do not get along with regular particles and regular atoms. When they meet, they completely annihilate each other and release large amounts of energy. The high energy levels are one reason that science fiction stories often power their spaceships with "antimatter," because small amounts of it would release the great energies needed to power ships to other stars.

So when you've made yourself an anti-hydrogen atom, it has to be kept someplace where it can't touch anything made up of regular matter. Since everything we use, see, touch or deal with is made up of regular matter, that makes things kind of tough. Scientists use magnetic fields to safeguard and store the anti-particles when they're created, so they can be studied.

The CERN scientists finished a "spectroscopic analysis" of the anti-hydrogen atom using those magnetic fields and by measuring the results when the magnets were turned off and the anti-hydrogen atoms annihilated against regular matter. If this sounds like trying to figure out what kind of bug left a certain pattern on your car windshield, you have an idea, but apparently this is much more difficult.

Scientists believe that the spectroscopic analysis should show that anti-hydrogen is exactly the same as hydrogen except for the electrical charges of the particles, just like the anti-particles are the same as the regular particles except for the reverse charges. If the two are the same otherwise, it will help scientists better understand how things got made.

If the two are not the same, then more study will be needed to learn which atom is wearing the goatee so that we can see if the anti-matter universe is evil...or we are.