Sunday, July 17, 2011

Can’t Think of a Title

After a barely functioning Saturday, today turned out better. Even the daily crossword puzzle was solved in just over 12 minutes. Still feeling puny but got out to church and to a birthday part for a child of friends. Scored leftovers, so it was a good day.

It probably helped I went to bed at 9:20 PM last night.

Today I learned something new. A person can hit the snooze button every ten minutes and still fall into a deep enough sleep to dream during each interval.

It is so humid my eyeballs fogged over. This is going to be a rough week with mid to high 90’s predicted and heat indexes well above 100 F. But the media it playing it up like it is some amazing heat wave when I remember stretches of true 100+ weather in previous decades.

I’ve figured out what movies I’ll review next and it will be nice getting back to a more traditionally vague format.  The Battle of Britain will be followed by Thirteen Days.

Speaking of movies, Netflix has changed their fees and I was looking at a 60% increase for the package I had subscribed to. With low bandwidth, I went to the two DVDs for $12 option instead. Not happy with this, but the streaming revolution isn’t really happening thanks to the movie studios. I’m beginning to wonder if it ever will.

At least I’m slowly catching up on popular movies I had no interest in seeing at the theater. So far, most have not impressed me.

Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull was bad. It came off as a parody of the previous films and Harrison Ford is way too old for this kind of thing.

Quantum of Solace destroyed all the momentum from the reboot, Casino Royale. Not content to fumble things, it turned into a poorly written and edited left wing conspiracy fantasy. Ian Fleming must be rolling in his grave. It is just a very bad film on many levels, despite having a good cast. A true waste of talent.

Inception has cemented my being a fan of Chris Nolan. He is what we hoped M. Night Shyamalan would become as a director. I knew it would be heavy on special effects and that didn’t interest me. The idea of manipulating dreams did, however. What surprised me was how sentimental the film was. Well worth watching.

I’m bemused by how my evaluations of films and TV series confuse my friends. There is no question that I dance to a different drummer and employ criteria that aren’t the norm. But if I manage to annoy everyone at some point, I’ve done my job. Or just had fun annoying them. It’s a tossup.

Oh before I forget, I have an animated film out of Ireland to recommend. It is called The Secret of Kells and is a lovely piece of work. The animation style is unique and fits the minimalist story very well. In places it was absolutely haunting and I really liked the ending. Good for older children and up, younger children could be frightened by the violence.

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