The Saint

The Saint

"The success of our prayers had a simple foundation. We regarded it as 'Error' - our name for Evil - to believe the evidence of our senses and if we had influenza or consumption, or had lost our money or were unemployed, we denied the reality of these things, saying that since God could not have made them, they therefore did not exist. "

Men in Black III

Young K, J and Old K

It comes as a surprise to see Men in Black III 10 years after the bad sequel in the Men in Black II for the truly original one in 1997. Still more surprising (for any sequel), it comes out as good as, if not better, than the first Men in Black - part of my childhood memory. 

The basic elements are there: a secretive agency dealing aliens, men wearing black suits and black ties, aliens disguising in human forms and firing space guns and erasing memory with the Neuralyzer. The interesting bit, though, is to know the Neuralyzer initially needs a portable charger - a feeling similar to looking back at the box - like computers back in 20 or 30 years ago. K (Tommy Lee Jones) still carries his no - nonsense businesslike style while J (Will Smith) slipps in with his hype and gags, only with better humour and added force this time. 

One natural extension to this hyper - technology in the film is time travel - an old theme but nonetheless one that always raise interesting questions. This time, J has to jump out from the 319 meter - high  Chrysler Building to travel back to 1969 for saving the young K from Boris the Animal, the nasty alien who escaped from the moon prison and threatened to destroy the Earth with his massive army but for an ArcNet shield K has succeeded to set up. 

Causal relationships always chime in whenever it involves the time travelling. 'What if' something happens, the future will probably change. A simple causal relation here is: if the young K dies, then no one sets up the ArcNet, then Boris will invade the Earth. But what if someone other than K can do the same job? What if Boris changes his mind and invades another planet? What if K did not set up the ArcNet but still survive? Well, who knows. 

A comic twist comes at the final scene when Griffin (who can predict the immediate future by looking at different possibilities resulting from various causes and events) said 'Uh, oh', what if K has forgotten to pay the tip when he left the restaurant? It might be something catastrophic. 

Finally, the movie added a touching dimension between J and K - shedding light why K recruited the young J in the first Men in Black. 

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

"They are puzzled, too, by the seeming impossibility of reconciling the voices heard in contention, with the facts that no one was discovered upstairs but the assassinated Mademoiselle L'Espanaye, and that there were no means of egress without the notice of the party ascending. The wild disorder of the room; the corpse thrust, with the head downward, up the chimney; the frightful mutilation of the body of the old lady; these considerations, with those just mentioned, and others which I need not mention, have sufficed to paralyze the powers, by putting completely at fault the boasted acumen, of the government agents. They have fallen into the gross but common error of confounding the unusual with the abstruse.

But it is by these deviations from the plane of the ordinary, that reason feels its way, if at all, in its search for the true. In investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked `what has occurred,' as `what has occurred that has never occurred before.' In fact, the facility with which I shall arrive, or have arrived, at the solution of this mystery, is in the direct ration of its apparent insolubility in the eyes of the police." I stared at the speaker in mute astonishment.

七種武器之 拳頭

小馬道："但是痛苦也能使人保持清醒。 "

痛苦也能使人清醒。 

人活著，就有痛苦．

那本是誰都無法避免的事。

你若能記住這句話，你一定會活得更堅強些，更愉快些。

因為你漸漸就會發覺，只有一個能在清醒中忍受痛苦的人．他的生命才有意義，他的人格才值得尊敬。