Stardust and Neil Gaiman
24.11.07 - 10:40 a.m.
Have just finished a lovely 2-week posting in Anaesthesia. I really enjoyed it! If, according to our experience, we are able to (loosely) generalise that "surgeons are flamboyant", "paediatricians are humourous and patient", "psychiatrists are understanding", "pathologists are the most cheerful" etc etc then the stereotype for anaesthetists must be "affirming and encouraging, and they speak the best English", haha.
In fact Lydia says that her anaesthesia posting in the same hospital that I did mine was the Year 4 posting she enjoyed most thoroughly too. I might consider going back to S G H anaesthesia as an MO in future heh. (Where Kamal and Zie Wei are MOs at this very moment! Hee, I keep bumping into Zie Wei.)
I guess before this posting I always thought that anaesthesia was boring, but in fact I found it quite pleasant, and closely allied to Emergency Medicine, which to date is still my favourite posting :) Also, this was the first posting I did in S G H, and I realise I really like the feel of this hospital (well, at least the OTs). And all the staff, including all the surgeons, seem very happy to be there. No wonder somebody wants to be a surgeon there after doing his Surgery posting there hehe.
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I ventured to tell one of my anaesthesia tutors on the last day about how one of our classmates had had to insert a laryngeal mask airway in NUH for another of our classmates who was undergoing surgery for a broken wrist (who went under before he could say "NOO..."). He was very amused, and said that if he ever had to undergo surgery it would be hard to avoid being anaesthetised by someone who knew him. He related some anecdotes about doctors who had to be admitted in the same hospital in which they worked and had been frightfully embarrassed (imagine having to be catheterised etc), and commented, "Most of us would rather be admitted to a different hospital... It's a problem, as you know, in the OT there's no dignity, and you don't really want the people who work with you to see you undergoing surgery... it's one of those things that you'll feel will Change Your Life Forever... you'll wake up and Things Won't Be The Same..."
Hahahaha...
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Yesterday I went to collect my race pack for the marathon next Sunday with Jeremy Mong! Both of us are running the full marathon. Wonder if we will survive, haha. The farthest we've run so far is 30 km, the recommended distance which one should have run at 1 go at least once before 42 km. But that means we'll have to go from 30 to 42 on the day itself, which is a bit mad. :D
I've noticed that whenever I go and collect race packs with my running buddy the people at the door tend to initially assume that he's the one running and I'm just a.... female companion. Think that small girls cannot run is it huh huh?
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Stardust
Went to see Stardust last Wed with a Special Person, because said person had heard from a friend that "Stardust is a show you must watch with a Special Person". :D Hmm.
My verdict: Nice fairytale with happy ending, in flavour not at all like the book, while preserving the major elements of the plot, which was Neil Gaiman's intention (he didn't want to have an exact replica of the book on screen, but to have the director create something that was its own creation). Good move. So it was humorous and whimsical and slightly Monty-Pythonesque rather than dark or goose-pimple-inducing. I think I'd have enjoyed it more if I hadn't read the book though, cos it was that kind of movie adaptation that you felt was a bit spoilered by having read the book!
I think something else that contributed to the rather COMFORTABLE feel of the show was the fact that there were so many familiar faces among the actors - Michelle Pfeiffer, Claire Danes, Robert de Niro. All old hands, they gave excellent performances, especially Robert de Niro! (And Rupert Everett and Peter O'Toole are also in the show - spot them if you can!)
Claire Danes is beautiful, and the single thing which I liked best about the show was the way she glowed when she felt happy! I thought this was a show which depicted very excellently how girls feel when they feel loved. :D My favourite shot was the one in which rays of light suddenly illuminate her hair the moment she starts dancing with Tristan on the flying ship - it was a shot which one could see coming and you're thinking, "it would look exactly like this" - and then it DOES look exactly like it should! And that is exactly how a girl would feel, if guys could only have their eyes opened to these things :) For that shot alone it would have been worth making the show.
The feel of the show is very much that of a Terry Gilliam show without Terry Gilliam (which in fact it is) - in other words, with its teeth pulled. No dark, biting tendencies. None. I don't think Gaiman fans will be disappointed though, because it's very well-done, and pretty funny. Still, it was more 'fairy story' than comedy - so, not THAT funny (though the 7 brothers were hilarious).
While we enjoyed the storybook adventure, and laughed at the visual gags (including an incident when the Special Person got one of the risqué jokes somewhat late and then proceeded to Laugh Very Loudly! haha), both of us agreed that it lacked a certain "oomph" right at the end... there had been a lot of build-up to a happy ending, but when the happy ending finally came, there was a feeling of "oh, that's it?" In the end it just remained a story and couldn't be elevated beyond the pages of the book, which is the same feeling I got with the novel.
In all other aspects it was an ideal show, though - well scripted, perfect performances from the actors - oh, and excellent use of special effects! This is the way that special effects should be used! :) Not over the top, but wisely and well. So there, Pirates of the Caribbean 3!!
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The show also got me reflecting a bit on Gaiman's oeuvre. I used to have a love-hate relationship with Neil Gaiman's books and the Sandman comics. I was attracted to his stuff early, before it became well-known, as it contained many typical poetic images which gave me thrills as I recognised them, and also because it was somewhat Chestertonian in style (the Sandman comics even featured Chesterton himself occasionally) - Gaiman tended to get his numbers (THREE witches) and his names mythologically right (in general), which was satisfying, and added his own imaginative variations, which was interesting.
However, I grew to feel that they had a very 'processed' kind of feel - he'd take many original myths and stories, slice them up and rearrange them, spice them up by dwelling on the violence and gore a bit more than necessary, and package them for the masses (not in itself a bad thing). I stopped reading them altogether after a while because I felt they tasted unhealthy, like eating too many potato chips. So I started going "off" them just as many of my friends were beginning to discover them. Now I neither love nor hate his books - I guess I'm generally just not very interested in them :P
There were two separate issues involved in me going "off" them though, the "pure" and the "purist"! As I've mentioned, I stopped reading Gaiman because I felt there was too much graphic violence (in almost all works, especially Sandman) and sexuality (only in some) for it to be a good idea for me to be reading them if I was saying that I was striving for purity; even though he was influenced by Chesterton, I got the feeling that Chesterton wouldn't be reading such books himself heh.
But... I must admit I also stopped because my snobbish internal literary purist was starting to groan at his jackdaw habits, heh. In fact, the biggest issue I had with Stardust was actually its Shakespeare rip-off line "Every lover is in his head a madman and in his heart a minstrel", which to me was like fingernails on a blackboard. It is probably ungallant and snobbish of me to find famous lines and images that are stolen and repackaged for popular consumption groanable... I guess maybe it's just that some people can stand it and others have a lower purist threshold, heh. I have nothing against retellings, because that IS the way mythology propagates itself (and look at the Narnia books, full of - nay, founded on - Classical scholarship!)... but perhaps in the end Gaiman just proved too "pop" for such subject matter for picky me. :P
Gaiman is an excellent writer, though, and if his writings prompt people to go and chase down the original sources of the imagery, so much the better. And yet those images also are only signposts of Joy in the end, and in themselves cannot satisfy the longing for all that, only increase the thirst.
I was VERY interested to find this transcript of a speech by Neil Gaiman online: Mythcon 35 Author Guest of Honour Speech, on the Mythopoeic Society webpage. He speaks of CS Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton in the way I would speak of them... And that is precisely why he's an author whose books demanded my attention. His books - and this speech - mark him out as an author of the same kind of imagination. It's as if he should figure in a later continuation of the same list of names - and yet he's not in the same category. He employs the same literary powers, invokes the same Romanticism that they did. And yet what he evokes is different - not the same "oomph" - and, of course, a lot darker. I feel he belongs to another list of names, very different although equally brilliant - J.M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Saki. For, ironically, there is a world beyond all those of his creation which is closed to him; he writes as if the signposts were the destination.
