Random Droppings

Last night we were going to watch a re-run of Hellboy, but instead we stumbled across the SciFi Channel showing of "Tin Man", which was a re-imagining of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz". Dorothy Gale is now DG, and works at the diner in the small town; her parents have a farm. Unbeknownst to DG, there's another world in which an Evil Sorceress is looking for the path to power. She sends her henchmen through a Travel Storm to DG's house, and the adventure is off. Alan Cumming plays the scarecrow, Neal McDonough is the Tin Man, and I don't recall who played Raw, the lion.

The Evil Sorceress turns out to be DG's sister, the evil older sister who wants to take over the Outer Zone.

It was shown in two parts, back to back, so we had to send Sonny off to bed at the conclusion of part one. We stayed up to watch the entire thing, and it was well worth it.

Today we sent the Sonny off to the Y program, and after our errands were done we took in a movie that we wouldn't otherwise get to see. I'm not sure why "Milk" is rated "R", but it is also a good movie worth seeing. I knew who Harvey Milk was, and how he was murdered, but Honey had only vaguely heard of him. Sean Penn is a fantastic actor and really captured the accent, mannerisms, and passion of Harvey Milk. Some of the scenes brought tears to my eyes, because they were a powerful reminder of how bad life was back then. It took a lot of charisma to bring people out of the closet, and he did.

I suppose I should review the movie we saw yesterday. I was looking forward to seeing Prince Caspian, and I have to say I was a bit disappointed.

Well, I did fall asleep during the movie, so clearly it was not as compelling as the first movie. Prince Caspian, as played by Ben Barnes, was just a little bland. I'm not sure what kind of accent he was supposed to have, and it was a wee bit intermittent, so I was really not sure why he needed an accent. His dad, whatever his name was, was nicely evil. The badger was funny, and Peter Dinklage shone as a grumpy dwarven warrior of Narnia. He does glowering so well.

Edmund was reformed and did not have any evil adventures; Peter and Susan were on the bland side of things too. I dislike it when characters repeatedly make errors of judgement, and Lucy kept annoying me with her "innocence", constantly approaching beings as if she could immediately trust them. Of course, that is what she did from the very beginning, but one would think she'd have learned from that bear.

Maybe I'm just too skeptical and cynical to believe anyone could remain so innocent.

The battles were decently plotted and choreographed. New Zealand is still a beautiful country. This was filmed also in Poland and Slovenia, which were also beautiful. Reepicheep was bigger than I'd imagined, and voiced by Eddie Izzard, which is cool.

Overall, not as good as the first movie.

We saw the Transformers today, which is based on a tv show that I never watched. Hey, when it first came along, I was in college being a nerd, plus I didn't have a tv. Anyways, it can be summed up thusly: "Machines + fighting". Lots of machines, doing lots of transformations, and fighting lots of long drawn-out scenes. Manly men doing manly things, and -- surprisingly enough -- two strong female characters not entirely relegated to the background, and contributing to the "defense".

My only real complaint about the movie is that there was too much reliance on the "hand-held camera" effect, with subsequent blurring and jigging all around -- I couldn't see the action well enough. The sound was muddy too, making dialogue sometimes difficult to understand. Some of the cardboard subordinate characters were a little obvious.

All in all: not bad. A decent summer blockbuster, but probably easier to follow on a small screen.