Weekend happenings.

I can't exactly decide whether I should find this cool or disturbing. Don't get me wrong. I have a great deal of admiration for Mr. Whedon and what he's managed to do with his life so far, but a whole branch of academia dedicated to Buffy, of all things?

Yes, I'm sure that you could find a fair number of cultural statements to make with regards to the series, but at the end of the day, let's face it, the series is about a blonde bimbo running around the california suburbs poking creatures of the night with pointy wooden things.

But far be it from me to condemn an entire branch of academia on the basis that I don't get it.

Again, it should not be assumed from my statements that I don't believe that this series has a lot of deep, very important messages to communicate to its viewers. Although I was never as fanatical a viewer as, for example, my younger brother, or an ex-roommate of mine, I admit that the episodes I watched impressed me with the quality of their writing, and frankly, their willingness to step a little ways outside the box. He filmed an episode which had no dialogue, and an episode which was entirely in the form of a musical. Both events which, to the best of my knowledge, had never been done on television before, and both of which could have been complete train wrecks. In short, as far as I can tell, Whedon is one of the few people in television who's willing to take a chance that he may royally fuck up.

But on the other hand, I have to admit that I (perhaps arrogantly) find it difficult not to snicker when I picture a professor giving a lecture on "Buffy and the New American Buddhism," even if I really have no clue what that means.

April and I took my little brother out to see Van Helsing this weekend. It's been getting rather heavily slammed review-wise, and frankly I can't decide whether or not that's fair. I mean, if you're going there expecting Oscar-worthy performances, or a spectacular, wonderful, greatest-movie-ever-made type of film, then I guarantee that you're going to be disappointed. If, on the other hand, you go to the movie looking for entertainment of the check-your-brain-at-the-door variety, it's actually not that bad. Admittedly; there isn't much which could be mistaken for a plot, the accents are annoyingly fake, the dialogue somewhat canned, and there are a few, shall we say, liberal interpretations of the laws of physics. But I'm willing to overlook all that for a little bit of mindless escapism. I was in the mood for, and needed, some entertainment that didn't require my brain to be active. That was good, because I've been doing too much hard thinking lately. I've got a PhD to worry about, and I've been more than a little frantic. So doing something which didn't require me to think was actually kinda nice.

On a similar note, some buddies and I watched Shaolin Soccer the other night. Another superbly fun experience, especially if you've done a little Kung Fu, and are somewhat familiar with the philosophy behind it. For those of you unfamiliar with the movie, it's basically one part Bend it Like Beckham, one part Victory (an old 1981 move which starred Sylvester Stallone), One part Kill Bill, and two parts every Bruce Lee movie ever made. Again, mindless entertainment, but the scary thing is that I can actually picture scouts going to Kung Fu schools all over to recruit soccer players. In a weird, bizarre, somewhat warped kinda way, it actually makes some degree of sense. Even the not-so-good Kung Fu students can kick like a fricking horse. The really good ones can do some things which would boggle your mind. Hell, after having seen my Shi fu in action, I still can't figure out how he's physically capable of doing some of the things he does as a matter of routine. As an interesting side-note, back in my undergraduate years, one of the subjects I was considering writing my thesis on was entitled The Physics of Karate. There were a fair number of martial arts being instructed at Ubish at the time, and I thought it would be neat to analyze some of them from a physical perspective; to understand how they worked. I wanted to look at the mechanics behind these martial arts. I thought it would be a relatively easy project. I was really, really wrong. I've taken Kung Fu for almost a year now, and I still don't get the mechanics behind it. I have been, quite literally, thrown across a room by someone who, it seemed, barely even made contact with me. My Shi fu is somehow able to generate what can only be described as a huge amount of force, but having watched him do it quite possibly hundreds of times, I'm still clueless as to how.

I fear I've strayed somewhat from the original topic. Suffice it to say, I had a pretty good weekend.