The Hateful Eight 70mm, Star Wars: The Force Awakens

The big news about The Hateful Eight is of course it was shot on 65mm film stock and transferred to 70mm print for projection.  Just like The Sound of Music or the good old days.  I believe the film was shot anamorphic meaning the image is actually squeezed vertically, and later un-squeezed (on to the 70mm print or during projection?) to make it even wider at 2.76:1 instead of the usual cinematic 2:39:1.

I went to see it in a movie theater by the Lincoln Square in Manhattan, which I think is one of the best.  It also houses one of the best IMAX theaters in the nation, or so I experience, or read and led to believe.

The few things I notice is the film is really film and by that I mean it evokes my early memories of seeing film with warts and all.  One thing I notice is that it isn't as wide or big as I thought it would be.  It is supposed to be wider than what's out there but I don't feel it that way.  The movie screen doesn't seem that gigantic or wide to begin with.  The flicker is pretty obvious right in the Overture before the start of the actual movie; and when the audio is off or low I can hear the sound of the projection which I think is something buried deep in my childhood memory and suddenly resurrected.  The outdoor blizzard scenes don't seem as sharp as it should be or I want it to be perhaps it's the nature of the medium or the scenes or a combination of them.  But the indoor shots seem sharp or sharp enough just not digitally sharp.  It has a rich quality to it.  The audio is great and I never notice any out of sync with the picture even though I tried hard to look at the lips too see if the dialogues are out of sync or not, and they aren't.  The film actually comes with intermission which I don't recall I ever experienced except for double features I saw eons ago.

So what is old is new again.  Film seems to be the next frontier, to be discovered, tamed and enjoyed once again.

By the way, the film is typical Tarantino, that's just another way of saying it got plenty of dialogues and gores, actually not so much for the latter by my standard.  Do I like it?  I like it all right but off the top of my head I am still more blown away by Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill--I saw Reservoir Dog on VHS too long ago to remember anything.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Thank goodness I only paid 6.75 for the ticket.  The movie is all right, very typical J.J.Abrams, very mediocre.

Jones Beach, Long Island

Nikon D700 and Nikkor 16-35 f/4

Year 2015

Books I actually finished reading, not in any particular order

* Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin
The more things change, the more things stay the same.  Why not read a classic?  A Chinese classic.  I bought this 2-book edition way back when I visited Taiwan many years ago.  Then it took me still another few years to actually begin to read it from beginning to end.  This epic of a novel is credited to Cao Xueqin, a Qing aristocrat who wrote it in the 18th century and is believed to be largely semi autobiographical with characters and events heavily drawn from his own family's decline.  This edition comprises the usual 120 chapters.  By some account, the last 40 chapters were written, allegedly by, someone other than Cao.  Or some argue they were compiled and edited from lost and found Cao's manuscripts.  I will leave the detective work to the Redologists to figure that out.  This is an encyclopedia of sort of all things Chinese.  You can find nuanced accounts on anything from feast to funeral, occult to opera, and everything in between.  Not to mention the rich tapestry of characters, the achingly beautiful, the comically vulgar. the perennial scheming, and the incorrigibly licentious. Despite my shortcoming of the language, history and everything in general, I find the novel not as difficult as I imagined, at least on the surface.  The writing, maybe except the poetry, is not too difficult to understand even for someone like myself.  The premise of the story is laughably ridiculous and oddly fascinating as once upon a time there is a stone who got left out and left behind from mending the sky.  The stone turns to some demigod and saves a withering plant in heaven by watering it.  The plant survives, prospers and takes the form of a female body.  To return the benevolent act of watering, the plant vows to pay back the stone with all her tears when they reincarnate as humans on earth.  And reincarnate they do, and hence the beginning of the story of the stone.  It's redundant and utterly under qualified--that's a truism and of itself being redundant, on my part to heap praise on the novel that is considered one of the the four best classics ever written yet it doesn't stop me from saying this:  I found the novel emotionally engaging, utterly fascinating and ultimately a joy to read.

* Native Speaker, Chang-Rae Lee

*World War Z, Max Brooks

* Little Failure: A Memoir, Gary Shteyngart