New blog, and review of The Nomad

Welcome to my new blog. I am a graduate of Kalamazoo College with a BA in Philosophy, and currently an AmeriCorps volunteer working out of Brown University. My service up until this past week was as a college guide in the Newport Public Schools: I worked with high-schoolers, mostly with low-income and first-generation upperclassmen, on college access - basically acting as a helping hand on college essay and resume writing, college applications, SAT registration and prep, financial aid, senior projects, &c., &c. I have also spent the past five months volunteer tutoring twice a week in adult literacy classes in public libraries in Pawtucket and East Providence.

All this in preparation for Peace Corps! I'm really excited to have been invited to teach English in Kazakhstan, and I've been preparing in several ways - doing research online, reading the Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia, buying and reading the Book of Words by Abay Kunanbaev (Абай Кунанбаев). This past week, though, I rented Көшпенділер (The Nomad), a 2005 high-budget period piece produced by the government of Kazakhstan about one of its founding fathers, Abylai Khan (Абылай Хан).

I did watch it with some trepidation - I looked it up first on Rotten Tomatoes to see how it had been reviewed by American audiences, and I found that it had been pretty widely panned by most American critics (getting a 6% rating! Not even Dragonball: Evolution scored that badly!). The critics seemed to like the scenery and the historical and cultural flavour, but complained largely of poor acting and a plot that made little sense without relying on the main characters being idiots.

I was in for a surprise, however. It was a decent, exciting action movie, even if the writing did tend to rely heavily on the heroic monomyth and even if some characters (notably Gauhar and Yerali) tended to be foolhardy well past the point of stupidity on some occasions. Jason Scott Lee was amazing as Oraz, the Obi-Wan-style wise mentor to Mansür and Yerali - he even got Sir Alec Guinness' half-smile down pat! - and Mark Dacascos made for a plausibly sinister enemy general. I still don't really understand why they chose Latino soap-opera stars from this hemisphere (Kuno Becker and Jay Hernandez) to play the two male leads, but they worked well in the roles they were given.

Special effects were used sparsely, which was somewhat refreshing given the current trend in action movies to green-screen and CGI-enhance any and every visual element of the film (a la Zack Snyder). Where they were used, however, they were suitably epic (as in the final battle outside Turkestan), though I kind of eyerolled at one of Mansür's 'trials', in which it seemed like the SFX director had been watching The Matrix once or twice too often - Mansür does a backbending bullet-time dodge of five arrows aimed at him on horseback. But the hats and costumes were great, the horses were great, and the scenery was breathtaking - if this was meant to be a tourism advertisement for Kazakhstan, it worked! Overall, it's not the best period-piece action film ever, but it's a movie I'd gladly watch again.