This post has mentions of Vampires, and is a bit of a rant on a book-turned-movie and how unfair it all is when they do things like that. But some pretty pictures at the bottom~
So every Friday on Yomiuri TV, channel 10, (in Osaka at least), they have a western movie special at 9pm. We've had some John Trevolta, Mission Impossible, Terminator, Anaconda, a wide variety of old and new movies. Tonight was "I Am Legend" a movie make of one of my most favorite books. (It deals with vampire but thats not the only reason I love it). I've been hesitant to watch it for several reasons.
1) In the movie, the "vampires" are more like zombies that die in the sun. They have no other vampire traits.
2) I've heard terrible reviews that it was a poorly made movie that was a disgrace to the book.
3) Vampires don't scare me. Zombies terrify me. I can't sleep after watching Resident Evil, as much as I love the story line.
But J really wanted to watch, and I assumed that I would be less scared if I was sleeping next to someone rather than alone, so we sat down to dinner and watched.
Dinner tonight was Pasta Gratin with tuna, broccoli, green peppers and onion. And lots of cheese of course!~ Oh and they have this amazing bread topping that is similar to garlic butter for making garlic bread, but much less low in fat! They also have french toast topping and something called sugar toast. You simply spread the paste on top of the bread, and put it in the toaster. It comes out like garlic bread! Except in sliced toast form! But for tonight, a grocery store nearby has a fancy little bakery inside and I found a loaf of french bread for 98 yen! (Remember the money translation from the first post~) So we had real garlic bread.
Normally I would have just made my own garlic butter, but not only was the tube lower in fat...
They don't have garlic presses here. J told me he has never seen one in his life when I googled it for him...
So the movie. I was actually enjoying it. I could see both similarities and mild differences from the book up until the climax point, but it still made for a good movie. Then the climax, he goes ballistic, finds another human and then sacrifices himself so that they can escape, along with the cure that he created.
The summary of the novel is below, extracted from wikipedia~
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Legend_%28novel%29
The novel's main character is Robert Neville, apparently the sole survivor of a pandemic the symptoms of which resemble vampirism. The author details Neville's daily life in Los Angeles, as he attempts to comprehend, research, and possibly cure the disease that killed mankind, and to which he is immune. Neville's past is revealed through flashbacks, while his emotional struggle to cope with losing his humanity is dealt with by going about a daily routine.
Every day Neville prepares for nightly sieges from a vampire horde. Neville spends the daylight hours repairing his house: boarding windows, hanging garlic garlands, disposing of vampire corpses and gathering supplies. Once darkness falls, the infected come out of hiding and lay siege to Neville's house. They taunt him and attempt to entice him out — he recognizes one vampire as a former friend, Ben Cortman.
Neville comes across the seemingly uninfected woman, Ruth, abroad in the daylight and captures her. After the initial shock of seeing another human wears off, Neville becomes suspicious of Ruth and is skeptical of her story. He also notices that she is strongly against the killing of the vampires — he feels that if her story of survival was true, she would have become hardened to their fate.
From here, text is in WHITE so as not to reveal spoilers. Read the book. Its amazing the detail that comes out about his life and how he copes with being the only living human left.
(blah blah blah) Ruth agrees to let him take a blood test on her the following morning, she knocks him out just as he realizes she is infected. When he wakes up, Neville discovers a note left by Ruth. In it, she tells him that the infected have slowly been able to adapt to their disease to the point where they can spend short periods of time in sunlight and they are even attempting to rebuild society. They fear and hate Neville since he has unwittingly destroyed some of their people along with true vampires (dead bodies animated by the 'germ') during his daytime excursions and view him as a predator.
In their quest to capture him, the infected sent one of their own to Neville. Ruth warns Neville in her note that her people will eventually attempt to capture him by force, and that he should leave his house and escape while he can. Neville disregards Ruth's warning, through not wishing to leave his house, and is eventually captured by an ambush party of mercenaries used by Ruth's society to kill any true vampires they encounter.
After his capture, Neville is held in a prison, awaiting execution, and is visited by Ruth; she informs him that she is a ranking member of this new society but unlike the others she doesn't fear and hate him. She tells him she had come to his prison to try and help him escape but that is now impossible. She acknowledges the need for Neville's execution, and slips him pills, claiming they will "make it easier." Emotionally broken, Neville finally accepts his fate and tearfully asks Ruth not to let this society get too brutal and heartless. Ruth kisses him and leaves.
Neville goes to his prison window and gets a glimpse of all the infected milling about in the yard waiting for his execution. When they spot him, he sees the fear, awe and horror in their eyes and he understands to them he is a scourge, just as they were a scourge to him at the beginning of the novel. He is the only known immune human left in the world, the only survivor of the "old race".
He glimpses a future society where infection is normal and he, Neville, is a murderous biological deviant. As he turns away and swallows the pills, Neville grasps the reversal that has taken place and that just as vampires were legend in pre-infection times now he, an obsolete exemplar of old humanity, is legend in the eyes of the new race born of the infection.
As his perspective shifts Neville is able to chuckle even as he dies, his last thoughts being "[I am] a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever.
I am legend."Epic ending isn't it? Well, in the movie ending, Ruth and her son escape to some domicile in the mountains where other still living humans have gathered. Neville has also found the cure and gives it to her when she escapes, staying behind to prevent her death, and blowing both himself and the horde of vampires to bits with a hand grenade. He becomes a "legend" because of the cure. Very lame. I was enjoying it until this all happened. Then I was just disappointed. It was so cliche! And the novel is a very original piece of work!!
Another part that bothers me was the story of Neville's wife and daughter. In the novel, they both get infected. The mother is infected at the very beginning of the virus, before much was known about it and when she dies they bury her. But her corpse is reanimated by the disease and she comes back to their home where Neville is forced to kill his wife. His daughter is later infected and she is thrown in to a pit of flames to keep the bodies from re-animating. Its a part of the novel that is always in the background, as the pit of flames is still burning, even so many years after everyone else but Neville has died. In the movie, the wife and daughter escape the city on a helicopter, but another helicopter runs of course and there is a mid-air collision.
Anyways, its an OK movie as a stand alone, but I'm also irritated that they claim its a great remake. I highly recommend the book to anyone though! Even those who aren't all that interested in vampires. Its a great characterization of solitude and its possible affects on the mind.
I have a silly picture to put in here~
We were talking about muscle and weight and how I have a slow metabolism, gaining weight quickly and losing it slowly, an he has the fastest metabolism of anyone I know (I'm serious), and can barely put on weight or muscle. He was in a motorcycle accident about 2 years ago and was in the hospital for a month with a broken ribcage. Much of his muscle wasted away, and through rigorous effort and thanks to his job as an auto mechanic he's been able to gain this much muscle~ I decided to draw the classic "Mom in a heart" tattoo on his arm and he thought it was hilarious~ So I took a picture~
I also found a neat diet trick that I'm using to hopefully drop 15kg. Protein is one of the most time consuming substances for you metabolism to absorb, so if you eat protein before sleeping, your metabolism will continue running longer.
So, I bought these.
They have 8g of protein each and only 140 calories, 2g fat and 10g of sugar! So low in bad substance with lots of protein!
I've also started taking multivitamin and mineral chew tablets, iron and folic acid tablets, dietary fiber, and L-Acytel Carnitine~ I ride my bike almost everyday up a hill, to get to the train station/shopping area, and I've started mild exercising for about 10-15 minutes a day~ Hopefully I'll see some changes soon.. x.x;
And finally, sunset pictures~ I barely noticed the sun until I glanced out the window and saw it all red! It was gorgeous~
I'll only upload a few here, but if you'd like to see more you can click below~
https://picasaweb.google.com/102970583507996767325/October7th2011OsakaSunset
This is not a picture of the sunset, but can you guess what it is? I'll give
1) The time is currently just after the sunset, dusk
2) The topic DOES tie in with this post, but not about the sun
3) I want.
This is our next door neighbor. *smile*
It's a bat!! There is a whole colony of about 10-20 that live around here and come out to eat all the bugs~ I think it is either a whisker bat, which can be found in cities near water, or a Little Japanese Horseshoed Bat, also very common in Japan. They move very fast and I wish I had a faster camera so I could actually capture a picture~ But oh well~
Thats all I have for now~! I'm having cravings though recently. Tonight, because I started this post yesterday, I am making sukiyaki gyoza!
Sukiyaki is normally a nabe dish, or one-pot dish, where you add beef (or pork or chicken but beef is most common), veggies such as cabbage, onion, mushrooms, as well as tofu and then sukiyaki sauce and eat as it cooks at the table. For my gyoza, I'm going to use ground chicken, onions, enoki mushrooms, tofu and a secret way of adding the sauce. I might take pictures for a later post.
I'm off to cook!
-主婦H~
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