strange_complex | Entries tagged with china

So I got a new phone. My last two have been Samsung Galaxies (first an S4, then an S7), but after I had owned each of them for about two years, the microphone on the first started to fail and the battery on the second went rapidly downhill, so that recently it hasn't been able to make it through a full day without needing a booster charge. Nonetheless, I was familiar with what Samsung had to offer, and liked in particular their high-quality built-in cameras. That meant I did look pretty hard at the S9, and especially the S9+, on which the various extras include a larger battery. But then when I actually logged into EE to check out their upgrade deals, they recommended a Huawei P20 Pro as the closest replacement for the S7 I had, so I looked into it to find out more.

The real clincher for me was the 4000 mAh battery (as compared to 3000 mAh for the Samsung Galaxy S9 or 3500mAh for the S9+). But then it also turned out to have twice as much storage capacity as the S9+, to be available in a very pretty ombre colour called Twilight shading from dark blue to rich purple, and to have one of the best cameras (or actually set of cameras) currently available in a mobile phone. So I have kissed goodbye to Samsung and made the move.

This in fact turned out to mean I was setting up the new Huawei on Thursday evening while listening to news stories about their chief financial officer being arrested for breaking US sanctions on Iran and fears about them using 5G kit they have supplied to spy on western countries. I do wish I had known about any of that before I bought the phone, but it's rather too late now - I already own it, and besides I don't think there is really any such thing as an ethical high-end smartphone.

I've been getting used to it, and setting everything up the way I want it, over the last couple of days. All my contacts and apps transferred over very smoothly via my gmail account, despite the move to different hard-ware, although a lot of the apps have taken the change as permission to switch back on all the annoying notifications which I'd spent ages hunting down and switching off on the old phone. So I had to redo a lot of that, and I'll need to put my music back on it and make a new set of lockscreen pictures for it at some point - all Dracula-related, of course, just like on the old phone, but they need to be different dimensions now.

I hadn't quite got round to the camera until this evening, but I realised when I began thinking about it that I had an excellent opportunity to test out its supposedly-excellent low light settings. Just over a month ago (in fact specifically on Halloween evening), there was a power-cut in Headingley, which hit around 7pm and last for about half an hour. It was fully dark outside by then, so I lit some candles to provide at least some light in my lounge, took a picture with my Samsung Galaxy G7 and tweeted it:

Actually, power-cuts have been a major feature of this week too, but only at work, so I didn't actually need to dig out the candles at home. But I realised that recreating the picture above, with the same conditions of five tea-lights and no other illumination, would be an excellent way to test out my new Huawei's capacities. So that's what I've just done and here is the result:

It did something quite different from the Samsung while taking the picture, announcing that it was 'processing' for about four seconds and taking what I think were actually a series of shots that allowed it to calibrate and perhaps even stitch together the best overall picture by using different lenses and settings on different parts of the scene. Anyway, whatever it did, the results clearly are in a different world from the Samsung equivalent. Much better colour balance between the candles themselves and their surroundings so that they don't just look like balls of white light, and then much better colour and detail on things like the round table-top, the carpet, the items on the mantelpiece, the chair and the cupboard behind.

Oh, and meanwhile the battery is currently sitting on 56%, whereas by this time on a similar day I would have expected my old S7 to be plugged in getting a second charge. So apart from accidentally supporting China's efforts to destabilise the west (whoops!), I guess I'm pretty happy. Definitely looking forward to seeing what else the camera can do at least.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/626138.html

Fandom can take you to some terrible places, can't it? Just as every really enthusiastic Doctor Who fan eventually ends up watching stories like The Twin Dilemma or Warriors of the Deep, knowing full well that they are terrible, because they love the series as a whole so much, it seems that sooner or later the avid Hammer Dracula fan finds themselves face to face with The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. I've gone down this road once before in my life, and had hoped to avoid ever retreading it. But now that I've got the idea in my head of trying to make the entire Hammer Dracula franchise fit together into a single coherent canon, it had to be rewatched.

ms_siobhan was kind enough to accompany me in the endeavour, fortified in her case by the prospect of some Peter Cushingy goodness. I, alas, had no such comfort, since Christopher Lee was noticeable only by his absence - but even as a massive fan of his Dracula, I have to admit that he called this one right.

The film is a co-production between Hammer and the Hong Kong-based Shaw Studio, filmed entirely on location in Hong Kong, which attempts to marry up the '70s kung-fu craze with the successful Dracula franchise for Much Box Office Win. Apparently (according to this book about Peter Cushing from which

ms_siobhan emailed me some relevant details), Shaw insisted on the Dracula character appearing within the film, even though Christopher Lee has refused to do it, as they believed it would pull in the audiences. I guess Hammer weren't so convinced, as Dracula isn't actually mentioned in the UK release title (The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires), but he was in some of the foreign release titles (e.g. the USA, Singapore).

In my view, the Hungarian title, Van Helsing és a 7 aranyvámpír, is actually what the film should have been called everywhere (with appropriate translation, obviously), because essentially that's what it is - a Van Helsing adventure which takes our man to China, rather than any kind of Dracula film. I found myself opining in a comment on my Brides of Dracula review that although personally I'm glad that Hammer (mainly) used Dracula as the thread to link their sequels together after the first film, as far as story potential goes it would have been equally valid to do the same with Van Helsing. That's essentially what Brides of Dracula does, in spite of its title, and it's also what The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires does, in spite of including a character called Count Dracula.

ms_siobhan's book also reports that a further film entitled Kali, Devil Bride of Dracula was planned for after Legend, and presumably this would have been much the same, but this time taking Van Helsing to India. Indeed, Google informed me that Hammer got as far as mocking up promotional posters for this film, and Peter Cushing is certainly on them.

( Bodged-on Dracula book-ends )

( An actually quite decent Van-Helsing-goes-to-China story in the middle )

( But with too much chop-socky action, poor treatment of the Chinese characters and even worse treatment of the women )

( And some nods to The Seven Samurai (probably), Dracula 1931 and Nosferatu 1922 )

OK then - so I'm properly done with watching and reviewing every possible entry in the Hammer Dracula franchise. Next to ramp up the geekiness yet another notch while I rake over their in-story canon and continuity in immense and obsessive detail.... *rubs hands with anticipation*

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

With Sarah Jane covered, I'm now taking two parallel approaches to my Who viewing: returning to the early days to watch William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton's stories sequentially, while also joining Lovefilm and sticking all DVDs released to date for the Third, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors on my request list (well, except for Seven's final story, Survival, that is - I feel that particular one actually does need to be watched last).

When I said 'sequentially' for One and Two, what I'd originally really meant was 'sequentially but omitting those stories that are more than fifty percent missing'. Having watched Hartnell's first three stories back in January, then, that meant I was scheduled to sail right on past the next story, Marco Polo, and pick up at The Keys of Marinus instead. But then

gair pointed me towards

altariel, who had listened to the sound-track with linking narration, and she was so enthusiastic about it, actually ranking Marco Polo as the strongest story in the first season, that I decided to give it a try after all.

( First Doctor: Marco Polo )

I'm definitely glad

altariel stopped me from missing this one, then, and plan to continue with audio and / or still reconstructions when I get to other stories for which the original footage has been lost. I do reserve the right to rethink this policy when I get to seasons 3-5, though, where only four stories survive entirely complete out of a total of 26. That could get kinda tedious - at least unless tempered pretty heavily with complete stories from later eras. We'll see.

IMDb page here. Thanks to

rosamicula for helping guide me towards it. Watched at home on a video borrowed from the Edward Boyle library.

After finally securing a tape of it that worked from the library on Thursday, I watched Ladri di Biciclette in the afternoon, in preparation for my Italian exam. I'd seen a Chinese film inspired by it, Beijing Bicycle (2001), a few years ago with

mr_flay, so I already knew the basic set-up. In the Chinese version, a boy from the country comes to Beijing to get work, secures a delivery job which requires him to have a bicycle, gets one as an advance on his salary, but then has it stolen. He can't do the job without it, and it's already become a great symbol of his upward aspirations, so he spends the rest of the film hunting it down through Beijing, and becoming more and more obsessed and unhinged as he does. In the end, it's not about the bike at all, but his frustrated ambitions and sense of being trapped in a hopelessly unfair socio-economic dead-end, as well as a way of portraying the social make-up of the city as a whole. But although the boy's difficult position and the unfairness of having his bicycle stolen make you feel sympathy for him initially, by the end of the film he has all but completely alienated the viewer through his obsession and his own willingness to wreak violent revenge on the people he views as responsible for his plight.

It turns out that the Chinese version is pretty faithful to the Italian original in general outline, but that there are some significant differences. Most importantly, the Italian main character, Ricci (a deliberately ironic play on ricchi (riches)?), isn't a teenage boy - he's one of late 1940s Rome's great mass of unemployed adults. This is partly just a reflection of the different cultural context - each is a plausible character for the situation in their respective times and places. But it also makes for quite a different tone of film. Most of the Chinese boy's actions can be viewed as driven by fiery teenage emotions, and this makes them fairly easy to dismiss as simply immature. But Ricci's increasingly questionable behaviour appears much more serious, coming as it does from a grown man - and especially a grown man with his young (but frighteningly old for his years) son following him around, witnessing his father's disintegration.

We watch Ricci gradually progressing through a serious of increasingly questionable actions - harassing an elderly man in church, completely neglecting his son, rashly spending money his family can ill afford to try to make it up to him, starting fights in the street, and finally trying to steal a bicycle himself. And far more so than in the Chinese equivalent, we can understand the apparent logic in each step he takes, even as we recognise that it is hopeless, foolish and driven by desperation. Yes, we lose sympathy for him as he loses his grip on where the line between right and wrong lies - but never quite as entirely as in the Chinese film. We understand, even if we don't condone. And perhaps this is most of all because the son is there with him - to remind us of just how much is at stake for this man, who cannot support his family without this bicycle.

I can't remember how Beijing Bicycle ends, and can't find out from online reviews, either. But I think Ladri di Biciclette is just slightly less bleak in its denouement. Ricci is caught in the act of becoming a bicycle thief himself, and surrounded and slapped by a knot of concerned citizens (who of course had not been there when the same thing happened to him). But it is at this point that he gets his first break of the film. The owner, seeing Ricci's son looking on, and recognising his desperate circumstances, decides not to press charges and lets him walk away. He's still lost his bicycle, his job, his economic future and his respect in his son's eyes. But his problems have not been compounded further, and he has the chance at least to rebuild his life and his relationship with his son. He has also learnt through example of the possibility of compassion - something he had not been able to demonstrate himself earlier, as he continued to seek revenge even when all hope of recovering his bicycle had clearly been lost. It's a very humane ending, really, and also has the important effect of putting Ricci's situation back under a wider social gaze: allowing us to step out of his blinkered obsession and reminding us that he is just one of many people trapped in a completely desperate situation.

As a result, it feels more powerful than the Chinese remake did. We've watched a man being broken by a combination of his circumstances and his own warped sense of justice, and we haven't been able to write off his behaviour as hormonal sounding off. Instead, he's remained entirely human in our eyes - and we know that Rome is full of people going through much the same trials as he has. Just like Roma, Città Aperta it comes across as a very honest example of Italian self-examination - and makes me feel all the more in love, always and ever, with Rome. What a relief that, by 1962, De Sica felt able to make films like Ieri, Oggi, Domani - which I don't think is as good, but is certainly testament to a much happier Italy.