Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

I am such a nerd

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Darin says I should title this, “I feel so alive.” I think he thinks I spend too much time on-line.

Here we are at Live from the Blogosphere in Chinatown. Even if this event is entirely boring, it got us out of the house on a Saturday night. (God, do Darin and I need lives.)

Later: Great—they put seats outside for the overflow crowd, and no speakers so that we could hear what was being said outside. So here we are, crammed in, standing. And in some cases, holding an iBook with one hand and typing with the other. Or, kneeling and balancing an iBook on one knee and typing.

Shanghai Knights: the review

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Good movie? No. Funny? In places. Charming? Pretty much. Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan go to England for some reason or other—yadda yadda Chinese Imperial seal yadda yadda becoming the English king yadda yadda Strangers on a Train meets Laurel and Hardy yadda—and the movie manages to hit every quasi-Victorian cliché, up to and including hanging off of Big Ben.

Aidan Gillen, as the British bad guy who would be king, is the sneering genetic splicing of Jeremy Northam and a generic Baldwin brother; Donnie Yen plays the Chinese bad guy who would be emperor. They do stuff to further one another’s evil ambitions; Jackie and Owen foil them. You really don’t need to know the plot. Trust me, in a movie where the plot involves a pillow fight with whores in a Whitechapel bordello as part of a male bonding ritual, you don’t need to know the plot. Just go and enjoy the jokes.

I had a good time. Shanghai Knights is a B-movie and should be treated as such.

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The absolutely hilarious thing about the movie wasn’t the movie, it was the teenagers in the audience behind us. They clapped excitedly at all the right places (“Ooh, they got the bad guy! Yay!”), and the girls squealed when Owen Wilson and the chick kissed. No, I’m not kidding.