Paranormal Activity

Plot: After a young, middle class couple moves into a suburban ’starter’ tract house, they become increasingly disturbed by a presence that may or may not be somehow demonic but is certainly most active in the middle of the night. Especially when they sleep. Or try to.

Paranormal Activity is a 2007 independent horror movie directed by Oren Peli. It follows the life of Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat), a young couple who happens to deal first hand with the hauntings of a demonic presence. The film is the modern Blair Witch Project head-to-toes: shot with a home camera (in the filmmaker’s house), it’s presented as “found footage” from the camera set up by the couple to capture what is haunting them. In the opening credits, the filmmakers thank their parents and their local police department for the use of the edited home video footage we’re about to see. It only costed 11,000$ and after its long-awaited release in the US theaters in October 2009, went on to make over 100 million, becoming what it’s considered to be one the most profitable movies ever made.

Paranormal Activity was super hyped, and even branded as “scariest movie of all times”, and for that reason, soon developed two completely opposite school of thoughts: those who really loved it and those who really despised it (altho i have to say one thing to those who didn’t like it; watching this movie in a noisy and crowded movie theater just doesn’t give it justice. Try watching it alone, in a dark room, with headphones on, and then see if it doesn’t stick with you even a little bit)

I remember when Blair Witch came out the reaction was exactly the same: some were coming home shocked and puzzled and some others where more like “uhm.. what was that?” . There simply was no in-between whatsoever.

Now, let’s just say that if you’re a believer – in ghosts and hauntings and the like, that is – chances are you’ll really dig it. Personally i found the movie to be absolutely frightening, real, and scary as hell in its simplicity. I’m with those who couldn’t sleep the night they watched it. And as the horror hound that i am, i couldn’t wait for the challenge, for the discovery of something that despite my “now accustomed to atrocities” mind, could still give me the chills.

As you may already know, there are two alternate endings : the first, original, 2007 release – and the 2009 theater one. I won’t discuss them here for the sake of those who haven’t seen it yet, but if you want to read more about it just click here. There is also a less known third version that was part of a private screening and was later added to the Dvd.

I don’t have many pictures to show you this time, since the movie is very simple and follows the everyday things of a normal couple. You’ll have to get used to the slow (thus realistic) pace, building up to events that are more and more evident, messing up with Micah and Katie’s life to the point of non return.

All in all Paranormal Activity was one of the most discussed, certainly most successful movies of the past few years, so even if you don’t believe in “silly ghosts” and all that jazz, give it a try either way, just like that, with no particular expectations, for the ride will be entertaining to say the least.

Those who loathed Rob Zombie’s take on the Halloween franchise…scream. Those who actually enjoyed it, here’s an easter egg for you.

Barnes and Noble released its second quarter earnings report on November 24th. However, at this point the earlier October 27 investor presentation contains some intriguing information about B&N’s digital strategy that deserves another look in order to help predict what the future holds for digital content product development.

According to the investor presentation, B&N is looking to build a nook “eco-system” with accessories, warranties and additional content. Accessories and warranties are easy enough to imagine, as this is a standard production cost subsidization strategy for many electronics retailers. However, the focus on “additional content” suggests that long term product developments will focus more on enhancing what content is delivered as opposed to how it is read.

The B&N investor presentation calls digital content a multi-billion dollar market, and makes some tantalizing allusions to potential developments in e-book features. Among the suggestions for future innovations are: supplementary content, alternate endings and collaborative writing. These suggestions move digital content strategies beyond simply reproducing existing book content in electronic form towards a form that leverages the fact that it is being delivered on a wireless device that can be tied in to subscription style services.

Here are some ideas for what exactly the products could entail:

-Supplementary content post-publication: an add-on subscription service could automatically load new prologues, notes, corrections and other updates to electronic content. In the long run, this could make for a much more interactive book- subscribers can sign on for automatic updates in new book series, and running author commentary can provide a long-term value add for non-fiction titles. Another option would be to develop a feature that allows users to choose what upgraded content they want to purchase as an add-on to the original book.

For example, the popular title Freakonomics was re-released with added content including Q&A with authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman is on version 3.0 that includes two new chapters and the author’s response to reader FAQs. It seems far more likely that readers would pursue a sort of a la carte option that would allow them to pick and chose what new features interest them as opposed to simply buying an entire new version of a book that is still comprised mostly of “1.0” content. User feedback can also allow authors and publishers to determine what sort of add-ons are most valuable to readers, and what add-ons are regarded as unnecessary fluff.

-Alternate endings: for fiction titles, this can hold a big appeal for a loyal fan base. Imagine books such as the Twilight series being able to offer a variety “choose your own endings”. Fan fiction enthusiasts would have a field day with this sort of content, and most likely would be inclined to pay extra for access to premium content on top of the title’s base price. The model would be all the better if booksellers can finagle a way to sign on authors to provide them with exclusive content.

-Collaborative writing: this is perhaps the most open-ended suggestion, but while ambiguous still provides for some intriguing ideas. A blurring of the lines between periodical and book can produce content that is regularly updated and commented on by a group of contributing authors. Books can also incorporate user feedback as well as editorial input. This sort of content delivery and enhancement is perhaps most useful for authors who may be using self-publication platforms such as Smashwords (an indie ebook distribution platform that revealed recently that it partnered with Amazon to supply content to the retailer’s Kindle Store, following in the footsteps of other distribution deals made between Smashwords and Barnes and Noble, Sony, and Shortcovers) to bring their books to the electronic content market.

Paranormal Activity is the latest ‘is it real or not?’, low-budget horror movie pieced together with supposed amateur home video footage.  Think The Blair Witch Project for haunted houses.

While I liked the overall idea and it’s by no means a terrible film, Paranormal Activity didn’t really do it for me.  Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood to be scared.  It did have its moments, but certainly isn’t the ’scariest’ or ‘most terrifying’ movie of all time (or even the year) as it has been hyped up to be.

The footage begins when young couple Micah and Katie, living together in a fairly nice suburban house, decide to get a video camera to capture the paranormal activity they have been experiencing.  There is a bit of a back story and you get to know the characters are little through footage of their daily lives, but I found these to be time fillers than any real effort to allow the audience to get to know, and perhaps even care about, these people.

Like The Blair Witch Project, the tension in Paranormal Activity is built up slowly and gradually, with the intent of blowing the audience away with a ripper of an ending.  However, even at only 86 minutes, it felt like nothing was happening for a really long time.  A few bumps in the night, a few eerie things here and there, but for the most part they seemed like relatively minor incidents that were met with overreaction.  I understand director and writer Oren Peli’s intention to build an atmospheric film that utilises dread rather than cheap scares, but I spent much of the movie wishing something would actually happen.  I will say, though, that there were a couple of pretty cool things that happened towards the end, but unfortunately the final sequences weren’t as chilling as I had hoped.**

The film’s biggest problem, from which most of its other problems stemmed, was the restrictive nature of its format.  Of course, as the audience, you only get to see what has recorded by the inhabitants of the house.  But that raises some very difficult obstacles.  How much can you reasonably expect someone who is being terrified by demons to tape everything that happens to them?  Do you go the realistic route and miss out on some of the action?  Or do you come up with forced excuses to make them take the video camera everywhere and record everything?  Either way, the film suffers.

To its credit, Paranormal Activity tries to reach some sort of balance between the two extremes.  As the inhabitants actually set out to capture and document the haunting, a camera is set up in the bedroom and runs throughout the night, and that is when most of the creepy stuff happens.  In my opinion, that was by far the cleverest idea in the film.  Every time the bedroom cam is set up and the residents to go bed, I start to swell up with anticipation as the clock fast forwards to when ’stuff’ happens.  Occasionally, they venture out of the bedroom in hand-held mode, but thankfully the footage is not as shaky or nauseating as it could have been.

However, what this system also means is that some scenes are left to your imagination because you can’t see what is going on – sometimes that may be more frightening, but that’s not always the case in this movie.  It also means that at least one of the characters has to be a totally unreasonable prick so the camera can be kept running, but it gets to the point where it becomes a stretch.  With this type of film format, you just have to take the good with the bad.

Paranormal Activity also suffers from a few other issues.  This kind of film thrives on the gullibility of the audience.  The more you believe it is real, the scarier it becomes.  The problem is, while both leads were adequate, there were a couple of occasions where they felt unnatural.  Could be the dialogue or the acting, but I wasn’t convinced I was watching authentic footage.  One of the reasons why The Blair Witch Project was so successful was because it misled people into believing that the footage was real.  The film was presented and marketed as authentic.  10 years later, this has become a lot more difficult to accomplish, and as a result Paranormal Activity doesn’t have quite the same impact as its predecessor.

In the end, Paranormal Activity is a film worth watching simply because it is fresh and not done very often.  And to be fair, it also has some solid, atmospheric moments.  That said, lower your expectations if you want to be genuinely frightened.

3 stars out of 5!

** Apparently there are at least 3 alternative endings for this film, and I don’t quite think the one released in the cinemas is the best one.  See here for more details.

PS: a sequel is already in the works thanks to the success of the film, which is already the most successful independent film ever in terms of return on investment.  Let’s just hope the sequel is at least watchable, unlike that dreadful sequel to Blair Witch which I still rank up there as one of the worst sequels of all time.

“Lost Boys: The Tribe”
a review by Darby O’Gill

Hey, remember that great 80’s movie The Lost Boys? Yeah, well this ain’t it. Actually, it’s the exact opposite. No really, the exact opposite. You know how in the first movie the older brother turns into a vampire? Yeah, well in this one, it’s the younger sister. It doesn’t stop there. Remember how the original film focused on Michael’s slow transformation into a vampire, and Sam’s realization of that fact? Yeah, well in this one, you drink the head vampire’s blood one night, and you’re one of the tribe the next. I just realized, I’m getting a little ahead of myself; let’s just start over.
It’s been 21 years since we last visited Santa Carla, California, but surprisingly their vampire population is still going strong. Only now I guess they’re surfers. I don’t know. I stopped looking for the sense in these kind of movies years ago. There is still one familiar face in Santa Carla, and that would be Corey Feldman’s Edgar Frog, not that he remains untouched by the update. Instead of working at his parents’ comic book shop, Edgar is now a surfboard shaper… Of course, that makes total sense. Having been a comic book nerd that becomes a full-time vampire hunter, why wouldn’t he take up surfing as a hobby? Did anyone even try to write a decent story for this movie? As many of you may already know, Corey Haim was going to be in this movie as well, but on the account of his being a… What’s the word? Disaster? They ultimately ended up cutting his performance out completely. Really, how screwed up do you have to be, to make Corey Feldman look like he’s the one that has his shit together? (We’ll talk more about that in the special features section.) I would go more in depth with the plot, if there was one. Look, I’m all for a good sequel. A good sequel. But the thing that I don’t get, is how so many sequels always seem to get it wrong. I mean half the work is already done for you. The characters and story setups are already in place. All you have to do is come up with an original new place to take them; or in this case, new characters to inhabit an already existing world. It’s really not that hard. But once again, instead of coming up with something new, Hollywood just flips the original story and repackages it, and somehow seems to think we won’t realize what they’ve done. It’s the same movie, you idiots! If I wanted to watch The Lost Boys, I would have rented The Lost Boys! Oh wait, I guess I sort of did. Only this version seems to be a sucky bizarro version of the one I remember. Word of advice; if you do rent The Lost Boys make sure Kiefer Sutherland is in it, and not his half-brother Angus Sutherland. You’ll thank me.

Rating:

DVD Special Features:

• Lost Boys: The Tribe – Action Junkies

This is just a behind the scenes look at the totally tubular extreme action, dudes! I thought this movie took place in 2008?!

• Edgar Frog’s Guide to Coming Back Alive

This is an interview with Corey Feldman, in character as Edgar Frog, raspy voice and all. However, he doesn’t really stay in character the whole time, and it also feels like no one ever really asked him to be in character. It seems like they went into Feldman’s trailer to interview him about being in the movie, and this is what they got. I could be wrong, but this is Feldman we’re talking about.

• Alternate Endings

Yeah, endings plural. They all pretty much have to do with Corey Haim’s inability to perform in the movie, forcing the production to work around him, which is kind of too bad. I sort of liked where they wanted to go with this story arch. But, it’s still no excuse for making a shitty sequel. The alternate endings also deal with Edgar’s brother, Alan Frog, once again being played by Jamison Newlander from the first film. Here’s where you got it wrong, once again Hollywood, this isn’t the end of the sequel! This should be the beginning of the sequel!

• All-New Remix Music Video of Cry Little Sister by G Tom Mac

Uh, okay.

• 3 Yeah Whatever Music Videos

That’s not me making fun of them. The groups name is Yeah Whatever, which is perfect, because that’s how I feel about this feature.

I was at least hoping for a commentary that talked about all the drama dealing with the two Coreys during production, but I guess this is the best they could do.

DVD Special Feature Rating:

Norwegian Avantgardist DEVAR just signed a deal with code666 for the release of their debut album titled “Alternate Endings“.   To be released by Code666 Records in late September 2009,  the Devar debut full-length is a unique and bizarre blender of Black Metal and Dark Rock. Recorded and Mixed at conclave Media Studio by Bjornar E.Nilsen (Taake, Helheim…).

Tracklisting for “Alternate Endings” goes as follows:
1- siren
2- h.m.h
3- cold slither
4- shadow feline
5- scourger
6- black 6
7- the dirge
8- …of my dead skull
9- watch them fly
10- in sanity

Devar are:
devar-vocals
daniel odland-guitar
aadland-guitar
ottoegil-bass
obdsaija-drums

An advance listening of the album is online on the band’s myspace page.

This Friday, X-men Origins: Wolverine comes out in theaters. Although the movie was leaked on the internet a few weeks ago, I am urging everyone to go see it.

I have not seen the bootleg copy or have any clue if the movie is good or not. I DO KNOW that there are a few things that will disappoint me, such as what they did to Deadpool (you can read my Blog about it here). And this disappointment is what lead me to this tell you to go see it. confused?

Fox has said if Wolverine does well, they will make a Deadpool movie. Which would be awesome! They have also said that not only will they consider doing Deadpool, but a Gambit and Magneto film as well. So if there was anytime to go see a movie, This is it. Even if Wolverine isn’t everything we are hoping its going to be, there is a chance that they could do these other films justice.

Last weekend the Fatal Attraction rip off Obsessed starring Beyonce made almost 30 million at the box office. So if people are willing to sit through that crapfest, they must be willing to see Wolverine right?

Opening Weekend Box Office:
X-men – $54 Million
X2: X-men United – $85 Million
X-men: The Last Stand – $102 Million

You would think if this pattern continues Wolverine could make around $120 Million, right? Maybe not. With the leak who knows how many have people have seen it and would be willing to again.

If Wolverine can at least make $60-70 million opening weekend, i would say that would be a success. Any less and it might not be worth it for Fox to make more of these films. So this weekend, grab your friends and go see it, maybe if you have nothing up… go see it again, as Fox has also said that there will be alternate endings (obviously to help counteract the leak).

Plus with Star Trek coming out the weekend after… this might be the only weekend to show your support. So do me this favor. ok?

———-
UPDATE: The Bad and Ugly has some news on the Alternate Endings. [Spoiler Warning]

There are 3 after credit endings… depending on what theater you see it at.
1. Wolverine in Japan (setting up for another wolverine movie maybe?)
2. Weapon XI lives (Deadpool is Alive! Booyeah!)
3. Striker’s s trance is interrupted (What the heck is this?)

 

Was it?...-in the?...-with the? (R to L) Leslie Anne Warren, Martin Mull, Madeline Kahn, Michael McKean, Tim Curry, Christopher Lloyd and Eileen Brennan.

CLUE (aka: Cluedo, aka: Clue: The Movie) (1985)
Flawed but well-meaning, Clue does what it can with the board game premise. It’s garnered a sizable fan base on video and cable primarily due to a game cast (heh), which includes Leslie Ann Warren (Miss Scarlet), Eileen Brennan (Mrs. Peacock), Martin Mull (Col. Mustard), Christopher Lloyd (Prof. Plum), Madeline Kahn (Mrs. White) and Michael McKean (Mr. Green). Aging punk rocker, Lee Ving, is the doomed Mr. Body. Colleen Camp is sexy as Yvette, the maid. But its Tim Curry’s performance as Wadsworth the butler, that makes Clue worth your time. Much of the movie seems modeled on William Castle’s House on Haunted Hill! Clue was released theatrically with three different endings. You had to see the movie three times in three different theatres if you wanted to see them all! I doubt many did. Of course having three possible endings renders most of the “mystery” moot. The VHS version crams all three into the last few minutes of the movie while the DVD gives you the option of one or all. So obviously, not everything here works. In fact, an ill-advised dog shit joke unfortunately sabotages the movie’s first fifteen minutes. Despite some PG13 sex jokes, kids seem to love Clue. I sure as hell did. I made my parents (I was 11) take me to see it in THREE theaters to see all the endings. (The newspaper listings indicated which theater was showing which version: A, B or C.) I wonder how many people on earth can make the same claim. I actually have a hard-cover Clue: The Storybook with big, colorful stills from the movie and the plot interpreted for CHILDREN but without hedging on references to Miss Scarlet’s escort service! It was published by Little Simon and is a cherished artifact for me. A paperback novelization was published as well. John Landis shares story credit with director, Jonathan Lynn. A “Clue” VCR game (There was a very short-lived VCR game craze in the 80s.) came out around the same time. It was unrelated to the movie, hard to play and pretty much sucked in general.
** ½

Watch the trailer:

I was watching Pride and Prejudice online a little while ago and was shocked when the movie ended without showing the ending scene. It was soon after I realized that I was watching a UK version of the film. The ending that was missing is apparently an ending for the American version of the film only.

So for those of you who haven’t seen the best ending for this movie, Here it is:

by Emily Gravett

Summary: A duck is reading a book about wolves and their habits. In the end the duck gets eaten by wolves, but then there is an alternate ending. A very unusual children’s book that looks at books themselves. Kind of funny. (E Priest)

Lesson ideas: maybe for older kids, but a look at books and their possibilites. Maybe for writing a book, and for alternate ending activities. Read another book and give an alternate ending after reading this one.

As mentioned yesterday but to repeat again today, and expand:

About a year back, Ratatouille came out, which I adored. Give yourself a guess as to why I might like a film all about cooking, of course. Pixar to me over time has been a deservedly noteworthy studio rather than a uniformly ‘OMG BEST MOVIE EVER (whenever a new one comes out)’ experience — I understand the cultist impulse around the studio, there was some sort of hunger for a ‘new Disney’ out there, more than I realized — but they’d been on a solid roll of late: I enjoyed The Incredibles, Cars certainly looked gorgeous though I’m not up for a sequel idea, really, and Ratatouille, well, as mentioned.

As had often been the case, Pixar had a little teaser trailer for their next effort running before Ratatouille, and after a brief canned history of the studio’s big projects they mentioned ‘oh and we’ve had this one other idea kicking around for a bit.’ They showed a homely-looking robot and I think there was some brief voiceover bit about how he wanted to fly or something, and then the title, as also spoken by said titular character: “WALL-E.”

Aw, cute. Ugh.

Pretty much I was already sure what this was going to involve — some sort of nebbishy robot with a bunch of wacky robot pals, including the wisecracking sidekick played by Jack Black or the equivalent, plus an eventual love interest played by Renee Zellweger, and having hauled around garbage for most of the film he was going to get the chance to FLY! because he believed in himself. PASS. The formula having been now almost thoroughly set in stone I didn’t need to see another one.

The first intimation that I was wrong came when I saw the new Indiana Jones film, which had a Wall-E trailer. After a couple of seconds of “Oh, anyway,” I blinked a bit and thought “Wait…this looks really good. REALLY good.” A running thought among many has been that Pixar likes to test out a new effect or setting or something similar in each of its movies (as well as its notable shorts before the main features), and this time around it was definitely going to be space, ships flying around, not to mention robots, which combined with a slew of chase scene snippets made me go, “Okay, this thing looked like it moves, at the least.”

There was something else that I caught as well, though, which immediately piqued my interest — dialogue was minimal. In fact, there didn’t seem to be anything beyond the occasional mention of Wall-E’s name and a couple of other bits and pieces. I did some scrounging soon after and this was confirmed in a number of news stories — by no means a silent film, Wall-E’s script was nonetheless not going to be driven by snappy 200 mph dialogue. And this, more than anything else, sold me.

To expand on a slightly earlier point — the formula as mentioned for many (by no means all but many) big-budget animated films this past decade and a half has pretty much gone one of two ways. There’s the Broadway-musical-on-screen — the logical extension of the earlier Disney classics, readily mixing songs and plot, into an even more tightly wound presentation, with the triple punch of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin building it up and then The Lion King landing the knockout blow from which Disney arguably never recovered. A massive moneymaker and widespread success, it straitjacketed a dysfunctional Disney operation (if you haven’t read James Robbins’s DisneyWar, run, don’t walk) into making and marketing an endless series of interchangeable clones that followed, with only a couple of films like Lilo and Stitch pushing against this goose-that-laid-the-golden-egg approach.

This left Pixar wide open to claim the throne as it so readily did from Toy Story onward, but the success of that film in turn created the other overwhelming formula — the sprightly, snappy and sometimes sappy CGI feature length entertainment. Obviously not too far removed from traditional animation efforts, admittedly, but as Pixar found its feet and steered away from the musical formula more to create straight up action/comedies with twinges of moral lessons here and there, the flood of knockoffs, reworkings and similar approaches — Disney itself and Dreamworks being among the most notable (and arguably the most notable offenders) — grew proportionately. Kung Fu Panda’s in the theaters right now, something called Bolt got a preview before Wall-E — all of it can be laid at the feet of Pixar’s monumental position. Lots of wry dialogue, inspirational hoo-hah, pop-cultural parodies and name actors doing their thing. Ratatouille did this very very well, of course, but still, I knew what was coming — we all did.

And along comes Wall-E and knocks all that out of the park.

An overstatement perhaps. The film’s only just been out over a week and there’s no way of saying whether this is a new step forward or merely a lovely exception to a profitable but limiting path. And like all seemingly bold moves forward it builds on what had already been done previously — in this case reaching very far back into the language and history of film as a medium — to twist expectations with careful forethought. This is not simply untrammeled experimentation with no thought as to how it might succeed or not — Pixar is a business and both Steve Jobs and Robert Iger are not running a charity institution. But the film’s already doing very good business and that alone should provide a justification for more work that goes against the grain, however much the risk may be run of creating new cliches.

Wall-E is one of those films whose qualities reveal themselves in retrospection, in layers. The ridiculous controversy being manufactured by a flailing right-wing commentariat, starting ever more to find themselves on the wrong side of history when it comes to environmental questions (it’s been noted that ‘global warming’ isn’t even the issue in the film so much as trash and recycling — though I’d be amused if the likes of Glenn Beck argued that one must be litter to be a real American), misses many larger points about the film as, simply, popular entertainment, as assembled and presented by a top-of-the-line organization with money and time to burn.

The point about relative lack of dialogue was already noted but the two key people who carried that off need credit — Andrew Stanton as director/writer and perhaps even more importantly, the major voice talent of the film: Ben Burtt. Any Star Wars-and-after freak knows Burtt, whose role in sound design and editing from the original film onward not to mention any number of other films since, and here he gets to be ‘typecast’ again — the voice of a robot. R2D2 might arguably the most successful character in all six films depending on how you feel about George Lucas as a screenwriter, since of course all he speaks in are bloops and beeps, but Burtt had the perfect ear to make those sounds function as dialogue. As sound designer here, as well as lead performer, his dialogue is a hair more intelligible but, wisely, the only really understandable thing that Wall-E says is his name, along with that of Eve, the robot who he ends up falling for.

Everything else in Wall-E’s performance comes together as the usual fusion of acting talent any CGI character is by default, and with that as a lead, where to stop? As mentioned, Wall-E as a film has so much into it that it’s hard to easily come up with a flowing, carefully organized response to it all — one wants to point out things in fits and starts, because to mention one thing prompts a mention of something else. With that in mind, some fits:

• Animated films have always served as a realm for pop-cultural parody and reference, as noted — so many of the Warner Bros. classics alone thrive on a subtext that is now utterly nonexistent (but, crucially, never keeps the films from being hilarious in their own right), while Fantasia’s “Dance of the Hours” sequence, for instance, tackled everything from the overuse of said classical piece to popular dancers of the time, and from there it all snowballed. Similarly Wall-E draws on a slew of references from a now massive canon of English language SF films and entertainments — Star Wars by default, but Silent Running, THX-1138, Robocop, Alien, Blade Runner, most overtly 2001: A Space Odyssey and many more all get major or minor tips of the hat, for the most part quick and subtly enough that you catch them if you know what you’re looking at or hearing, but that otherwise doesn’t hit you over the head with the ha-ha-funny part of it (the closest that approaches being a snippet of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” towards the end, but it’s cleverly done). One of the best bits along those lines came with the revelation of the identity of the main ship’s computer in the end credits — Sigourney Weaver. Which meant that she was the one counting down the self-destruct sequence for the escape pod Wall-E finds himself in — and if you know Alien, I need say no more.
• One of the more audacious moves in the movie hasn’t yet been talked about all that much, at least to my knowledge — the mixture of live action and animation in terms of the history of future humans. Mixing those two in general is hardly new, of course, but I thought the idea of having Fred Willard appear ‘in the flesh’ rather than a CGI character he only voiced, along with the ad campaign for the Axiom and the best moment to my mind, the series of portraits showing the ship’s captains not only turning into doughy blobs over the generations but changing from being human photographs to CGI characters — I thought all of that was pretty slick. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it all meant something per se, but I wonder how much of it was planned beforehand — was it a jury-rigged solution to a timecrunch on Pixar’s part? Doesn’t seem like it but you never know.
• Dialogue and the judicious use of it already having been mentioned, speaking more of the sound design of the film, specifically its various environments depending on scene, deserves its due. The silence of the trashed Earth is breathtakingly creepy — you don’t know exactly what’s happened at first (and the cheery “Out There!” song that introduces the film and then fades into echoing nothingness is a killer touch), and once again it’s all about allusions one can make to past SF touchstones — old Twilight Zone episodes, Ray Bradbury’s post-apocalyptic short stories here and there — and the idea of it being nothing but very occasional random noises as Wall-E and his buddy the cockroach feels both serene and sad. The windstorms that sweep through every so often feel all the more harrowing, and the arrival of Eve’s rocket all that more monumental. Contrast it with the sparkling awe of the space sequences — shifting into visual territory, a friend noted that it was the scene in the trailer of Wall-E dipping his hand into Saturn’s rings that made him want to see the film — and the crowded craziness of live on board the Axiom, noise overload beyond description.
• How humor and sentiment were handled in this film can be an object lesson for many filmmakers to follow. I can only think of one or two moments where they stretched for a dialogue joke — again, helped not to have much dialogue in the first place — while the visual and situtational jokes were a treat, some merely chucklesome, others flat out hilarious. Wall-E debating the nature of a spork, the cockroach finding a home in a Twinkie, Eve’s bad-ass attitude and intelligence mixed with giggles (somewhere over the past couple of days I had joked about a crossover film between Wall-E and Wanted and maybe it would be in the lead female character being pretty good with a gun), pretty much everything to do with Buy-N-Large — again, Fred Willard, pretty much being Fred Willard and not needing to do more, M.O. the cleaning robot’s increasing frustration with foreign contaminants, the boxer robot among all the misfit robots down in Diagnostics, any number of quick throwaway visual jokes and references…it goes on. As for sentiment, the various love stories all worked but of course it was Wall-E and Eve’s that would get the lion’s share — and as friend Abbott put it, “This movie made you really want to hold hands.”

The end of the film has caused a bit of hackle-raising over on ILE, and it’s worth some thought. Wall-E essentially sacrifices himself to ensure that the plant sample EVE has brought to the Axiom gets properly read, and, having learned how Wall-E cared for her when she was in hibernation mode earlier in the film, she stops at nothing to get Wall-E put back together when the ship ends up on Earth soon thereafter. The sequence where she rips through Wall-E’s collection of curios and spare parts and swiftly reassembles him, punctuated by a rip-roaring blast of her gun through the roof to let in sunlight and activate his solar cells, is both tense and hilarious, and the slight pause where it seems like it’s not going to work is stretched out juuuuust long enough…and he’s alive!

But it swiftly becomes obvious that in replacing his parts his memory has been wiped or replaced, or else something was otherwise damaged. He’s back to square one when he started his life hundreds of years before, a robot quietly compacting and cleaning things up, with no personality or knowledge of what has happened. Alive, but not the same.

I freely admit part of me would have found that ending to be the one to go for. But then again, I am looking at it from the point of view that sees the 60s/70s SF trappings of the film in particular, as well as the many, many excellent books and stories from that time. This would have been the ending in, say, a John Brunner story, or a Harlan Ellison one, or an Avram Davidson short — or, thinking of my post yesterday, a Thomas Disch one, perhaps. I said on the thread that Studio Ghibli could well have gone for that as an ending. Humanity saved, at the cost of a soul.

Others thought similarly, but the counterpoint was reflexive if understandable — “Are you crazy? That’s not what this is all about!” Which is also true — after an electronic smooch from EVE sparks up Wall-E a bit more and his droopy eyepieces kick back in, it’s a happy ending for all in the end, but it’s not one I have a problem with, it’s just what it is. Yet the whole movie has been about that as well, the endless yet understandable trope of love-conquering-all — friend Slocki said that the film was bleak enough as it is in any event, and he’s not wrong, and my own eyes are not that of, say, a six year old kid’s. (I was six when I first saw Star Wars; I wonder what the current six year olds are thinking about this film. We will not know for some time to come — but I admit that if the Death Star had destroyed the rebel base or that Luke had given his life or whatever, I would have been pretty upset!) Pixar doesn’t do downer, at least not yet — and maybe never, and there’s no real reason why they should.

Still, they came close, very close. An edge pushed, not the first time in animation by any means, or of course in film in general, but maybe it will mean something pushed further next time — a Grave of the Fireflies for a newer generation. In the meantime, I’m content to fade out on the elaborate art history joke of the end credits, the pretty good Peter Gabriel song on the soundtrack and the thought that it was great to have my initial impressions of this film totally upended.

So far? Best film of the year.

A/N: Iljimae looks endlessly mockable, from the screencaps, but alas, no csubs as of yet. Posting this in the meantime.

This is for you, Neechan!

Ending #4

Sugar, Spice, and Mostly Nice

[Don't toss tomatoes or other deadly projectiles please. This one just ran away with itself. Also, reading Terry Pratchett did not help.]

They say that the Trousers of Time bifurcate upon certain choices, whereupon a new world is created with no fanfare but a lot of confusion, and things go on the way they would have, if so-and-so had gone down a certain path.

What they don’t tell you, is that the Trousers of Time have more than two legs. A lot more.

In another world, another time, a brave, relentless Gil Dong faced the fire arrows with the stubbornness of a man who knows he is going to die, sooner or later, and would prefer to go out with a bang. In another world, Enok died with him, and so did Chang Hui’s heart.

~~~

The first thing Gil Dong saw when he woke up was a fearsomely embroidered cushion. It was bright aqua blue with magenta threading that looked vaguely chrysanthemum-like, but upon second inspection, just looked like something he found floating in the stream the other day. Urrh. Right. Turning his head so his nose didn’t feel like part of the embroidery would be good.

Gil Dong turned his head, and groaned. He was in the royal palace, no doubt about that. Ruby red columns and elaborate ceilings everywhere. Plus, the … the upholstery was unmistakably in Lady Noh’s taste. Eurgh. Hong Gil Dong, hero of a nation, smiter of corrupted evils, blinded at the tender age of 29, by badly-chosen drapery.

He tried to move, but realized that he was actually physically attached to the bed. [Zero tolerance swear word omitted], had the crown troops managed to sneak past his barricades? He had to get to Suk Geun and Mal Nyeo quickly. At least Enok was out of the mess. And where was that old man? Surely they hadn’t all been caught napping.

His frantic efforts at untying the ropes with his teeth brought attention. Not the pounding feet along a corridor type, but rather the sly door-opening and grinning over the frame type. Mal Nyeo and Suk Geun walked in, one blank, the other unrepentant.

They were unharmed. At first Gil Dong felt thankful, but the well-rested look on their faces told him something he didn’t want to see. He fought down the rising bile in his throat and told himself that they were his family, his fellows in mischief – Suk Geun didn’t have a treacherous bone in his body, Gil Dong told himself. Get a grip.

Suk Geun cleared his throat. “Hey, I know what this looks like.”

Suddenly his prone position on the bed felt a lot more vulnerable. He croaked out something that sounded like ‘Why?” but should have been “You fucking backstabbing bastards!”

Mal Nyeo rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she said. “Obviously he’s not rational yet.” Gil Dong made a muffled response in outrage. Suk Geun lingered nervously, wanting to untie him yet knowing he would get seriously maimed if not killed for his trouble, so he compromised by settling down in a chair nearby and eying the ropes yearningly.

“Honestly, I don’t know why I bothered.” Mal Nyeo hit him gently with a fan. “If you’re not going to say it, I will.”

Suk Geun looked at her beseechingly. Mal Nyeo rolled her eyes again and dragged him out the door.

As they left, Gil Dong could hear them bickering. “Why did you come here if you were going to be such a coward?” “Yah! He looks like one of those tigers Doe Eyes always talks about!” “So what?!”

~~~

It was, in hindsight, the smartest thing to do – for all of them concerned. When hunting tigers, use the tiger’s weakness.

Enok tiptoed in with a tray of cookies, rather unsure of her welcome.

She eyed the ropes tying him down and set the tray down. “I’ll untie you if you promise not to do anything stupid.”

He thumped his head against the ornate cushion and cast an ‘et tu, Brute’ look her way.

She interpreted his look correctly. “Well. To tell the truth, you were killing yourself through utter stubborness. I didn’t know it was possible before meeting you that someone could die from being stubborn. You’re the one who told gongja that change takes a long time. We couldn’t let you destroy yourself that way.”

Gongja? So she’d talked to that pretty boy, then.

“Don’t look like that, please. We got together and talked about this. You should have seen gongja. He came to me and begged me to save your life, knock sense into you.”

Gil Dong turned his head to the other side and ignored her.

“I know you think we all betrayed you. But look at it from our point of view, okay? I’ll leave the cookies here for you.”

~~~

Gil Dong’s traitorous stomach rumbled. He’d lost count after 8937, and his brain remembered how good the Yongmun cookies were.

But Enok had forgotten to untie him.

“I give! I give up! Untie me nooooooooooooooooooooooow!”

As the cry echoed throughout the rear palace, Chang Hui grinned. Starving the enemy always worked, even in the books.

~~~

The little group was scattered around the room, cautiously keeping an eye on the figure munching enthusiastically away at cookies. Mal Nyeo and Suk Geun were discussing the placement of their ‘defeated and slaughtered’ rebel troops with Chang Hui, while Enok looked yearningly at the cookies Gil Dong was devouring. Chisu twitched every now and then, but that was just because Mal Nyeo insisted on swinging that fan of hers around.

Gil Dong polished off the platter of pastries in record time and brushed the crumbs from his fingers. “So let me get this straight,” he began.

“You” – he nodded at Chang Hui – “went to them? And then you managed to sneak more than 200 people out from under the noses of your very sophisticated and professional soldiers. After which, I hear, you razed and burned the Hwal Bin Dang headquarters to the ground? I don’t buy that.” He leaned back against the chair, hands behind his head in a relaxed gesture, belying the tension that reverberated around the room.

“No offense, your majesty.” Gil Dong added belatedly, with no small amount of irony behind those words.

Chisu wanted to curl up in some small, neglected corner and wait for sunrise. This was going to take all night. He wished, not for the first time, that he’d taken his mother’s advice and studied medicine instead.

Chang Hui smirked. Secretly Enok thought he was very good-looking once he stopped putting a dead squirrel on his head, but this smirking was getting too frequent. Someone needed to take him down a peg or twelve, which was honestly why Gil Dong was here now. Enok tuned out the rest of the king’s explanation in favour of inching closer and closer to the platter of food. Discreetly, of course.

~~~

A few days later found Gil Dong sitting on top of an unfortunate printer’s desk, poking his famed stick into the side of the man’s cheek.

“So.” He drew out the word, punctuated by small gasps from the other man, who was desperately trying not to offend him again, not that he knew who gave him The Tales of Hong Gil Dong to publish, no!

“You don’t know who did it?”

The printer shook his head as much as he dared, sweat dripping down his brow. “N-no sir! I swear!! My lord, it was a girl but I didn’t know her name! If I tell you what she looks like could you possibly not smash the rest of my shop?”

Gil Dong swung his stick back onto his shoulder. “Nah. Don’t bother. I have a good guess.”

As he left the shop, he looked back at the merchant, shivering in fear, and said, “By the way? Your porn sucks.”

~~~

Executions, thought the swordsman, were overrated. All that alcohol got into one’s clothes and skin, and then one’s wife refused to go near one for the next five days. But this fellow was alright. He wasn’t really complaining, like some of the other ones.

But then, the charge of high treason is kind of hard to contest.

It was too bad. The executioner had liked The Tales of Hong Gil Dong. No props to the publisher for getting caught, he supposed.

The knife swung high, and came down.

~~~

The nobles should have felt much better after the series of reprisals across the kingdom upon supporters of the now-deceased Hong Gil Dong. In fact, they did. It’s just that now there was no common enemy, they fell back into their original lines of bickering and jostling for power, which made for less headaches for Chang Hui.

Lady Noh wasn’t the prime merchant in the country because she made nice with other people, and she’d passed some of that down to him.

Lord Ryu got into trouble pretty soon, as he discovered that young people really didn’t like being controlled. He mused to himself that he should have restrained his granddaughter. At least if she was alive, he reasoned, he could have at least on noble at his feet, obedient to the patriarch of the house. Even better, if she’d managed to snag the king.

Oh well. There are other ways of bringing proud youths to heel.

Then the reports of irrepressible local banditry started. Splinter groups of Hwal Bin Dang appeared. There was even someone running around the capital sticking plum blossoms to the door of every person who was robbed.

It made no sense, but the nobles didn’t dare tell their king that so soon after the revolt of Hwal Bin Dang, they had lost control of their respective magistrates again.

~~~

One night, deep into the palace, Gil Dong, Enok and Chang Hui celebrated one particularly difficult heist. They had started quite early, and so all were about four sheets to the wind (even Enok, who was not supposed to have been drinking but snuck some anyway).

“Sho-” Chang Hui waved his bottle around. “Sho- I’ve been wanting to axe-sh-arsk -”

Gil Dong looked up blearily from his plate, “Wha-?”

Chang Hui bravely took on the consonants. “Why flower?”

Enok fell face first into the couch. Gil Dong looked blankly over at the source of the noise before going back to Chang Hui.

“Ish.” He tried again. “Ish the flowers. Dey pretty.”

Even inebriated, Chang Hui could make him feel like an idiot with one look.

Gil Dong waved his arms around, thereby knocking more things to the ground. “Mal Nyeo, she-she says, take flower. Sub-sim-symbol.”

Chang Hui nodded wisely, before falling face first into the table. Gil Dong wondered where he’d gone, and laid his own head to take a short nap.

~~~

Birds chirped merrily as Chisu pushed open the doors to wake up his king. Only years of careful training prevented him from dropping the entire breakfast tray.

Somehow, during the night, unbeknownst to Chisu, the boys had migrated over to Enok. More precisely, Chang Hui was using her stomach as a pillow, while Gil Dong just sprawled everywhere, as was his wont.

Chisu crept away. Maybe Yong Jin would have some way of explaining this morning.

~~~

Certainly it was one of the more unusual imperial relationships around, but it worked, though it gave many palace attendants a practice at poker faces.

Chang Hui got the best of both worlds, and Enok never went hungry.

As for Gil Dong, well. He got to hold the kids.

~~~

And so it goes.

-End-

Hope you liked!

Sevenses

The following piece of fiction contains bizarre and digusting images. Reader discretion is advised.

Roger locked the door to his efficency apartment. He threw off his coat and almost mangled his tie as he yanked it free of its double windsor prison. He pulled the paper with the telephone number out of his pocket and sat on the edge of his still folded out day bed. He had been excited about making this call an hour ago, while he was still sitting in his car. He even considered using his cell phone, but he worried about what would happen if the conversation got lurid. He waited until this moment, but his zeal had faded and was replaced by anxiety. If it is a prank of somekind, I’ll never live it down. It will haunt me. But what if this is my chance? My only chance? He reached for his phone and began dialing the number. 

His hand trembled as he put the reciever to his ear. It rang once. I wonder who will answer! Will it be a man or a woman? It rang a second time. What if it really is Irene? What will I say? ”I saw your number on the bathroom stall and thought that you’d want a little rumpy-pumpy.” His vision of a night with a sexually frustrated erotic dynamo started to fade on the third ring, when someone picked up on the other end of the line.  Roger’s heart pumped in his chest as he head her breathing. The phone connection was staticy, but he could hear her! That is feminine breathing if I ever heard it!

(Ending Version 2)

“Hello.” said Roger. The line remained staticy, though Roger could hear a sound, somewhat like a voice echoing in a tin can. “Hello? I can’t hear you very well. Can you hear me?” asked Roger, not noticing an inky cloud puffing out of the reciever. When he saw it, he dropped the phone on the floor. The black smoke filtered out of the phone swiftly; in the cloud he could see the face of a young woman. He fell over himself, tumbling to the floor. The amorphous cloud grew; a dozen faces floated in the cloud. Each face was unique, except that every face writhed in pain, sneering with mouths lined with fangs. Roger pushed himself away from the apparition as dozens of arms and legs began to form on the cloud’s perimeter.

“What are you!” he shouted, not knowing what else to say. He reached for a knife from his galley kitchen’s counter. His hand shook as he pointed the blade at the apparition. One of the hands swiftly reached out and grabbed him by the wrist. He shouted in pain as the thing pulled him towards itself. Its voice, echoed and tinny, called to him.

“We need you.”  it said as it wrenched his wrist around. Roger screeched in pain as the creature pulled at him. One of the mouths sunk its fangs into his flesh as several hands groped clumsily at him while others held him fast. Looking up at the apparition, Roger felt faint and powerless. He felt as though he left his body; he watched as the creature tore at his clothes. He watched as the mouths bit at him, sucking his blood. He winced as the scene became too disgusting to watch, but he could not look away. The apparition had many genitals; some male, some female. No! Stop! STOP! He tried to cry out, but the apparition was pulling his mouth open, pushing a tongue down his throat. He gagged, almost vomiting; he felt helpless and broken…

When he awoke, he was still bleeding. He pulled himself to the bathroom and let the hot water of the shower wash over him. He looked at his hands; they were wrinkled and spotted. These aren’t my hands. They can’t be. He rushed from the shower and saw that his face was heavily wrinkled. I look like I aged 80 years! What the hell did that thing do to me? As he looked in the mirror, he could see the apparition behind him, a hand reaching out and clasping him painfully on the shoulder.

“We want more.” said the creature, speaking in Roger’s voice and looking at him with Roger’s youthful face.

“No!” screamed Roger pleadingly, tears welling in his eyes.

“Then another. Bring us another. If not, we will be back.” The apparition slowly disappated back into the telephone, leaving behind only a dial tone. Roger nervously grabbed at the phone and terminated the call. Naked and alone, he felt vulnerable and afraid. His eyes fell on the torn clothes on the floor and the blood, his blood. He looked at the phone number and knew that there was only one way to deliver himself from the creature and what might be endless, nightly torture.

The next day, he went to the super market and went into the bathroom. He had taken a permanent marker with him; he started to write the phone number on the wall of one of the stalls. He felt guilt filling him as he scrawled ”For a Good Time, Call Annie” above the number. The words became blurry as tears filled his eyes. He left the stall, taking his marker with him, hopeful and fearful.  

Have you seen the movie I am Legend which stars Will Smith? How many of you were satisfied with how it ended?

Well…. Definitely, after watching one man living alone with his dog and witnessing how he lived his daily life, the ending was quite anti-climactic and highly melodramatic as far as I am concerned.

Now there is a problem with this kind of ending. It assumes that the human-turned-monster has gotten in touch with its human side again and was able to identify his female monster partner and feel emotions upon seeing the female monster. If they wanted this kind of ending then the humanness of the monsters should have been progressively developed in the movie.

There were hints that the monsters were developing a sense of intelligence, like the trap that they set up, the ability to prowl at the edges of sunlight, etc. But this was not apparent enough to make that kind of ending. The jump would have been too

Moreover, if the monster was that cognizant, shouldn’t he have asked for the treatment as well instead of just taking the female monster away?

On the other hand, the current ending has its own problems, in my opinion. As mentioned earlier it is too melodramatic in a heroic kind of sense. I do not also see the logic as to why he had to blow himself up with all the monsters. Wouldn’t it have been better if he just stayed alive as he was the source of the anti-bodies in the first place?

So here goes a list of alternate endings to the movie I am Legend:

Following the current ending of the movie –

1. Instead of blowing himself up with the grenade, he should have just thrown the grenade into the mob of monsters. Being an intelligent and scientific man, he should have prepared a plan in case his lab was infiltrated by monsters. He had enough time in his hands to do this. If he did this he could have:

2. Installed UV lights in his lab so that if it got infiltrated he would just switch it on from that small area that he was in and burn the living daylights out of those monsters.

3. Installed explosives that will either provide enough sunlight come day while he hides in that small nook.

4. Armored his small nook and installed explosives to nuke the damn things.

5. Placed an arsenal in that lab as he knew from the start that that is his last stand.

6. Build a shoot in his lab that will lead him to the Bat Cave.

You may believe that some of my suggestions are downright mad, but hey, I stayed there for 2 hours watching this man talk to himself and chat up a mannequin for God’s sake, the least the producers could do is give me a bit of action. Is that so hard to do?

Okay, what I want to know now is what you think the best alternate ending would be for I am Legend. I am going to put a challenge in Ibeatyou.com and I hope you could come and either vote or suggest your own ending. I will bet though that the 6th ending will win this game. (tongue in cheek)

Ahaha. The Gil Dong fans are going to hate me. Enjoy anyway!

Ending #3

In Which I Run Out of Ideas (CHxYN)

Gom ran away at the look on Enok’s face. (Much like Chisu, Yong Jin and various other guards had, earlier in the day.)

She slammed into the meeting room without much regard for the much battered and stained wood. Its occupants scattered for cover, having that admirable instinct which cautioned them to hide, despite never experiencing a tsunami. Enok stalked over to the table and leaned into it, trying to get as close to Gil Dong as possible without actually crossing to the other side.

“Yah! Didn’t you promise?! And I had to find out from gongja, of all people!”

Trapped by the table, Gil Dong had no choice but to look her in the eyes. He had nothing to say, as she very well knew. But some things had to be out in the open.

“I can’t take you.”

Enok sat down on the bench, legs giving out from pure shock.

“But… gongja said I could go wherever I wanted…”

Gil Dong stared at the wall beyond the top of her head resolutely. “Not where I am going.”

It wasn’t hard to make Enok cry, but the dripping tears did nothing to ease her ache at those words. She looked up to the person she’d always held to be a hero, someone she’d loved and trusted without reserves, the best source of strength, because he was always so strong.

“Why? Gil Dong, I won’t be any trouble, honestly, and I promise I won’t be stupid. We hunted tigers together, remember that-”

His expression darkened at her persistence. It was the best and worst of her, truly, and he didn’t need this. Not now.

“Tigers! Next you’re going to say you can run fast like an arrow! Stop thinking you can do everything and just go away, okay? You’re useless in a fight, and I can’t bring you along just to worry about you all the time. At least here the Daegoon can take care of you. Now go away and let us work.”

~~~

“What was that?!” Mal Nyeo, Suk Geun and Yeon demanded in angry unison.

Gil Dong ran a hand through his tousled hair. “I have to be heroic to achieve my goals!”

“Well, I think you’re a heroic asshole, that’s what.” Mal Nyeo nearly hit him with her fan, but decided to take the higher ground and walked away.

The rest did the same, angrily wondering if he was as great a person they’d thought he was… or if they even wanted to be in the same room as he was, when the time came.

~~~

Enok hid in a corner, crying. She was stupid, and useless, and, and, no one wanted her around! Even Gil Dong told her to go away. He’d done it several times, but she’d just been too dense to see it.

She was truly doomed to a life of idiocy.

Chisu rounded a corner and stopped in his tracks. His experience with girls was limited, but even he knew better than to interrupt Lady Enok in full-out cry mode. He decided that his news could wait, and headed out of the Yongmun compound.

Lady Noh watched her charge helplessly. She could poison a man without second thoughts, spot betrayal from the slightest hint, cow uppity nobles into utter submission with one glance and make a mean bowl of bibimbap, but she had no idea how to handle this innocent and volatile child. Her grandfather did very little in her daily life, being the sort to manipulate and thus utterly bewildered by the honesty of his granddaughter.

Sometimes she was glad that the Daegoon decided not to marry her. Besides not allowing Lord Ryu to control the throne, she seemed to create more trouble than she was worth, in the long run.

~~~

Eun Hye looked at her possessions, canary yellow, crisp green, pristine cream (and a particularly virulent shade of pink that could be recognized at twenty paces), mostly all in silk and costing a small city’s worth of ransoms. Then she thought, with a shudder, of not being able to bathe for weeks, of cold winters without her fur muff, of her fine skin withering into rough scabs.

Was it really worth it, she wondered, for a man who doesn’t even love me?

She looked at the blue pouch she’d embroidered, and resolutely threw it in the rag pile.

The next day, a lucky urchin carried it home and used it to store a mysterious string of coins he’d found on his doorstep.

~~~

Lord Seo was angry.

“This close! We had them at our door, and then what happens? The king tells us to wait for reinforcements, and they run away!”

Eun Hye hid her joyous, trembling hands under the table. It had worked.

~~~

Chang Hui had no choice but to send out orders for the Hwal Bin Dang’s capture with a promise of awards. But he was sure their rapport with the people would allow them to flourish. Indeed, they did a much better job of investigating corrupt officials than he ever had. And so the cycle went on.

If anyone noticed the large number of pigeons the king liked to keep in his gardens, well. That was just royal quirkiness.

~~~

Master Hae Myung was a wise man beyond his years, with an enviable philosophical outlook cultivated with care through the years. Nevertheless, he looked at the departing ‘children’ with worry. When would they meet again, if they did? Their world was a dangerous place, made more so by the paths that Gil Dong led them to. The flowers trembled in the wind as he laughed his creaky cares away.

Enok stood watching, tears in her eyes. If she couldn’t rescue people from the clutches of evil like her friends, she was just going to find something else worthy to do.

~~~

“See? And then the dog said -” A polite knock on the door interrupted her mid-story. Enok looked up from the giggling child in her arms.

“Oh, gongja! You shouldn’t have come here! What if you got sick? I’ll just finish up, and we can go.”

In ordinary city clothes, Chang Hui smiled at her, “I’d prefer to stay and listen. Do you mind?”

~~~

A year later…

Enok wrinkled her nose at the smell of new fabrics.

“Do I really have to wear all this?” She whined to Lady Noh, knowing that the other was in a good mood, and, therefore, would not boil her in hot water for complaining.

“Of course, my lady. If you would really like to continue doing all this charity work with the poor, it would be a good idea to appease the ministers by having the most traditional wedding possible.”

“Oh.” Chang Hui explained this to her, Enok thinks, but she wasn’t really responsible for what was in her head when he was around anymore.

Besides, she had such great plans for new schools, hospitals… everything, in short.

~~~

The kingdom celebrated the birth of a royal prince with all due pleasure and happiness. Lord Ryu perhaps more than most. At last, a king that would obey his commands alone. Goodness knew that this impish young thing his granddaughter married had found ways of thwarting him in the past. Now he could control the heir, but only if certain obstacles were out of the way…

It would be, he concluded, be the best for all concerned. A long term plan for the good of the kingdom.

~~~

In the five years since she’d last seen him, he hadn’t changed very much. Slightly more weathered, perhaps, and leaner, but the essential spirit was the same, burning through anyone they looked at.

He wondered how he could ever dare to ask her for forgiveness.

“So. When do I get to show you some godchildren?”

Gil Dong felt like he would be blown away with the shock. Did she really just say what he thought he heard? Another moment of speechlessness passed before Enok deigned to look up and smile.

“You saved his life, Gil Dong. What are little grudges to that?”

He nearly fell down with relief. “So. You don’t … uh. Ah. That.”

Chang Hui walked out of the door, trying to dissuade his stubborn son from stabbing himself in the eye with a mock sword.

“Still articulate as ever, I see.” He winked at his queen. “Is there anything I should be worried about?”

Chisu smiled at Yong Jin, both hearing Gil Dong’s frank laugh echo through the hallway. “See? And you were all fretful.”

End part 3.

Let me know what you think!

Sevenses

Well, today marks the first week without Hong Gil Dong. Am obviously not able to fill the hole it has left in my life, as you can see…

In case I didn’t explain it properly last time, these endings are separate and possibly conflicting replacements, written for purely recreational purposes.

Ending #2

Proving That There is a Thing Called Karma (GDxCH)

The nobles bowed in unison. There was nothing like peer pressure, after all, and they were sure their newly appointed king would send soldiers after that annoying insolent insidious seditionist once he heard their new reports.

“Your majesty, we present to you this book, in hopes that you will see Hong Gil Dong for the aspiring usurper he is. Please grant us the power to rid this world of his unworthy shadow!” Lord Ryu, as always, led the chorus of complaints.

Chang Hui envisioned putting all his nobles in a boat and untying the rope that held it to harbour, then watching it drift away, gently, with these quarrelsome men on board. He shook his head to clear it of such thoughts and glared at the object of his wrathful displeasure. Today, it was the plain-looking, slim volume of The Tales of Hong Gil Dong, Hero.

He’d read it. And while the writing was mediocre, the plotline clichéd and prone to embellishment (worst of all, he thought, the lack of romantic developments proved to turn the book into another mindless martial arts epic), it wasn’t a terrible attempt, as far as first books went. Neither he nor Enok showed up in the book, but honestly. It. Was. Just. A. Book.

It made the king wonder if the nobles weren’t secretly in love with Gil Dong, to wax so outraged at what was so obviously a piece of fanservice.

He seriously needed something to distract them.

~~~

“On a scale of truthfulness, that book would rate a 1, for getting my name right. The Daegoon’s not in it, that idiot’s not in it, none of us are properly described. Plus, I don’t want to be king. I’m sure whoever wrote it was just out to confuse the people.”

Mal Nyeo looked sceptically at Gil Dong. “You realize that book is going to do more than just confuse them, right?”

Suk Geun nodded, “Yeah. Now everyone will expect you to do something wonderful. Like become king.”

Gom jumped up and down in excitment. “Are you going to do it? Set up a kingdom?”

Everyone looked at Gil Dong, still chewing vigourously on rice, with grains stuck here and there for effect.

Yeon smiled indulgently at the others over Gom’s head and carried the protesting boy to bed.

~~~

Lord Ryu stroked the real Sa Yin sword covetously. He’d planned to get the crown prince at a young age and mold him into a king wholly dependent upon the Ryu family. But fate had intervened, and given him a stubborn young stallion with ideals of his own. Well. It was just time to look for other members of the royal family.

He was sure the young king would see reason after being presented with a more malleable relative.

~~~

Chisu, not being burdened with royal lineage and a mind prone to overthinking, simply worried about the direction his king seemed to be going in. Somehow it just didn’t seem right to have Chang Hui smile more before acquiring the throne. Now he frowned all the time, with nary a change in expression. He was too busy to see Lady Enok all day long, and in any case, she was in the same situation.

The king never chuckled at anything Hong Gil Dong said, or smiled at the ridiculous things Lady Enok did. Not anymore.

It was an unhappy state of affairs – and if this was the price of becoming king, Chisu wasn’t sure he wanted it for his master.

But, he sighed to himself while changing watches with Yong Jin, it wasn’t up to him anyway.

~~~

Dropping an inkwell on one’s foot has disastrous results in ordinary circumstances, but when one is faced with the lords of the royal cabinet, it is just downright embarrassing.

Lord Seo had trouble believing his ears. Minister Choi looked resigned, but Lord Ryu pressed the scroll into his hands.

“The king’s father had a younger brother. He was exiled to Jeju but there has been rumours that he escaped on the way there. We must find him.”

“But.” Lord Seo hadn’t felt this shocked since his newly imported carriaged turned out to have linen trim instead of silk. “He would be very old. And how can we tell if he is still alive, let alone the royal uncle?”

Lord Ryu smiled in what he imagined was a patronizing way (but it really just made him look like his beard got stuck in his clothes).

“He has a sword-shaped birthmark on the sole of his right foot.”

Minister Choi felt the beginnings of indigestion. He did not want to have to wade through dozens of wizened old men to see if they had a sword shaped birthmark. It was a distinctly unappealing prospect.

~~~

The eunuchs were trained from youth to never question the acts of a monarch, so when Chang Hui asked them to dress him in ordinary clothes and order a discreet escort, they said nothing against the wisdom of such a move so late at night.

Once he was in the warehouse, Chang Hui felt better, less impeded by the air in the palace he had left behind. He looked at the dismal and dirty drapes hung around the rafters of the empty room and thought this was a more welcome sight than any silken drapery. Even the old barrels were still there.

He remembers being hopeful, and expectant. But the box fate had left him turned out to be emptier than expected.

Reviewing scrolls, hearing from his nobles on the different doings in the kingdom, not being able to change anything important because his noble ministers were too attached to the status quo. The maneuvering and jostling for position were amusing, but ultimately tiring, especially as he tried to balance the factions against one another. And all this was just in the first week.

Chang Hui didn’t doubt it would get worse, until he was hunched and stooped over his scrolls and recalcitrant nobles.

If he’d let the court do its work without checks, it would soon return to a corrupt state once again.

He wondered when it would all end.

~~~

Lord Seo deliberated for a night, and sent out his spies to investigate after the whereabouts of the royal uncle.

~~~

The next day, Ministers Choi and Ryu proposed a public health measure for all citizens – daily access to apothecaries, public education schemes which included obligatory hand and foot-washing measures undertaken by health service stations set throughout the kingdom.

Chang Hui, pleasantly surprised by their initiative, approved the proposal without a second thought.

~~~

Hae Myung strolled around the market with Gom. The boy was stubbornly embarrassed by an acute case of teen acne, but he refused to see any doctors, citing cost reasons. The old man chuckled to himself. Now that free consultations were available to the peasantry, Gom had no more excuses.

He’d endure some washing for that.

~~~

Lord Ryu met in private with Lady Noh and requested a meeting with the king. She was surprised, of course, but it was Lord Ryu, their staunch pillar of support. Of course he could meet with the king anytime he wanted.

White hairs bristling with anticipation, Ryu broke the news that he had found a long-lost royal uncle who was perfectly able to take over the throne with ’some help’ if Chang Hui proved obdurate.

It was an interesting revelation for both king and subject, that Chang Hui was not willing to sacrifice Gil Dong on the altar of his throne. The man had saved his life, several times, and thrown himself in a revolution trusting him to make the right decisions as king. He would not betray that trust.

Besides, asking for the commoners to be given the same opportunities as the others, was that really so demanding?

Lord Ryu departed with veiled threats. Chang Hui just sat at the table, brows furrowed in thought.

~~~

On this night, however, Lord Ryu found more than one young person willing to defy his wishes. Enok balked, absolutely, completely and totally at marrying someone old enough to be her grandfather. She had doubted, ever since the truth of the sword was revealed, whether or not her grandfather was a suitable adviser to the king, and now she was certain.

If she could not be a good person as a member of the nobility, then she would simply cease to be a member of the nobility at all.

~~~

The next day, Lord Seo’s soldiers arrived at the palace to take control, but found the king and Chisu to be missing. Yong Jin stood sternly at the gates and demanded to see their permission for entry. The captain sent a runner to consult with Lord Ryu, but the messenger only found utter chaos at the Ryu household.

The coronation of master Hae Myung was hurried and perfunctory – especially as their new king burst into shrill laughter at random intervals during the ceremony.

The nobles all breathed a collective sigh of relieve when it was over. Finally, a king who would do as they said.

~~~

Away from the excited bubble that was the Hwal Bin Dang, Chang Hui dropped gratefully into a chair. It was not as comfortable as the ones he’d been used to sitting on, but a chair was a chair.

Gil Dong looked down at him with an inscrutable expression.

To break the silence, he said lightly, “Well, I don’t think ‘Lee Chang Hui’ will strike fear into the hearts of those pigs. I think I need something slightly more heroic.”

The other man began to smile. “Yeah. You’re too girly for something like Hong Gil Dong. How about Il Ji Mae?”

The erstwhile king stifled an indignant snort.

Gil Dong let his hand settle gently on Chang Hui’s shoulder, thumb accidentally brushing his cheek. “I’m glad you’re here.”

~~~

And they lived happily ever after, robbing the rich and giving to the poor.

(After a while, the nobles suffered so much under Hae Myung’s idiosyncratic rule that they begged for Chang Hui to come back. Chang Hui’s response? “I’ll think about it.” Enok opened a bun shop, but since she ate all the buns she sold, she actually lived off the proceeds of the third cobra. The boys drop in when they’re not otherwise occupied from rescuing kittens, puppies and other small cute things from the forces of evil.)

End Part 2

This one is less cheery, but uhm. I plead school affecting everything I write.

Love,

Sevenses

P.S. Let me know what you think – and the others are coming!

(Im)Possible alternate endings, for the heartbroken and discerning fan… (I may have overdone the lighthearted feel in some places, so most of our beloveds are probably out of character.)

Not being especially talented in writing, I’m always looking for concrit. Do give me your opinions.

Ending #1

Because the Universe has a Causality Law (GDxYN)

“You don’t want to be a minister anymore.”

Gil Dong had that stubborn look in his eyes. “I tried to change things around, but look where that got me.”

Chang Hui wanted to bang his head against the nearest pillar. All that effort convincing the nobles and the man quits. Honestly, it was enough to give anyone a case of acute tendonitis, migraine and wrinkles. (Not that Chang Hui admits to being concerned about wrinkles. Not at all.)

“So,” The young king said, with considerable effort, “What are you thinking of doing? Rallying your people to fight the evil, ravenous nobles?”

Gil Dong gave him a strange look.

“Have you been eating those weird cookies again? You know, the ones with the cute red berries in them.”

“No. After what – No.” Chang Hui remembers those cookies. And Enok. Eating them. And also what happened after. He shudders.

Gil Dong grinned. “Ah, well. I was thinking of taking that break I’d mentioned. Planning a revolution is hard work. And now that you’ve got everything almost set up, you don’t even need me around all the time anymore. If you don’t do a good job as an egalitarian king, I may have to come back and hit you, though.”

Chang Hui felt floored. He’d expected Gil Dong to protest a little more… vehemently. This nonchalance almost made him believe those rumours about the throne room containing mercury fumes. His comrade-in-arms hadn’t noticed his poleaxed expression, however, and continued rhapsodizing about his trip to China in a similar vein.

“Wait, wait.” The poor king massaged his temples. “What happened to your grand plan for abolishing unfairness and bringing justice to the people?”

Now Gil Dong was genuinely concerned. He looked at Chang Hui’s pale face and tried to put it in words the exhausted king could understand.

“This kingdom changing thing – you have to realize it doesn’t take one day. I didn’t expect you to gain the throne and suddenly create utopia. Are you following me? Good. Now the important part is to make sure these nobles listen to you, even if the real sword doesn’t have an inscription. Speaking of which, we should definitely destroy it.”

The candles flickered mysteriously, and the embossed golden dragons seemed to roll their eyes in the silence.

Chang Hui raised an eyebrow.

Gil Dong grinned.

Before he left, he waved a nonchalant hand at the king, “By the way, thank Lord Seo for those mushrooms, will you? We took a sneak peek at his packages and found all sorts of goodies.”

~~~

When they found out, none of the ministers liked that, exactly. The destroying of the sword, or the fact that Gil Dong was going off to explore the big wide world now that his king was safely on the throne. They liked having a united target around. They pleaded for Chang Hui to imprison the impudent affront to their authority, but he was having none of it. Finding them all together in the back room of one of his own warehouses, plotting to force his hand with the sword only made his temper worse (not that you could tell these days, the guy was practically a walking dragon).

Lord Seo and Ryu attempted to grovel. “Your majesty, we are concerned with this Hong Gil Dong character. He is a threat to your throne!”

Chang Hui’s eyes fell on the sword in Ryu’s lap. “Yes, of course he is a threat to the throne.”

The nobles looked relieved at his seeming acquiescence, but their relief evaporated when Chang Hui’s even tone continued, “He only risked his own life to help me onto the throne you’re all talking about in the first place! Just because the man believes that everyone deserves the same opportunities, that birth does not determine everything there is in this world, you think he is a threat. Does he threaten your livelihoods, or your pride? If he does pose a danger to my country, I will of course take action, but you are creating trouble where there is none.

“If anyone attempts to use this sword to threaten me, I will see it as a betrayal of the royal house. I will treat the traitor with all appropriate measures handed down by those traditions you so cherish. Is that clear?”

The nobles bowed, astonished that such a young king was able to exert his influence and come into his authority so quickly. Lord Ryu looked unhappy, but then he remembered his own troubles dealing with Enok, and decided that he had enough stressing his heart already. When his granddaughter got something in her head, she was as stubborn as her father. Lord Ryu shook his head all the way home. The youngsters of today were getting more and more disobedient.

~~~

Enok moped. She had gotten surprisingly good at moping, and as reading and being a bored noble didn’t suit her, she had lots of time to practice at Yongmun.

It was going to drive Lady Noh mad. She didn’t mind feeding the girl all the time (though even her cookie suppliers were starting to take notice of the amounts), and she was cute when she wasn’t moping, but really. Corporate morale was dropping.

It was time to drop hints about the benefits of travel to Lord Ryu.

~~~

There was a whistling in the woods. Birds, squirrels and various other cutesy woodland animals felt the distinct urge to leap out of their winter hiding places and frolic around a random human princess.

Except, of course, your princess is capable of eating an entire roast oxen at one sitting and practices dubious personal hygiene – but that doesn’t make her any less princessy – what’s that, you say? She’s just a noble? Oh well, she’s still Someone We Like.

More importantly, she is Someone The Main Characters Like. Almost Enough to Kill Each Other Over, in fact.

But, at the moment, she is happily making her way to (the appropriately named) China, anticipating mouth-watering delights from the Land of Silk.

Whether she meets our intrepid hero or not, well. That’s up to Causality.

~~~

In a place far away from Enok and Gil Dong, Chang Hui crept away from his eunuchs. Sometimes their enthusiasm for giving him baths was just too much.

He really missed having Gil Dong around.

~~~

End part one.

Anyone want tragedies… tell me, and I will either write you one or point you in the direction of a melodrama.

Love,

Sevenses

Not sure how I feel about this… opinions?

So it was Sunday afternoon. J was at the airport on his way to another city for the week. K and I had gotten our nails done and were supposed to go shopping. But the sale we wanted to take advantage of wasn’t happening for three more hours. K decided to go home first, spend some quality time with her family, get tanned then come back and pick me up.

I had three hours. I should clean was the thought that crossed my mind. I opened the closet door, got out the cleaning supplies and poof! the house was clean.

Well, first I sat down at my computer and researched all the proper ways to clean a house so as to assist me in my future cleaning endeavors. I’ve learned new cleaning techniques that I will write a book about to assist other folks who, like me, just want a clean house with minimal effort. I will be revered by all. And I now have the cleanest house on the block.

Okay, so I looked around the house and decided what we needed was a live-in maid. I quickly looked up the resumes of several up and coming housekeepers. They all were available for an interview that moment and came over. Each demonstrated their abilities by cleaning a room in the house. I was impressed by all, but decided to hire the hottest one because, let’s face it, he’s going to be around and I like the idea of a half naked man running around my house cleaning. And BONUS – my house is clean and I didn’t have to lift a finger.

Really, I looked around the house at what needed to be done and started crying. I had a breakdown because I swear I just cleaned the house last week, and since I was the only one home between now and last week, I can’t understand why it was messy. I sobbed into the fur of the kitties, then curled up in the fetal position for a good sulk. I called my therapist and he excused me from house cleaning duties for the rest of my natural life.

Actually, what happened was I looked around the house and thought, “Eh. It’s not that dirty,” and then went to the spare bedroom to lie down with the napping kitties. I alternately watched The Last Boyscout and On Golden Pond because who wouldn’t watch those two movies at the same time? After they were over, I watched Untamed Heart until my girl came and picked me up to go shopping.

I never did clean the house. Tomorrow. I will do it tomorrow.