Currently listening to:summer mix tape
Status:VERY. TIRED. FROM. PILATES.
Disclaimer: All photos in post taken with the Sony WX100
Hi guys,
We have to talk. Mainly about 1. Where to get good salmon and 2. Snow White and the huntsmen. There will be spoilers, lest you say you were not forewarned.
On Thursday night, I went for dinner at Ikoi Japanese Restaurant, Hotel Mirama, with Andrea and Cindy after work. Really pleased about this because they were being super nice and searched for restaurants that had two of my favorite things: 1. salmon sashimi and 2. cooked salmon. On hindsight, this might have been because they know i am physically unable to resist the call (splash?) of salmon and wouldn’t have cancelled last minute..
It was only after reaching did i realize they both don’t eat salmon!!!!!!! Tis the life of the unenlightened. Still, i was really touched- even if they were a little alarmed at the rate i was going at the salmon.
First impressions upon entering the restaurant: it was a little small. We’d reserved a counter seat but ended up regaled to a tiny square table in the corner. Consequently we were very studiously ignored by all the waitresses in far too short skirts. I would talk more about this, but then this happened:
SALMON, TUNA AND SWORDFISH SASHIMI!!!!!!!!!
(Swordfish sashimi is not that common in japanese buffets, so it was a nice surprise.)
Im trying to be fair and objective so here is a picture of cindy’s face after she had some salmon sashimi. She does not like raw fish.
But
The salmon sashimi was so good. In fact, i was apparently so visibly overcome by the sashimi that the chef came out and gave us (me) two dishes not on the buffet menu- Salmon belly and Cooked paper-wrapped salmon (!!!!!)
I turned pink. I was in Salmon Heaven.
The cooked paper wrapped salmon especially was so super good- this was towards the end of our meal and i was stuffed, but still i had to finish this. SO. GOOD. Even cindy, who doesn’t eat salmon, agreed that it was really good after a nibble. A NON SALMON EATER THOUGHT THIS WAS GOOD.
Other dishes we thought were good:
– the chawamushi (spelling?)
– anything with salmon in it
– fried tofu (idk what its called in japanese)
A little point about the last one- it was so good Andrea had Six servings. WHO HAS SIX TOFUS IN ONE MEAL????? I mean, yeah its a buffet, but SIX? I’m very tactfully not mentioning my plates of salmon sashimi. The point is the six tofus andrea had and how this proves that the Ikoi fried tofu is great.
IKOI japanese restaurant
401 Havelock Road,
#01-01 Hotel Miramar,
Singapore
Tel: +65 6887 3788
They’re always packed so you definitely have to make a reservation a few days before!
Okay, so on to the next thing. I watched a late night showing of Snow White and the Huntsmen with Andrea and Cindy. I feel very strongly about this show so I’m going to talk extensively about it, okay? Bear with me. There are spoilers but thats okay because the show itself is a spoiler. Of the original fairy tale.
Charlize Theron is gorgeous and fabulous and evil and gorgeous as always. Chris Hemsworth was basically playing Thor, but in a different movie. Kristin Stewart, bless her heart, cannot act. She has one expression which she has perfected and refined over the years and she STICKS TO IT so yeah i guess its a winning formula since she is in hollywood earning millions of dollars and i’m sitting behind a computer screen whining about her (non) acting.
This is that expression.
More screenshots of the same expression
It’s like her mouth never closes.
You see what i mean? It’s like her face was photoshopped onto a million different scenes. I actually got slightly frightened when i first saw her smile.
Anyway, on to the actual movie itself.
The movie opens with a mumbly voice over (whom i suspect is chris hemsworth, but I’m not sure) explaining the beauty of snow white and how this purity and innocence renders her special and this will come in useful later in life. Not much explaining needed here because everyone knows what the story is about. Suddenly, the queen dies because of a “particularly hard winter” and the king is lured into battle with a dark army while ‘in his grief’. The movie specifically mentions this. The king is lured into war while grieving.
He defeats the army and finds Charlize, a prisoner of war, in a locked carriage and is so overcome by her beauty that he marries her the next day. Asshole. In modern day that would be equivalent to hooking up with a cute girl at your dead wife’s funeral. Obviously Charlize kills him on the wedding night because it turns out she’s actually the leader of the dark army and anyway noone cries over this because the asshole of a king totally had it coming to him.
Life is not very fair. I literally gasped when i saw her onscreen.
She mentions something about ‘knowing men like him who use women for their beauty’ while the king faceplants on her boobs during their wedding night right before she kills him. You can ignore this. It is never elaborated upon. The hollywood writers obviously were not duly concerned with loopholes and unexplained plot lines. Is there a backstory to Charlize? Such a perfect opportunity to turn her into an evil character you can’t help but sympathize with or cry over. But no, it’s left hanging.
Fast forward to sixteen or eighteen years later (how old is coming-of-age in america??) and we have Kristin looking at what is obviously the first bird to ever rest upon the windowsill of the tower she is locked in, because she follows it to the window and finds a nail conveniently sticking out of the bricks. 1. Why didn’t the queen just kill her as a child? 2. Why do hollywood writers expect us to believe she has never come across this not-very-well-concealed nail in all the years she was locked in there?? Nevermind.
Queen Charlize does her Mirror Mirror gig and realizes that she is no longer fairest in the land and must consume Kristin’s heart if she is to remain young forever. She sends her bro to retrieve Kristin from the obscure tower: he enters her tiny room and starts touching her inappropriately and the entire cinema gets visibly uncomfortable.
Yeah, you know it. Seriously, and Kristin just lay there and said things like ‘she frightens me, but you dont’ and ‘what does she want from me‘ in a low voice. This is how date rape happens, okay. And she’s supposed to be the purest girl in the kingdom? r u kidding me.
Also, Sam Spruell is the queen’s brother so what is with the hair?! Surely she can afford a proper stylist for her brother. They’re royalty, for goodness sake.
Anyway just when the onscreen inappropriate touching was getting a bit too much, she slashes out at him with the nail and runs out of the cell, slides into what looks like a sewage system, and comes out on the other end led by birds to a convenient white horse.
It was at this point that i completely lost it and started guffawing loudly.
Hollywood is so full of bullshit.
Anyway blah blah blah she runs away and makes it into the ‘dark forest’ and the camera gets blurry and pans in and out a lot so we can’t actually see much of whats going on in the forest except get the point that it’s dark, scary and alive. She faints, and then wakes up after about two minutes of screen time in which we see the chasing Sam Spruell thrashing around angrily in the mud. Oh yeah i forgot to mention- she left her horse stuck in the mud. We also never see this horse again for the rest of the movie so i think it’s safe to assume he’s gone to the stable in the clouds where all the rest of the horses go after they die. Remind me again about the compassion and kind heartedness of Snow White?
Meanwhile, Charlize screams a lot in rage at her bro and says things like YOU HAVE FAILED ME which makes her look like a queen on PMS and makes her brother really upset, because he shouts HAVE I NOT GIVEN YOU MY ALL and she replies HAVE I NOT GIVEN YOU MY ALL and both of them get really quiet onscreen and i was like whoa whoa whoa what?? This is intense. Is there some sort of dark incestous background between the two???
Of course, the writers don’t elaborate on this. The next we know, Sam has found Charlize a huntsman (Thor dude) who is somehow the best candidate to hunt down the priceless missing princess although he is obviously drunk. He flat out refuses until Charlize tells him she can bring his dead wife back to life and HE BELIEVES HER. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry but mostly i want to just ruffle his hair and go there, there.
Thor finds Kristin in about two seconds and goes all incredible hulk on everyone when he realizes that Charlize can’t actually bring back the dead, and makes off with Kristin who somehow has found the time to reapply her lipstick. Priorities. They do not have it.
Blah blah blah they basically run away from Sam’s army and leave a trail of destruction everywhere they go. They also meet up with the dwarves and this is funny because i read online that this caused a bit of a ruckus in the real world when the Little People of America got offended at the digital rendering used to make the dwarves, uh, look like dwarves. They also meet up with Kristin’s childhood friend, William, the dude from Pirates of the Caribbean, who is obviously in love with her.
He is very good looking but he cannot act either. At least, not in this show. He makes several grand speeches about how he loves her and must rescue her and ‘cannot lose her again’ which basically sounds like a cut and paste from Cheesiest Cliche Lines of the Year or something. Also, he ‘infiltrates’ Sam’s hunting party by basically shooting Sam’s bowman and glaring at the entire party and saying Do you need a bowman several times very menacingly. Its supposed to be very attractive and gung ho but i can’t help but think it’s incredibly stupid, and don’t these incredibly important hunting parties have screening tests at least?
Somewhere along the line Thor kills Sam and we see Charlize rolling around gasping on the floor back at her castle. She’s rapidly growing old and there is no explanation offered as to why she doesn’t just suck the life out of one of the young ladies in the country, as she has been doing for years.
Blah blah blah Kristin is stupid enough to eat an apple (poisoned) from her childhood sweetheart William who is actually an illusion conjured by the queen, and basically dies. Thor and the real William find her choking and dying on the snow, and after she dies William kisses her and there is this anticlimactic moment as nothing happens.
Everyone onscreen cries.
Ten minutes later, they reach the Duke’s castle and Thor gets drunk and tells the dead Kristin that he loves her and kisses her on the lips too.
I don’t know about you guys, but this made me highly uncomfortable. This was basically a movie about hot guys making out with dead girls. If you came across a dead princess, would your first instinct be to kiss her? No? The movie is PG13 so we don’t see them go any further than a kiss, but .. well.
The dudes are all necrophiliac, man.
She wakes up at Thor’s kiss (burn, william. burn) and shouts a lot which also gave me a fright because i didnt realize she could go above 40 decibels. Instigates the entire country to attack the queen’s side of the country, and then rides on white horseback a whole lot faster than it took to come. How did they get so many white horses, btw? Yet another mystery we will never know the answer to.
Dwarves infiltrate the tower gate system and get the gate up by hanging off the rope in pulley style. The queen’s army has also obviously never touched Sun tze’s art of war, because the entire black army rushes towards the innocent people in the middle of the attacking party, although they obviously don’t have any weapons. Halfway through the battle scene i notice that the castle gates are still up. This means the dwarves are still hanging there well into the battle. Didnt anyone think to let them down? No wonder people in america are upset.
Hereafter there’s a very dramatic scene where Kristin and Charlize have a show off and Charlize stands in the fire and it’s all very dramatic until Kristin stabs her and she dies and all is well with the world.
Romance plot, unresolved.
Incestous plot, unresolved.
Random facts and loopholes in the story, unresolved.
But it’s okay, you know. Because i paid 7 dollars to just gaze upon Charlize Theron’s beauty, and gaze upon it i did.
x
♥Jem