We saw the new War of the Worlds last night. This had the potential to go one of two ways, I thought. They might have decided to make a thriller action flick (which would not have been very interesting to me), or they might have made more of a character story. Wells provided a foundation that could go either direction -- not that movies necessarily take much from the books they're based on, of course.

( here there be spoilers -- but c'mon; the movie's been out for two months )

Overall, I enjoyed the movie. I haven't seen any other movie/video versions of this story to compare it to. (I only know the book, the Orson Welles radio version, and Jeff Wayne's musical setting.) My favorite telling of it is probably still Jeff Wayne's; it and this movie are so different, though, that comparing them wouldn't really be feasible. That said, though, it's been years since I've listened to that recording and I should do something about that. And maybe dump it to CD if I can, since I currently have it only on vinyl.

"Existentially speaking, is there such a thing as half a piece of cake?" -- kayre

This evening at dinner the fundamental dynamics of lightsabres came up. Specifically, how does the color encoding work? Is Luke's blue because Luke prefers blue, or because any lightsabre Luke uses will channel Luke-specific force, which is blue? If so, do the admission criteria at Jedi University include "sabre does not glow red" (and if not, why not)? Are there important qualitative difference between blue and green sabres, both of which appear to channel the light side of the force? Surely these are important research topics for someone out there who has, you know, seen all the movies.

While we were in Sears waiting for Dani's new tires, he noticed a "bilingual tire gauge". Yes, it talks to you (in English or Spanish). It also has a decent-sized digital display. So I went looking for one that has the display but doesn't talk, because I have a lot of trouble reading a conventional gauge and thus do not check my pressure as often as I ought. Alas, there is a hefty surcharge for silence. So I got the noisy one and will hope for minimal annoyance.

Erik (the underweight cat) has developed a voracious appetite (for him) in the last several days. I'm happy to oblige, but I wonder what the difference is. I did buy a new type of food to try out on him on spec, but he's also chowing down on the food he had previously shown little interest in. Maybe he just needed some new flavors to jump-start his appetite. It's probably pretty boring (culinarily, at least) to be a domestic dog or cat, getting the same stuff day in and day out. Think back to childhood and those "tuna casserole again?" moments, and that probably wasn't daily. :-)

Dani and I finally saw The Incredibles this afternoon. Fun movie. They probably should have included a family pet, who would exhibit absolutely no powers but keep you wondering. But maybe I'm being influenced by The Crossovers. :-)

We saw a matinee and all the previews were aimed at kids. Is that because that's what's attached to this movie, or because you get different previews at matinees than at evening shows? There was also a short feature -- haven't seen one of those since I was a kid -- and it, too, was pretty clearly for the kids. Well-done technically; insipid artistically. (I didn't catch a title.)

(Ok, let's see if this will post today.)

We went to see the Harry Potter movie Monday night. Before that, though... this had to have been the most unappealing set of previews I've seen in a while:

• Spongebob Squarepants: Um, I think they might not quite have this movie's demographic nailed.
• Spiderman 2: Eh. Didn't see #1 and won't see this, but they're closer to the demographic.
• Sleep Over: Eww. Just... eww. Inane gigly teenage girls sneak around their parents and have cat-fights. Um, yeah. Maybe Spongebob wasn't so bad after all.
• Catwoman: If, like me, you have not read the comics (I assume there are comics), you get no information about this movie beyond "babe in black doing acrobatics". Maybe that's enough for their target demographic. (Oh, and I gather the cat-woman died and was recycled or something?)
• Cinderella Story: Cinderella set in modern-day LA. Looks cute, but if the glass slipper has really been replaced by a cell phone, I would think that identification would be anti-climactic. ("Each of you, quick: what's your phone number? Ok, let's ask the phone.")
• Princess Diaries 2: This looks like it could be fun. Or rather, it slightly motivates me to find #1 (this is a sequel). Dani has good things to day about the book.
• Polar Express: Eww eww eww. Even if I did Christmas, and even if I had kids, I still wouldn't take them to see this bit of insipid Santa-is-love fluff.

Now, on to the HP spoilers. ( Read more... )

Assessment: Much better than #2, not a rich as #1. I'll go to the next one.

We made extremely good time getting to the theatre, but were still surprised to be the first ones at this particular show. That's not really a win, though; it just meant we got to watch more commercials. Remember when you could spend pre-movie time just talking, with quiet music in the background?

Saturday night we went to ralphmelton and lorimelton's for dinner and a viewing of the extended version of Fellowship of the Ring. Some of the cut scenes were appropriately cut; others were a real loss to the movie. I particularly liked the scene where the hobbits get a lesson about how filling lembas are (a sort of flatbread that only requires one bite a day for a full-sized elf).

The DVD has some extras, most of which we didn't watch. We did see a (long) trailer for the Two Towers. We also saw a rather, um, tasteless send-up of the Council of Elrond called "Lord of the Piercings". We had to google for the navigation instructions, as the person who suggested it couldn't remember the details.

I'll bet easter eggs were a lot more challenging a decade ago than they are now. :-)

Sunday night we went to an SCA potluck dinner. The theme this time was "birds, including things birds eat". We rejected chicken as too obvious, and decided not to do things with eggs (quiche, devilled eggs, etc) for a similar reason. We worried about duplication. I finally opted for baked salmon (some birds eat fish), which went over well. And, as it turned out, while the hostess made roasted chicken, there were no devilled eggs.

The creativity award has to go to the person who constructed a bird out of soft cheeses (with some structural elements), with wing and tail feathers carved out of peppers, sitting in a nest of (probably) shredded cabbage.

After recording Saturday's torah portion for posterity (or whatever suffices for same in non-digital media), I set to work on the portion I'm chanting Thursday. It came back more easily than I thought it would -- once I consented to flushing parts of the previous one from active memory. It's weird how that works. I can remember zillions of songs, even ones that are similar, but two similar torah portions are currently beyond me. I guess that will get better in time. I've got to find more opportunities to grow in this area. (For next year I will learn the final chunk of the weekday reading for this portion, but I'd like to do something before then, especially since I'm now starting to be able to parse the trope directly, without looking every symbol up in the book. I still have to look up the less-common ones, but that too will get better in time.)

At the Saturday service a random member of my congregation congratulated me on becoming chair of the worship committee. Ok, I assume that means they've told the outgoing chair by now...

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 ).

(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? :-) )

Last night Gail, her parents, and Dani and I went to see Star Trek: Nemesis. It was a fun movie. It had liberal doses of plot issues and bad science, but you know to expect that. They still managed to tell an interesting story, if you just suspend disbelief. Short takes (and I'm mostly going to ignore the aforementioned plot issues and bad science):

• There were some fun bits in the first wedding. Thank you for sparing us the second one on-screen. I wasn't ready for a naked Ryker -- or Picard, for that matter.
• That looks like a very effective weapon, if you can distract people during the 7-minute power-up sequence. (I think the smaller instance we saw was not nearly that long, though. The best uses of this weapon are not in planet-killing but rather in government chambers and the like.)
• "Nature versus nurture" is so 20th-century...
• How the heck is Janeway an admiral while Picard is not?!
• I am very happy with the fact that we did not get a huge honking reset button with Data's name on it. For once, actual change. Yes, of course they could put things back the way they were with suitable applications of technobabble, but I hope they won't.

Several of the previews were noteworthy, but mostly not in the positive direction. Final Destination 2 implies that there was a Final Destination (1); I didn't see it and have no desire to see either. It doesn't look like we'll get a Minority Report-like examination; it looks like the point is to do blood and gore. Pass. (And the garbage-disposal scene squicks me, plain and simple.) Bruce Almighty (that might not be the correct given name) looks inane, though it did get me wondering what I would do if I were granted such powers for a week. Daredevil looks bad; I have nothing more specific to say. Bulletproof Monk looks like it could be a fun action flick sans plot, but I probably won't pay to see it. I've forgotten the name of the animated children's film with huge merchandising that turns me off so much. And let me just say that I'm glad that Austin Powers movie has been released now, because that means I don't have to see really inane trailers, at least until next time.

The big winner, though, is The Core. I am looking forward to seeing this. I'm sure the science will be, um, "novel", but it looks like they're doing a good-enough job with the story that I don't care. A US weapons program goes wrong; the end of the world is imminent. But wait; we just might be able to stop it, if we just drill into the center of the earth and... do something. I loved some of the humorous bits that showed up in the trailer, and it appears that there will be copious explosions and the like, so the movie will probably appeal to a broad audience.

Last night we joined lefkowitzga and tangerinpenguin for dinner at PF Chang (very good!) and Harry Potter (ok).

Food: PF Chang is apparently a chain, and they have some "signature" dishes. One of these is the "lettuce wraps", which are sort of like moo-shoo but with lettuce instead of pancakes. We got the vegetarian ones and they were very good. The "ma-po tofu" was also very good, with a tasty sauce that was not especially hot. (I would like to learn to cook tofu like this, and I don't know what the secret is to get pieces that are firm, almost "crispy" on the edges, and thoroughly cooked.) We also had the baked fish (tilapia, yesterday) with ginger. Mmm, ginger. The carnivores at the table ate two other dishes that I can't comment on.

Movie (without spoilers): It had some very funny bits (including a great one at the very end of the closing credits). Technically and acting-wise, it was pretty well-done. It was entertaining. It was not as good as the first one. And it had some character behavior that was either nonsensical or insufficiently justified; I gather it's the same in the books, which I have not read. So overall, it gets an "ok" from me.

I can suspend disbelief pretty easily for most things -- technology, alien worlds, magic, alternate history, even hard sciences to a degree. Just show me the ground rules of the story's world, and I can roll with it (even Star Trek, most of the time). But I've found that I cannot hold out against characters who behave in ways that do not fit with their characters as we've been given to understand them. I can't easily suspend disbelief about behavior. And in this movie, either some key characters (one in particular) behaved nonsensically, or their motivations were not sufficiently explained.

( Here there be spoilers. )

Short takes:

• That phoenix is pretty cool!
• That poor owl -- not even a seat belt. :-)
• How did they do the elf? Was it a puppet, or CGI, or what? It worked well as comic relief. The part at the end was fun.
• I was surprised to see Haggart with a fairly normal pet, after last time.
• "Can you tell me?" "Yes." Perfect.
• I take it that Hermione is similar to Jason Fox in her attitude toward school. :-)
• Oh, and this was definitely a much classier grade of commercials than I was used to. The trailers were a mixed bag (there's some animated thing coming up that looks really, really stupid). But no LOTR trailer! There was supposed to be an LOTR trailer!

We've been invited to dinner tomorrow by friends, so we went to see LOTR tonight. Well, first we went out for Chinese food (it's traditional), and the service was kind of slow, but we still made it to the theatre in time.

Side note: the theatre recording said the running time was 3:13, and I was curious about whether that included trailers. Commercials started at 7:29, trailers at 7:31, the movie at 7:41, and final credits started to roll at 10:30 sharp. We didn't stay through the credits, but unless they ran for more than 10 minutes their calibration was off.

But enough of that. The movie was visually stunning. The music worked really well -- which is to say, most of the time I didn't actively notice it but sometimes I did and it was setting the right moods. I still don't know how they shot some of the scenes with the hobbits and height differentials. (It apparently worked for the unaware: Dani asked me afterwards if the lead hobbits were played by mdgets.)

I hated the photography in most of the fight scenes, though I generally liked it otherwise. Yes, fights are fast and chaotic and you want to convey "action", but when things are actively jerky it just doesn't work for me. A secondary complaint about the fight scenes is the lack of tactics the combattants tended to show; I don't expect grand strategy, but you don't entirely stop a fight to watch someone die, nor do you run past an enemy and ignore a clear shot. Ah well, the price of high drama. :-)

But don't get me wrong -- I did enjoy the movie!

Stolen from chite:

Recommend me...
1. A movie
2. A book
3. A CD
4. An LJ user not on my friends list
5. A website
6. Something to do in the next two months