simont | (no subject)

Last night I broke with my usual routine to an almost unprecedented extent, by not going to the Monday Night Geek Pizza meet. This was for the excellent reason that Lucy was celebrating her birthday with a curry, and I hadn't eaten curry in ages so I did that instead. I was a bit sorry to miss pizza with the geeks nonetheless, particularly since I had an excellent geek question to start an argument about, but the lure of curry was just too strong. And a very nice curry it was too.

After that, the five of us went back to Lucy's and watched a Jackie Chan film. Or in my case watched half of one, since I noticed half way through that it was going to be quite long and I was getting tired already so I went home to sleep.

I've never quite understood Jackie Chan films. The combat sequences are so fast-movingly hilarious, and yet the in-between bits tend to be either cringeworthy or downright incomprehensible or (in extreme cases) both at once. I suppose you have to pad the films out with something, if only because full-speed Chan combat for over an hour without a break would quickly become impossible to appreciate because your brain couldn't keep up; but it's always seemed to me that you have to be one sort of person to enjoy the fights, and quite another to enjoy the in-between bits, which strikes me as an odd way to do things.

When I left, I asked the others to let me know if the second half accidentally made sense. Nobody has responded, so I can only assume it didn't :-)

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It depends on the film. Some of the films have characters that are essentially random, and I suspect it's because of Jackie Chan's brand of activity - the same things happen to him whether he's moving about or talking, only the medium is different. I know some of them have decent plot lines, some of them have what I presume are decent plot lines for a Chinese audience, and some are just a bit crap.

It kind of made sense. There was a *huge* fight in a rope facctory followed by a happy ending. I'm still wondering how Jackie Chan would do Hamlet.

Noone would die by the end.

True. It would be a comedy Hamlet. We thought the whole 'you killed my father, prepare to do die' family honour thing was appropriate. What other Shakespeare would Jackie Chan be good at?

I could see him doing quite a good Puck. Scampering isn't quite his thing, but it sounds like something he'd be able to turn his hand to easily enough...

Not enough fight scenes?

What is this "Monday Night Geek Pizza meet" of which you write?

Bunch of geeks meet outside the Regent Street Pizza Express at 6:30 on Monday evenings, eat pizza, geek vigorously about whatever happens to interest them at the time, and then typically retire to someone's house and drink coffee and/or port. Apparently it's been a longstanding tradition for somewhere in excess of ten years now, though I've only been going to it for two or three (I lose count).