short takes, including RotK

[cellio]

Note to cat: You are welcome to sleep next to me under the covers. However, if you are going to sleep with claws extended, please orient yourself in a different direction next time.

This morning I got to work to find the door locked. That is, the door is always locked with an electronic lock; we all have cards to get in. Today, though, this was augmented with a physical lock. The landlord's answering service was no help (yay for cell phones, though; at least I could try). Eventually I roused a security guard, who objected that I should go home and spend Christmas with my family instead of working. Projecting? I'm guessing that he drew the short straw and wanted to be home with his family. (Y'know, if they hadn't locked the employee entrance there probably would have been no need for him to be there...) This didn't happen last year, so it took me by surprise. But hey, at least there's heat. (There wasn't at morning services; the furnace broke last night. Oops.)

We saw RotK last night. (High kippah density; not surprising.) I thought the movie was pretty good, especially with the challenge of telling such a big story in three hours. I think they could have found ten minutes to cut to make room for scourging the shire, though.

Individual scenes worked very well; there were places where overall coherence maybe wasn't what would be needed for someone who hasn't read the books. (That might be moot, though; they may be assuming that everyone has read the books, and I can't name a counterexample from my circle of friends.) I'd be interested in hearing reactions from someone who approached the movies cold.

Technically I thought it was very well-done, and from the end credits it looked like they used just about every effects technique in the book. I heard somewhere that about 30 of the horses were real and the rest were CGI -- and that they got the AI "wrong" on the first pass, because the computer-generated horses were refusing to charge the bigger monsters. Don't know if it's true, but I found it funny.

Best Gimli line: "That only counts as one". :-)

We had a suboptimal viewing, unfortunately. We had about five minutes of downtime at about hour 2.5 (in the middle of a scene, so likely not a reel-change screwup). Breakage, maybe? I think we lost a bit when it did come back on, but it was just Sam's pep-talk to Frodo about the shire, so we already had the gist of it. I also noticed a lot of scratches, particularly toward the end -- and this in a copy that's only been in use for a week. I didn't know they were still using film (rather than digital copies), actually, but I can't account for the scratches if it wasn't film.

Tonight we're spending the seventh night of Chanukah with friends at a Chinese restaurant. :-)

Comments

Re: one more bit of data

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

There's *got* to be a list! When I worked security at Rich Products, I was overwhelmed with lists. I had lists of employees (multiple copies actually, I could look someone up by Name, ID #, or Parking Tag), lists of vendors (non-employees who were allowed in), we even had a list of all the artwork in the building along with it's location and insured value. I used it like a self-tour of an art museum. "You paid $28,000 for a blank canvas with one red stripe on it? Do you like blue?" My favorite was the one outside the bakery testing lab, a plaster sculpture of a cartoon frog drowning in a sea of doughnuts. I never understood the deep meaning, if one existed, I just thought it was cute! :D