Mongol was pretty good.  It's one of those movies where the good bits are memorable and the bad bits are forgettable.   Wonderful scenery and music.  Plenty of throat singing, and the hardest 10 year old I've ever seen on the big screen.   No falconry, but plenty of horses and camels and desert.  The story was very folklore, like it was jumbled together from various tellings that all had different agendas.  The closing credits had a heavy metal guitar over them, which made all kind of sense. 

 

The epic movies I like are all built around an impossibly macho figure who generates their own reality field.  There are two versions of it, the british imperial (Gandhi, Lawrence, Colonel Nicholson), which involves looking through people, and the chinese imperial (Nameless in Hero, Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun Fat in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Tamujin in this)  which involves more hitting.  This movie didn't quite work, because the reality field wasn't compelling: you didn't feel why people followed him, it was just sort of a given.  The hordes just sort of appeared.    (I guess the american version would be Steve McQueen / John Wayne, and entails actual swaggering) _
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12:01:04 PM, Monday 23 June 2008

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Gah.  So yesterday I tried a new recipe, and made a really delicious lamb tagine, which I proceeded to have somewhat nasty reaction to.  The current theory is that it was the chickpeas.  Felt like my throat and lungs were swelling, general digestive rebellion, fun stuff like that.  So now I've got 3 servings of good lamb stew I really shouldn't eat.   On top of that, I took a benedryl on general principles, so now I'm hung over. _
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