{"id":10828,"date":"2013-10-11T23:32:11","date_gmt":"2013-10-12T03:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=10828"},"modified":"2013-10-11T23:32:11","modified_gmt":"2013-10-12T03:32:11","slug":"friday-31","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=10828","title":{"rendered":"Friday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/81595350@N00\/9437640078\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm8.staticflickr.com\/7295\/9437640078_f63c28e4d2_c.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I wish I could say it had been an especially productive week, but it hasn&#8217;t been, really. I mean, I did watch the entire second season of <i>Continuum<\/i> and a bunch of movies, but I&#8217;m not exactly sure that counts.<\/p>\n<p>I like <i>Continuum<\/i>, which I say having not always been the biggest fan of star Rachel Nichols. Of course, I say <i>that<\/i>, I now realize, only dimly remembering her at all from <i>Alias<\/i> and <i>The Inside<\/i>, and from small roles in the first <i>GI Joe<\/i> and <i>Star Trek<\/i> movies. This season may have complicated things with a little too much plot, but maybe that just leaves something for the (now confirmed) third season to make sense of. The show&#8217;s Canadian-ness also started to creep out in year two. I don&#8217;t necessarily remember them <i>hiding<\/i> the fact that it takes place in Vancouver in season one, but it&#8217;s firmly established in season two.<\/p>\n<p>I also watched a bunch of movies. Earlier in the week, it was <i>Point Break<\/i> and <i>The Sunset Limited<\/i>, then <i>Gravity<\/i> on Wednesday, <i>Magicians<\/i> last night, and <i>This Is 40<\/i>, <i>Room 237<\/i>, and Stanley Kubrick&#8217;s <i>The Killing<\/i> all today. (Oh, and I re-watched <i>Pee Wee&#8217;s Big Adventure<\/i> this afternoon as well.) <\/p>\n<p><i>Gravity<\/i> is more spectacle than story, more experience than anything else. It&#8217;s a pretty thrilling experience, and worth the (not insignificant) added cost of seeing it in IMAX and 3D &#8212; seriously, this is a film that will <i>not<\/i> benefit from DVD or television viewing &#8212; but there&#8217;s not a lot of weight to it beyond the often stunning visuals.<\/p>\n<p><i>Room 237<\/i> is an interesting movie, full of lots of odd theories &#8212; most not very compelling &#8212; about <i>The Shining<\/i> and Stanley Kubrick&#8217;s intent. The theorists in the film &#8212; heard but never seen &#8212; who talk about <i>The Shining<\/i>&#8216;s impossible geographies and recurring visual themes are much more convincing than the ones who claim it&#8217;s about the Holocaust or Kubrick&#8217;s involvement in the faked moon landing. (&#8220;I&#8217;m not saying we didn&#8217;t go to the moon, I&#8217;m just saying that what we saw was faked, and that it was faked by Stanley Kubrick.&#8221;) If nothing else, it made me want to re-watch <i>The Shining<\/i>, though I settled for Kubrick&#8217;s earlier noir film <i>The Killing<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p><i>Magicians<\/i>, meanwhile, was pretty terrible, as was <i>This Is 40<\/i>, although at least the former was just unfunny and didn&#8217;t feel like it was forty years in real time. I like a lot of the cast in both films, and it&#8217;s easy to see how <i>Magicians<\/i> might have seemed funny on paper&#8230;whereas <i>This Is 40<\/i>, on the other hand, is so shaggy and plotless it&#8217;s hard to believe any of it ever existed on paper. It&#8217;s telling when you&#8217;re sitting around in your pajamas on a Friday watching a movie and thinking, &#8220;Maybe I should have gone to work after all.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Of course, I did kind of go to work. I sent and answered a whole bunch of e-mails this week, mostly trying to get reviewers looking at a project before I return to the office at the end of next week. I also went back to SUNY Old Westbury briefly yesterday morning, since that seemed easier than trying to schedule a phone call.<\/p>\n<p>And that, more or less, seems to have been my week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wish I could say it had been an especially productive week, but it hasn&#8217;t been, really. I mean, I did watch the entire second season of Continuum and a bunch of movies, but I&#8217;m not exactly sure that counts. I like Continuum, which I say having not always been the biggest fan of star &#8230; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=10828\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14,28,17],"class_list":["post-10828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-movies","tag-personal","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10828"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10828"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10830,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10828\/revisions\/10830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}