talk #385

This Lighter movie goer has seen quite a few movies in the past few months. Nothing much to report. Sure, the " Iron Monkey" was fun to watch, and the entire movie is in Cantonese. Still it did not provide sufficient motivation to say anything about it.

Then I saw " Mulholland Drive" a few days ago, a mystery movie of higher order. As the curtain lifted, it was a straightforward movie based in LA. Slowly it became tough to see through. The more I did not understand what was going on, the more I wanted to see. I wanted the story to go on and on, and really not getting it way after I finished watching the entire movie. I should say I believe I got it, but who knows? This is what the director, David Lynch, intended, or I should say this what I believe DL intended.

This movie now replaces " Enemy at the gates" as the best movie of this year on my list. Without giving away the plot, I provide the following hint by citing the story of Chuang Chow...
"Chuang-Tzu once dreamed he was a butterfly. When he awoke, he no longer knew if he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man, or a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly".

I would also cite the opening poem of " Dreams of the Red Chamber"... when dream is taken as reality, reality then becomes a dream ( a very loose translation at that). Enough said about " Mulholland Drive".

You may notice that I changed " Movie Talk" to " On Movies" and now use the pen name " ual55". Why? well, quite awhile ago, Walter Tsui sent me a website and told me that I could find out just about anything about a person on this site, I tried my name and found a few things about myself without paying too much attention to it. A week a go, I came across a name that I wanted to know more about. I went the WEBSITE, and found something VERY INTERESTING ( shall we say). I
was impressed and tried my name again, and this time I was scared by the search. Every time my name appeared on an URL, it received a match. A lot of the papers "published" in the last 5 years, including some on " movie Talk" on the Lighter website, got matched. This in itself is not surprising, since I publish papers for a living.

I , then, discovered that I was on a conference organizing committee with " the People of Vietnam" in 1997. I had no recollection of ever doing that. Scary, isn't it ?

Of course, not every match was to my " credit", there is another
person at U of Texas at Austin ( professor of pharmacology) with the same initials and last name. I have known about her for long time from online search of the author index "Current Content". But this time I found her home page and saw what she looked like and knew her b-day. She is much better looking and younger than I.

Now you know why I use the pen name ual55, and changed over to " on movies".

Having said all that, I think you want to know about the URL , yes ? Please ask Walter Tsui . Ask him for it. Please don't spam me, I would NOT give that out. He is responsible for my misery of finding out something I didn't want to know. SPAM HIM instead.

Beware that going to that website may give his the feeling of ...
"when dream is taken as reality, reality then becomes a dream". Don't say I have not warned you. Do not gaze at the flip side of the " wind and moon jewelled mirror ", the question is "can you resist the temptation?" .