The Karate Kid changed my life. The movie, of course. Not the Legion of Superheroes comic character. I'm watching it right now as I type this blog and I was thinking about how many of my perceptions about karate were shaped by Mr. Miyagi. I was never big on "sports" movies, I never saw Rocky. But I knew what it was like to be the little guy. The new kid on the block. And I knew what it was like going up against an institutionalized system of separating the "winners" from the "losers". Luckily, I had friends in and out of school that liked me for who I was and not for who I desperately thought I wanted to be. It took me a little while and Karate Kid 2 to realize what I did want. The summer that KK2 was the summer where I decided to take control of my life and stopped worrying about what the @$$holes thought. It wasn't even a gradual thing. Once I had made that decision, suddenly things started changing around me. I had confidence and that made it ea...
[Note: Check This $#!% Out was originally a seperate blog but is now a feature of patokon blog ] Since my kindergarten class where we had a guest teacher with a monkey puppet that spoke only French, I've been interested in the French language. My interest never went as deep as my interest in Asian languages, but deep enough that I have several dozens of books in or about French. My first French movie exposure was the stylish thriller DIVA . The opening opera scene still gives me goosebumps just due to the amazing singing of Wilhelminia Wiggins Fernandez . It would be another few years before I got to see Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita . A few years after that I saw the fantastic comedic horror (or horrific comedy) Delicatessen , and the classic slapstick spy comedy, The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe . I really enjoyed these two genres of French film, the comedy and the action thriller and always looked forward to finding new works by these actors and direct...
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