Ain’t Dead Yet
Posted by | Filed under Life, Movies, Reviews
Today marks the completion of my third decade on this planet and I am quite pleased to be able to announce that I ain’t dead yet. :D But worry not gentle reader, I’ll not be subjecting you to some passé retrospective about my life. Instead, I’ll just recap today and today alone.
I was up playing Wild Arms 3 till about 3 am as I just couldn’t sleep. Most likely due to an excessive amount of munching on holiday goodies while downing glass, after glass of soda1. I found one monster to fight that took around an hour to defeat but it jumped my characters up 4–7 levels! *grin* Then when I eventually got to bed; I slept poorly. Our apartment is just too dry this time of year and our little humidifier stopped working. This causes me to keep waking up with sinus headaches and a terrible thrist. I got out of bed about 8:30 — 9 and went back to playing the video game a bit more. Shortly there after, Michelle got up and gave me my birthday present.
What’d she get me? A case of blue balls Bawls. Then after lazing around most of the day; we headed out to the local mall to meet some friends.
I’d foolishly asked a bunch of friends to join us in watching the Narina movie with a follow-up plan to eat dinner together. There was one point that I’d not factored in these plans. This year, my birthday fell on a Saturday. Just about the last Saturday before Christmas. Traffic was insane and people all around were grouchy, though we did run across some nice people that helped us get around the parking lot2. We went over to the mall a little early and bought a new humidifer and then headed down to the theater. We got tickets, met up with our friends and went in to watch the The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
*whew* What a movie! While not perfect, it was probably as good as we could hope for from a Hollywood production.
High points:
- The actress playing Lucy was spot on. Most of the other actors cast in the movie were also quite good
- The backgrounds were gorgeous.
- The addition of the Nazi bombing run at the beginning of the movie really helped to give context to the time of the story.
Low points:
- The costuming on the witch. Her outfits were ugly and just didn’t work with the imagery I have in my head for the character. Though I do have to admit the black , soulless eyes did work for me.
- The witch was not nearly as afraid of Aslan as she should have been. In my memories of the book, the witch was terrified of Aslan but the movie seemed to put them on a more even footing.
- Maugrim’s voice. The actor doing the voice did a fine job, but being the only character without a british accent really stuck out and annoyed me.
Overall, I’d say it was worth seeing in the theater and it is something I’ll be adding to our DVD collection when it becomes available.
After the movie was over, we headed to the restaurant. Oh, I should mention we had called earlier in the day to try making reservations but were told they don’t do that for parties of less than 8. And that they would have plenty of room for the 6 of us. When we got there; we were told it would be a 2 hour wait. We decided to switch to the Oyama Sushi restaurant. They seated us within minutes of our arrival (even though they were already pretty packed). Then they plied us with drinks until our food was ready3. We had a jolly time chatting and drinking (non-alcholic, for the most part) but all good things do come to an end and eventually we all headed home. It was a very good day and while I ain’t dead yet; I am a bit tired so good night, sleep tight and don’t let the space bugs bite!
1 a.k.a. pop to you heathens.
2 A few people threw their cars into reverse to open up bigger areas for us to drive through and things of that nature.
3 It turns out this weekend contains not only my birthday and practically the last weekend before Christmas but it’s also graduation weekend for the University! No wonder everything was so packed today! This also explains why it took so long for our food to arrive.
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About Mark McKibben
Mark works as a [REDACTED] for [REDACTED], currently residing in Iowa. CoffeeBear.net is a place for him to blather on about whatever strikes his fancy. He currently spends his "free" time working on a photography project, playing with his cat and attempting to keep his wife happy (not necessarily in that order).
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December 20th, 2005 at 3:44 pm
Happy birthday, to you and our father-in-law!
Be sure to celebrate geeky non-anniversaries as well. I threw my third-of-a-century party four months after turning 33. Maybe you could remember to celebrate your ten-pi day when you hit 31.4159… (late on May 17th, 2007).
I had a little different view of the Narnia movie. Although it had moments, I still unreservedly recommended against seeing it to friends. Denise backed me up on this and, oddly, we independently came to the same conclusion: that it was essentially a well-produced ABC after-school special. It was definitely a movie made not for adults, but for children.
But some of your points are well-taken.
— Lucy’s actress was good.
— The panoramic backgrounds were gorgeous, but were mostly ignored as simply background.
— The Nazi bombing run was a good touch.
but
— Most of the actors were not good.
— Through no fault of their own, they had to lean constantly on CGI. And whether for budget or technology reasons, they simply were not where they needed to be. It was distractingly unnatural.
— Silly props, with a lot of cut-aways and reaction-shots to cover for that fact.
— A feeling of being rushed (which is common in a lot of book-to-movie movies).