Sushi. I had sushi with Quek yesterday at a restaurant that shall not be named for diplomatic purposes. Anyway we got ourselves all bloated up, and also received a lasting stench of fish for the rest of the day. I tell you, that place absolutely reeks of fish. If not for the fact that you can eat as much as you want I think I would seriously consider not patronising it for both lack of comfort (the smell) and questionable freshness of food (the smell again).

After that we watched The Banquet. Now, it is supposed to be a Chinese adaptation of Hamlet, and while the plot is roughly the same (I say roughly), it simply lacks the flow, or same emotional power as the original. After so many martial arts films coming out of China I think everyone in the West thinks Chinese people must have been brilliant in ancient times at sword fighting and such, and that we all fly here and there when we fight. Transposing that style of martial arts onto Hamlet produces rather ridiculous results. For example, the "Laertes" figure rescues the "Hamlet" figure from assassination by popping out of the ground with his men, and simultaneously killing all the would-be assassins via cross-bows fired in mid air. In another scene, two soldiers fly out of water onto a bridge to halt an oncoming charge of the enemy. Those moments produced more laughs than melodrama.

Then there's the role of the characters. Of course, since Zhang Ziyi's the big star in the movie she gets the most limelight, effectively reducing the screen time of the "Hamlet" figure. This means that the one doing most of the angsty thinking is no longer Hamlet, but rather Ziyi, who plays the Empress, or the "Gertrude" figure. Gertrude is transformed from the mother of Hamlet, into his childhood sweetheart, a change I cannot understand. And, she becomes a scheming venomous female dictator reflctive of the real life Empress Dowager Cixi. Because the focus is no longer Hamlet but rather the whole tangled mass of schemes, the plot loses its intellectual and emotional driving force, since we feel no sympathy for Zhang when she dies or Hamlet when he dies. In short, the movie doesn't work.

What it did for me however, was to spur me to read Hamlet again, which I'm doing for s paper anyway and which I've never thoroughly covered. So i guess at least one good thing came out of it haha.

So, that was yesterday. Today I woke up feeling terribly sleepy since by body clock hasn't readjusted tself, and that feeling carried through for the rest of the day. Got back GP and SEA history papers today. I truly truly thank God for my grades thus far because they're better than I expected. I can say my efforts at SEA history after the debacle of BT2 really paid off. Now, we wait for the rest of the papers...