{"id":1215,"date":"2008-04-28T19:58:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-29T02:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2008\/04\/28\/janes-forbidden-book-kingdom\/"},"modified":"2008-04-28T19:58:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-29T02:58:00","slug":"janes-forbidden-book-kingdom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2008\/04\/28\/janes-forbidden-book-kingdom\/","title":{"rendered":"Jane&#8217;s Forbidden Book Kingdom"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over the weekend, D and I saw two movies from opposite ends of the genre spectrum:  <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">The Forbidden Kingdom<\/span> (in a theatre) and <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">The Jane Austen Book Club<\/span> (on DVD).  Both were enjoyable, for different reasons.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-style:italic;\">Kingdom<\/span> is all archetypes and broad strokes, with plot points telegraphed hours in advance, sometimes immediately upon a character&#8217;s introduction.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, since the story is based on Chinese legends<span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">*<\/span>, and myths are sometimes built upon knowing what&#8217;s coming, but it is all very silly.  Good clean family fun, though, and you know what you&#8217;re going to get within the first fifteen minutes.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-style:italic;\">Book Club<\/span>, on the other hand, is all about the specifics of its characters and the precise mechanics of their relationships.  The only story that didn&#8217;t quite ring true was Prudie&#8217;s.  I haven&#8217;t read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ISBN=0452289009\/curtiscchensfree\">the book<\/a> yet, but D says Prudie comes off as much more sympathetic on the page; in the movie, her husband doesn&#8217;t seem like such a villain, and their final reconciliation is a little bit too tidy.<\/p>\n<p>But any show which advocates Ursula LeGuin&#8217;s novels (and science fiction in general) is totally worth supporting.  I firmly believe the world would be a better place if more women read science fiction and learned <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">kung fu<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">*<\/span> <small>Aside:  When I was younger and on a serious <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">Star Wars<\/span> kick, my parents told me repeatedly (in a manner that would have made <a href=\"http:\/\/memory-alpha.org\/en\/wiki\/Pavel_Chekov#A_proud_Russian\">Pavel Chekov<\/a> proud) how the whole Jedi mythos was ripped off from centuries-old Chinese <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">Wu Xia<\/span> novels.  They were partly correct; culturally, George Lucas stole more from Japanese Samurai history, but many of the supernatural elements (&#8220;These aren&#8217;t the droids you&#8217;re looking for&#8221;) are derived from <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">Qi Gong<\/span>.  I suspect they were trying to get me in touch with my ethnic heritage or something.  Didn&#8217;t really work.  It&#8217;s tough for anything to compete with <span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">lightsabers<\/span>, you know?<\/small><\/p>\n<p>~CKL<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the weekend, D and I saw two movies from opposite ends of the genre spectrum: The Forbidden Kingdom (in a theatre) and The Jane Austen Book Club (on DVD). Both were enjoyable, for different reasons. Kingdom is all archetypes&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}