HEAVY WEATHER 2009: MORAKOT!

Which didn’t hit Hong Kong, but clobbered the hell out of Taiwan today, dropping 2000 mm of rain and causing the worst flooding in 50 years. Three dead, 31 missing.

And then there’s the six-story hotel falling into the river that ate away the foundation.

The action starts around 30 seconds in. No translation necessary, I think.

The good news: authorities had already evacuated the place before it toppled, so no one was hurt.

Still.

Anyway, now it’s Fujian Province’s turn.

Here in HK, we’re far enough away not to get any rain, but the effect for us is dead air and broiling heat.

Hot hot heat,

This is dF

UP THE JOE

I spent some time at the cinema this weekend. And you’ll never get any sleep until you know what I saw and what I thought about it.

Up
I confess, I walked in expecting to be disappointed, as the trailer and the basic premise (old guy makes his house fly with 10,000 ballooons) didn’t look promising. Naturally, it turned out to be much better than that.

The two things I like the most about it is (1) the way it starts off unexpectedly grounded in the reality of daily life and then, once the house is airborne, completely changes into wacky cartoonish adventure, and (2) this approach kept me wondering just where all this was going to go. The bit about the talking dogs is also fun. Maybe not the best Pixar film ever, but certainly the most unusual.

GI Joe: The Rise Of Cobra
First, the disclaimer: I was never really a fan of the cartoon TV series, which came out while I was in the military. So in that sense, the movie is everything I expected it to be: loud one-dimensional America-centric gung-ho Alpha-male sanitized high-tech war-porn (and not in a good way).

It’s not all bad, mind – there’s a serviceable McGuffin storyline under all the noise, and there’s also the Rachel Nichols treadmill scene. And ... well, that’s it, really. I also enjoyed the blatant product placement from Cisco Systems, but mostly for professional reasons. Mostly, though, it’s rubbish CGI overload, although it's a great film to show to yr conservative friends the next time they complain about Hollywood's liberal elite. Sure, they're so liberal they'll spend $175 million to make peacenik hippie films like this one.

Knowing is half the battle,

This is dF