Happy New Year everyone!

I can’t believe 2010 is gone! What a year it was!!!

Last night while hubby was unwrapping the new sofas for our living room, he told me to put the second part of Kill Bill on. I said, “You really want to watch it?!”

He said, “Yeah, sure, why not. It’ll make the time pass.”

So we watched it, and I kept wondering why I could sit there, watching, even after hubby got the sofas up and running (so to speak), and left. He had long since abandoned trying to figure out what was going on in the convoluted plot.

My son came in and out of the room at times saying, “You still watching that?”

And when it was all done, and Bill was finally dead, he said something so insightful, I wish I’d thought of it! He said that Kill Bill was a video game with a story.

Bingo!

Especially the scene with the crazy 88.

But it was worth watching for one reason.

One of my favourite animated movie from a few years ago was Kung Fu Panda.

I’m not a huge fan of Jack Black, though I did love him in School of Rock, but I thought Jack did a very good job in Kung Fu Panda and I actually thought it should have won best oscar for animated flick over Wall E, which was good but not as compelling a story.

But Kung Fu Panda fell down (pardon the pun) in some places and after watching Kill Bill 2 I think I know where.

KFP didn’t connect all the dots. I had to figure them out myself and maybe it puzzled some of the viewers. Or maybe it only just puzzled me.

It’s not good to leave readers or viewers puzzled.

But Kill Bill 2 did do one thing right. It set up that silly five finger exploding heart punch properly.

There’s an old rule in scriptwriting/playwriting and that’s show it early and pay it off later (or something like that).

That is if you’re going to use a gun in act three, you have to show the audience it’s there in act one. Either have the protagonist or villain pick it up and fondle it, (if that’s in character) and the audience see that it’s there.

In Kill Bill 2 they mention this engimatic blow in one of those ridiculous stereotypical scenes with Pai Mei. So that when Uma does it on Bill, you realize what she’s doing.

Silly, but effective.

Unfortunately in Kung Fu Panda although you do see the villain, that panther creature perform his signature move, somewhat similar to the five finger whats-it move that Uma does on Bill, only this one doesn’t explode hearts (ha!) it paralyzes the person. Well the panther does it to the fabulous five: the monkey, the tiger, the crane, the praying mantis and the viper (representations of five kinds of Kung Fu by the way), and all five of them (except the crane because he has to fly them back) are paralyzed.

The raccoon looking master has to unparalyze them. Later when Panda is fighting the panther arch villain and he tries to do the move on him, for some reason it doesn’t work. And the panther can’t figure out why.

But the old tortoise who chose Kung Fu Panda as the ‘one’, he must have seen it.

Because Kung Fu Panda is fat, the layers of fat insulate him from the paralysis technique. THAT’s why it didn’t work! But unless you watch the movie a few times, like I did, you probably won’t pick that up. Somewhere one of the characters should have asked, or maybe the villain should have asked it. And because it wasn’t asked, the movie didn’t quite hit the mark. It fell just a smidge short of genius.

I also thought that whole thing about there being nothing on the scroll was lame.

Anyway, after watching Kill Bill 2, I realized where the writers might have gotten that whole paralysis strike from.

There seems to be a whole mythology being built around samurai and Kung Fu fighting.

It’s fascinating how it’s happening.

On another note, I finished the sequel for Wanting Mor. I may have just pulled off a type of coup. At least I’ve never heard of a sequel being funny when the first story was sad.

I really really hope it works!