總網頁瀏覽量

2015年12月30日 星期三

2015年12月20日 星期日

Weekend Fun (週末趣味)

Weekend fun has been around for quite a while. But never once has any videos been played here. As it's close to the end of the year, it may not be a bad idea if weekend fun were to go from verbal to visual. Here's something I got from the internet. Enjoy.



Have Fun.
Have a nice weekend.


2015年12月12日 星期六

Weekend Fun (週末樂趣)

Japan is a tiny country with a huge population and is the third largest economy the world, ranking after only America and China. Everything there is meticulously regulated. It appears a no nonsense country. Yet. believe it or not,Japan is just 1/26th the size of America, even smaller than the state of Montana. Perhaps out of jealousy, perhaps  because tiny Japan is the only country in US history which dared attack the USA, Americans like to joke about them. The following are taken from the internet.

1. 

Q: Did you ever hear about any Japanese winner in any international beauty contest? 
A: Me neither. 

2015年12月11日 星期五

Maryland (Disorder) (失常)

House invasion can be a thrilling cinematic experience like David Finchers's Panic Room (2002). One would have imagined that such house invasion thriller genre would normally be a male director's work. Not so, if we may judge by Maryland (Disorder)(失常) (2015). It's a film directed and co-written by Alice Winocour with Jean-Stéphen Bron

In this film a Special Squad French solider Vincent Loreau (Matthias Schoenaerts) who had seen action in Afghanstan and is suffering from Post-traumatic Distress Syndrome with occasional panic attacks and hearing noises is asked to go on leave. During such leave, he is co-copted to join in a commercial security assignment  by his buddy Denis (Paul Hamy) to protect a rich Lebanese merchant Imad Whalid (Percy Kemp) and his beautiful German-French wife Jessie (Diane Kruger) and his kid Ali (Zaïd Errroughi-Demonsant) in a French estate in Southern France fitted with all kinds of spy cameras and a control room covering almost all areas of the estate called Maryland first for a glamorous party where high profile politicians and financiers are involved and later when Whalid leaves on a business trip in Switzerland, to protect just his wife and kid. 

2015年12月10日 星期四

Osaka & Kyoto (大阪-京都)


It's red leaves time again. Time to budge from my chair and my readings and talks etc.

I took to the skies again and had my last look at Hong Kong.

Quand Je ne dors pas (When I don't Sleep)(失眠夜)

It's rare nowadays to see a movie in black and white. But I saw one last night: "Quand Je ne dors pas (When I don't Sleep)(失眠夜") It's the second feature by Tommy Weber (his first being Callao 2009), who co-wrote it with actor Mohamed Kerriche, a film inspired by J D Salinger's prize winning short novel in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye麥田捕手》about the which started the now common practice of wearing a baseball cap backwards by teenagers and some ex-teeangers. 

When the film opens, we see a teenager Antoine (Aurélien Gabrielli) asking for the price of a train ticket so that he may to go to see the northeastern coast of France, but he appeared to have no idea which town there he wanted to go to, nor what hours he wanted to go. From the converation, which was not well taken by the train ticket clerk, we learn all he got in his mind is the simple idea of wanting to go to look at the sea the following morning. He asked the clerk which town he could go to and was given four or five names, he just randomly picked one and then asked for the time of departure and then the price. When told it cost $30 Euros. He said it was too expensive because it far exceeded what he got in his pocket and left. He had a problem coming up with the money. So he went to Diego ( Mohamed Kerriche) a friend whom he knew was in the business of selling maijuana. He was given a number of packets which he was told cost $15 Euros but that he could sell it in the market for $30 Euros and split the profit 50: 50. 

2015年12月8日 星期二

The Alpha and Omega of Beethoven's Symphonies (貝多芬交响樂之始末)

It's always interesting to see someone develop. It is a heavenly experience if that someone happens to be a proto-romantic who revolutionized the way 18th century symphonies are written, someone typically represented in books about him with a pair of angry eyes and crazy frizzy hair sitting on a huge round forehead, like that of a lion. We had that experience at the Cultural Centre last Saturday. Classical symphonies are always quick, gay and stately but when Beethoven tried his hands at it at the turn of the century, about a decade after the French Revolution broke out and Europe was afire with new hopes, you can be sure that not a little of the spirit of rebellion would somehow find its way into the music, especially when it came from the hands of that eternal rebel. It's nothing like those delightful symphonies written by Mozart or Haydn, but not entirely unlike them either. We got the quick tempo and gayness but mixed into that is a certain force, a kind of defiance which you'd never find in the symphonies of his predecessors, in the form of what is later to become his trademark hammer like sound from the whole orchestra with the help of the timpani as they wham down three or four or even more times without any prior warning or preparation amidst otherwise softly flowing and beautiful melodies, with such patterns being repeated time and again with slight variations but each time progressively louder and more complex than the previous. You can already hear too in Beethoven's first symphony that massiveness in the way he develops the sonic structure of his sound of his principal and secondary motifs. .