Tuesday, March 15, 2022
6:28 a.m. Bungalow 2, Chan and Cees
Chiang Dao, Thailand
Time is running out on my visa and therefore on my trip. I want to be back in Mae Sot on the 23rd. And I have a couple of places I want to visit on my return journey. In particular, I think I’d like to spend a night up in the village of Ban Jabo. I’d also like to spend another night or two in Pai. It feels like with my terrible experience at Mr. Jan’s Guesthouse that I didn’t manage to fully absorb the pleasures of the town. Pai didn’t really get a chance to work its magic on me. I’ll work out a rough itinerary later on today, but I’ve started to think in terms of turning my scooter around and heading back. Even if I were back in Mae Sot a day or two earlier than absolutely necessary, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. With the terrible haze in the sky right now, I’m not terribly excited about roaming around this part of Thailand at the moment.
Yesterday, I took in another of the sights of Chiang Dao. I went to a temple on the slopes of the mountain. It’s called Wat Tham Pha Plong. And for a tourist like me, it is popular because of the short climb to get there and the views it offers of the mountain and the region. Unfortunately, the haze meant that the views were severely limited. But I still enjoyed the visit. I went early in the morning, and I passed the time pleasantly enough as I slowly walked up the steps and took pictures. Now that I’m using the G85 more for video, I find myself drawn back to snapping pictures of little things and scenes around me. I guess that’s a big advantage to shooting video with a real camera instead of a GoPro. The G85 can do both video and photos while the GoPro is really just an action video camera. It can take pictures, if all you want to do is snap a wide shot of the scenery around you. But that’s all it can do. It can’t do any actual photography.
My G85 has been giving me a lot of trouble when it comes to exposure. But the problem seems to crop up in very bright situations when there is a combination of land and sky. Yesterday, I was climbing up a steep path that was hemmed in on all sides by jungle. I was taking pictures of flowers, leaves, water faucets, spider webs, and other small things. I wasn’t taking wide pictures of landscapes. And in that situation, the exposure problem wasn’t as extreme. I was able to adjust for it and the camera still worked. That was a pleasant surprise.
My original plan was to follow that hike to the temple with a long scooter ride into the countryside and even around the whole mountain. But with the haze, I lost interest. I’d probably still have enjoyed it, but at the time, it felt like I’d just be sitting on the scooter for hours going up and down on a narrow countryside road and seeing nothing but the road. I’m just not in the mood for exploring right now, it seems. That might have something to do with the news that Malaysia is opening up soon. My thoughts have been turning more and more towards returning to Malaysia. My brain appears to be writing the epilogue for my time in Thailand. My time here appears to be drawing to a close.
I think you can see that mood even in what I’m writing about. I’m just penning short notes to summarize each day’s activities. My heart doesn’t seem to be invested in Thailand. In fact, I’m more excited about my pop culture world than about being in Thailand. I watched a couple of movies over the last few days, and I find myself thinking about those movies much more than about my plans for Thailand. Those plans include going back to the caves this morning. I think I’m going to do that. I visited the main cave last time. I might go back today and visit the dark caves with a lantern guide. I’m not super excited about the idea. But I’m here in Chiang Dao. I’ll probably never be here again in my lifetime. I might as well do something interesting with my morning, right?
As for pop culture, I watched the new Pixar/Disney movie Turning Red and the new Spider Man movie No Way Home. I have my usual somewhat complicated thoughts about them. I listened to the podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour yesterday, and they reviewed Turning Red. And they raved about it. Absolutely raved. And I found myself annoyed. As with many people these days, these reviewers seemed to be grading the movie based on a checklist of ideas and themes rather than on whether the movie just worked as an entertainment. And they fully approved of all the ideas and themes. Yet, for me, the movie kind of fell flat. There was nothing wrong with it, to be honest. It was perfectly fine. Yet, it just didn’t come together. Plus, the entire movie was in the trailer. I watched the trailer many times beforehand because I found the trailer to be very funny. But the movie didn’t add anything to the trailer. The whole thing was right there. The movie was just a longer version of the trailer. And the movie felt somewhat frantic and expository at the same time. Characters seemed to be telling us the story all the time rather than the story simply happening in the movie. It had all the charm of a crazy Saturday morning cartoon for me. Sure, there were a lot of bright colors on the screen and tons of crazy things were happening all the time. And I could see all the themes. But it just felt like an exercise in movie-making rather than a good story.
The new Spider Man movie also didn’t quite work for me. It’s a really strange movie, to be honest. It’s strange in that the parts that worked for me, really worked. I absolutely loved a certain part of the movie. It delighted me. This part was like a diamond at the center of a bunch of junk. And that diamond was so much fun that it was almost worth it to deal with all that junk just to enjoy the diamond.
The problem is that they had to come up with a story and a plot to make that diamond happen. And the story they created is so convoluted, so complicated, has so many moving parts, and makes so little sense that it is overwhelming. It’s like a crazy house of cards a hundred stories high. It’s a very flimsy structure built on top of nothing and everything at the same time. Yet, I loved this one part of the movie.
I can’t mention this part of the movie without spoiling it. The spoiler is that the movie’s complicated plot created a situation whereby all the recent Spider Man versions show up in the same universe. This movie, of course, stars Tom Holland as Spider Man. But the modern era of Spider Man movies began with Tobey Maguire playing Spider Man. And then Andrew Garfield played Spider Man. And each of those had their own Spider Man franchise. And in No Way Home, all three of them show up in the same movie, and they have to work together to fight the villains that also came from the three different universes and the three different franchises. And as a movie buff and an avid consumer of superhero movies, I was delighted by this. It was so much fun to have these three different actors, each in their Spider Man costume, talking and laughing and hanging out together and comparing experiences. And in telling each other their stories, things got surprisingly deep and emotional and human. Each Spider Man has their own tragedy involving the deaths of relatives or girlfriends. And they shared their stories. And there was one moment in particular that drove this point home. The Andrew Garfield Spider Man franchise is widely considered to be the worst of the three. But there is a moment in his movies when his “MJ”, his girlfriend, gets involved in the fighting, and she falls from a great height. This always happens in a Spider Man movie. MJ is always being kidnapped by a supervillain, and Spider Man always saves her at the last second. But in this case, she falls to her death. Andrew Garfield’s Spider Man does try to save her, and he does manage to grab her with some webbing to stop her fall, but it isn’t quite enough, and she smacks hard against the cement floor, and you can hear her back snap in half. It was a surprisingly brutal moment in a cartoony Spider Man movie. And it was so interesting to have these three different Spider Man versions comparing stories. They each have an MJ in their universe. And different things happen to MJ. And Andrew Garfield kind of wins their comparing-tragedy segment, because in his universe, MJ dies. But in this movie, Tom Holland’s MJ starts to fall to her death from a great height. As I said, this seems to happen in every Spider Man movie. And Tom Holland goes to save her, but in a horrific moment, he appears to fail. And you think that in this movie, his MJ is going to die, too. But then Andrew Garfield’s Spider Man saves her. And it is like he redeemed himself. He wasn’t able to save MJ in his universe. But he saved Tom Holland’s MJ in this one.
And there was a death in this movie that was also surprisingly emotional. The classic Spider Man origin story involves Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben being shot and killed. This moment is a key factor in forming Spider Man’s persona and character. But in the Tom Holland Spider Man universe, he doesn’t have an Uncle Ben. He has just an Aunt May. And in another twist, Aunt May isn’t an older grandmotherly type. She’s played as a rather beautiful and sensual woman by Marisa Tomei. And in this movie, she dies. And she died in a particularly brutal way. They took their time with this death and really drove it home. It was a very real and unusually heartfelt moment in a Spider Man movie. Anyway, all this combining of the different Spider Man franchises and having the three different versions of Spider Man interacting and meeting each other was a lot of fun and very emotional. It felt real in a way that superhero movies pretty much never do. And I liked that a lot. I just kept thinking that there must have been a simpler way to make this happen. The movie created this situation in the most convoluted way possible. The story itself hardly seems to make any sense at all, if, in fact, you can even follow it. I think most people just give up. There’s no point trying to figure out exactly what happens or why they do certain things. It’s just a giant bunch of technical and scientific and magical mumbo-jumbo and plot devices. It all leads to these three universes combining into one. And that’s the diamond at the heart of the movie. I just keep thinking that they could have made the same thing happen but in a much simpler way. For me, they didn’t need all the crazy over-the-top fighting as, once more, the entire universe was at stake and could be destroyed. All I needed was to have three Spider Man versions sitting down in a coffee shop together and swapping stories and getting to know each other. That would have been a great movie.