2007 movie preview: Balls of Fury

My mood still sucks major ass, but I do have something more positive (or at least amusing) to report in this entry.

I took a need respite by going to ping pong tonight. Yes: I skipped lunch, two seminars (including one I really wanted to see), and even reading of some sort (whether for pleasure or for work) at Peet's (though I did walk there and sit there with coffee and pastry for 15-20 minutes and listened to the classical music they were playing, just to get away from work for a little while) because of the work situation, but ping pong I would not skip. (That said, my heart really wasn't in it today. It's spending quality time in the pit of my stomach at the moment.)

The coach, Wei Wang, had been out of town for a few weeks (or at least out of class), and I gather she wasn't around last week either. I hadn't realized it before, but it turns out the reason she was gone is that she was serving as a consultant during the filming of Balls of Fury, which apparently involves some sort of combination of ping pong and kung fu. (It's probably modeled in part after flicks like Kung Fu Hustle, but it's not the same person doing it.) This is something I would see for novelty anyway, but now I'm definitely going to see it---not that I think it will be good, but I need to see the ping pong scene, in which actors like Maggie Q and Christopher Walken (starring as "Fang" ... ugh, although I want to see Walken try to play an Asian guy or at least an "Asian" one) swing furiously at CG ping pong balls. That's right...no real ping pong balls for them. Wei was there to hopefully give their strokes some semblance of reality and to say "ping" and "pong" when they should swing to get the timing right. Now, Wei is an excellent teacher, but I'm not convinced they'll look so great (and Wei's comments support this as well, as she was there when they filmed those parts).

Olympic team member, Caltech coach, and now movie consultant... that's definitely not bad.

(I did progress a little farther with numerics fixing, but we're definitely going to have to weaken our conclusions a bit, and I'm still not quite far enough for minimum acceptability.)