What the hell have I been doing?

I took off all last week to lay around the old home place with my family, play some music, read, buy a new car, and go to a bunch of movies.

T3: In the immortal words of my friend Suzanne, I was happy, my expectations were low. Shwarzenegger looks surprisingly close to T2 form; I was expecting big saggy manboobs, but either they did some amazing CGI work on his pecs or he actually managed to get back into something close to his 1991 form. The chick cyborg was more effective than I expected, and the mayhem is non-stop. There were some stupid moments, but overall I think I liked it about as well as T2 (The Terminator is a cut above either; T2 might have been on a par with it if Cameron had been able to control himself and spare us the infamous thumbs-up gesture as Arnie melts into a big pile of molten goo at the end.)

Pirates of the Caribbean (twice): Geoffrey Rush and Johnny Depp chew the scenery with gleeful abandon, while Orlando Bloom turns in a somewhat uneven performance (with a couple of nice comedic moments) as the Flynn du jour. Keira Knightly manages to be feisty without becoming overwhelmingly annoying. I am admittedly biased in favor of pirate movies, and this one might even be good enough to rescue the genre from oblivion. It's not "Against All Flags" or "The Sea Hawk", but it's not bad.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Sean Connery does the Alan Quatermain thing, Stuart Townsend plays an hilariously arch Dorian Gray. Lots of suspension of disbelief (and common sense) necessary (really, just how deep do they think the canals are in Venice?) but the visuals are nice, the action is rousing, and the comic relief isn't overplayed.

The Hulk: Don't be misled by the cheesy trailer. It's good, and the closest to the actual feel of a Marvel comic of all the comicbook movies, the more so because of the way Ang Lee deliberately uses comicbook transitions between scenes and multipanel shots. The people who didn't like the angsty nature of the hero and the lack of non-stop action probably didn't read the comics much. Better than Spiderman, better (in some ways) than the X-men movies (not to damn them with faint praise.)

My new car.




Picked it up on the 5th and just broke 1500 miles. Heh.

My new favorite website.

From an initial prod from James Lileks' column today, a great collection of quasi-musical drek. Includes a link to a video of William Shatner performing "Rocket Man" circa 1978. Is there a German term for mingled horror and delight?