What did I do this weekend? Friday night was Chris Slater’s stag party, where we ate pizza and pie, played video games (I played 5 different games – my favourite was some Final Fantasy version) and card games, and some got drunk. I did not. I saw someone’s nipple but that’s about as naughty as it got. And no, it wasn’t Iain’s.
Saturday I had a meeting with Tim Carter, went to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow which I largely recommend with some caveats (see more below), and wandered around downtown with Marlo.
Today was Chris & Kathryn’s wedding. The padre mispronounced Kathryn’s name once and kept talking about God this and Jesus that but otherwise it was really great. I’m really happy for those two crazy kids, and there was tons o’ love at the reception. It was nice, and the food was amazing. I haven’t eaten that much meat in a long time – and it was all because of the two kinds of gourmet mustard and the horseradish sauce that went with the roast beef.
BIG FAT SPOILERS ABOUT SKY CAPTAIN: As I mentioned, I enjoyed the movie. Expectation is everything, and I didn’t expect anything out of the actors, so it didn’t trouble me too much that they came through on the promises of milquetoast acting made in the trailers. Still, I wanted to slap Gwyneth Paltry just to get some kind of emotion out of her. Mostly I wanted to see the movie because I love the genre and I wanted to see how they could pull off a movie that was almost entirely shot on blue screen. I had most of the same problems with the movie as Warren did (see blog link to the right) and I had a few more as well. I didn’t see the usefulness of using CGI cars instead of real ones (it was distracting). There were some really dumb bits, such as when Sky Captain punched and essentially K.O.’d robots twice his size. I guess the robots were made of balsa wood. There were general problems with the aircraft that you didn’t have to be an engineer to balk at – monoprop planes lighting safely on a few hundred feet of landing strip; planes not shattering when they hit the water surface at terminal velocity; etc. I also made some pretty good guesses which I expect a lot of other people did as well. The second time I saw the mystery woman, I knew she was a robot. As soon as I saw Totenkopf’s holographic face, I guessed he had been dead for a long time, and the evil plan was all his robots’ legacy. One of the things that I really did appreciate in the film is that nobody had any gratuitously revealing clothes. They stayed true to the genre on that and I thought it was classy that they avoided sinking to the lowest common denominator.