The Core

We went to see The Core Sunday afternoon. I enjoyed it. Yes, you have to suspend disbelief about the premise, but I knew that going in. The premise is that strange electro-magnetic events are happening all over earth, with frequency and severity increasing, and it's because ( spoiler, but if you've seen the preview you know this already )

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(Grumpy aside: the previews gave away a (different) plot point that was revealed only later in the movie. I suspect the impact would have been better if I hadn't seen the preview -- except that I wouldn't have gone to see the movie at all if I hadn't seen said preview. So you can't win.)

The movie was more action-focused than I'd expected; they could have included more of a look into the effects the problem was having beyond causing large things to fall down. I guess we know what demographic they were going for. :-) Still, it was a fun movie with some very funny bits tucked in among the more serious and predictable ones. Once they got the "you'll just have to accept this" premises out of the way, they stayed consistent and even had some good storytelling bits (like an apparently-trivial matter near the beginning of the adventure that factors significantly into the ending).

( premises you have to accept (mild spoilers) )

There were some nice touches, including referring to a bit of plot-essential technobabble as "unobtanium". In general, I thought the writers who actually implemented the outline they were given did a very nice job. Certain plot points, such as the fates of various characters, were obvious pretty much from the start, but this didn't diminish my enjoyment of the movie.

There was one big continuity glitch that would have been trivial to fix; I wonder how it was that no one noticed it. Oops. (It involves the number of sections in the ship.)

A small point: in the previews, I'm 99.9% sure that they showed the hacker kid saying that he's going to need a steady supply of Star Trek videos and Pop Tarts. In the movie, it's Xena videos and Hot Pockets. Faulty memory, product placement, or something else? (And, the kid isn't savvy enough to ask for DVDs? :-) )

Sunday short takes

The snow on the dafodils yesterday morning was very pretty. I should have gone inside for the camera, but I didn't -- and it was gone when we got back later.

Sunday dinner was pleasant. We had corned beef and cabbage (delayed from St. Patrick's day). Also some very tasty potatoes and (later) wonderful if misspelled creme bruille. Yum!

After dinner some of us played Cosmic Wimpout. I'd heard of the game but never seen it before. I'd always assumed that it was some sort of knock-off or spoof of Cosmic Encounters, but it's unrelated. It's a dice game with a gambling element.

Dani took an early lead with a 180-point turn (most of us were getting about 30 points a turn, if we scored at all). When he topped 500 and we all got one final chance to beat him, I had a good turn and beat him by about 30 points. So then he got a final chance to go against me, but he didn't score. That was not how I expected that to turn out at all.

(The black die has a wild spot on it that isn't on the other dice. Belatedly I realized that I don't know which face it replaces. That would seem to matter to the odds.)

In other news... the Trib printed my letter on Sunday. The Sunday edition has higher circulation than any weekday, so that's nice.

This Shabbat I was once again reminded of how most people at my synagogue seem to assume that all liberal Jews are politically very liberal. It drives me nuts. I wonder if some of my fellow congregants would say some of the hateful things they say if they realized that there's someone in the room who actually holds the opinions they're deriding. (I see little interest in actual debate/discussion.) I have no problem with disagreement; my problem is with unnecessary snideness and rudeness in denegrating the other side of any conflict. In my experience, the ultra-liberals seem to be somewhat more prone to this sort of thing than are the ultra-conservatives, with the exception (from the latter camp) of the anti-abortionists.