Have you ever read a review so harsh, you just had to see the movie? Part 2

I had this feeling once before, when I read Roger Ebert's review for Lady in the Water (and when I eventually saw the movie in question I must admit that while everything Ebert said was true, I still I liked that movie).

Now I've just read Hal Duncan's take on the new Beowulf. Hal Duncan's very harsh take on Beowulf. How harsh? He invokes Hawk the Slayer. I was already planning to pick this one up the day it comes out on DVD, but now I'm really dying to see it. I'm not sure if in the end I'm going to be a fan, though. I mean, I liked The Thirteenth Warrior, which was the farthest thing from a loyal retelling of the story, but this one departs in some ways I don't think I'm going to like. Namely, the battle of all battles, Beowulf vs. Grendel's Mother, fought in her lair deep in the dark under water, with Beowulf beating her with her son's arm... apparently that's all gone, replaced by a sex scene. And here I thought Angelina Jolie in a no-holds-barred fight would be worth seeing. Angelina Jolie doing the sexy thing? Not so much.

And Hal Duncan brings up some interesting anatomical considerations. Follow the link and you'll see what I mean.

What, no basketball blog?

Well, so for the Timberwolves are 1-5; nothing to celebrate there. Mostly my problem is that all of the games so far have been on nights when I'm working or out and about, so the few minutes of game I've seen haven't yielded me any useful information as yet. I have to wait for a game I can actually watch to check out our new players and get a sense of how they play. Reading the stats doesn't tell me what I want to know; I'm too visceral for that, I guess. They're in the process of building up a new team from scratch, which should be exciting to watch even though we stand no chance of making it to the play-offs.

On the other hand, KG and the Celtics are 7-0. So my husband has pretty much decided he's following the Celtics this year. It's good for KG, and he deserves it, but there is something not particularly fun about total domination, you know?

Until they play Kobe. I can get behind total domination if it's Kobe they're crushing.

Ooh Ah!

Oh yes, I loved my movie. The bummer of seeing something in the theater as opposed to DVD is that the next day when the urge strikes to watch it all over again, I have to wait six months. *Sigh.* I'm on a DVD-buying moratorium until the WIP is done anyway.

Now, I knew I was going to like Saawariya, but I was somewhat surprised that Quin liked it too. I had spent all week dropping little warnings, about how it was all filmed on sets and was going to be highly stylized, like Moulin Rouge only more so, which I was pretty sure wasn't going to be his sort of thing. And it did in fact feel like a play performed on the world's largest set, a 3D set where the audience could follow the actors through all the little nooks and crannies. Saying a movie felt like a play is usually a criticism, implying that the movie was too static and claustrophobic; that's not the sense of being like a play I mean. It was more like every scene was visually composed like a painter would block out an image. The people in the background were standing "just so", if you see what I mean. And the colors really were fantastic. I've had the soundtrack for a while now, so it was cool to see just how they staged all those songs (and was pleased that Rani got to picturize my favorite).

The theater we saw it at was one of the last multiplexes built before they started building the stadium-seating super-multiplexes. It's kind of sad, it was only state of the art for about five minutes and then it lost all of its patronage to the huge new place built down the road. Perhaps I'm overly sentimental of this particular theater; it was the one Quin and I spent our "honeymoon" at. (We couldn't afford to go anywhere, and I was still on a probationary period as a new hire at work and could get no time off beyond the normal weekend, so we spent the day after our wedding watching back to back movies: A Life Less Ordinary, Seven Years in Tibet, and The Devil's Advocate). It's a dollar theater now, playing a bunch of films like Ratatouille that are already out on DVD but apparently someone still wants to pay for the old, scratched film experience.

They also have one screen set aside for Hindi movies, for which they charge full price. I had no idea, I thought this just happened to be a foreign film they were showing for prestige value or something. If the crowd there on Saturday night was any indication, this is probably where they make most of their dough. They even had made over part of the concession stand to sell samosas instead of popcorn (and if we'd known that, we would've saved room; they smelled so good).

We were also the only ones in the crowd who actually needed the subtitles. Which is a cool way to watch a foreign film, in a crowd for whom it's no so foreign. There is an upside to not waiting for the DVD. They'll be playing Aaja Nachle later this month, the new one with Madhuri Dixit in it. I've already been poking my husband. Babysitter again, yes? Since the babysitter in question enjoys building Lego sets and watching old episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender just as much as our boys do, it's really a win-win situation. Two movies in a month, that's positively decadent.

Brief update

Not nearly as much writing getting done as I had hoped. It's been a long week for work and school both (it's so much easier when they alternate getting stressful). On the upside, I'm still way geeked to go to the movies this weekend. One could almost say pathetically geeked. Simple pleasures, I guess.

At any rate: here's an Eddie Izzard bit about Star Wars, done with Legos. So you know it's going to be funny:

I'm going on a date this weekend!

Believe me that's exciting. It's a rare, rare thing when the stars align and we can get someone my very picky husband trusts who can come over for a few hours and watch a DVD and build Legos with our boys.

This one only happened because I'm still in owes for our tenth anniversary, which we spent in Duluth with both of our boys, one of my husband's brothers and one of his sister's boys, looking at ships in the harbor and visiting train and WWII museums. This hadn't been the original plan, and the husband has been in the doghouse for quite some time for derailing the original vaguely romantic plan in order to bring me along on a boys' weekend away. I'm only into trains if someone is dancing on them; and in fact I didn't go into that museum. I waited outside and read my Jasper Fforde novel. It was a gorgeous day, and the wind blowing off Lake Superior was marvelously pleasant; I enjoyed that couple of hours at any rate. I did go into the Richard Bong WWII Heritage Center (and it looked like we were the only folks there who didn't actually remember the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but it was a Friday morning). There was a little display there of things Richard Bong had had as a kid: his slide rule and his Boy Scout manual. It was very Heinleinesque, and I totally want a slide rule.

But I'm owed something resembling a romantic evening with just the two of us, so I'm making my husband go see a Hindi movie with me, Saawariya. It's the latest from one of my favorite filmmakers, Sanjay Leela Bhansali. It looks particularly Moulin Rouge-esque, with fantastic sets and twirling skirts and ooh! the colors! (For those of you who have strayed too near my house and have been pulled inside and forced to watch dance numbers, Bhansali is the director that did "Dhol Baaje"). It will all be too melodramatic for my husband's tastes, surely (although he seemed to like Devdas, so who knows?), and he's been forewarned that Salman Khan makes an appearance. It'll be a long day with working 8 hours, going to a 3 hour movie, then working another 2-3 hours, but I'm certain it will all be worth it.

On the writing front, I have my work cut out for me. The horrible weekend of working jumped me so early on Friday I didn't get any writing done that day either (I usually get at least half my usual writing time on Fridays, but it was zero this time), and I spent my "extra hour" on Sunday not sleeping or writing but working. There's nothing like sitting at a computer typing as fast as you can for ten or more hours to really kill any desire to sit in front of another computer typing, even if it's stories you desperately want to get out of your head (so I watched Spider-Man 3 with my boys instead. Kind of a "meh" after Spider-Man 2, frankly, but watchable enough I suppose. The Sandman was cool.)

Well, I'm off to do the teacher thing, so that I can hopefully have the time this afternoon to pound out a few thousand words. Wish me luck!