Unreal City

(Shown with Nokia BH-902 headset, which will be reviewed separately.)

The Nokia N95 was one of the first must-have Nokia smartphones.  A sleek slider with a big screen, a 5 megapixel camera, and a host of features, including Wi-Fi, it was, like the iPhone, a status symbol phone in 2007.  Later on, like the iPhone, it became more and more ubiquitous among the middle class until it ceased to be special.

Nokia followed up on the N95 with the N82, which I also bought.  Thanks to a beautiful Xenon flash and swift optics, it featured one of the best cameras ever in a Nokia phone.  Alas, the N82 was a typical candybar, a slightly altered, and, in its original silver body, slightly girlish N73.  It was not a phone you use to show off.

Enter the N96.  With 16GB internal memory and an 8GB memory card slot available plus strong multimedia features, the N96 is essentially Nokia's attempt at an iPhone killer.  I say attempt because the phone's Symbian OS remains remarkably sluggish and will frustrate anyone who's watched the smooth flow of the iPhone's screen.  Likewise, Nokia's multimedia management software is buggy, and I found myself using iTunes to convert all the music I put on the phone.  Photo management is handled through Nokia Photos, and more than once I found myself screaming at how slow the program was.  I could manually copy via Bluetooth much faster than Nokia Photos could copy through a USB cable, suggesting that the program's database format hinders usability.  Sadly, Nokia should be aware of these shortcomings in their multimedia hardware and software, as they've been present in every NSeries since the N73.

Stylistically, the N96 suggests an illicit affair between the N95 and N85.  It has the heart and functions of an N95 but the stylistic cues of the N85. The rounded corners and piano black-and-silver motif won't be to everyone's liking, but I still think it's pleasing to look at. A nice, if gimmicky, feature is the addition of a small kickstand that lets you set the N96 up on a desk for movie watching. If you're watching a movie on a car or plane, however, the kickstand will be of little use.  The multimedia keys around the navi wheel provide music control which is independent from the rest of the phone, while the light around the navi wheel can "breathe" when the phone is in screensaver mode, which has the unexpected benefit of helping you find the phone in the dark as well as letting you know when you have messages waiting for you on the phone.

The camera is a mixed bag.  It's essentially a throwback to the N95's camera, albeit a bit faster, and it lacks the solid optics (and sexy flash) of the N82.  As such, shots will be hit and miss.  Daytime photos can be brilliant, as shown below:

While good night shots are hard to come by:

And indoor shots have frankly ugly color and graininess thanks to the LED flash:

The camera also features video recording with a continuous dual LED flash light, but my friends found the light extremely annoying, so I usually turned it off while filming.  Video quality is adequate but the sound recording leaves a little to be desired, and the poor color quality remains, as we can see in this clip from a Tianjin club:

Software-wise, the N96 is where most other Symbian phones are.  The N96 has a good browser, nice dictionary features, and some games.  It's nothing too special, and like my other phones I find myself using the simple Converter program more than I'd care to admit.  The biggest improvement in this current version of the Symbian OS is the addition of a predictive text dictionary for Chinese pinyin input.  Similar to Google IME or Microsoft IME, the N96 will suggest longer phrases and recognize multiple pinyin words rather than only accept one pinyin word at a time.  This is a remarkable advance over the Chinese writing system used in older Symbian phones, and has tripled (at the very least) my Chinese texting speed.

The GPS has been upgraded and has highly detailed maps for Tianjin and other large Chinese cities, maps which are unfortunately lacking much in the way of searchable locations.  GPS can tag photos (as shown here), and has its typical uses, but in 2009, on-phone GPS is nothing revolutionary.

The N96 Chinese model may have above-average software, but the hardware is sorely lacking. In addition to the lagging caused by a combination of a weak OS and downgraded processor, the N96 has been stripped of Wi-Fi support thanks to Chinese gov't restrictions.  Nokia fans in China have had to deal with this disappointment ever since the first Chinese N93 came out, and while iPhone fans may not have noticed, the phone WiFi ban -- intended to protect phone companies from competition from VOIP -- is one major reason why the iPhone has yet to legally come to China.  Not having Wi-Fi means that a lot of software, especially multimedia uploading and downloading software, is simply too slow over an EDGE connection.  It also takes away from the "cool" factor of the phone, denying it iPhone-killing power, and to add insult to injury, Nokia doesn't lower the crippled phone's price point one iota.

With smartphones it's always good to talk about the battery, and I can say that the N96 has about a one-day battery going for it, meaning that with one day of casual calling, regular Bluetooth use, some Internet, and lots of texting, I can use up 90% of the battery.  I can squeeze two days out of the battery by using the phone sparingly, but when buying an N96 you should always consider getting a spare battery too.  As they say, YMMV.

Bottom line:  With working Wi-Fi, the N96 would be a strong, four-star phone and a worthy successor to the N95, which is to say that I recommend it to anyone outside of China.  For those in China, however, I'd recommend getting another phone or finding a Hong Kong N96 import that has working Wi-Fi.  The Hong Kong model will also receive firmware updates more frequently than the mainland model, something which is a must for any gadget enthusiast.

Rating:  3.5 out of 5 stars.

Note:  This review is based on the China N96's original 11.018 firmware.  I'll update it with notes on the 12.043 firmware if it noticeably changes my user experience.

Warning:  This review contains spoilers.  Watch before you read.

The turnaround of "Lost" in season four was one of the few bright spots of network television in 2007. Season three had been a meandering disappointment until the finale, which turned the dynamic of the show on end by adding the twist of flashforwards into a not-quite-happy future.  Season four utilized this move into future time to up the tempo and the show's sense of purpose by moving the story along parallel tracks -- the escape from the island in the show's time and the quest to return in the show's future.

Though truncated the actor's strike, the fourth season nonetheless worked by expanding upon its core mythology, by positing new villains, and by having us rethink old foes. The best writing of the series concerned the ever-shifting character of Benjamin Linus (played with bug-eyed intensity by Michael Emerson), who transformed from outright villain into a plausible anti-hero, a Stalin fighting against the show's would-be Hitler.  (Ben is still Stalin, however:  he will liquidate his friends as well as his foes.)  The season ended with most of the core cast escaping from the island, though not without the apparent sacrifice of several supporting cast members as well as the mysterious death of John Locke.  And in what became the key quip of the finale, Ben moved the island.

Season five's opener begins with the reappearance of Dr. Marvin Candle in another one of the show's morning musical wakeup montages (the best remains Desmond's from season two). After feeding his wife's baby -- and begging the question of whether said baby was born on the island or not -- Candle turns to the task of recording another instruction film for the island's many research stations before being interrupted by his workers. It seems they're having trouble drilling through rock, and hand Dr. Candle a sonar image that shows the chamber Ben entered to move the island.  The workers suggest blasting through it, but Candle cautions that the site they're working at is home to an energy source that can be utilized to control space and time.  Thus, we are reminded of (or introduced to) a key plot point of season five -- time travel.

We then shift to where season four left off, with Jack signing on to Ben's plan to take everyone back to the island.  These scenes wrap up quickly enough, and then we move to those left behind the island, notably Locke, Kate, Sawyer, and Daniel the freaky scientist guy.  Locke is separated from the others, and it's through his eyes that we first understand that moving the island had the odd side-effect of shifting Locke through time, as he witnesses Eko's brother's plane crash in the jungle before getting shot by a not-dead Ethan. Then, flash, Locke and the other island survivors are shifted to a new time and place on the island. The time shifts move both forwards and backwards without a set rule; I had been expecting them to occur every 108 minutes, but no such luck.

Moving off the island, we follow Kate, Sun, Jack and Ben, and Hurley and Sayyid separately.  With Ben's help, Jack sobers up -- recall he spent most of season four's flashforwards getting drugged out of his skull -- and shaves.  As was the case in season four, Kate seems very content with her post-island life (if only because it means not running anymore), and she seems like the hardest sell to go back to the island, though outside forces may push her to do so.  Sun continues her subplot and her evolution into one of the show's (possible) villains by continuing her Devil's bargain with Charles Widmore to kill Ben Linus. (I truly hope that this is one plot that will be continued to a logical conclusion, and won't be forgotten or argued away easily by Jack.)  And then there's Hurley and Sayyid, whose pairing provides us with both comic relief and the lion's share of the action in episode one.  Hurley winds up driving a tranquilized-by-the-baddies Sayyid straight into an encounter with a "ghost" -- Ana-Lucia, who warns him to stay away from cops and passes on a hello from Libby.  How sweet.

(An aside:  the writers have always argued that the "Lost" universe relies on scientific rather than supernatural phenomena.  If they don't reasonably explain the "ghosts" Hurley encounters as well as Jack's dad and Jacob on the island, they're going to lose a lot of good will.)

Episode two opens with an argument on the island's beach among Kate, Sawyer and the other Flight 815 survivors about whether life has no meaning (or something like that).  One particularly annoying survivor starts bitching about how they can't even make a fire to cook food before taking a flaming arrow to the chest.  I admit it.  I laughed.  The survivors run across the beach away from the arrows in a scene that would be especially tense if we actually recognized any of them besides Sawyer and Julet.  Cut to the off-islanders.

Kate and Sun have a meeting that starts out warm but ends coldly.  Sun makes it known that she blames Kate and the others for Jin's death.  Fair enough, though if she's really out for revenge she'd not play that card so early.  Jumping over to Hurley and almost-corpse Sayyid, Hurley manages to get back to his dad and mom and sends his dad to find Jack to help Sayyid before spilling his guts out to his mom about everything that happened in seasons one through four.  Hurley's retelling of the past is, one supposes, a sly joke from the writers about how absurd the plot of the show really sounds.

Returning to the island, Sawyer and Juliet are nearly murdered by some paramilitary guys who look neither like the DHARMA people nor like the Others or like Widmore's group.  New plot point!  Their savior is Locke, who Rambos one of the guys with his survival knife and stands there looking like a 50-something badass.  Which Terry O'Quinn is.

Back on the mainland, Jack helps to revive Sayyid and Hurley has a meeting with Ben, which Hurley promptly exits on account of not-believing-anything-Ben-says-itis (a disease one can easily contract on the island) and is happily -- happily! -- arrested by the police outside his house.  Ben then goes to a church (or a university?) and has a meeting with Barbara Bush (er, Mrs. Hawking), who warns him of dire consequences if he doesn't retrieve the others in 70 hours.  But will we get a countdown on screen, "24"-style?

Overall, "Lost"'s return presents a new narrative device -- time travel -- without answering many questions.  The writers can now cleverly create flashbacks within flashbacks and flashfowards without flashforwards, or even flashforwards within flashbacks or vice-versa, but they haven't shown us what they intend to do with this power.  The first two episodes lack the punch of the new "Galactica" season opener, but "Lost" has more going for it than battle-worn shows like "24" and "Prison Break," which have long since lost nuance and characterization in favor of almost-constant cliffhangers.

I'll still be watching, but "Lost" will need a bit more coherence to keep the show enjoyable in the long run.

Author's note:  Another poem, this time in Chinese with an English translation.  My Chinese poetry skills are extremely limited, especially when it comes to rhyming poems, so this is a vocabulary exercise of sorts.  Note that the translation omits the AA BB (etc.) rhyme scheme of the Chinese.

河岸晨曦

晨曦走路
远日快出
早鸟愉鸣
不能留听
爷爷清道
不能留聊
已经太晚
想去河岸
前桥无人
渡桥看滨
蓝雾盖水
雾里有谁
只船夫影
过桥下静
头身都倦
也想坐船

Riverbank Dawn

Walking at dawn
The distant sun soon rises
Morning birds sing happily
I cannot stop to listen
The old man sweeps the streets
I cannot stop to chat
It is already too late
I want to go to the riverbank
The bridge ahead has no people
Crossing the bridge I look at the riverbank
A blue fog covers the water
Who is inside the fog?
Just a boatman's shadow
He passes under the bridge quietly
My head and body are both weary
I also want to ride in his boat

Author's note:  Taking a break from reviews for a bit of my own poetry.  Will write more reviews in the near future.

when month and day made seven
a life’s singular joy unraveled
its strongest bonds torn by prejudice
by
her confucian obligation
irreparable
like a mirror falling falling falling
onto unforgiving earth

the reservoir of tears held back
so long
let loose, then
flooded the quiet valley of love
the deluge, a prelude to the temblor
neither emeralds nor pearls seen in its wake
all their shining glories shuttered by the dark waters
nightmares
the swirling blackness
the words unspeakable backwards and forwards

the next day awaking to feel less
if only to not feel pain
and conjuring up a lying smile
a veil over sadness and anger
regrettable sentiment filling up an ordinary day
until the unforgiving earth
seized its moment
the sober quiet here disguised the doom afar
but the quick-moving fog of dread lent
perspective

who shall hear a dying heart amongst the dying of men?

pictures of a shattered landscape
splintered buildings like demonic teeth
the concrete tombs that should not be
the passing of children chokes the throat of the soul
the many nameless dead
as mere witness
so powerless again to stop
the agony
only free to offer some small sacrifice
could hope lost for one be yet given?

yet after the ritual of mercy
mercy remains a stranger
looking at the face of the shoe-bandit
dirtied with no caring hands together to wash him
or seeing her
a thousand echoes of her sweet laugh resound
piercing that ragged organ within the chest

a final night together
the penultimate tears
a goodbye never to say hello to another?

i can only walk
the sadness a wind at my back
i can only walk
until the end of time
i can only walk
across the unforgiving earth
i can only walk

After Fateless was released in 2005, critics praised the film for offering audiences a new look at the Holocaust.  The film indeed offers a different perspective, but its brilliance is short-lived and material too familiar to be a true masterpiece.

Fateless breaks from the usual cinematic Holocaust narrative of Western European Jewry by showing us the world through the eyes of a Jewish Hungarian boy named György (Marcell Nagy), who retains a measure of happiness in spite of all the misery in his life.

Although the protagonist is a bit unusual for a Holocaust film, the imagery of persecution and the camps is quite familiar to people familiar with the Holocaust and/or Holocaust films in general.  To call Fateless resembles a Schindler's List without the intrigue would not be far from the truth.

The film can be praised, however, for the realism in its portrayal of the concentration camp victims.  Unlike the tendency of Spielberg (Schindler's List) and Polanski (The Pianist) to play upon our sentimentality by showing Jews as angelic victims of the Nazi regime, György's fellow prisoners are extremely human in their flaws.  They fight, bicker, and barter in a manner that may prove unsettling to viewers expecting a traditional dichotomy of good and evil in the camps.

Two other things save Fateless from being just another Holocaust film.  The first is György's existential philosophy of happiness, narrated by Nagy and Camus-like in nature, a happiness that comes in the form of rebellion against death and oppression:  we are told that to suffer so much one cannot be hurt anymore brings a kind of happiness.  This is also the philosophy of Camus' Sisyphus, who, like György, is cursed yet still smiling.  Unfortunately, so profound an idea requires a compelling actor to convince us of its truth, and while Nagy physically inhabits his role, his other abilities fall short.

The other aspect of the film that sets it apart -- and is in fact the best part of the film -- is the portrayal of the return of Jews to their homes after the liberation.   Alienated from their humanity by the camps, the victims return to find their homes changed or lost, and people unable to understand their experience.  Consider the scene where a man stops György in the train station and repeatedly asks about the gas chambers.  When György says he didn't see any personally, the man appears strangely satisfied and moves on.  That haunting moment suggests that Holocaust denial may spring from the inability to understand the experience of the Holocaust in addition to old-fashioned anti-Semitism.

In all, these few minutes at the close of the film are emotionally gripping, and I found myself wanting more.  Fateless, alas, was scripted from a novel and the return of the Jews is not the main story we were meant to see.  But it is a story we ought to see.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Mandarin title:  《苹果》

With its sex scenes and sordid look at Beijing life, Lost in Beijing was banned in China for some pretty obvious reasons, though the biggest reason may be that, unlike Ang Lee, director Li Yu just doesn't have the connections to get a film like Lost in Beijing past the censors, even though she cut the film heavily for the Chinese screens.  As a result, Lost in Beijing was labeled "pornographic" and kept out of the Chinese market for months, though that means nothing to millions of curious Chinese who have already downloaded the film from the Internet or bought it from DVD shops.

Many Western critics have applauded Li Yu for the film, and likened it to Lust, Caution, perhaps because of the "Western" style of the love scenes.  By comparison, the love scenes in other Chinese films resemble Western movies of the 1950s -- a discrete fade to black.  I don't mean this as criticism.  In fact, putting a lot of sex into a film doesn't make it good.  And such is the cause with Lost in Beijing, which has the kernel of an excellent film but is dragged down by a meandering plot and not really helped by the sex scenes.

The basic story centers around Liu Pingguo, a masseuse in an upscale Beijing massage parlor, who is played by Fan Bingbing in what is frankly one of her best performances to date.  One fateful day, a drunken Pingguo is raped by her drunken boss Lin Dong (Tony Leung Ka-fai) and winds up pregnant a few weeks later.  Pingguo's husband An Kun, a window-washer played by Tong Dawei, seizes upon her pregnancy as a chance to extort money out of of Lin Dong, whose business and connections have made him super-rich, albeit trashily so.  Along the way, An Kun also starts an improbable, revenge-based affair with Lin Dong's wife Wang Mei.

Lin Dong, who is childless, agrees to pay the couple money and pass off Pingguo as a surrogate mother for his and Wang Mei's child.  This makes An Kun delighted, though Pingguo is more or less forced into the arrangement.  Things go sour in the end, however, as An Kun becomes increasingly jealous of the parental relationship between Lin Dong and Pingguo and winds up kidnapping the baby.  The ultimate result of the story I won't spoil for interested viewers.

Many parts of the film ring true for urban Chinese life.  The film's depiction of the lifestyle of massage parlors and KTVs is spot on, and Tony Leung Ka-fai's gangsterish, prostitute-soliciting, Mercedes-driving massage parlor boss is a man I've seen or met countless times in Tianjin.  Likewise, the documentary-style snippets of people living and playing in a smoggy Beijing setting are refreshingly realistic, as is the backstory of Pingguo and her husband, who have moved to Beijing to make a living. The movie also gives us a look at the subculture of Chinese bribery several times, such as when An Kun bribes Pingguo's doctor to "determine" the baby's paternity.

However, the film fails on two counts.  The first is a matter of simple aesthetics.  The gorgeous Fan Bingbing takes the Charlize Theron route and de-glamorizes herself for her role, and this I can accept.  But Tong Dawei is simply not believable as a window-washer:  no manual laborers have his fair complexion and nice teeth and none of them would appeal to a fashionable fortysomething Chinese woman like Wang Mei.

The second and more damning point is the way the plot develops after the shocks of the opening act.  Lost in Beijing begins as a grim look at life in Beijing and the stark divisions between the Chinese underclass and the new rich.  If it had stayed that movie, Lost in Beijing could have been one of the great films of 2007.  However, once the extortion plot gets into full swing, the movie transforms into a black comedy.  Lin Dong is no longer a sleaze but instead a happy, sappy father-to-be.  And the relationship between An Kun and Wang Mei is unquestionably there as a humorous subplot.  Even the way the kidnapping is resolved speaks to comedy:  Lin Dong is impossibly gracious to An Kun, whereas a real-life Lin Dong would have savaged him.  By the time Lost in Beijing finally returns to a serious mode in the closing act -- signaled by the death of Pingguo's co-worker -- the detour into humor has already done its damage, leaving audiences with a deeply schizophrenic movie.

Finally, another aspect of Lost in Beijing that may unsettle some viewers is the way Pingguo is horribly mistreated by the people around her.  She is less a heroine than a victim, but her seeming unwillingness to rectify the situation left me cold to her.  I wouldn't say her character distracts from the storyline, exactly, but it adds to the viewer's central dilemma of having no one to root for or identify with in the movie.

In all, the film is worth watching, but one hopes that future Chinese filmmakers look at Lost in Beijing and find themes that need exploring while avoiding the flaws present throughout the plot.

Rating:  3 out of 5 stars

Mandarin title:  《色戒》

When I asked my students in 2007 who the greatest Chinese director is, nearly half of them said Ang Lee.  This despite the fact that most of them had never seen an Ang Lee film, and also despite the fact that the first Ang Lee film to become famous in China and the rest of the world, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, was mocked relentlessly by Chinese on the mainland.  This newfound love and respect for Lee just goes to show what the Oscar will do for you.

Thankfully, the Oscar-winning Lee continues to be innovate rather than rest on his laurels.  (Zhang Yimou, take note.)  His latest effort, 2007's controversial Lust, Caution, builds on Lee's previous themes while giving audience a richly textured portrayal of wartime Shanghai.

Like his Hong Kong contemporary Wong Kar-wai, Lee seems fascinated by the subject of love and torment.  In Crouching Tiger... it was the unspoken love between Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh's characters; in The Incredible Hulk, the subject wasn't love so much as the anger that can flow from love denied; and in Brokeback Mountain the main characters are famously troubled by gay love at a time when being gay was socially unacceptable.  In Lust, Caution, Lee continues this theme with a Hitchcockian tale of a Chinese traitor and a Nationalist agent out to seduce him, and who, in turn, is seduced by him.

As the female lead Wong Chia Chi, who poses as a wealthy socialite named Mrs. Mak, Tang Wei offers a startlingly powerful performance in her portrayal of a young Chinese girl who is manipulated by forces on both sides of the Sino-Japanese War as she sets a trap for the collaborator Mr. Yee.  She begins as an idealistic actress performing in nationalistic plays with the theme of "China must not die," and is soon compelled by members of her theater troupe to put that motto into action.  The film's comic moments come early on, as the troupe decides to stop acting on stage and start acting in reality.

Tang Wei's Miss Wong/Mrs. Mak outshines Tony Leung in his performance as Mr. Yee, arguably because Leung's character will seem quite familiar to anyone who's seen 2046 -- his glowering, malevolent Mr. Yee is the darker side of the already dark coin Leung showed to us as the spiritually hollow Mr. Chow in 2046.  This is not to say that Leung isn't menacing as he tortures and murders his way through the anti-Japanese resistance, it's just that his performance is not as novel as Tang's.

Lust, Caution is infamous for the sadomasochistic and quite explicit love scenes between Mrs. Mak and Mr. Yee, and the film suffered a number of cuts before release in mainland China.  Having seen both the Chinese version and the international version of the film, I was struck how the cuts leave us with a film that is watchable yet puzzling.

The Chinese version is compelling enough that I could call Lust, Caution a good film even without the sex.  And yet, we never really see how Mr. Yee could establish such a strong hold over Mrs. Mak, or how, in turn, she could make him fall in love.  This is because Ang Lee uses the sex scenes to accomplish what dialogue does not, and the Chinese version would be better had Lee shot some additional footage to fill in the noticeable story holes.

For most Western audiences, the love scenes will seem a bit startling, though probably not offensive.  The bigger mark against Lust, Caution will be that it is too long.  Yet, students of Chinese history might find the time well spent.  I enjoyed the depiction of Shanghai, right down to the Shanghai branch of Tianjin's Kiessling's bakery where Tang Wei waits in the opening and close of the film.  Also, as noted elsewhere, Lee is presenting his mostly-mainland Chinese audience with a daringly different narrative of the war:  the Nationalists, far from being cowards, also fought the Japanese.  While more acceptable in these years of CCP-KMT reconciliation, it goes against decades of Chinese political messages, though few Westerners will really appreciate it.

Overall, in both its cut and uncut versions, Lust, Caution is a good but not great film that is rich in atmosphere and buoyed by a strong performance from Tang Wei.

Rating:  4 out of 5 stars

Korean director Park Chan-wook may be best known for directly ultrabloody revenge fantasies like Oldboy, though he proves he has a softer side in I'm a Cyborg, but That's Okay, a weird-but-whimsical drama-romance that recalls the work of Tim Burton.

The storyline follows Young-goon (Lim Su-jeong), a twentysomething girl who suffers a psychotic episode and nearly kills herself in the opening reel.  (Trust me, it's more watchable than it sounds.)  Afterwards, Young-goon is admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where she is treated for her delusional belief that she is a cyborg.

This is not One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  The people in the hospital are more endearing than threatening, and the environs the patients live in are warm and calming rather than cold and clinical.  Naturally, we are introduced to a large cast of characters, including K-Pop star Rain as Park Il-sun, a patient who believes he can steal people's characteristics.  Rain sports a variety of silly hairdos (note the photo above) and some cool handmade masks but doesn't demonstrate a lot of acting depth.

Young-goon, for her part, mostly meanders through the picture in a daze.  This is appropriate for her character, since, as a self-professed cyborg, she has stopped eating food.  Her  most active movements are CGI enhanced, when she imagines she is using her cyborg powers to kill the hospital staff.  (The gore that follows is also the most "Park Chan-wook"-ish part of the movie.)  Eventually, her behavior reaches a crisis point, but her life is saved by Il-sun in one of the film's most touching moments.  At the close of the movie the two develop a kind of proto-romance.

While the acting and storyline are a bit on the shallow side, the visuals are, as always for a Park Chan-wook film, amazing.  The special effects sequences smoothly integrate into the rest of the film, while the color palette is otherworldly, as if every scene has been handpainted.

I can't say I liked I'm a Cyborg... a great deal, but it does prove that Park can successfully helm a film that doesn't involve brooding anti-heroes or torture.

Rating:  2.5 out of 5 stars

It's striders, striders everywhere in the latest iteration of the Half-Life franchise, Valve's much-delayed Episode Two.

Part of the Orange Box mega-collection, I'd wager that most players will get around to Episode Two after playing their hearts out in Portal and Team Fortress 2.  And it wouldn't be surprising, either, since the other additions to the Orange Box represent significant new play opportunities while Episode Two is a solid game built with an aging game engine.

I was surprised to learn that I was one of the few people who liked Episode One better than Episode Two.  Both games have shortcomings, the most obvious of which is that it's a bit ridiculous to wait a full development cycle to play a game that lasts a handful of hours.  But while Episode Two is slightly longer than the first episode, it tends to drag on in points and in general feels more "videogamey" than the rest of the Half-Life 2 franchise, adding, among other things, an Achievements system inspired no doubt by XBox games.  Moreover, it doesn't significantly advance gameplay like Episode One's co-op modes.

Driving sequences, which I disliked in the original Half-Life 2, abound in this game.  At their best, such as in the final Strider battle, the car adds to the frantic pace of the mission.  But in other parts of the game it just seems an excuse to show off the Central European vistas painstakingly crafted by the level designers.  Unfortunately, while nice, the outdoor environments can't compare with the scale of Crytek's Far Cry and Crysis offerings.

The supposed "new weapons" are in fact a little boring.  The so-called "strider buster," which the player tosses through the air with his trusty gravity gun, seems cool on paper, but Valve undercuts the idea by having the player use another weapon in exactly the same way earlier in the game.  To add insult to injury, the enemies in these two sequences are invulnerable to damage coming from the rest of Gordon Freeman's weapons, despite the fact they could be destroyed easily with RPGs and the like in the rest of the franchise.

The strongest part of the game may be the storyline, which moves the series towards the ultimate conclusion in Episode Three.  We learn more about the Combine's activities on earth as well as see what becomes of the portal opened at the close of Half-Life 2.  Along the way, the slug-like Combine advisors make an appearance, as do the "mini-striders"--the deadly hunters.

The game is good while it lasts, but Valve probably made a good decision by bundling Episode Two in the Orange Box.  If a hardcore gamer was given the choice between playing Episode Two and the likes of Bioshock, Halo 3, or even Gears of War on the 360, I'm afraid Gordon Freeman would be in the loser's column.

Rating:  3 out of 5 stars

Mandarin title: 《重庆森林》

I had been in love with Faye Wong's cover of the Cranberries song "Dreams" for a long time, but I was curious about when the song first went into circulation. After watching Wong Kar Wai's Chungking Express (Mandarin title: 重庆森林 ), I finally had an answer.

Being a WKW film, it's not surprising that his familiar themes of love and lost opportunities are central to the narrative of Chungking Express. For a little while it seemed like Wong was going to weave myriad storylines together, but instead he settled on just two.

The first storyline involves a lovesick, pineapple-eating police officer (Takeshi Kaneshiro) in pursuit of a femme fatale (Brigitte Lin), while the second follows another police officer (Tony Leung), his air hostess girlfriend, and the waitress (Faye Wong) who secretly loves him.

Without giving too much away I think he could have axed the entire first storyline entirely and treated the audience to just the quirky Faye Wong-Tony Leung romance, which involves a case of too-cute-to-be-stalking stalking on Faye's part. Also, since it's impossible to walk half a kilometer in any Chinese city without running into Faye's picture, so the movie is a pleasant reminder that ten years before she was strange-but-beautiful, she was strange-but-button-cute. (And in this film she can actually act!)

A word about the title: the English title is the name of the restaurant, Chungking Express, where the various storylines intersect, and tends to give Western audiences the impression that this is a love story at a restaurant. But the Chinese title, Chongqing Forest, reflects the deeper, maze-like quality of the storyline. 

Besides the usual WKW motifs, there are some fun conceits in this film, as well as some innovative camera angles, and on the whole it's the most upbeat Wong Kar Wai film I have in my collection.  Highly recommended.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars