I saw The Warrior’s Way a couple of days ago. Enjoyed so much! This movie has: a cool, handsome assassin (Jang Dong-gun), a feisty gal out for revenge (Kate Bosworth), the wild west, ninjas in badass leather costumes, a circus troupe living in a broken-down town, Geoffrey Rush as the town drunk, a really cute baby, and one of my favourite things — dynamite! Oh yeah, and a plot gleefully strung together out of Western and martial arts cliches, with two sets of bad guys, the aforementioned ninjas and a gang of desperados who look like they were rejected from Mad Max 2 for looking too rough.

Here’s the trailer. This interview says that Lee initially wrote the script 11 years ago and envisioned a more contained, low budget film, and there did seem to be signs of a more low-key story getting compressed to become part of the movie’s plot. I can’t help being a little curious about the original script, but anyway, I thought the end result was a whole lot of w(h)acky fun. I could criticise this and that, but why criticise a film I smiled nearly all the way through (with a couple of squick moments)? I basically agree with this review. Oh, and The Warrior’s Way would make a great double feature with The Good, The Bad, The Weird.

Philippines spec fic guru Charles Tan gave me an opportunity to yadder over at his blog, Bibliophile Stalker.

Reading: I recently finished reading The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the memoir of Jean-Dominique Bauby, former editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, who suffered a massive stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome — a state where a person is conscious but unable to communicate due to total paralysis of the body. Bauby was left with some movement in his head and eyes, and wrote the entire book by having a helper recite the letters of the alphabet in their order of frequency in French, and blinking when the right letter was reached — meaning that he had to compose everything he had to say beforehand. The book is short and mainly describes his life after the stroke, in brief chapters — it’s a series of sessions in which facts, feelings and images are arranged with no wastage of words, but with finely tuned artistry, in such a way that a big picture of a life is created. Recommended.

In the paper today I read about Belgian locked-in syndrome sufferer Rom Houben, who was thought to be in a vegetative state for 23 years, whereas he was aware the entire time. I can’t process what that would be like — it’s literally unimaginable. How would you not go mad? Perhaps you would want to go mad, and be tortured by your ongoing full awareness and sanity. Houben is also writing a book.