Wonderful Town (2008)

Let's do, err, laundry.

Wonderful Town
Written and directed by Aditya Assarat
Starring Supphasit Kansen, Anchalee Saisoontorn, Dul Yaambunying

The world was still heady with holiday hangovers when the news of a great disaster of mythological proportion filled our screens and stunned us immobile by its enveloping devastation.

"Wonderful Town" takes us back to the beaches of Phuket, Thailand where a tsunami claimed hundreds of thousands of lives four years ago. The rushing and crashing of waves fill the screen, a hypnotic lullaby that sings of loss, strangely graceful and sinister at the same time. We get flooded in by foreboding before we get a first glimpse of a town framed by ragged mountains with patches of jungle, idyllic and murmuring with impressionist pastoral warmth. Wonderful, from a distance.

And it is this calm glamour that Ton (Supphasit Kansen), an architect from Bangkok, falls under. He checks in an old hotel and later, while on a site visit to oversee the rebuilding of a hotel along the coast of Phuket, reveals to his foreman that he volunteered for this assignment, preferring the solitude and quiet over the busy city, preferring to stay in an almost empty hotel in a town muted by predictability.

At the hotel, Na (Anchalee Saisoontorn) peacefully goes about performing her chores, changing sheets, folding towels, carefully but vacantly. But when she enters Ton's room, for the first time we see a hint of a sparkle in her eyes, a little tension in the arches of her shoulders. Later that evening, after searingly casual introductions, Na presses her ear against Ton's door, listening to him sing under the shower. The darkness rolls away from the shore as the second half of the movie delicately follows the relaxed conversations and uninhibited sweetness of falling in love that is reminiscent of Il Gon-Song's 2004 movie, Git or Feathers in the Wind. Na spends her afternoons sleeping in Ton's unmade bed, carefully following the creases with her fingers. Ton steals glances and kisses as the wind stirs up a line of drying towels.

Aditya Assarat's eye allows us to soak in the details until every curve of a landscape, every thoughtful brushing of skin against shadow against skin, every hissing summer blade, becomes imprinted in memory and are dialogues in themselves. This hypnotic spell, this immersion of gestures, motives and scenery in a single breath is much like Apichatpong Weerasethakul's atmosphere of strange calm where the mundane is amplified by steady camera pans until it reaches delirious surrealism. But where most of Weerasethakul's movies take a detour to the fantastic, Assarat's abruptly changes in tone as we hear the sea once again while the lovers make love in the darkness, the thief that steals, the waves that are hungry.

Na's brother, Wit (Dul Yaambunying), disapproves of his sister's illicit affair, which has stirred the town to life with gossip, and decides, along with his gang of thugs, to do something about it.

The abandoned haunted house, the crazy local boy, and the gurgling sea---like a forgotten memory from the beginning of the film---rear their ugly prophecies and suddenly fall into place. In an ending that is evocative of Weerasethakul's "Blissfully Yours," drowned ghosts not different from a town left hollow by tragedy, remain ghosts that pull others down to its murky, secretive depths.

"Wonderful Town" is adjective and irony, a heavy current with invisible waves. Assarat's first full-length feature is deceptively haunting, but its message does not lie in an aimlessly drifting bottle in the ocean. It's the in-between, the love (even) among the ruined, that can sweep us away like nothing else can.

5/5

Links:

Wonderful Town Wins 5 Subanahongsa Awards (Wise Kwai's Thai Film Journal)
Aditya Assarat's Wikipedia Page

Shi gan (Time)

Days of open hands.

It's a strange feeling, getting old. I feel the same, sleep the same, I even sound the same. But the mirror in the bathroom disagrees. I have gotten heavier around the middle. My eyes a little darker; my hair a little lighter with gray. My teeth stained from the hundreds of cigarettes and a thousand cups of coffee that I have and will consume.

Time has made me wiser. But also older. And let's face it: More and more less of what I was.

I see this sometimes reflected on my partner's eyes. And it's a painful thing to see.

Kim Ki-Duk takes this pain and creates an admonishing parable in his 13th movie, "Time."

Shi gan (Time)
Written and Directed by Kim Ki-Duk
Starring: Sung Hyun-Ah (Woman is the Future of Man), Ha Jung-Woo(The Unforgiven)

Familiarity breeds monotony, and in the two-year relationship of Seh-hee and Ji-Woo (Ha Jung-Woo) it has resulted in obligatory sex and predictable dates in a cafe. In trademark Kim Ki-Duk fashion, Seh-Hee asks Ji-Woo to think of someone else while they fuck. The sex is hotter. Seh-hee is destroyed. The following day, Seh-Hee disappears and without telling Ji-Woo, undergoes cosmetic surgery to change her face beyond recognition. Six months later, Ji-Woo meets See-hee (Sung Hyun-Ah) in the cafe he frequents and dangerous sparks fly out of the blue and into the black. See-hee is Seh-hee and demands the clueless Ji-Woo to choose between them.

This is definitely Kim Ki-Duk's most obvious work as he (angrily) slaps on the movie his disdain for Korea's, and everyone else's, obsession with physical beauty. After Ji-Woo realizes that See-hee and Seh-hee are the same woman, he also gets his face altered leaving Seh-hee desperately looking for him; the feel of his hands in hers her only anchor. If the hands fit, so to speak. And this is a Kim Ki-Duk movie where the laws of reality are ignored and the fantastic and the surreal exist as truths. In the end, "Time" admonishes too much to be really provoking. The vicious cycle ending comes across as preachy, and not the ambigous catharsis that we've come to expect from the director.

It is withot doubt though that "Time" is visually magnificent. The statue park of Baegumi on the island of Mo which breathtakingly displays the sculptures of Lee Il-ho becomes the only constant in the passage of time and tide. The iron hands that sometimes rise from the depths and oftentimes cradle the lovers is the heart that remains a child. Tarnished, yes, but unchanging.
3/5

Sud sanaeha (Blissfully Yours)

Welcome to the jungle.

Sud Sanaeha (Blissfully Yours)
Written and Directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Starring Kanokporn Tongaram, Min Oo, Jenjira Jansuda

Ever had that indecipherable feeling of dreamy watchfulness? You become a vigilant critic, every crease, every scent is memorized as if it were your last day on earth. You become a watchful romantic, haunted by disbelief at the clarity of someone's skin. You become heady with desire; the alliance of hormones and heart rush to the head, an assault of contentment.

Bliss.

In Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Blissfully Yours," bliss begins with escape. The movie starts all too suddenly, in the middle of a scene. A man (Min Oo) afflicted by a mysterious skin decease is being treated by a doctor. He is accompanied by Roong (Tongaram) and an elderly woman, Orn, played by Jansuda with a consistent undercurrent of slyness. We discover the relationships much later in the film. The man, Min, turns out to be an illegal immigrant that Roong, a young factory worker, pines for. Orn helps the lovers navigate through life in Thailand in exchange of cash, and in the afternoon of their visit to the clinic, she helps Roong out of work so Roong can spend time with Min. Orn lends them her car and the two drive out into the dusty open road.

45 minutes into the movie, as the road trip begins and the scenery changes from dry to lush, the movie credits roll out. Roong turns on the radio and a Thai version of Summer Samba (So Nice) plays. Roong puts lotion on her and Min's hands. Fingers become flirty and playful. Colors deepen, yellow to golden, green to deeper green. They step out of the car and walk into a forest.

Bliss begins. Bliss takes over.

The next hour of the film is a celebration of naked intimacy, of moments of abandon at once introspective and instant. Weerasethakul's steady shots frame Min and Roong's childlike euphoria with journalistic clarity yet even the simplest gestures---picking wild berries, Roong resting on Min's lap---are soaked in a languid dream-like state. A waking dream impossibly captured and almost impossible to fully grasp.

In the meantime, Orn is also in the forest frolicking with her lover when her husband's motorcycle gets stolen. Tom, a factory worker, chases after the thief, and Orn wanders into the forest. Where Weerasethakul's "Tropical Malady" took a surreal turn in its second act (a parable that admonishes desire?), "Blissfully Yours" flourishes with calm bewilderment.

Orn stumbles into Min and Roong by a stream; Orn says that somehow the trail disappeared and her wandering led her to them. The stream, clear and reflective, becomes release and salvation for the three characters. Again, Weerasethakul elevates the ordinary to wonder lust. I was specifically transfixed when Orn began to intensely watch her hands under the running stream, palms up then down, weaving, worm-like shadows running across them. And then a kind of miracle. A delicate distortion, the healing cold.

"Blissfully Yours" is a state of being on film that's nearing abstract. But once you pull away, once you let the scenery sing and watch the lovers fall asleep, the bafflement becomes an expanding sun in your stomach. Lightheaded, you desire, too, to lie on the bank and listen to the stream whisper:

Follow your bliss.

5/5

The Thank You Girls

The Thank Your Girls (Kung giunsa pagbuhat og binisayang law-oy: Original script title)
Directed by Charliebebs Gohetia
Cast: Gie Salonga, Pidot Villocino, July Jimenez, E.J. Pantujan, Kit Poliquit

No queen of the desert, no Julie Newmar fetishists can carry a sparkly candle against "The Thank You Girls," a colorful troupe of hard-traveling drag queens in search of a title and a little tenderness. This low budget independent movie is rich in characterization and brims with lust for life; a rollicking fuck-you to poverty, stubbornly poised to laugh at misfortunes and loneliness. Which is quite a feat, really, as both social commentary vehicle---purely coincidental as these girls are set against a backdrop of debt and prejudice---and a gay movie that truly rejoices in what truly defines the homosexuals in this country: quick wit and glittery make-up. And love, of course. Love of and for companionship. Minus the burden of gratuitous nudity and sex, "The Thank You Girls" is able to focus on a staccato of stories, which bounces back and forth from the actual pageant to the next one, until all the girls' mishaps and raison d'etre are told, before finally embarking on the last pageant. But somehow, it's different this time around. After all the hilarious question and answer exercises (If you are stranded in an island, how did you get there?) and casual confessions, it feels like I actually know these girls and I did wish them well as I sat quietly in my seat. As the movie reaches the final stage, spotlights on, stomach in and chest out, a dream sequence all of a sudden rolls out. Glamour shots, flowing white gowns, expensive make-up. A quiet peek inside their fantasies, our fantasies at one point in our lives: To be blindingly beautiful. And if this is what it feels like to be onstage, even if it's just a fleeting moment of grace, then it's all worth it. 4/5

Minyeo-neun goerowo (200 Pounds Beauty)

She ain't heavy...now.

Minyeo-neun goerowo (200 Pounds Beauty)
Directed by Kim Yong-hwa
Cast: Ju Jin-mo (Happy End), Kim Ah-jung (When Romance Meets Destiny)

Andy Lau still gets the award for best acting in a fat latex suit in the hilarious and heartbreaking "Love on a Diet" but Kim Ah-Jung does come a close second for playing Hannah, the overweight "backstage singer" of a catty pop star who literally brings the house down with her dancing. A little too much, like most of the fat jokes that roll out mercilessly during the first hour of the movie, but Kim Ah-jung's self-deprecating tics and troubling earnestness keep the material grounded, until she loses the latex and the movie finally moves from sitcom drudgery to genuinely funny. Even as the gorgeous Jenny, a persona Hannah invents, she still acts ugly-awkward. "200 Pounds Beauty" lightly deconstructs beauty: What one can get away with and how one can never run away from an ugly past. It delivers its share of commentary on plastic surgery, not too deeply, but enough to ask weighty questions. Underneath the layers of comedy and Korean culture exposition, underneath the skin and fat, is a desperate search for acceptance and love no matter what the cost. Hannah is too overweight to be wanted; Jenny is too perfect to be touched. After yet another rejection, Hannah/Jenny laments: I endured the pain when they were cutting through my skin and bones. But this hurts more. I'm quoting badly of course. But it did get me to thinking, is love worth the pain of a transformation? If you had the means, would you get rid of the fat around your stomach, the weight that drags your feet, that look on people's faces? Yeah, me too. Funny, huh? 3/5

Rak haeng Siam (The Love of Siam)

The Love of Sherbet

Rak haeng Siam (The Love of Siam)
Written and Directed by Chukiat Sakveerakul (13 Beloved)
Cast: Witwisit Hiranyawongkul (4 Romances), Mario Maurer (Friendship), Cheryarn Boonyasak (4bia), Sinjai Plengpanich (The Legend of Suriyothai)

Somewhere in the second half of the movie, the characters converge in Siam Square. The camera follows the craning necks and the long last looks, the oblivious, the forgotten and the ignored, under blinking lights down clogged streets. It’s a short sequence but it has left its mark. “The Love of Siam” feels accidental. The placid storytelling takes its time and lets life run its true, natural course. And the effect is almost incomprehensible. The story is quite straightforward: Two boys Mew, the withdrawn wimp, and Tong, the rugged menace, become friends in a quiet neighborhood until Tong’s family is struck by tragedy and had to move house. Years later, Mew (Witwisit Hiranyawongkul) and Tong (Mario Maurer) meet again, rekindle their friendship, but both now weighed down by growing pains, the former’s “frightening loneliness” and Tong’s crumbling family life. And here, the movie goes where no mainstream teen romance (as the film was marketed in Thailand to gain a wider audience) dared to venture.Chukiat Sakveerakul's script is delicate and never becomes precious with sentimentality. The graceful camera movements panning across bedrooms, streets and classrooms, the steady shots of a family unraveling or a fragile kiss, keep the pace slow but thoroughly involving. With the Director’s Cut running 178 minutes, one would expect a drop somewhere—even the much acclaimed “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” had a saggy middle—but not a second is wasted.Sakveerakul cleverly slips in enough quirky tics that widen Mew and Tong’s universes. The feisty neighbor who has resorted to chick-lit voodoo to win Mew’s heart, the band manager that finds herself entangled in Tong’s family, and the treasure hunt games. The treasures? A toy. Then a goodbye. “The Love of Siam” is a deceptively simple, no-frills family drama. But like Mew adding the missing nose of a wooden puppet as tears of rejection and gratitude run down his uncomplaining face, I am left grasping for reasons and motives. For whys and what-ifs.“The Love of Siam” feels accidental, much like the love it defines: We simply can’t choose where our love lands. 5/5

20th Century Boys

No longform manga since Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira rocked my planet harder than Naoki Urusawa's 20th Century Boys - - - except maybe his Monster, which I haven't read yet. Moviebound for years now, a teaser's out at fucking last. And a teaser it is. Superlative use of that T Rex riff notwithstanding, it isn't much . . .but if you've read the manga or if you're not in kindergarten anymore, this will make you drool more than that potentially sucky kid's movie with Robert Downey in red armor coming to brand us stupid in a few weeks.

4bia

Stupid,punny title. See Prang rings better. The four-piece Thai horror anthology tackles various makes and models of fears - - phobias, get it? In rough order - - - a mysterious text message, a cursed diploma, a camping trip gone fuckup and a dead princess on a plane. My soft spot for horror anthologies notwithstanding,what hooks me is the involvement of Yongyoot Thongkongtoon of Iron Ladies and the tag team of Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom who may have soiled us with the abysmal Alone but also gave us the brilliant Shutter. Quality, then,of a sort. Plus, Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom go solo on an episode each so maybe now we'll know who fucked Alone up. Or not. The plane episode (Wongpoom's) has burrowed under my skin on those snippets alone - - - but everything else looks promising. Wise Kwai has a more in-depth breakdown.

Linger

Mad Detective is on DVD. The Sparrow premieres in Berlin this year. And Linger opens January 10 in Hong Kong. When one of your favorite filmmakers on the planet is as indefatigably prolific as and as impervious to making a dud as Johnnie To is, heaven is a place on earth.

Invisible Waves

Love hurts.

Invisible Waves
Director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang
Stars Tadanobu Asano (Café Lumiere) / Kang Hye-Jeong (Welcome to Dongmagkol)
Ken Mitsuishi(The Vanished)

Grow up among nuns and you get real cozy with both the notion and throb of guilt, wear it like a scar that recedes but never really fades. It’s like a bitch monkey on your back, up there with regret, and often the same thing, for the vehemence of its nag and its bite - - - and man, can it bite. So you get how the blood on Tadanobu Asano's chef's hands is actually making him physically sick. You also get how his milieu's suddenly irradiated with bulletins of his sin - - -a decrepit hotel room in Phuket with graffiti that reads redrum, for instance. You get it mostly because he's your quintessential noir fall guy - - - works for a gangster, bangs the boss's wife, feeds her a spoonful of poison under orders, goes on the lam, gets shot to death, comes back to life, takes revenge - - - and we've seen remorse manifest itself as anxiety, paranoia and stomach disorder many times in many noirs. But this is only half the quintessential noir you think it is, perhaps even less, and those echoes of the noir piece it most closely hews to - - - John Boorman's great Point Blank - - - bouncing off the walls are only just echoes, and what Pen-Ek really siphons off to make weird green soup with is its ambiguous shadow instead- - - that Lee Marvin's resurrected hitman could be a ghost. Title alone's fat with metaphor- - -rebirth, purification, cleansing - - -and this isn't so much Pen-Ek headtripping on the vagaries of guilt but more on the currencies of atonement. Because guilt with no out is nihilistic and pointless. Grow up among nuns and you get real cozy with that, too. You can see the shape its arc wants to be - - - a sort of karmic coming to grace. And Christopher Doyle's palette isn't so much bleak as it is an opaque remove - - - everybody here's from someplace else, adrift and seeking anchor points, talking in a stunted English that evokes their unmooring. That entire first half on the cruise ship he escapes on with its malfunctioning cabins, bloodstained fishtank full of baby sharks, childhood friends he doesn't remember and repentant barkeep who's a ringer for his Dad going sensei on repentance has such a rich, purgatorial charge, you wish it never disembarked for the lukewarm second half that brings everything full circle back to Hong Kong, a cleavage it doesn't make it out of whole. Guilt is not a cul-de-sac and there's ecstasy in the promise of transcendence alone. But the impertinent, overlong confrontation with the double-crossing boss sucks the fatalistic conclusion of whatever measure of epiphany it might have shivered with, leaving nothing but metaphysical void. Withdrawal like that can sap you into a stupor. * * *

Total Bangkok

Pen-Ek does shoe ads.

Home Pro

Pen-Ek does bathroom fixture ads.

Mad Detective

Around here, Johnnie To directing Lau Ching Wan again has all the bang to wet panties as Martin Scorsese directing Robert DeNiro again, John Woo directing Chow Yun Fat again, Seijun Suzuki directing Joe Shishido again.





Mad Detective , then. Directed by Johnnie To. Starring Lau Ching Wan.

Coming soon to soil geek underwear planetwide.

Eye In The Sky

Simon Yam and Tony Leung in versus mode. If it looks like this is built on classic Milkyway chassis, that's because Johnnie To has his producing mitts all over it. His longtime scripter Yau Nai Hoi pops his directing cherry, threatens to be the next Derek Yee. Let's hope so.

Kantoku Banzai

Loopier than Takeshis from the looks of it. Funner, too. Big on the serene brutality of his noirs- - -Sonatine, Hana-Bi , Brother - - - as I am, I could live with Takeshi taking this phase of his a few more movies down the line. Has its own weird voltage,give it that. Funny, too. And the world needs a new Kitano movie as often as he can make 'em. Does wonders for the environment.

End hero worship. Cue trailer.

Sakebi (Retribution)

Hideo Nakata’s got game but not even he can touch Kiyoshi Kurosawa as J-horror overlord. Visual intelligence alone gives Kiyoshi dibs. And the way his movies - - - Kairo, Cure, Charisma- - -get under your skin and stay there until it grows cultures of unease. I give. I've been stealing from him wholesale, and shoplifting bits from Nakata as well, over the last month doing this scriptwriting gig. He's been out of the horror loop for a bit. Sakebi is his comeback. Goody.

Epitaph

As ghost milieus go, haunted hospitals have mileage. Spiffy come-on for something possibly classic . . .or possibly a pile of dog poo. Director's a newbie who's done time with Park Chan Wook so we can worry less. Let's just hope those hair strands near the end are just design elements.

Tonari No Totoro

Yummy fur.

Tonari No Totoro
Directed by : Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away)



The whimsy's there if that's your thing and there are days this is like a down blanket for me, something to keep warm in - - -that bus stop vignette and my wanting to play it over and over again as if looping would somehow enable me to cross over, there's no way you can break that down to a science, no way to peg why it works in the way it does, no way to do it again, not even Miyazaki himself tried. Could be the wet, shimmery palette's what makes it - - -and the whole piece ,really - - - so immersive, a kind of hush. Also the absence of anything going on in the usual sense of anything going on - - -two sisters billeted in a country house, their mother in a hospital and oh, next door lives a family of snuggly tree spirits that help them plant a tree, take them on a bus ride and later flying through the night. It's ambient, almost. The magic circle aura holds until you get the sense that the supernatural never overwhelms the natural, that there's a certainty to the creeping uncertainty in its peripheries- - -and you get it. Miyazaki would go on to do more ornate work - - - wiser, prettier,better. But what he nailed here that he won't nail again to such a degree is what Erice nailed in El Espiritu De La Colmena : that blinding headrush of what it's like to be a kid - - - and the sense of wonder and threat that come with it. And he nails it not because the magic he taps into makes those wisps of foreboding go away, like they do in neo-Disney mollycoddle. But precisely because it doesn't. * * * * *





Post Written for the Ghiblogathon.

Saibogujiman kwenchana

Crazy in love

(Saibogujiman kwenchana) I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK
Director Park Chan-wook
Stars Rain (Full House) / Lim Soo-jung (Tale of Two Sisters)


Not entirely a surprise for PCW. Lady Vengeance already had the funnies, Old Boy the fantastic. But I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK doesn't have the cohesive narrative of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. Understandably so, the movie is about a girl who has delusions that she is a cyborg, Terminator-lite with machine gun for fingers, built to decimate the Initiative, well, the home, who took her grandmother. In the institution, Young-goon (Lim) refuses to eat human food and she is dying. Il-soon (Rain) who "steals" itches, ping-pong tricks and memories from the other crazy folks makes it his mission to help Young-goon eat. And this is where PCW takes his time to animate the sagging middle with explosions of surreal quirkiness. Booster socks. Sing-along mirrors. A whole bunch of crazies. I had fun with these, but I did hit the pause button a couple of times to make a sandwich and grab a drink. This is a long movie with a thin plot with too many detours. Still, there are scenes that remind you what PCW is all about. In this movie's case, it's the quiet ones. That bit at the basement, where Il-soon carefully upgrades Young-goon, the confusion of the trembling touch. Love at first byte. ***

Two By Pen-Ek

Last Life In The Universe (Ruang Rak Noi Nid Mahasan )
Director: Pen-Ek Ratanaruang (Ploy, Invisible Waves)
Starring: Tadanobu Asano (Ichi The Killer, Cafe Lumiere), Sinitta Boonyasak (Bite of Love)


Boiled down, this is about opposites attracting - - - chaos and order, scatterbrained and anal, free spirit and suicide fetishist. The arcane physics of desire. Also, the milk of every other hackneyed formula love story. It pushes the same buttons: the soft electricity of attraction, the sweet endorphin of emotional rescue, the wistful possibilities of happiness. But the (mis)matching of Tadanobu Asano’s bookish nerd and Sinitta Boonyasak's flighty hostess is bonded more by ghosts of shared regret than anything sexual (but we get there eventually) or romantic, stranding them in a hermetic world of their own design , speaking in fractured tongues as they fumble to master that inarticulate speech of the heart, the last lives in an impossible universe that isn't forever but, for a brief shining moment ,is magic. * * * * *

Mon-rak Transistor
Director: Pen-Ek Ratanaruang (Fun Bar Karaoke, 6ixtynin9)
Starring: Supakorn Kitsuwon (Tears of the Black Tiger, Suriyothai), Siriyakorn Pukkavesh (Adventures of Iron Pussy)



Village kid meets village girl, they fall in love, she gets pregnant, he gets drafted, she gives birth, he deserts the army and becomes a pop star. Then their troubles begin. Screwball for the way it crams surfeits of melodramatic incident that could bloat two telenovela seasons then plays them for absurdist pleasure. Satiric for the way it harbors a nostalgic fondness for such overwrought soap opera tropes at the same time appearing to take affectionate digs at them. But there are genuine emotions fueling these soap opera tropes we malign. It's what makes them persist. Those flitty-tatty feelings we're all oh-so ironic ,or probably just too chickenshit, to express. And later, all artifice and agenda is dropped. A picture on the wall speaks volumes of regret. A damburst of tears and a tentative hug speak of a love that's too scared to come out of hiding. And the climactic ,inevitable reunion disarms then stabs me with the flitty and the tatty, full-on, guard down, right through the heart. Pow. And I'm a mass of blubber. Nice trick, Pen-Ek. Crafty bastard.
* * * *