Paper Fruit

I have super-tight Achilles tendons and calf muscles. Basically this means my knees won’t move past my toes if I try to drop into a squat without assistance. (On a Smith machine or with TRX bands I can get into a deep squat, but only if I distribute my weight in an unusual fashion.) In the past, this has never been a big problem for me, because I can run, hike, lift weights, whatever, I just tend to be up on my toes a lot when active. Even in yoga it’s never mattered so very much—in down-dog, my heels are off the ground, but so what. It’s not pretty, but I’ve never been graceful so no surprises there.

Unfortunately for me, my current athletic endeavors focus on the ankle and calf quite a bit. Squatting is important, as is keeping my heels planted on the ground at all times. I figured over time my ankles and calves would loosen naturally through practice, but this hasn’t proven to be the case. Thus: Project Increase Ankle/Calf Flexibility. I know this isn’t the most fascinating blog topic, but it’s taken me a while to assemble a good routine to treat this issue, and only from consulting several sources including physical and massage therapists. So yeah, I figured I’d consolidate what I’ve learned here in case anyone (like me) googles ankle/calf flexibility and finds the same old stuff (stuff that hasn’t been particularly effective for me).

This is now what my daily routine looks like:

In the morning before getting up for the first time, I sit on the edge of the bed and do 20 ankle circles in both directions, then 20 repetitions of pointing my toes and then flexing my feet. Then I trace the alphabet with my toes. This warms up my ankles nicely.

Later in the day, after I’ve walked around/warmed up a bit, I do two calf stretches: this one, and then this bent-knee calf stretch. I hold both for at least a minute. Then I do a few sun salutations, focusing on downward dog. I “walk the dog” and do one-legged down-dog, focusing on stretching my weight-bearing heel downward toward the mat. Then I squeeze one ankle between the big and second toes of the other foot, and try to physically use my non-weight-bearing foot to drag down my weight-bearing ankle. I think that makes sense, how I’ve typed it.

Next I face a wall, placing my toes a few inches from the baseboard. I try to then touch my knee to the wall, slowly pulsing back and forth. I do this 10 times per leg, holding the last one (wherever I’m at that particular day) for a minute.

Because sometimes tightness in the calf can lead to shin pain, I then walk around on my heels with my toes as up in the air as I can manage to balance all the calf stretching. Then I round out the routine with some super-skaters, to strengthen the muscles around the ankle and calf, and work on my balance. (The demo starts at 0:50, there’s an annoying long intro.)

At night, I repeat the circles, flexing/pointing, and alphabet routine. Then I ice my ankles.

That’s it. It doesn’t take too long, and my ankles definitely feel stretched at the end of the day, but not overly so. I feel like I’ve made some slight gains already, and hope to make more steady progress. I’ve also followed up on the recommendation of sleeping in a night splint (yesterday I finally ordered one). It’s super-sexy bedwear, as you can see. The purpose of this is to keep my foot in a neutral position for the time I’m sleeping. (My ankles/calves are so tight that when sleeping my toes point forward like a ballerina’s.) Given the price I just got one, and am going to alternate feet every night. Typically these are used to treat plantar fasciitis but now a physical and massage therapist have independently told me they’ll help my ankles, so here’s hoping.

Anyways, if you’ve had this problem, and feel like sharing stuff that’s worked for you, that would be awesome! I’m amenable to adding in more stuff.

I love the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. I had an amazing time last year meeting people and watching a ton of movies. This year I had a different sort of amazing time hanging out in the immaculate weather, much of the time on Andrew Fuller’s porch, meeting a few new friends, and doing stuff around Portland. I hardly saw any films at all—just Dunderland, and I’d say 25% of Prince of Darkness, which despite having Victor Wong and Dennis Dun, was so very boring I snoozed through it. And startled awake at one point, spilling an entire cup of water over Nick Mamatas. He was very kind about it, though.

Portland is my very favorite city, and this trip I took advantage of being there. I got some great food, and many great drinks. Eh, at least I’m a giddy drunk! With … forgiving friends.

Picture time! I actually remembered to take some.

First day: Hanging out with Nick, Camille Alexa, and Andrew, hanging out at The Moon and Sixpence (a rockin’ British pub) after the VIP reception. I got to try Deschutes’ The Abyss on tap (pictured!), a beer I wanted to try last year but never got a chance. I got the 2012; Andrew the 2011. They weren’t much different, but I think the 2012 was a little more coffee-tasting.

I like, needed doughnuts the next morning, so I took the Max into town and got some Voodoos at Voodoo Too. I think this is the maple stick I’m holding up so you can see my gross bite. Also you can see their ridiculous Froot Loops doughnut, the classic Voodoo, a Oreo-covered one (BREAKFAST!), and one covered in Chik-o-Stix. Voodoo Doughnuts are so good, the fact they do both raised and cake-style fucking rocks. I didn’t make it through them all, but I brought some home, where they were promptly devoured by my family. They stayed amazingly fresh!

The second day Wendy Wagner joined our little posse, and we saw a reading and then attended the Bizarro panel. Oh, and Nick lifted Scott Nicolay, as you can see. Later we went out for pizza at Sizzle Pie, where we met Barry Graham, he of The Big Click fame and extreme niceness. At first he thought I was Raechel, which goes to prove that people think we are the same person even over the internet.

We dipped through Powell’s to get to a cocktail place Camille likes for “dessert martinis,” and en route I was convinced to get over myself and sign my books. By the time I went back to buy a few things on Monday (Bruce Lee’s Chinese Gung Fu: The Philosophical Art of Self-Denfense, which is also turning out to be so good, though obviously in a different kind of way), they’d turned my book out! Very exciting stuff, I tell you what.

the first of many beers, at the VIP event (with Cameron Pierce and Ross Lockhart)

That second night I fully planned to see, like, something, but the theatres were the temperature of the inside of the sun and packed to the gills. Innsmouth joke! Hilarious. So I dipped out, went to the Moon, and later went to Tony Starlight’s, where I got to hang out with Orrin Grey and Amanda Downum, as well as Miss Wendy, and others.

The final morning I went to brunch, which is apparently a big Portland thing to do, then did my reading with Nick and Camille. We all read from Fungi, so I got to do my Tubby voice. I only cracked up a few times, all after the, I dunno, ionization in the audience changed when they realized it was a story about gross-ass talking cats. I also watched the panel on writing supernatural fiction. Later we went for dinner/cocktails at a vegan bar (!!) called Sweet Hereafter, where I had a boss Bahn Mi and a drink called “The Mature Sour” which I figure I’ll adopt as a nickname. Then we went to another place fore more cocktails and food for those who did not care to eat at Sweet Hereafter (which, btw—the Bahn Mi was 100% totally delicious, but the Buffalo soy curls sammich is the way to go!), and by the time we got back we’d missed everything showing and had to do more hanging out and having fun instead. OH WELL!

Monday morning I felt a little sad, because HPLFF is the only con I get a little sad at the end of, but I made do with having another awesome day. I went to Powell’s, as I mentioned, and grabbed lunch with Cameron Pierce at DC Vegetarian, on the advice of David Agranoff. Then we got a beer and I hopped on the Max to head to the airport. It was a little traumatizing … the Max wasn’t running across the river due to some technical concerns, and while that morning the Tri-Met people had thought it would be done by afternoon, that turned out not to be the case. Thus I cut it very close indeed, getting to my flight, which anyone who knows me knows is like, my number one source of travel anxiety. But, all’s well and whatever.

I had such a good time. People I saw but briefly, and wish I’d seen more: Nick Gucker, Joe Pulver, Mike Davis, Lena and Mike Griffin, the rest of the Bizarros, Wilum Pugmire, Ross Lockhart, and I dunno, everyone else, including the people I saw the most of. At HPLFF pretty much everyone is nice, and clean, and personable, and super-stoked about Lovecraftiana. I always get writerly ideas there, too: Something about Portland, and the festival, and everyone just … recharges my batteries. But today I’m catching up on life stuff, like laundry and whatever, and hanging out in my fucking sweet new Miskatonic University hoodie. OH YEAH:

Bye, Portland. See you again, as soon as I possibly can!

Refrigerator pickling! I’m super-into it these days. I’ve been eating a lot more veggies this way, as they’re already prepped and ready in my fridge. I’ve been a little busier than normal, which means I get tempted to give up nutrition for convenience. But my mom’s been on a healthy eating kick and I’ve been inspired to make sure I don’t fall into unhealthy habits just because I’m strapped for time.

Here’s what I made yesterday. From left to right, there’s do chua (pickled carrots and daikons, like you’d get on a banh mi), dubujangajji (pickled tofu and onions), and mediterranean pickled beets and turnips. It all took about two hours, including cleanup. And now I have plenty of fresh veggies for the week, plus a weeknight meal (the dubujangajji can be thrown over noodles with some of the kimchi I have fermenting in my fridge. But kimchi is its own post!).

Not that this is news to those who are always super-domestic/into heritage kinds of activities, but I have discovered that it is kind of awesome spending just a few bucks on whatever’s cheap at the grocery store and ensuring it doesn’t rot in my fridge if I get lazy some night during the week. Vinegar, salt, and sugar are all cheap, and Ball jars are a one-time purchase (the two shown cost me not four bucks). So anyways, I figured I’d share because these pickles have all turned out awesome. Frankly, I’m not all that into cucumber/dill pickles, but a pickled daikon, or green bean, or cauliflower, that’s good stuff right there. Plus yeah, if cauliflower is cheap, but I don’t feel like cauliflower that week, I can preserve it so that it’s around even after the price has gone up. Pretty tight! Who knew? Except everyone who already does this, I guess.

I need to do a kimchi post because I found THE RECIPE, but that’s fermenting, so maybe next week.

This weekend, I should mention, I’ll be at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, in Portland. Here’s the schedule! The only thing I’m doing, I think, is a reading on Sunday (“Reading 4″) and otherwise I’ll be trotting around to the various films (stoked about Night Breed and Beyond Re-Animator), hanging out, and going around eating myself sick. Should be a good time, and plenty of cool people are attending/participating! If you’re in the area, you should come.

Eden Foods makes that soymilk you see everywhere, the one with the pastoral landscape on it:

(Credit: Photo treatment by Salon)

They also make a ton of other natural foods products, like beans and oil and vinegar and flour and cereal and all kinds of shit. Anyways, they are suing the Obama administration because they don’t want to cover birth control for their employees.

Fuck them. Fuck that shit!

Here’s the Salon.com article where I initially found out about Eden Foods’ conservative agenda. It’s awful:

Eden Foods … says in its filing that the company believes of birth control that “these procedures almost always involve immoral and unnatural practices.” The complaint also says that “Plaintiffs believe that Plan B and ‘ella’ can cause the death of the embryo, which is a person.” (Studies show that neither Plan B nor Ella interfere with fertilization, which is the Catholic definition of the beginning of life, if not the medical one. In other words, not the death of an embryo. Also, at that stage, it’s a zygote, not an embryo — let alone a “person.”) The filing also said that “Plaintiff Eden Foods’ products, methods, and accomplishments are described by critics as: tasteful, nutritious, wholesome, principled, unrivaled, nurturing, pure.”

As if the above wasn’t awful enough, Eden Foods’ CEO is just so goddamn enthusiastic about their taking a wholesome, principled, nurturing stand against women’s health that he called Salon to respond to their article! And comes off as a fundamentalist asshole!

I floated by him the fact that contraceptive coverage is cheaper to pay for than, say, maternity coverage.

Potter replied, “One’s got a little more warmth and fuzziness to it than the other, for crying out loud.”

For crying out loud!

…he opposes “using abortion as birth control, definitely.” But the mandate doesn’t cover abortion, I reminded him, only contraception, and emergency contraception is not abortion.

“It’s a morass,” Potter said. “I’m not an expert in anything. I’m not the pope. I’m in the food business. I’m qualified to have opinions about that and not issues that are purely women’s issues. I am qualified to have an opinion about what health insurance I pay for.”

Morass indeed. Read the whole thing here.

So, yeah, fuck them! Don’t buy their shit, and even more importantly, write them a letter or go say something on their FB page or something.

Obviously lots of natural foods companies are owned by parent corporations that suck, or are shitty in some way, but when they sue to make this country even more goddamn backwards, and then come right out and enthuse about their fundamentalist, religious, conservative ideologies, well. As I said: Fuck them. 

As I snoozed in bed this morning I heard my phone beeping at me, but I ignored it because I’ve had an internet phone for four months now so I have learned to disregard any kind of sound it makes before 8 AM. Eventually, however, the ruckus became so serious that I got up to see what the heck everybody was push-notifying me of. It was important! Go figure. Thus, Lessons were Learned about always keeping my internet phone right by my bed forever and ever and ever because (inhale!):

The Guardian! (I know, what?) One of their columnists, a gentleman by the name of Mr. Damian Walter, held a contest of sorts, the point of which was to find out if indie authors/publishers had, amongst their numbers, “[a] book to rival the magnitude and sheer storytelling bravado of George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones.”

Cool! Well, what happened?!

 ”The brutal truth is that nothing I saw came close.”

Honestly … no surprises there. I have recently gotten in to A Song of Ice and Fire, and it’s the best thing ever. Who knew, except for everybody except me? Since 1996? Anyways, the good news is that Mr. Walters went through 800 or so indie books and thought mine (mine!) was pretty good! Maybe more than pretty good, if I’m honest:

“My favourite novel among these five, however, is A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer. Imagine a history of 19th-century literature where the eldritch weirdness of Poe and Lovecraft had infected the mainstream drawing-room novels of the era … Molly Tanzer is a tremendously clever writer, with a remarkable knack for fusing the grotesque and the comedic. A Pretty Mouth manages the thing that becomes ever harder as the novel grows older. It does something new.”

Uh? Yay! What? OMG!

So, thank you to Damien and congrats to everyone else on the list, you can read the whole thing at the link above. And seriously? I am still kind of in awe. (My face! In The Guardian! And for a great reason!) I’d gibber some more about how awesome this all is, but I gotta go do stuff to my most recent batch of kimchi. Writerly life is glamorous, what can I say?

I’ve been slack on blogging, so I have a few A Pretty Mouth-related things to note here!

First: Tomorrow (2/15) begins a two-week Goodreads discussion about A Pretty Mouth, hosted by The Next Best Book Blog, those kind folks who liked my book and for whom I concocted the Infernal! cocktail. They hosted a giveaway about a month ago, and the participants have (allegedly) been reading my book and coming up with questions for me about the text. You, dear reader, may also participate by signing up for the group and asking your own questions. I can only imagine.

Second: Just look at this crazy thing, courtesy Sam McCanna at Scurvy Ink:

Yes, that is a t-shirt of my book cover! Holy moly. I haven’t seen one in the flesh (cotton jersey?) yet but I’m sure they are going to be awesome. Go buy one and simultaneously support an independent shirt-maker and also rep my book!

Third, and finally: The Arkham Digest, a fine site indeed for those into horror, weird, and interesting media, was kind enough to review A Pretty Mouth, glowingly, and then interview me! The questions were very fun to answer. So, go check it out, and check out the whole site, too. Justin reviews super-interesting books and video games and movies and all that stuff, so it’s worthwhile to put it into your RSS feed.

All right all right. Enough! I must flee. Happy Year of the Snake to you all/Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Denver/Boulder/Colorado Springs/Littleton people! (And others, though less relevantly to this post.) It’s Chinese New Year this weekend, and if you’d like to ring in the Year of the Snake by watching some traditional Chinese lion dance, you’ll have plenty of opportunities. Many different organizations are hosting performances, but Shaolin Hung Mei Kung Fu will be will be lion dancing and doing kung fu demonstrations at the following locations/times:

Friday, Feb 8th: Boulder Restaurants

China Gourmet: 6:00 PM

Lee Yuan: 6:00 PM

Golden Lotus: 6:30-6:45 PM

Spice China: 7:30 PM

Saturday, Feb 9th: Colorado Springs/Denver

Chinese Cultural Institute CNY at the Colorado Springs City Auditorium: 11:00 AM

Denver Chinese School CNY, Paramount Theater, Denver: 2:00 PM

Chinese Student and Scholar Association CNY at the Glen Miller Ballroom, CU, Boulder: 6:30 PM

Sunday, Feb 10th: Denver/Littleton

Empress Seafood Restaurant, Denver: 11:00 AM

Far East Shopping Center, Denver: 12:00 PM

Shoppes at Columbine Valley, Littleton: 3:00 PM

Red Coral Restaurant, Denver: 5:30 PM

For a full listing of Chinese New Year events, check out our calendar! There are performances all throughout February.

Yesterday I saw a bunch of vegans I know online sharing this article, “The 19 Most Annoying Things About Being Vegan,” and it was pretty good for a laugh. It’s sadly true that most vegans I know (including myself) have experienced most it not all of the items on that list, including dealing with the hand-wringing of people who become suddenly concerned with our protein intake, or obviously take some sort of bizarre pleasure in playing “gotcha” by pointing out that abstaining from cheese and meat is (allegedly!) pointless because there’s pig fat in tires and animal by-products in plywood. It’s also an amusingly self-aware article about veganism, for friggin once, since instead of taking the but why do you refuse to think about the screaming of murdered baby pigs and cows you omni asshole tone so rampant in internet articles about veganism, even the “funny” ones, it instead points out that yeah, some of us do miss the taste of cheese sometimes, and yeah, we do laugh at jokes aimed at vegans because we do have a sense of humor, and yeah, while it’s frustrating to be fed plate after plate of grilled veggies at catered events, it’s super-nice of people to ensure there’s a vegan option.

But another reason that Buzzfeed piece made me laugh so much was that last week I saw at least (at least!) fifteen thousand people posting and reposting a Guardian article called, absurdly, “Can vegans stomach the unpalatable truth about quinoa?” Upon seeing it for the first of far-too-many times, I immediately felt my expression becoming frown-cat face because I’ve been vegan for nearly 7 years at this point and I can smell a finger-pointing, smug-but-misinformed locavore article a million miles away. It’s a talent, what can I say?

Anyways, the article starts out with a description of quinoa, a grain-like seed native to South America, and talks about how it’s become increasingly globally popular in recent years because it’s good for you and tastes pretty okay too. It’s also a “credibly nutritious substitute for meat” (reputable nutrition journalists without an obvious bias against vegans would simply call quinoa a “good source of protein”, btw).

It then talks about how the global appetite for quinoa has begun to affect Peru and Bolivia negatively, alleging that farmers in those areas no longer can afford their staple food and are eating less healthy, more processed alternatives. If accurate, this is obviously extremely distressing. I say “if accurate,” as it turns out that NPR ran a similar article in November of last year, but there has been some question about the truth behind some of their claims, which are similar to the concerns raised in the Guardian article. I don’t know for sure which side of the story is true; both sides raise interesting issues. Regardless, this concern for Bolivian and Peruvian farmers is certainly something I’ll be considering when making future food purchases.

Yet, setting aside the core of the article for a moment, I think it’s fascinating that the finger in the Guardian article is pointed directly at vegans. Vegans, it basically says, can you handle the truth that you’re also morally suspect when it comes to making ethical dietary choices?

Yes?

Duh?

Protip: That’s exactly why many of us vegans are vegan in the first place! (Shockingly enough, it’s not just that we hate fun and bacon and also really enjoy being a giant pain in the ass to everyone when traveling or deciding where to go to dinner!) Thus, the finger-pointing (and finger-waggling) the author utilizes to make the various points she’s trying to make beyond the whole quinoa thing that defined the first part of her exposé is kind of … stupid. Like this, for example:

Soya, a foodstuff beloved of the vegan lobby as an alternative to dairy products, is another problematic import, one that drives environmental destruction. Embarrassingly, for those who portray [soy] as a progressive alternative to planet-destroying meat, soya production is now one of the two main causes of deforestation in South America, along with cattle ranching, where vast expanses of forest and grassland have been felled to make way for huge plantations.

What’s actually embarrassing is that even the Guardian, who ran that dumbass article, can’t even stand behind the author’s claims—they have, since publishing the piece, added a footnote to the above quote I cited clarifying that, in their own words, “while soya is found in a variety of health products, the majority of production – 97% according to the UN report of 2006 – is used for animal feed.” Yep, it’s not actually those pesky vegans ruthlessly destroying the rain forest with our appetite for fake bacon bits and plant milks! Because—again, another protip—as vegans, we eat neither the animals fed with soy beans nor do we consume the products of animals fed with soy beans. (We just eat the soy beans. Yum!)

Additionally, the notion that such a small group of people out there—vegans are, I think, less than 2% of the population in the U.S.—could be the ones responsible for this problem is deeply silly. The bias in the Guardian article is so absurd, so obvious, so pointlessly, misguidedly accusatory, that it’s pretty cringe-worthy that this was presented not as an op-ed but as environmental/world news. Because, despite our efforts to vote with our dollars, vegans simply don’t have enough economic clout, enough large-scale buying power, to impact such an enormous change on the world. (The reason there’s ten jillion kinds of plant milk at the natural food store isn’t the vegan clientele—it’s that vegetarians and omnivores also like hemp milk.) While it’s true that I bought one bag of Bob’s Red Mill Quinoa a year and a half ago, and I have genuinely no idea if it’s South American or not … I’m still using it. Compared to, say, Whole Foods’ (omnivorous) salad bar, or the Boulder yuppievore restaurants around here who serve it alongside elk steaks and farm-to-table chicken and whatever else, I’m statistically insignificant. Not that my insignificance excuses my actions—like I said, I’ll be considering this issue whenever I think about buying quinoa in the future—but as a vegan, I simply don’t matter as much as the vastly larger population of rich omnivores who control the market for “health foods.”

Why am I bothering to point out this article’s bias against vegans? Surely the issue as regards farmers in South America is more important? Yes, definitely! And because of that, I feel that it’s important to note that the author’s ridiculous sputtering over those people who make different ethics-based dietary choices than she does is so extreme that she herself gets away from her point, wasting valuable space and time ranting about those troublesome vegans instead of doing actually good investigative journalism on what seems like a major issue. Instead of keeping her focus, her article devolves into an attempted ha-ha about soy, and asparagus, and how locally-raised meat and dairy are so much better for the earth and for humans (though she is just plain wrong about that … at least, so says the extreme leftist vegan propaganda engine called, uh, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.)

Anyways. I guess my overall point is that when it comes to talking about global food markets, shortages, economics, and the ways we can be better people … unless one’s goal is simply to get as many hits and comments as possible, surely focusing on the truth behind what our appetites are doing to the planet and the people living on it—and what we can do to change things for the better—is probably a better way to raise awareness about those issues?

I continue to be overwhelmed and amazed by the enjoyment people are getting out of my humble work(s) of fiction about incestuous flaky fops. As of now, A Pretty Mouth still has a five-star rating on Amazon, I’m gearing up to do a Q&A in February over at The Next Best Book Blog (which should soo be putting up my recipe for an Infernal!, my Calipash Twins-themed cocktail), and just a day or so I noticed that A Pretty Mouth had made a best-of list—to be specific, Black Heart Magazine’s Best of 2012.

Gabino Iglesias, their poetry editor, was kind enough to say about my book:

Fun, unique, sexy, Lovecratian literature of the highest caliber. I wanted to paint my walls with some of the lines in this book. It’s simultaneously classic and new and the prose is undeniably authoritative. This is the kind of book that weak writers read and decide to stop writing because they’ll never be this damn good.

Wowza. Seriously. And the fact that I’m on the list with Stephen Graham Jones, Tom Piccirilli, and several other amazing writers makes my inclusion even more pleasing. Pleasing being an understatement. See, that’s the kind of “undeniably authoritative” prose that gets me this kind of praise!

Thanks again, Mr. Iglesias! And if you, dear reader, would like to own your very own copy of A Pretty Mouth, well… 

I know I’m in the minority here, but I’m not a huge fan of Tsui Hark’s films.

I should like them, I know. Hark directs lavish kung fu/wuxia epics (yay) with lots of female kung fu masters in them, very often female kung fu masters dressed as men (a favorite of mine, which should come as no surprise to anyone), but something about them just falls flat for me. I didn’t bother finishing Green Snake (1993), wasn’t impressed by Detective Dee and the Phantom Flame (2012), which despite having (1) a lady kung fu master dressed as a boy and (2) friggin Detective Dee, a favorite literary character of mine, was a disappointing mess of bad CGI plus “and then (gasp!) and then (gasp!)” plotting. Once Upon a Time in China (1991) was totally good, and it’s probably my favorite of his films that I’ve seen, but it can’t keep up after the initial OMG FUCK YES of Jet Li (as Wong Fei Hung) saving Chinese New Year from evil English imperialists by lion dancing up the rigging of a ship to pluck the greens.

Anyways, so yeah, Dragon Inn. Accuse me of drinking a big glass of Haterade, or perhaps baking up a nice fresh batch of hater tots, or whatever, but … I just didn’t think it was all that great. I know it had audiences cheering at the Sundance Film Festival, but like Detective Dee and Once Upon a Time in China, it’s a film that I came away from feeling like it was far better in theory than in execution.

The premise is totally great: An evil, power-crazed eunuch (is there any other kind in film?) murders an uppity minister and the minister’s whole family save for two kids, whom he saves to lure rebel general Chow to him. Members of Chow’s army, including Chow’s awesome cross-dressing lover Mo-yan (Brigitte Lin, I looooove you!!) free the kids, and then take them to a desolate inn near the Dragon Gate Pass to try to smuggle them over the border.

Then they get to Dragon Inn and … oh dear. Maggie Cheung is there, being a shady brigand and a sort of … desert-criminal-kung-fu-master-Mrs. Lovett (again, good premise!) called Jade, but unfortunately, she’s super-duper obnoxious. Her cook Dao is pretty tight though, with his ability to flay anything ruthlessly. At any rate, Jade figures out that Chow’s girlfriend is a girl through your typical Perceptive Feminine Wiles™ and then sets her cap for Chow when he arrives. And by set her cap, I mean that, even after seeing how much Chow loves Mo-yan, Jade aggressively and frequently attempts to seduce Chow, up to and including trying to force him to sleep with her to obtain her help once the eunuch’s hit men show up. Uncool.

Anyways, so yeah, it’s a great setup! Genderqueer-ish stuff! Sword battles! Handsome Tony Leung Ka-Fai being handsome! Wuxia action sequences!

And yet … the by-the-numbers catty nonsense between Jade and Mo-yan is a boring entanglement that really doesn’t make the star, Jade, particularly endearing. So that set my attention a-wandering … plus, the directing is sub-par. There is little artistry in the filming of Dragon Inn overall, despite the beautiful sets and costumes, and action sequences are often wasted due to poor framing. What should be tense desert battles are a zoomed-out mess of people stampeding around on horses with no discernable purpose; other sequences that would have benefited from a wider angle feel claustrophobic and cheaper than they should. Many of the kung fu battles feel simultaneously crowded and disjointed, with the exception of the Maggie Cheung vs Brigitte Lin sequence, which was definitely the best part of the film.

For me, Dragon Inn gets 3 1/2 out of 5 stars. I’d give it a solid 4 but for the annoying ending. Ah well! I’m glad I saw it, and it’s certainly worth watching. It just didn’t quite live up to its reputation, which is common enough with 90′s Hong Kong films.

Next time: Probably Golden Sparrow. Yay for Cheng Pei-Pei!