Evenings in Quarantine:

The (Pittsburgh-based) Zombie Opera!

Teaser trailer here.

梦影童年

(拼音: mèng yǐng tóng nián; 英文: Electric Shadows*)

DaBing is a water delivery man.

One day he accidentally knocks over a pile of bricks with his bike.

Out of nowhere, a young woman attacks him.

The police decide to send her to a clinic.

DaBing demands she tell him why she attacked him but she says nothing,

only holds up a sheet of paper on which she has written,

"Please feed my fish."

She gives him a key.

The key unlocks her room, which has been transformed into an old-fashioned movie theatre.

Amongst the film reels and posters, DaBing finds a sketchpad.

The sketchpad is a diary.

The film is her story.

这部电影让我流泪, 但是它非常好。

This movie made me cry, but it's really good.

*This is the English title of the film.

The English translation of the Chinese title is something like Shadows of Childhood Dreams.

Word Swapping

There is a rather well-known (courtesy of Slumdog Millionaire) Hindi song called Jai Ho (जय हो). In Hindi, "Jai ho!" means something like "May you have victory!" or even "Hallelujah!"

Unfortunately, this song happened to get stuck in my head today. This was unfortunate not because it's a bad song (I rather like it) but because I spent probably six or seven hours reading, writing, and memorizing Chinese today.

At some point I realized that "jai" and "ho" are both valid sound combinations in Chinese as well as Hindi ("zhai" and "hou"), which gave me the wonderfully procrastinatory (™) idea of finding out what I might be singing, were I singing in Chinese.

Somehow I don't think the dance at the end of Slumdog Millionaire would have been quite as meaningful if Jamal and Latika, finally reunited, had grasped hands and yelled, "Pluck crabs!"

Oh Facebook, How Well You Know Me

Search Stories!

Go to www.youtube.com/searchstories to make one of your own! It takes about a minute. What an awesome idea. Thanks, Google, even though it's a marketing ploy. I'm sold.

CMU I ♥ YOU

Tonight I went to the CMU I ♥ YOU film festival, held under the big tent as part of Carnival. Terri invited me because she co-directed one of the films.

All of the films were made by CMU students in the film club, based somehow on the theme of love, and they were varying degrees of good. Most were well done enough to be appreciated without being so amazing as to be scary. Some were a bit dull, including one about a boy who has a crush on a girl, so he writes her a note and leaves it in her text book but then - gasp! - she comes back with her boyfriend. Sadness.

But my favorite was called Untitled. It was the only one called Untitled. Figures.

Untitled begins with a girl standing against a wall. You can only see her face. The picture is black and white, and her eyes look like two bright white holes. She stares at the camera for a while and then begins to speak, but you don't hear what she's saying, just creepy music. The rest of the video is startling and disconcerting overlays of streets and lights and colors and the profiles of two faces moving in and out of each other, always layered over the girl's face as she talks and talks about something you can't hear. At the end she falls silent.

Chemists was artistic and well done visually, a lot of wide shots of stairs and walls. Tale of Two Majors was a rather amusing sort of Romeo and Juliet story about a drama student dating a CS major. Map Time was a cute and well done animated piece about some book characters fighting over a female tennis player in a magazine. Morning After was a narrated story about an apathetic couple set to artistic shots around campus.

I froze, but I enjoyed the films.