Pebble Beach

Not the one you play golf, but a very interesting state beach full of strange rock patterns.

Movie: The Road

Forget about "2012". If there is only one end-of-the-world-family-survival movie you are going to watch this season, it will be "The Road". (Compared to it, "2012" is like a family trip to Disneyland.) However, it's not for the light-hearted. It is dark, bleak, and you will feel you are walking through hell with the protagonists (a father and son). It shares some common theme with 2007's "The Children of Men", but the view here is much more pessimistic. While in "The Children of Men", a new born baby was treated as the hope of the dying world, in "The Road", children are cattle to be slaughtered.

The whole movie was shot with minimal colors. Dark brown, grey, yellow, and black comprise most of the color palette like a late Goya painting. Some of the scenes were shot in places I had visited (e.g. the high rise bridge where the father and son slept in a trunk was on the way to Mount St Helens), which made it even more realistic, and haunting.

(Warning, spoiler below)
Surprisingly, the ending, compared to another McCarthy adaptation, "No Country for Old Men", seems optimistic. While "No Country for Old Men" ends with Tommy Lee Jones's mumble-jumbo monologue, "The Road" ends with the boy meeting a new family. It seems, to McCarthy, though there is no country for old men, the fire is carried, even in hell.

P.S. The "glorious" tone of the trailer doesn't match the movie at all. I wonder if the editor of the trailer had ever watched the whole movie.

On Thanksgiving Day

Receding Tide

Yesterday was not a good day for the kind of photography I had in mind. First, the weather was bad, clouded, with a 30% chance of rain along the California coast. Then it was the "severe weather alert", warning me of "big waves". However, I picked up my camera and headed for the coast, believing that I could still find subjects to photograph, and, since it was Thanksgiving day, there would be no people on the beach, it would be just me v.s. Nature. How wonderful it would be!

Wrong. I forgot the beach I wanted to photograph was composed of yellow, and gray rocks. While during sunset the distorted rock formations might look surreal and magical, under a clouded sky, they were just messy. My idea of photographing wild life was also off target. Even animals (harbor seals, pelicans) knew to stay put in bad weather. After spending hours of composing bad photos (which directly went to the "delete" key after I came home), I was frustrated and very disappointed about my ability as a photographer.

Before I called it a day, I noticed the "waves" had left very interesting marks. The marks only lasted a few seconds. By next wave, they were gone. Though the weather was against me (very windy and very wet, my glasses were all foggy and I had to wipe my lenses once in a while), I decided to give it a try. The result was not perfect. But these photos reminded me the possibilities of photography.

Untitled

A Stroll On the Beach

I hadn't touched my camera for months. After so many weeks of hard work, I knew I had to go out shooting or I would lose my sanity. It was quite windy on the beach and I felt kind of rusty after being out of practice for so long. As expected, not that many good shots. However, at the end of the day, I sat in my car, watching the afterglow and listening to my Kate Royal CD. After all, life is good.

(Mysterious light after sunset.)