Thursday March 10, 2005

House of the flying daggers

I watched a film the other night with my wife called House of the flying daggers . The film is based in China a long time ago. The story is about a rebel group - the flying daggers and one of them ( a very pretty Chinese girl ) who is trying to get back to their base camp in the north. The authorities corrupt and on their way out are trying to infiltrate the rebels and see this as a chance to finish them off once and for all. It has excellent cinematography and the scenery is fantastic. The effects are not brilliant but I guess this is a low budget film unlike its Hollywood counterparts. It is all in Chinese so you have to read the subtitles. I would recommend the film.

The thing I said to my wife afterwards is we all know about our countries history and usually European, American but how many of us have any knowledge about Asian history ? The only Asian history most of us know about is related to the second world war I expect. I imagine they have the same colourful characters like Oliver Cromwell , Henry Eighth and so on.

During a team building event organised for us prior to a several day meeting on a proposed big project Steve White got the team to do various things to explore ourselves and help us understand more about each other to 'gel the team'. It was very interesting. One of the things was to draw a shield with some things of importance to us on it. I cannot remember all we were meant to do but it was related to a person who we thought was important. It will be no surprise whom I chose. Winston Churchill . One of the guys in the meeting from Singapore had drawn some person from Chinese history. A pretty important chap by all accounts. We had never heard of him. We still have a lot to learn.