Weekend roundup.

Better late than never.

Saw Riddick with Angela, see below. Saw Troy for the third time with Sean, Greg, and Kate; Sean thought the dialog was corny (which is precisely why Greg and I like it) but liked the fight scenes. His reaction to Paris: "Let's run away! I'm good at that."

Had three migraines, which was a whole new level of annoying for me. Not the painful kind, for which I am suitably grateful, but it was disorienting to round the corner of the back freezer section at Sam's Club and suddenly start seeing a jagged semi-circle of oscillating light in the periphery of my vision. Lasted about 10 minutes, followed by a mild headache. I was going to casually mention it to the doctor the next time I saw him. After driving back to Ohio Sunday night I had two more, one right after the other, with nausea this time, and woke up the next morning with a pounding headache (though not bad enough to get me out of work.) So I scuttled to the doctor Monday morning and am now sitting on a bottle of Imitrex waiting impatiently for another light show to kick off so I don't feel like I wasted my money. [One would think, also, that one's insurance company would accomodate one in the area of migraine medication in that they would not dare to throw up roadblocks in the way of one's acquisition of said medication. One would be wrong, of course.]

Watched as much of the Reagan funeral on Friday as I could between bites of lunch at Nan's*, and then watched the first half again at Angela's via the miracle of digital recording. As Bernadine noted via email last week, he was probably the greatest president we'll see in our lifetimes, and I'm grateful he came along when he did so I didn't have to spend my college years listening to Carter asking the rest of the world for more gruel. He left the country better than he found it; I can't imagine a better legacy.

*Paternal grandmother, last remaining grandparent. Great cook.

Chronicles of Riddick.

It was...eh. I didn't hate it. The iconography looked great, but Vin Diesel deflated the whole project every time he opened his mouth, and he got more screentime and dialog than anyone. Some of the effects are neat, some are crappy; Judi Dench as an air elemental was nifty, but the catlike critters running around terrorizing the prisoners on Crematoria (which I can't even type without rolling my eyes) were cartoonish, to put it kindly. Also, I thought there was an implicit anti-Christian message underlying the setup of the necromongers (convert or die, attacking the peaceful inhabitants of "New Mecca", etc.) and that tempered my enjoyment of the spectacle.