Justin Bieber Carried on Great Wall of China so he can Skateboard in Beijing?
Being Justin Bieber means never having to break a sweat doing things that other people do. It also means that you can get your bodyguards to carry you on that arduous journey to the top of the Great Wall of China.
Published in 1989, The Fireman by Stephen Leather is his second book. Leather was still working as a journalist at the time so it is no wonder that his protagonist and his story are set in the world of journalism.
Fireman is the term applied to a ‘high flyer’ in the news world. They are the journalists who are sent around the world at a moments notice to cover the big stories. They are the heavy hitters, the Babe Ruth’s of reporting and as such are on call twenty-four hours a day. It is an exhausting job, but one that pays well and you have a guaranteed by-line.
The main character is the fireman that the title refers to. Or was the fireman before he got jaded and his intake of alcohol required that he be “dried out.” The rehab was paid for by the newspaper he works for and he has slid down the professional ladder to second string crime reporter. One step below an overpaid youngster.
The paper is being taken over by computers and their workforce is dwindling. The fireman gets a call from Hong Kong where his sister Sally is working as a free-lance journalist. She has fallen from a tall building and the Hong Kong police are calling it suicide. He now needs fly to Hong Kong and sort her things out and explain to the police that Sally would never kill herself.
Set in the days before Hong Kong was “given” back to China, the colour and the pace of the place is brilliantly painted for the reader. The ex-pats and their comfort in a self-imposed exile from England are just as colourful and also sad. These are not life’s movers and shakers, rather they are the ‘also rans’ who have managed to find a place higher up on the social ladder.
That Stephen Leather has a solid background in journalism is apparent in how well he describes the setting of the newspaper’s working environment. I worked for a local rag in the early 90’s. Not as a journalist, but as a driver. As the paper was more localized I was privy to how a lot of things worked and got to see how every thing came together to produce the paper.
But, even if you haven’t worked in that arena, you can feel the authenticity of the characters and the pecking order as laid out by Leather in his book.
Written in the first person, you never learn the protagonists name. When I went to write this review I ‘skip read’ through the book repeatedly to find his name. Not there. This, I have been lead to understand, is a common device with Mr Leather in a few of his books. It does not detract from the story, if anything it helps give the impression that you are living the action right along with the hero.
And there is a lot of action to live through. You follow him every step of the way as he tries to find out who was behind his sister Sally’s murder. It is entertaining and very fast paced. As this was his second work to be published, it lacks a lot of the polish that his later books have. But the rough edges don’t detract from the story and it is still a good read.
In an interview, Leather has stated that he was not too happy about the family circumstances that his editor insist that he put into the story. I can empathise with him as that part of the story stuck out like a sore thumb and did feel “tacked on.” I won’t say what it is but I do believe that you’ll find the same when you read the book.
When the villain is finally tracked down and dealt with it is one of the best cases of poetic justice I’ve seen. I enjoyed my leisurely perusal of vintage Stephen Leather and I am looking forward to reading some of his other earlier books.
While this book is not in the same league as Fair Game or Nightmare, Stephen still shows that splendid ear for dialogue that makes his books stand out so much from other authors.
I would highly recommend reading The Fireman. It will entertain you and hold your attention.
So I get up this morning and as usual I start skimming the web. I am looking for news that I find interesting, funny, exciting, irritating or just strange. This morning I found a wealth of headlines that made my eyebrows shoot up towards my almost non-existent hairline.
Entire firework display explodes – this was a video that fit the bill of funny and irritating. Of course I would find it funny, I didn’t fight crowds of people to see it live. Nor did I have to pay for parking and then have to fight to get back to my car when the fifteen second display finished. But for the folks who attended, I think maybe irritated would be the order of the day, or in this case night. I wonder if San Diego will try to make it up to the citizens, legal and illegal, who attended the show.
Imogen Thomas shows cleavage – I don’t know who Imogen is, but, I am pleased for her I guess. This one falls straight into the irritating category. If I hadn’t seen the other “headlines” I would have thought it was a slow news day.
Man dies as road swallows car – this one is brilliant. The mental picture you get while reading this one is funny. I got an image of a road sprouting a mouth, opening wide and working it’s muscles literally swallowing the car. The reality, while nowhere near as graphic or fantasy filled, is just as strange. Two people driving in China and the road literally opens up into a five metre hole “that about thirty some odd feet for you non-metric folks out there). Funny with a touch of sad, since one of the unfortunate motorist died.
Pencil Pierces Brain of Two-Year-Old Girl – Pretty self explanatory this one. A toddler on her way to bed falls and almost gives herself a DIY Lobotomy. Luckily for her it did not result in a more fatal injury. Strange and a little interesting. It kind of feels like a ‘human interest’ story in shorthand.
Base jumper survives 120m fall – Another ‘it does what it says on the label’ type story. Guy’s jump goes wrong and he free falls 393 feet and survives. Luckily he landed in snow, so he only fractured about every bone in his body. But…he lived. Another strange and interesting one.
Okay, so admittedly, these ‘headlines’ were all about the video news. These items were all produced by ITN (aka ITV 3) and they were picked presumably because of their diverse nature. Well they certainly caught my eye.
They funny thing is, all these stories made me think of the video equivalent of The National Enquirer. The “newspaper” that used the tagline, “Because inquiring minds want to know,” has been a supermarket favourite for years. *About fifty in fact.*
A lot of people, mainly celebrities, despise the Enquirer. I’ve always found it quirky and downright weird. With is old ‘yellow journalistic’ style of writing I’ve always been drawn to it if for no other reason than to give it a quick scan while waiting in the check-out queue.
The Enquirer used to boast great eye-catching headlines like: Toddler eaten by rats while horrified mother watches, Elvis is alive and living in the back of my car, and Freakish sea monster eats entire ship. I mean just the headlines alone, made for great imaginative skim reading.
While those video ‘headlines’ I saw this morning don;t quite match the tasteless ingenuity of The National Enquirer they are, at least, the spiritual blood-brother of the paper. It is nice to see that with all the horrible, scary and depressing news that we are usually bombarded with someone has made time for the weird and the wonderful.
Directed by Rob Minkoff (The Lion King, Stuart Little 1 & 2) and written by John Fusco (Hidalgo, Young Guns 1 & 2), The Forbidden Kingdom has scored a couple of ‘firsts.’
It is the first time in cinema history that a western film company was allowed to film in China and use the Hengdian World Studios, Heng Dian, China, although The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor was allowed to use the facilities in the same year. The second ‘first’ is of course the pairing of Jackie Chan and Jet Li .
The films main protagonist is Michael Angarano as Jason Tripitikas, a young American teenager who is obsessed with martial arts films and kung-fu. Angarano has been working in the business since he was small child and he has a list of credits as long as your arm, He is perhaps best known for his work on 24 and Sky High.
The film also introduces to western audiences two actresses who are well known in China, Yifei Liu as Golden Sparrow and Bingbing Li as Ni Chang the white haired witch. Bingbing Li will be seen as Ada Wong in Resident Evil: Retribution later this year.
The film’s plot in a nutshell is this:
An American teenage boy goes to his favourite pawnshop to look for little known original kung-fu films. The shop owner Hop (Jackie Chan) likes the boy Jason and helps him to find films. While he’s in the shop, Jason discovers a golden Staff that he thinks he recognises and Hop explains the it has been in the shop since his father ran it.
Later Jason has a run in with a local gang who make him go to the shop in order to rob Hop. Hop tries to defend his shop and the golden staff. The gang leader shoots Hop who gives the staff to Jason and tells him to run. Jason runs to the top of a building and falls off of it. He hits the ground and loses conciousness.
When he wakes up, a Chinese lady is speaking to him and he appears to be in Feudal China. Since he doesn’t understand anything anyone is saying he starts wandering through the small village. A horde of soldiers arrive on horseback and start rounding up villagers and killing them.
Jason runs and encounters Lu Yan (Jackie Chan) who saves Jason from the soldiers. Lu Yan is talking to Jason, who keeps saying that he can’t understand him. Lu Yan states it is because he is speaking English. The moment Lu Yan says this Jason can understand what he is saying as magically everyone in the film starts speaking English.
Thus begins the journey that Jason must take in order to find the staff’s owner and return to his home. Along the way Jason and Lu Yan meet and start travelling with Golden Sparrow (Yifei Liu) and The Silent Monk (Jet Li). Jason learns that Lu Yan is an ‘immortal’ (he isn’t) and that Golden Sparrow is seeking revenge for the murder of her family by the Jade Warlord (Collin Chou).
Jason also finds out who the owner of the golden staff is, The Monkey King (Jet Li) who was tricked by the Jade Warlord long ago and turned into a living statue. The Monkey King is a true immortal and can only be released from his bondage by the return of the golden staff.
The Jade Warlord knows that the staff has been found and he sends Ni Chang (Bingbing Li) to stop the small group and get the staff.
This is an absolutely brilliant film.
The scene where Jet Li and Jackie Chan fight is absolute magic. Their separate styles are shown to great advantage. Li stoic and silent. Chan athletic and amusing. They are equally matched in the film. Li’s Silent Monk and Chan’s Drunken Master each change their martial arts style to match the other’s. Easily the most anticipated scene in film history, it does not disappoint.
The rest of the film is entertaining and will have you laughing and crying, at the very least tearing up, and cheering.
Filmed with a budget of $55 million with a box office return of $127,906,624 this was a wildly successful film. But to be honest, it looks like a 55 million dollar film. The scenery, the sets, the costumes all look fantastic and really help to make you feel like you are in feudal China.
This film is a definite keeper I bought the blu-ray the second it came out. It’s a film that can be watched again and again. The blu-ray also has some brilliant ‘featurettes’ not least of which is the ‘gag’ reel or ‘out-takes’ which shows just how much fun the actors had working together.
Mikes Film Talk 