Chigaijin

Apple

2012-05-14T00:00:00-04:00

I’ve had an extraordinarily lucky life.

Since leaving Cambodia, I’ve been travelling around visiting friends and family, seeing shows…and interviewing for jobs. Probably the most important thing has been living with my immediate family (parents, brother, and dog), who moved to the east coast about when I left for Cambodia. But it’s time to get my life moving forward again.

Starting after Memorial Day, I will be joining Apple Inc. I will be working on the Clang compiler, an open-source, high-quality compiler frontend for C, Objective-C, and C++.

My interest in Clang began with its static analysis engine, and I’ve contributed to the project on and off for the past two years. A lot of you have probably heard me explain it as “a tool that helps programmers by catching stupid mistakes”, the software development equivalent of a warning when you’re about to lock your keys in the car. (If you’re a programmer, take a look at the post on my technical blog for a programmer’s explanation.)

I’m excited about going to Clang for a number of reasons (some of which I already can’t talk about), but one in particular is something I’ve been interested in for a long time: communication. Using a different programming language affects how you solve a problem, just as using a different natural language might encourage you to phrase things differently. A programming language is a user interface for software developers, and I believe we can improve that user interface both by allowing programmers to be more expressive, and by improving compilers to better understand the intent behind the code.

Most of you are probably not surprised that I’m going to Apple. I actually am, though. I grew up in Cupertino. I’ve interned there before, so even as a Mac developer it’s not a “final frontier”. I’ve been a little unhappy with the way iOS developers have been treated on a few (past) occasions. And I had a couple other very good options, which made this a very hard decision.

On the other hand, Apple is a company filled with smart people who have a lot of the same priorities that I do. And in the end, it was the project that convinced me: Apple is the place to be to work on Clang and its static analyzer, and Clang is the project for me. And hey, it’s open source, so not everything I’ll be doing will be secret.

I’m planning to live in San Francisco and commute down to Cupertino, either by Caltrain or by Apple’s corporate shuttle system. (By the way, does anyone know anybody who’s looking for a flatmate starting in June?)

My life has been extraordinarily lucky, even taking my lowest difficulty setting into account. I’m going to Clang, and it’s going to be great.

P.S. Because I’ll be working on tools for software developers, it’s still not my fault when your Mac or iPhone doesn’t work.

Movie Review: The Last Samurai

2012-04-30T00:00:00-04:00

Contrary to what you might think, the eponymous last samurai is not Tom Cruise, but the rebel leader Katsumoto—or perhaps the entire rebel army. “Samurai” is, after all, both the singular and plural form.

The Last Samurai is another one of those stories, where the protagonist representing imperial {America, Britain} is told to lead an attack on primitive but noble people, but instead ends up appreciating their way of life and eventually joining their struggle against the imperialists. I’ve heard this genre called “Movies White People Need to Stop Making”; similar examples include Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, and Avatar.

As an example of this genre, The Last Samurai does not fare too poorly (spoilers): the rebellion ends in defeat, the pretty girl does not throw herself at the protagonist (and indeed may not be in love with him at all, until the final scene), and the protagonist does not become the universally-respected leader of the “tribe”. These minor positives don’t really change the underlying hubris, though.

Besides that stigma, The Last Samurai is a fairly enjoyable action-and-character-growth movie. Yes, it’s fairly predictable, no, there’s not any great content in the “character growth” part of the movie. Pretty much the only intellectual appreciation I can get here is how the two cultures continue to be alien to each other—the unexpected differences and the unexpected similarities are probably the truest parts of the story of the protagonist’s conversion to Japan-dom. And then there’s some cool sword-fighting and such, even if there’s a bit of named-character plot armor.

The Last Samurai is historical fiction, but it is based on real rebellions in Japan in the 19th century. After centuries of closed borders, modern American ships entered Japanese waters and forced them to open up; the Meiji emperor then did have to play catch-up with modern technology, and the feudal system of samurai and daimyō was replaced by a more modern capitalist class system…since swords and arrows really cannot stand against even 19th century guns. There were actually several rebellions against the new ways, but they all ended in defeat against the superior firepower of the modern soldiers. The main difference here is that Americans were hardly the sole power in Japan at the time; Wikipedia says the armies were Prussian-trained, and the inspiration for Captain Algren, the protagonist, was a French man named Pierre Brunet.

As with any movie that has Japanese in it, I amused myself by comparing the sentences I understood with the subtitles. Most of the time the characters simply spoke too fast, but other times I found a few mildly significant differences. My brother pointed out that most of the conversations were probably written in English and then translated, and then not translated back even if that made the subtitles not match so well.

The music was unmemorable. The scenes were pretty good from a cinematographic standpoint, of course contrasting the beauty of Katsumoto’s village with 19th-century Tōkyō. And apparently the casting was very honest, using actual Japanese actors for all the Japanese characters.

(spoilers about the ending) The ending was very awkward. I understand that it’s necessary for Katsumoto’s last message to get back to the emperor, but it’s really a shame that Algren survived to do it. I can’t think of an alternative, but…the whole movie sort of hinged on Algren already being a dead man, and then he’s the only one who lives. Did he learn to live again in the village? I guess that’s what we’re supposed to think, but then we get Taka being a reward. Ugh. I was kind of hoping she’d pull an Éowyn and do her part on the battlefield, but…well, I guess that wasn’t really in samurai culture. Still, Algren should have died with Katsumoto.

I also wish Algren had been able to act as Katsumoto’s second, as cliché as it would have been. Or that someone had been his second—maybe the commander who ordered the guns to stop firing. Apart from the in-universe pain of having to slowly die from his hara-kiri, it was foreshadowed way back at the end of the first fight.

But I’m very glad they didn’t win. Only in Return of the Jedi do bows and arrows beat guns, and the real story is that the samurai lost. That is how the world works.

The movie is inconsistent about the value of human life, treating Custer’s Last Stand as a folly but ~~Thermopoli~~ Thermopylae (300) and the rebellion itself as noble. I guess this is in line with how we view things now (modulo now being ashamed of the whole campaign against Native Americans), but it doesn’t make for much of a moral. If anything, the movie is nostalgia for the samurai’s way of life, but (a) the real world doesn’t and didn’t work like that, and (b) most people today wouldn’t actually want to live like that. (Samurai hipsters?)

A final note, which I mentioned to my brother while we were watching the movie. Japan has had a noble military past, and still has some military culture (some of it quite controversial). But after visiting the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, I feel like there is a feeling that Peace really is important, that it is worth trying to avoid military conflict, that the country would be happy never going to war again. The time of the samurai is over, but so is the Meiji era that followed.

Three movie reviews in a row is not really a good thing! Neither is three posts in two months. I’m actually working on a quite long post, however, that’s a little different than most of what I’ve done before—you’re supposed to learn something from it. (We’ll see how that goes.)

I’m afraid I won’t be posting a review of the The Hunger Games movie. I saw it in theaters with my family a few weeks after it came out, despite initially not having much interest. The casting was pretty good, the cinematography had some problems, the data dumps were mostly well-handled, and the pacing sometimes felt a little funny, but what made me unable to review it properly was the deliberate ignoring of several details that the book specifically calls out as important. I didn’t think I had such an attachment to the book (it’s not great literature by any means), but the things they changed felt like they would have been fairly easy to get “right” without cost. (One of the most glaring ones for me was how every district had matching costumes.)

The other reason I couldn’t review it was because I couldn’t answer the most important question for reviews: who should see it? The target audience is teenagers, and most of them will enjoy it (hopefully stealing the Twilight fans as intended), but that doesn’t really answer the question. My family did enjoy it.

As for the Hunger Games books, I’ll controversially say that #3 was my favorite, because of the way it ended (or rather, the way it didn’t end), and leave it at that.

Movie Review: Alien

2012-03-24T00:00:00-04:00

Two movies in one week! I finally got a chance to watch Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi movie Alien. In the context of books I’ve spoken out against “classics” (okay, a blog post is not “speaking out”). So how does Alien measure up? Does it stand on its own two feet?

Well, to be honest, Alien feels like the movie equivalent of a science fiction short story. I could point to certain similar traits—minimal background and explication, “business-as-usual” atmosphere to start, and the restriction of the movie to one problem followed through from start to finish—but there’s more than that. I think anyone who’s read short stories by Asimov or Dick (or the wonderful The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol 1) will know what I mean when they see Alien.

Okay, so what does that actually mean? Do I recommend the movie? Well, actually, I’m willing to put forward the proposition that if you like spacebound sci-fi short stories (in the style of Asimov, i.e. not trying to be exciting), you will probably like Alien. If you’re not a hard-sci-fi person, though, the movie’s flaws may drag you down. For more detail, read on…

Alien is not like modern mainstream movies in that it doesn’t worry about keeping you focused. There are few shots just showing emotion, and the characters are all here for professional reasons. There is nothing exciting like an action movie, and there’s actually not a constant sense of foreboding, like in modern horror movies. There are scenes that could have been tense, but because there’s no music cue or whatever, they aren’t.

None of that is bad, just different enough that if you’re looking for an action movie or a horror movie, Alien isn’t it. If anything, I’d say Alien’s goal is to be an atmospheric movie, at least in the first half, and at that Scott does fairly well. The interiors of both ships are great, and I’ll add that I appreciate the Star-Wars-style ship hulls (sort of patchwork and bolted together, rather than Star Trek’s smooth unibody surfaces). I’m pretty sure Cloud City’s underlevels in The Empire Strikes Back, are in turn at least partly an homage to Alien.

The place where Alien really falls down is in the actions of the crew during the second half of the movie. One of the characters calls the eponymous alien “a perfect killing machine”, but we never get to see that because of how stupid everyone acts. To give just one example, Lt. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) cautions everyone to stay in pairs, and immediately after that two of the characters go off on their own, separately. Now, nothing happens to them this time, cause they’re in the safe part of the ship, but SERIOUSLY? ARE YOU KIDDING [US]‽

The science babble is mediocre…not as bad as Source Code, but still. (That’s not how “T-minus” works!) The computer systems are kind of funny to see, too – the tiny little screens people from my generation remember from Apple IIs back in elementary school. I guess they were using real computers as set pieces here. Still, it’s funny that in almost all old sci-fi movies they never thought that screens would get bigger, or show color, or anything. (Also, when Ripley is “analyzing the signal” it shows up in zeroes and ones…and spaces. There are a number of things wrong with that…)

There is one good twist in the movie that I didn’t see coming at all. Even with the minor foreshadowing, the exact nature of the reveal was still a surprise.

I will mention that Scott often cuts from one scene or perspective to another without much of an “establishing shot” beforehand or response to what happened, the two common ways for filmmakers to explain cuts to your subconscious. Because of this, my grandma did have trouble following what was going on sometimes (to the point of complaining about it), though I only had issues once or twice. It’s the sort of “rough edges” like this that makes it feel like a matter-of-fact sci-fi short story, but make the movie less accessible and more difficult at the same time.

(but this was still eclipsed for both of us by the stupidity of the crew during the second half)

So…yeah. It’s got great atmosphere. It’s got some unique alien design features that have made it into sci-fi canon. It’s not a bad movie…just one with a number of holes.

Apparently Aliens (the sequel) is better.

P.S. Perhaps my enjoyment of this as a sci-fi person is somewhat comparable to a Tarantino fan’s enjoyment of Kill Bill.

Would you like spoilers with that?

Again, not really well-organized comments here, just a bunch of things to write down.

As my brother has pointed out on multiple occasions, the entire “Battle on the Amerigo” sequence from the original StarCraft is basically a tribute to Alien. Hydralisks even have the same sort of design.
Sadly, the chest-explosion wasn’t a surprise to me, since it’s so famous in SF movie canon. But it was still well-done – not overly shocking and still fairly horrifying.
There’s one horrible cut when Ripley reconnects Ash’s power, from dummy head to actor-with-head-through-table. It wouldn’t have been so bad if there had just been an intermediate shot! Come on, Scott, I’m just an amateur and even I know how to fix this.
Even though they didn’t do the thing where the lead female’s clothes get more and more shredded (for some reason Parker got that role), they still had to show Ripley in her underwear. Small underwear, too. *sigh*
Both my grandma and I knew Ripley’s final escape was too easy, even without looking at how much time was left in the movie. We had different theories about what was going to happen, though. She was convinced it would all be a hibernation dream, since it showed them waking up from the pods in the beginning. I was pretty sure the alien would turn out to be space-proof (like some Zerg) and crawl down onto the windshield.

Movie Review: Kill Bill, Vol. 1

2012-03-21T00:00:00-04:00

Welcome back to normal posts on Chigaijin! After a two-week hiatus (really a one-month hiatus) I’m kicking things off again with a review of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. I’ve got plenty of article ideas in the pipeline, so hopefully I’ll keep up a good post rate, at least for a while.

Kill Bill (Vol. 1) was my first Tarantino movie, though I’ve seen clips from Pulp Fiction before. I didn’t know much about the movie, except that there was a lot of violence and it felt like an odd thing to be watching with my grandma. So what I got was, if you take a step back, a revenge movie. A very weird one.

As far as plot goes, that’s about it. The movie opens with a fight scene, of course, which does get everyone interested in who this crazy woman is, and why she’s taking revenge on all these people.

For those regarded as warriors, when engaged in combat the vanquishing of thine enemy can be the warrior’s only concern. Suppress all human emotion and compassion. Kill whoever stands in thy way, even if that be Lord God or Buddha himself. This truth lies at the heart of the art of combat.

We get this quote in voiceover as the main character (whose name we never learn) gets into her car and drives away after committing murder in Suburbia. And that pretty accurately describes the rest of the movie: the protagonist fairly mechanically follows each step necessary to fulfill her goals.

Unfortunately, rather than reveal the backstory in tantalizing pieces throughout the movie, we get all we’re going to get in “Chapter 2”: the investigation of the mass murder we caught a glimpse of in the prologue and in the protagonist’s flashbacks. There is one piece of intrigue added just before the credits, but the net effect of having a straightforward backstory and an emotion-suppressed protagonist was that I didn’t care about her success.

(There are plenty of things unrevealed about the primary antagonist, the eponymous “Bill”, that I assume we’d find out in the second half of the movie. Wikipedia says it was intended to be one movie to begin with anyway, but ended up too long. Again, though, I don’t know if I care enough to watch the second half.)

That’s pretty much the entire plot side of the movie, but that’s not really the point of watching it, right? How about the action side of things?

…well, actually, the best fight scene was the first one. Almost all of the protagonist’s adventures in Japan were rather uninteresting fights. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by better showy martial arts (most recently, a Khmer translation of The Protector which I watched some of on a bus ride from Phnom Penh to Kompong Cham). I couldn’t help thinking, though, that this was not only not that showy, it also wasn’t very good fighting (lots of openings and pauses and such that could get the protagonist killed, and the enemy cannon fodder troops were really bad). And seriously…as cool as sword fights are, this is why guns were invented.¹ I actually said this out loud because of how stupid it felt.

There’s an incredible amount of violence, but unlike some other movies in the last decade it’s actually not emphasized most of the time. Everything’s so matter-of-fact and practical—wait, maybe this is the “content modified for TV”. Even so, some movies are trying to shock you with the gore or mutilation or whatever, and I didn’t get that feeling in Kill Bill. Tarantino really likes clean amputations and spraying blood fountains, but other than that…

Okay, so the plot’s fairly mediocre, and the action’s fairly mediocre. As I asked on Facebook, what was I supposed to like about it?

My friend Gerald explains:

It’s an homage to all the kind of (rather crappy) movies that used to be crammed into matinees or late night tv/cable during the ’70s/’80s. When you were bored and looking for something to watch, you’d see these an’ sorta think: “wtf.. this is what people try to pass off as ‘entertainment’?” and the amusing thing is that the utter failed attempts made for their own form of entertainment.

This was during the age before infomercials took over late night television, so Kill Bill, in multiple ways, is referring to a bygone era in cinema history. Imagine if, after several more years, people eventually drop away from reality TV and the ‘genre’ thankfully dies, then 20 years later someone makes a work that is essentially the peak of evolution of ‘reality entertainment’. Kill Bill is kinda like that.

As for that, it’s rather not the best choice for someone who’s just trying to understand the entire point behind it.

…Okay. I have to admit there were some clever and/or fun points (listed at the end of this post under the section labeled “Comments With Spoilers”). My other friends Bien and Jessica back up Gerald’s POV. So what do I think?

Well, it’s perfectly okay to make movies targeted at a demographic that has prerequisite cultural knowledge. Heck, I watched all the original Star Trek movies. But like non-Trekkies (Trekkers?) coming to the original Star Trek movies, it does mean the movie’s going to lose some of its general appeal. For someone who is familiar with old action / martial arts movies, this could actually be a lot of fun. For the average movie-goer, though…

In the end, I feel like Tarantino was putting in a lot of references and tropes, and maybe that’s what’s supposed to make the movie enjoyable. But it felt like he was just pushing buttons at random, throwing in a bit of everything cause it was fun. That’s not good storytelling. That’s normally a newbie mistake on FanFiction.net.

I still want to see Pulp Fiction in full (I’ve only seen clips), and I’ve heard Reservoir Dogs is good too. But Kill Bill wasn’t fun enough or interesting enough to be worth the investment for me, and if I never see the second half I won’t really care.

Comments With Spoilers

These are random comments about things in the movie. Oh, and they have spoilers…though since you see in “Chapter 1” that O-Ren Ishii is already crossed out, you kind of know how the entire rest of the movie is going to go…

The Bride’s legs have atrophied, but her arms are fine? Pretty sure that’s not how it works. (Okay, the whole “wiggle your big toe” sequence implies neurological damage too, but even so.)
“The Origin of O-Ren” turned out to be one of my favorite chapters. At first I hit the “is this racist” block – she’s half-Japanese, so her story’s in anime? But maybe I’m just a sucker for this particular style, where the lines fluctuate a little during action.
On the other hand, the way The Bride pronounces “Ishii” really bothers me. I mean, I know the name really is “ishi-i” (probably 石井), but there’s not really a pause in there like that…
YOU CAN’T JUST TAKE A SWORD ON A PLANE.
When Ishii beheads Boss Tanaka, it actually shocked me more that she didn’t clean her katana before putting it back in the sheath. Guess the movie had already inured me to that sort of violence…
Is it just me, or was it a lot more work to take out Ishii than Green?
My Japanese is really bad now, but I tried to listen when they spoke in Japanese. I found it interesting that when The Bride says「殺したい鼠がいる」, 「ねずみ」is subtitled as “vermin”, but immediately after Hattori replies “Big rats”. I think “rat” is a better translation, but I suppose “vermin” has the connotation she was looking for.
Oh, that’s where “Woo Hoo” comes from.
I actually liked how the Bride’s name was bleeped out cause it was “interesting”, but in retrospect it feels like one of those buttons being pushed at random. When you don’t use someone’s name at all it means they’re either the everyman (-woman?) or they’re already dead / erased from the world. I guess it was the latter here, but…

…Yeah, I think that’s it. Carry on.

This actually is why the feudal systems of both Europe and Asia mostly collapsed: ranged combat > close combat. In Europe, it was specifically the rise of crossbows, which fired bolts that could puncture armor. In Japan, you get the wonderful story of closing borders to Westerners in order to keep guns out of the country. ↩

Goodbye (Achievement Unlocked)

2012-03-07T00:00:00-05:00

It was a long and wonderful five and a half months. I met so many great people, Cambodian and foreigner. Kids and adults.

Everyone’s always smiling, always friendly. There are always exceptions, of course, and even some darker stories beneath the surfaces. But I can’t help but appreciate how this attitude just makes things better in a day.

(It’s not that people in America aren’t friendly, but too often we don’t pay attention to the people right across from us at the checkout counter, right next to us at lunch, right behind us on the street.)

I’m back in the US now, and it’s weird how disconnected my life here is from my life in Cambodia. After a twelve-hour flight from Asia…“was it only just a dream?”

What will I take away from this experience? I don’t feel like it “changed my life” in the way that it does for some people. But I did gain even more respect for teachers, especially primary school teachers. I affirmed up close that some people have almost nothing, and that sometimes they’re happier than we affluent materialistic Americans. I made friends with my students, with the other teachers (and staff), with other volunteers, and with my host family. I didn’t singlehandedly change anyone’s life, but I think I did help some kids (and some teachers) learn some English…and hopefully some learning skills as well.

My original reason to go to Cambodia was because I’d never lived outside of the US in my life—heck, I’d never lived outside of the San Francisco Bay Area.¹ I’ve been a tourist plenty, in the US, in Europe, and in Asia. But now I’ve lived for five months in Phnom Penh (which…isn’t exactly so drastically different from the US the way the provinces could have been). More importantly, I now have a second family. That’s what I will take away from this experience.

*sigh*

Like Berkeley, I’ve made a list of achievements that I’ve accomplished in Cambodia. And like Berkeley, the list doesn’t really capture any of what’s made it so special. I have so many friends that I know I’ll be coming back.

Thanks, everyone. Som aoi sok sabbey.

Before I was three doesn’t count.↩