movies

Not easy being green

A largely uneventful day, broken up by a nice walk in the autumn sunshine and the deeply disappointing movie Green Lantern.

I off and on live-tweeted the experience, which revealed two distinctly different movies. The first, starring Ryan Reynolds and some genuinely impressive and inventive CGI (minus his mask), was worth the time. Mark Strong as Sinestro is particularly good. The other movie, starring Peter Sarsgaard and some very muddy, ill-defined family issues and long stretches of boredom, was not. Again, more disappointing, a huge missed opportunity, than strictly bad. If there’s a director’s cut, or an earlier version of the script, it might almost be worth investigating, just to figure out when and how it went wrong.

Of course, that would require watching it again, and it wasn’t interesting enough to warrant that,

Movie day

This afternoon, shortly before we got the wifi in the house running again, I finished watching Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time on my iPad. I wish I could say, after three days of watching the movie, that it was worth it. The acting’s not too bad, despite some scenery chewing by Ben Kingsley and Jake Gyllenhaal’s questionable accent, but the the story — and the script — are a little too dumb. A couple of the stunts have genuine humor and intelligence behind them, but not so much the rest of the movie.

This evening, I watched The Lincoln Lawyer, which wasn’t perfect, was a little predictable, and at times strained credulity. But it was pretty good nonetheless, an intricate and intelligent legal mystery and a good lead performance by Matthew McConaughey.

In between those, I most puttered around the house, did a little cleaning, watched a little TV, failed to get the wifi working again all by myself. (My father and brother-in-law did pretty much the same thing I’d done, power-cycled the modem and router, but for them it worked.) Tomorrow’s the last of my four-day weekend, and I think by then I’ll be rested enough to go back to the office.

Post-Turkey Day

Spent several hours helping my father and my brother-in-law clean the gutters and leaves in the backyard, while the dogs ran around. (Well, Chloe, my sister’s dog, ran around, but she did enough of it for anyone.) My sister’s husband, Brian, is tall and less nervous than I am climbing up on the roof — it’s less the height than the incline, I think — so it’s good that he was here. Not that it’s really been cold, but it has been at least a few months since we had any call to switch the AC on.

Anyway, that took up a big piece of the afternoon, and this evening we all went out for Chinese. Then I tried to finish watching Prince of Persia: Sands if Time, which I started watching yesterday…but then the internet (and the streaming video) went out. Maybe the universe was trying to tell me something? (It’s not a great movie so far.)

Thanksgiving cornucopia

  • We live in a country where pizza is a vegetable. I’m just saying. [via]
  • Harry Potter director developing all-new Doctor Who movie. Not at all a sure thing, but still, when do we stop remaking things? Maybe when the last remake is still on-going?
  • Genevieve Valentine on Immortals, which she describes as “a batch of snickerdoodles with thumbtacks inside.”

    The labyrinth and Minotaur are well turned out, and their showdown takes place in a temple mausoleum, where an archway of stairs frames a goddess’s head that’s inset with candles to make it glow from within. It’s the sort of thing where you think, “Man, that’s good looking! I wish this stupid scene would stop so we could just look at it.”

  • I really don’t know what to think about actress suing IMDB for revealing her age. They both seem to have a perfectly valid point.
  • Massive plagiarism might help your book sales [via]
  • Billy Crystal will be hosting the Oscars this year, giving me another reason not to watch. Which is not a dig at Crystal, necessarily, who I generally like…you know, back when he made movies people watched. But it’s such a safe, boring choice. The Academy really missed a golden opportunity to let the Muppets host the Oscars
  • Tilt-shift Van Gogh
  • Polite Dissent on Forgotten Drugs of the Silver-Age:

    The more I think about it, for all intents and purposes, Jor-El was a mad scientist. He espoused scientific theories well outside the accepted norm and performed numerous unauthorized scientific experiments of questionable ethics.

  • Mysterious D.C. rampage leaves smashed cars in its wake. Seriously, it looks like the Hulk went through there. [via]
  • And finally, the Center for Fiction interviews Margaret Atwood:

    I think it’s a human need to name – to tell this from that. On the most basic level, we need to distinguish – as crows do – the dangerous creature from the harmless one, and – as all animals do – the delicious and healthful food object from the rotting, poisonous one. In literary criticism it’s very helpful to know that the Harlequin Romance you sneak into when you think no one is looking is not the same, and is not intended to be the same, as Moby Dick. But stories and fictions have always interbred and hybridized and sent tendrils out into strange spaces.

Wednesday various

  • You kind of have to love Umberto Eco’s answer to the question “What’s one thing you’re a fan of that people might not expect?” He said: “My last grandchild.”
  • John Seavey pitches Evil Toy Monkey — The Series. I’d watch that.
  • “It was nearly toast, but Coney Island Bialys and Bagels is on a roll again after Muslim businessmen Peerzada Shah and Zafaryab Ali recently took over the 91-year-old mainstay of the Jewish noshes.” Now if we could just figure out how the Middle East is like a bialy shop… [via]
  • Ken Jennings suggest weaning ourselves from our GPSes:

    But as much as I love GPS, I worry that wayfinding is yet another part of our brains that our culture has decided it’s okay to outsource to technology. A famous 2000 study on London cab drivers showed that the hippocampus, the brain’s seat of spatial knowledge, grows physically as our geographic knowledge increases. Many people believe their sense of direction is hopeless, but in reality, that just means they need more practice. In experiment after experiment, researchers have learned that repeating a few simple exercises can turn lousy spatial thinkers into good ones. Without that exercise, our skills get flabby.

  • And finally, Firefly the Animated Series. Oh, if only. [via

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