It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Tag: movie (Page 1 of 6)

Day 343: current events

January 21, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Let me put aside the earthquake in Haiti and the Massachusetts special election and its effects on the health care reform bill, and let’s talk turkey.

Avatar: what is up with this movie making gajillions of dollars? I saw Avatar (once) and I enjoyed it. I thought the world was pretty and plot was simple enough to follow. I liked them sticking their ponytails into things and how they were all big and blue. But, man, this thing has a life of its own.

Which begs a question like: is Avatar our generation’s Star Wars? Is it the movie that’s going to be the benchmark for an entire lifetime of franchises? Somehow, this movie managed to hit that piece of the market that manages to play well to heavy sci-fi fans and play decently to everyone else in the world. Most hardcore sci-fi movies get shunned by mainstream audiences, while most sci-fi movies that appeal to mainstream audiences don’t find a large enough hardcore following.

Will we be seeing Avatar sequels, prequels, book series, graphic novels, Christmas specials, action figures, bedsheets, Lego sets, and conventions for the next half century? Will ThinkGeek jokingly put up a USB orange Pandora shrinking plant a few years from now and then be forced to make it due to insane popularity and demand? Is this the world we now live in?

Also, wow is NBC and Leno getting hammered right now in the public eye. Everyone I know who has any kind of opinion on this clustercuss is on Conan’s side and I can’t imagine that anyone else will come out of this smelling good. I’ve rarely watched The Tonight Show (or any late night television for that matter, except for a short period of time in high school when I watched Letterman regularly), but it’s hard to resist tuning in for Conan’s final few days when most of what he’s been doing is glibly poking fun at NBC all night long.

I don’t dislike the network’s programming in general, but this Tonight Show incident is nothing short of a publicity debacle (even if Tonight Show ratings are up right now) and it’s essentially a public confession that all the confidence they had in The Jay Leno Show saving them money in the 10 o’clock slot was just a lot of hubris.

Day 322: 2009 favorites

December 30, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Author’s note: This post is ghostwritten by Katie. Scott is busy reading the directions to a new board game we got for Christmas, so he’s dictated his list of “favorites” for 2009. I’m providing the descriptions, which probably won’t give you any real insight as to why he picked them.

From Scott: I wanted to make a best of 2009 list, but seeing as it’s only my opinion on things, calling anything “the best” seems like an overstatement. So instead, here are my favorites of 2009:

Favorite Movie: Where the Wild Things Are
I talked Scott into going to see the Maurice Sendak exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum on Free Museum Day. He wanted to go to the Chabot Science Center, but I convinced him it’d be a better strategy to go into the city during the day and then come back to the East Bay and check out the science center at night, since they have an observatory. It would have been a brilliant plan except that everyone else apparently had the same idea. By the time we got to the observatory there was NOWHERE to park so we had to turn around and go home. The only relevant point to this story, of course, is that Maurice Sendak wrote Where the Wild Things Are, and we got to see a lot of the original drawings that day at the museum. The movie was pretty good too.

Favorite Old TV Show: Lost
I don’t even remember what happened last season on Lost. Time travel? Juliet might be dead? (Oops, spoiler.) They’ve been on hiatus longer than the human gestation period! We’ll have a BABY before we know how this show ends!

Favorite New TV Show: a toss-up between Glee and Better Off Ted
Yes, the singing is fake, and yes, the baby drama is a little over the top, but how many other TV shows have choreographed musical numbers? Glee may be cheesy, but who among us doesn’t love cheese? Better Off Ted is pretty funny too. I feel like there are a lot of shows about people named Ted, though at the moment the only other one I can think of is How I Met Your Mother. That probably isn’t relevant either.

Favorite Theatre Event: American Idiot
For those of you not in the know, Berkeley Rep produced a musical this fall in collaboration with Green Day. The result, American Idiot, felt a lot like I suspect Hair felt like back in the 60s. Disenchanted youth abusing drugs and alcohol to dull the pain of real life…one guy goes off to war, another gets his girlfriend pregnant, the rest of the plot is a little fuzzy. We had seats in the second row. The set was enormous, the music was loud, and the baby had a great time thrashing about in my belly like the dancers onstage.

Favorite Internet Thing (Useful): Google Wave
Umm…Scott sent me an invitation to Google Wave, but I never actually tried it, so I have no comment on this one. Other than I heard from other people that it wasn’t useful.

Favorite Internet Thing (Useless): Yo Balloon Boy
I was disappointed to find out, about 10 minutes ago, that this is an actual internet thing and not just something clever that Brice thought up for his facebook status update.

Favorite Food: Yogurt by weight
I’ve never seen Scott so swept away by any other trend. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that you feel like you can’t get ripped off–you’re paying for exactly what you put in your bowl. That and he feels like an “expert.” And I can pretend it’s somewhat healthy!

Favorite National Event: Barack Obama’s inauguration
We only saw about 5 minutes of the inauguration telecast before heading out to work. We had recorded the whole thing on our DVR but never watched it and it got deleted. We saw the important part, though, when he was sworn in.

Favorite Personal Event: Katie’s pregnant!
I bet we can all predict Scott’s favorite personal event of 2010. Hint: Katie will no longer be pregnant! (And I don’t mean the series finale of Lost.)

Scott: Wow, Katie did such a great job writing most of this post, maybe I’ll make her write all my posts in the new year! Tomorrow, I’ll write a lot about video game this past year, which I would never let Katie write because she’d make video games sound stupid and boring. She once wrote an ode to a Playstation that should never be seen by any video-game-loving gent. It would break a boy’s heart.

Day 320: sensitive

December 29, 2009 / / 0 Comments

You know what’s weird?  I’ve been crying a lot lately.  Or, actually, almost crying.

Now, I have cried before.  I do cry.  I am human.  But I’m not someone who I’d say cries a lot.  But every once in a while, whether it’s because of current circumstances or hormones or the phase of the moon, I seem to get weepy at the slightest thing.

I got kind of weepy at Avatar, when the main character gives the inspirational speech.  I got kind of weepy at Valkyria Chronicles, when a character I had grown quite attached to died suddenly with no warning (and through no fault of my own).  I got quite weepy throughout the second half of Big Fish when we watched it tonight, even though it’s a movie that I’ve seen at least a half dozen times before.

I think what I’ve started to do is to blame all of my emotions on the fact that our family is growing via stork delivery soon.  Maybe the thought of having a baby makes me suddenly that much more sentimental about…everything.  Maybe being a father makes blue alien underdog vengeance, Europan war death, and fictional father-son relationships based on tall tales all very serious business in my mind.

Either way, if you’ve ever wanted the chance to talk to me about feelings, now might or might not be the perfect time to do it, depending on how you react to men that burst into tears at the drop of a hat.

Although, sidenote, speaking of hats, I do need to acquire myself a top hat.  For, you know, occasions that call for one.

Day 319: my head hurts

December 27, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Either watching Avatar in 3D today or playing four hours of Valkyria Chronicles gave me a pretty terrible headache tonight.

Was it James Cameron’s epic blue alien action-adventure hippie-fest? A 2+ hour treatise on how hugging trees can eventually lead to being able to ride birds?

Or was it squad 7’s valiant infiltration and liberation of the Darcsen concentration camp at Fouzen? And by liberation, I really mean conflagration. Oops. (Also, spoiler.)

Maybe it was both? While I’ve played more than four hours of games before with no ill effect, I didn’t also get hit with the CameronHammer on the same day! I’m sure that 3D glasses didn’t do my eyes or brain any favors.

Man, me and 3D movies. It’s a relationship gone sour. Every time I tell myself I’m going back to regular movies, 3D is always like, “but what about this groundbreaking new movie that’s sure to be better with me, babe?” and then I go see it and 3D hits me. In the head. Out of love?

I won’t go see Alice in Wonderland in 3D. I won’t.
I’ll probably be holding my son instead, or perhaps delivering a baby in the back of a yacht, if things go horribly wrong.

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