my order reached.

my order of Canteloube's Chants D'auvergne by Veronique Gens and 2 DVD's have reached. Along with them also came my new Genetics textbook. My fondness for Brody has become evident as i found myself very excited even receiving the textbook. but well, brody's a nice and funny prof. just not comfortable that he cut me out when i asked if i could go talk about genetics with him but i couldn't make it to his office hours. he said, you could make an appointment with me, but there are 400 kids you know. implying my stupidity in trying to waste his precious time in useless conversations, i guess. which i understand perfectly, just that i thought he could've been less blunt on the matter. hm.

anyways. chants d'auvergne was totally folky. frankly i didn't quite expect sth like this, after indulging myself in gens' melodie album nuit d'etoiles. well that was really fantastic faure/debussy/poulenc stuff. i guess it'll take a while before the chants "grow on" me. (quoting a guy who's fond of this phrase. eww. still reminds me of fungus. what's growing on you? fungus right?)

2 dvds. to live. cos it was banned in china, so i think, i'm not sure, i think i've never seen it in china. also bought farewell my concubine. well, i've read both books and saw the latter movie a few times. feels good to have a copy of each dvd at home but honestly the movies can never be compare to the original fiction. there's just something that only words can do. what do you think? and anyway the books are both way too long to be condensed into a movie. like to live, the story hang half-way through. maybe they wanted to cut down on the tragedy and show some warmth and hope in humanity. but that really wasn't the point of the original intent, i believe. i thought yu hua set out to see how big a man's capacity for hardship is. why, then, did the movie end when the family was still left with a lot of people. all of them were supposed to have died by the end of the story. well. yu hua's extreme. but i like the way he wrote it. and ba wang bie ji, it is still much better to see cheng die yi in my imagination. at least in that way he stayed impeccable. i'm not saying that zhang guo rong is not good at the role. well, he wasn't pretty enough. there was still this inevitably awkwardness in his acting in the operas in the movie. well. guess that couldn't have been helped and he was probably the closest you could find in the business. still. still.. the notion of imperfection bugs me. a lot.

and wonder why is the cutting and transition so unnatural in these movies. by right, since they were by zhang yimou and chen kaige, the making is supposed to be good. i don't know. weird transitions all over the place. in comparison, hero in terms of movie making is really much better than these earlier movies.

wonder too, how The Peony Pavillion is like then. maybe i should watch it too. anyone has watched it before?