You know how it goes.

It’s midnight

Time is Fleeting.
Madness, takes it’s toll. But listen closely, (not for very much longer) I’ve got to keep control.


You know how it goes.

Just got back from seeing the Luc Besson movie “Unleashed”, strarring Jet Li, Bob Hoskins and Morgan Freeman.

Wow.

the acting was great. I’ve always admired Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins. I’ve loved Mr. Freeman since he was Easy Reader in the Electric Company on PBS. He is the only reason I didn’t start a riot at the screening of the Kevin Costner debacle that was Robin Hood.

Mr. Hoskins was in Several gritty dramas before “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” I am still amazed he did that one. He's such a typical Brit actor, accomplished and beleivable. Actors who trained to act. Who knew?

I once had a multimedia project in school where I created a design document to make a presentation on the letters unearthed at Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall. The remakrable thing about these letters were the content. They were messages from Officer’s wives to one another, letters form home outlining care packages and the like. In this document, I wanted Mr. Hoskins & Mr. Gordon Sumner to narrate.

The story is thus; a man, Danny (Li) has been raised to be an attack dog by a local Glaswegian thug (Hoskins), after a Mcaguffin, Danny comes to live with a blind piano tuner and his step-daughter. There he becomes human. He encounters his old boss again, and of course he ends up confronting his former master, and learns of his past.

Standard stuff, really, but the themes are nicely handled; the scenes deftly shot & edited. Mr. Besson doesn’t revel too much in the violence to show what a beast Danny is; except to establish he’s a badass. Anyone familiar with Jet Li knows this, but still, it’s refreshing to have the story told, rather than rely on the actor’s reputation. to move it along.

There are several scenes that are superb. Where Hoskins and Li show, by turns, what animals we really are. Both good and bad. Hoskins talks to him in tones like one would a dog, first chiding, then conciliatory then stern. Li, in response adopt the shuffling gait, the downcast eyes, the beseeching eyebrows that dogs pull on you.

I believe domestication is a two-way street. humans are definitely a domesticate-able species. To quote the poet Perry Farell, “We’d make great pets.”
There are several traits an animal must have to be domesticated, if it’s missing just one, it can’t be domesticated. Take the llama and the vicuna for example, or the horse and zebra. In both instances, they are very similar cousins, genetically, but there’s one trait, that is the difference between the wild and the tamed. The llama doesn’t panic when penned, and the zebra will not accept a human as the alpha of the group.

The Book “Guns, germs and Steel” (ISBN 0-393-31755-2) describes this in depth. It’s a bit deterministic, but overall a good. book.

The premise reminded me of a recent development in DC Comics. It the Batman constellation of comics, the original Batgirl, Barbara Gordon, is crippled, and becomes ORacle, kind of major domo for an ersatz batcave the graduates from the Batman School of Crime-fighting. In a series several years ago, a young girl is raised to be a perfect fighter, where she never learned to speak, so her first language was combat. According to the comic, the language centers were used for her fighting skills, rather than speech.

But I usually don’t read Batman, or DC Comics. After all, a writer I don’t know says that there’s an editor who works there who discriminates against women writers.

Great movie. I highly recommend it.