Tag: Movies

I had originally planned on attending a Pampered Chef party with my wife last Sunday. I had been thinking it would be some pleasant socializing over some tasty food with a bit of somebody trying to sell me some pricey kitchen stuff. That is to say a not entirely unpleasant to spend part of one’s afternoon. Instead about an hour before the party, our friend Bryon stopped by and mentioned that Bruce Campbell was in town giving a short talk and promotting his new book, Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way.

I thought about it for a minute, but I knew there’d be more chances for Pampered Chef parties and I doubted I’d have any better chance of getting to see Mr. Campbell in person. So after a quick shower1, Bryon and I hopped into the car and drove into Iowa City. We got to the site about 40 minutes prior to the event began. We waited around and it turned out one of my co-workers was also there2. Then about 10 minutes before Mr. Campbell was scheduled to begin speaking; they opened one set of the doors into the auditorium and let everybody in. And naturally, it wasn’t the door we’d had been waiting at. *sigh*

Eventually, everybody was inside and mostly seated but then the organizers explained how the signing procedure was supposed to work and said the new book was for sale at the back of the auditorium. So we ended up giving up our fairly good seats to go get in another line. It took a while to get through the line, but it was good that we both went to the line as Laura3 showed up looking for us. Apparently, she decided the party wasn’t her cup of tea. While we were waiting in line; she kindly thanked me for “being so god-damn tall”.

There was a considerable amount of waiting in line to get the book, but eventually we all got our copies and headed back to find new seats (the good seats we’d had were long gone). A bit after that Mr. Campbell started taking questions. It turns out he’s a very charismatic speaker. There were a number of questions about him working with Sam Raimi, but the only one that really stuck in my mind was:

Questioner: When working on Spiderman, did you hang out with Tobey Maguire?
Bruce Campbell: Why would I?

*grin*

After far too little time had passed, Mr. Campbell stopped taking questions and then made a short speech promoting B-movies as the only place that is still creative in Hollywood.

…getting bitten by a radioactive spider is a b-movie!

After the speech, they started having people come up to get their books signed. Bryon & I had relatively low numbers but when we were going up they weren’t actually checking peoples numbers. Eventually I got up there and had Mr. Campbell sign my book; but I felt like a complete twit, the entire time I was there. I mean I have enjoyed all of his movies that I’ve seen and what I read of the book while I was in line was very amusing but I didn’t really have anything to say to him. He was very polite to me, but it was a rather uncomfortable moment for me. Signed memorabilia is nice to have I suppose, but it doesn’t do much for me. To tell the truth, I’m not entirely sure why I went up to have him sign the book. Other than I’d waited in line to get the sticker saying I could do so. *shrug* Life, go figure.

After that, we took off and headed off to meet up with some other friends for some RPGing. When we got there they were still finishing up with the Pampered Chef party and I got to munch down some of the leftovers4. Then it was game time and afterwards off to Old Chicago for dinner. All in all, a very pleasant Sunday. 🙂

1 Bryon arrived before we were expecting anybody. And yes, I’m extra-specially lazy on the weekend; so if I’m not expecting company I will hang around the apartment without getting myself up and ready for the day.
2 That would be Quincy for those that are curious.
3 Another friend of ours. One who was supposed to be at the Pampered Chef party.
4 Ah, breakfast at 3pm….

It’s been a good week for interesting links…
From Pukka:

Not from Pukka:

This week’s selection of links from Pukka include:

Not from Pukka, but still worthy of notice:

Yup, I finally went and saw this wretched bit of crap that Lucas put out. It was less horrifically bad than I had anticipated but still failed to be a good movie. The dialog was cheesy and the acting wooden. In particular “Annie” aka Darth Vader blew chunks, though he did get slightly better once he was in the Vader suit. To be fair though, the special effects were kind of nice; nothing particularlly innovative (just lots of CG). Still the massive battle scenes were cool. The individual battles of Jedi vs. Sith were just as cheesy as the dialog with tons of flips and swirls that almost looked impressive but were actually a massively dumb way to fight. Overall, I’ll give E3:RotS 1 star out of 5 (vs. -24 for E1:tPM).

Serenity

As my long time readers might recall, I watched a show called Firefly a while back and greatly enjoyed it. This week, thanks to one of my co-workers, I had an opporunity to drive 5 & 1/2 hours to plant my butt in a packed movie theater at 10 o’clock with a broken air conditioner. That is to say, I was able to attend a special preview showing of the Firefly movie, Serenity. Though the movie hasn’t quite been completed yet; it was fanatastic!

It started off with a short speech by Joss Whedon. He basically thanks the fans for their support and asked them to continue that support by asking them to help promote the movie. Then the movie was off and running. It appears to pick up at least a couple of years after the t.v. show ended1. Not all of the crew is still flying on Serenity though most are. The Alliance is still after River and they seem more desperate than ever to get her back. Desperate to the point where they’ve sent an unamed agent after her. During this agent’s introduction, we get treated to see a holographic recording of Simon rescuing River from the facility where they were experimenting on her; as well as finding out one of the reasons the Alliance wants her back so badly.2 Overall, I thought the story worked very well for fans of Firefly but I’m not sure how well it will play with people who never watched the tv show. The movie doesn’t have any big-name actors and it hasn’t been getting much in the way of promotion from the studio. I hope it does well at the box office (mostly in hopes of the tv show being revived).

Closing thougts about the preview:3

  • The preview didn’t have much in the way of music. This really bothered some people and it is one of the things that they’re still working on.
  • There weren’t any credits; again this is something they’re working on.
  • Supposedly there were some placeholders for special effects that aren’t complete yet, but I didn’t catch them.

1 Supposedly there is a comic book coming out in July (?) that covers what happens between the show & the movie.
2 I bet you’d like it if I told you why, wouldn’t you?. Too bad, this preview-review is going to be spoiler free. :p
3 Sorry, but 11 hours of driving in 2 days plus watching the movie at 10 o’clock, staring straight up at the screen from the front row, doesn’t exactly leave me pumped up for writing an indepth review. Maybe I’ll have something more to say after the official opening on 30 Sept 2005.