Geek On The Mountain

Winter Solstice is a film about a father and his two sons and what they go through after his wife/their mother dies.

This is flat out the worst movie I’ve ever seen. When I rate movies, I can almost always find some redeeming quality in them and give even the worst of them at least a 2 or a 3 (out of 10). This movie, however, is a solid 1.

For starters, there is absolutely no entertainment value in the movie at all. Through the course of the movie, virtually nothing happens. We find out one of the sons wants to move away from home and the other is failing out of school. We also find that, despite it being five years since the death of his wife, the father has not began dating. And how does the movie end? The father has made it around to asking someone out on a date, one son moves away, and the other may have made an effort to pass one class (One of his teachers earlier commented that he sometimes does well, and other times does not, and that when he’ll do which is unpredictable. So his doing well once doesn’t really say much of anything). And it takes ~90 minutes to do all that… I’ve really left out very little.

Of course, a movie doesn’t have to accomplish anything to be good. Perhaps some witty dialog could have saved the film. But alas, there is none. Not only is more or less totally serious throughout, but the dialog is “realistic” as well. One normally assumes that, when watching a movie or TV show, the characters have interactions with each other and generally do things when we’re not watching. All we see on camera are the interesting parts of what happens. Winter Solstice does an excellent job of exposing us to those boring interactions that nearly every other film would skip right past. On top of that, much of the dialog is delivered at a rather slow pace, further drawing out the pain.

But then, this isn’t a movie meant to be entertaining. It has some deeper meaning of expressing the emotions and telling the story of the characters. It’s a kind of art-type-thing. That’s well and good, but this movie appeals to me on an artistic level about the same amount as it does on an entertainment level.

From what I can tell, people who liked this movie tended to connect with it on some level. Some people find it realistic and moving. The slow, awkward dialog acts to enhance the whole thing. While it didn’t hit me on any emotional level, I can at least admit that it is realistic. I think it’s a good depiction of how men deal with things. Unfortunately, I find nothing interesting in it, so the movie is completely empty to me.

If you do see it, it’s entirely possible that you’ll find it interesting on at least some level. On the other hand, don’t be surprised if you’re utterly bored out of your mind.

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We went and saw Goblet of Fire earlier in the week. As usual, before the movie started, they were showing advertisements. One of them was Comcast giving some standard sounding spiel about how great their cable is. There really isn’t anything strange about it, until you consider that Charter provides cable service to the entire city. Perhaps Comcast is available in some adjacent area though….who knows.

Comcast is advertising in a town where people couldn’t sign up with them if they wanted to. Seems like a worthwhile way to spend money. At least it makes me laugh.. Especially when you consider that I saw them doing this same thing once or twice a couple of years ago as well. They must really pay close attention to the impact their advertising has on sales.

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Serenity is out on DVD now! That’s an awesome turnaround since it was released in theaters on September 30. And surprise, surprise, it’s #1 on Amazon.

I’ve heard no news that a sequel will be coming, (though I haven’t been paying much attention lately) although there were rumors going around of Sci-Fi funding a sequel to be shown there at some point. The original plan was to follow up the first movie with two more if it proved to be a hit. It didn’t really though. They didn’t even make their money back in the theaters. Given the popularity of Firefly on DVD though, they’ll probably more than make up for it on DVD sales. Hopefully it will do so well that we can do something to continue on with the story…

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The last of my four days off is coming to a close. Overall, it’s been a good weekend. It hasn’t been exactly optimal, however.

Thanksgiving itself went well. We had (and still have) lots of food. If I made a list of everything we had, it would probably top 30 items…Milenka tried to do so and ended up with more than a page of stuff. The funny thing is that everything was for 3 people…we always do that though. The Lions really, really got killed. I didn’t actually figure they’d win….they suck as always, despite having some nice talent. They’ve generally stayed alive pretty well in most of the games they’ve lost though. There’ve been a couple that they lost in the last minutes of the game. This one was pretty much over by halftime. Not that any game ever is ever really over that early, but without a change for the better, there’s no way to come back from being 17 behind. That was their worst game all year.

We watched a few movies, though nothing particularly notable. I will say that Polar Express was better than I thought it would be. Of course, I thought it would be absolutely horrible. In reality, it was only slightly horrible. The whole thing is CGI and looks just awesome. The quality reminds of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. That’s about where the good parts of the movie end though. Beyond that it’s mostly boring. It kind of has a nice happy Christmas moral or whatnot, but, bah! If the movie had been done with real people I probably wouldn’t have watched the whole thing. It’s also kind of silly because Tom Hanks does like half of the voices, which probably wouldn’t be a big deal if he had talent as a voice actor, but he doesn’t. So all we get is different variations in pitch of the same voice….lame.

We got our monitor back. It’s still broken. What a surprise. It’s actually rather difficult to see what’s wrong with it….a single column of pixels is really very, very small. We’ll have to try again some other time I guess… It was a big shock and a bit annoying to have all of the text be so small again once I got it hooked back up. I quickly got used to it though and it’s absolutely incredible how much more can be crammed onto one screen. I feel like I can actually see web pages again and not just half here and half there.

I also did some misc. cleaning and painting and other rearranging of furniture. It’s always nice how just moving stuff around a room so it looks different can breath new life into things.

As for the dying….that’s mostly Milenka. She likes to go around saying “I’m dying” when she’s feeling really sick. She’s felt not so great the past couple of days. She was nauseous for about 14 hours the other day and she finally felt better when she threw up a piece of turkey that seemed as though it was stuck somewheres. She was feeling good last night and this morning and then early this afternoon she was back to feeling terrible again. We’re not real sure what’s going on there.

And then there’s me. I was trying to cut a loaf of bread. I was holding the loaf of bread as I was cutting it and I was going off the theory that the bread knife wasn’t all that sharp. I knew I was about through and I really wasn’t giving it much but I cut into my fingers rather badly. It’s one hell of a bread knife I guess….I could probably shave with the thing. I would have rather stayed at home, but it was a bit too deep (and it a bit too bad of a location to keep relatively immobile) for that. I ended up with 7 stitches. At least I can still type… It just compliments the time I cut the back side of those two fingers when I was like 12. Oddly enough, I did it the first time using my swiss army knife. Just earlier that day I had put that knife in my pocket after finding it. It had been floating around the house somewhere and I had been looking for it for some time.

It’s kind of odd as well. The last time, I was supposed to keep it covered pretty much all of the time. This time, I’ve been told to keep it bandaged for 24 hours and then just leave it unbandaged all of the time unless I’m “digging through the mud” (the nurse’s exact words… ). The primary difference being a well that they gave me a prescription for keflex as opposed to last time when I had nothing but Neosporin for infections. It just makes me think of tattoo aftercare… (which is basically just care for a wound). Some camps say to keep it covered nearly all of the time and only let it air our for a little bit each day, whereas others say to keep it open all of the time. It’s a bit different with a tattoo of course as the primary goal is to keep the ink from bleeding out, but then this generally corresponds with healing it as quickly as possible. Anyways, it just makes me wonder more about the whole bandaged vs. unbandaged thing. Is one a newer trend, or do some people just do it one way and others do it the other (while others do everything in between, of course) with no particular rhyme or reason when taken as a whole?
The picture is really for my own records….and for the relatively odd others out there. For the record as well, my index finger has some dried blood on it so it looks slightly worse than it really is…

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I saw Serenity Saturday night after work. I can’t believe I haven’t had time to write in the last two days. At any rate, the movie was good. I was pleasantly surprised in some ways and not so pleasantly in others.

As I said, the movie was quite good. It’s actually moved up on IMDB and it’s now rated at 8.6 with just over 10000 votes. There’s an overwhelming number of 10’s in there. I’m not exactly sure what I would have thought of it if I hadn’t seen Firefly first. I’m sure I would have liked it, but just how much I don’t know. Of course, I’ve heard of many people who loved the movie who had never seen the show, so who knows really? It was interesting though. The movie was darker than the show (in both lighting and story). Of course the entire cast signed on for the movie, which was good, and they managed to keep things pretty consistent overall. The ship itself was changed slightly, but not by much. Did it have legs in the show? Towards the start, when we first meet the crew, the camera follows Mal around the ship as he talks to someone. The best part is that it literally follows him from room to room to hallway to compartment to etc. Most sets aren’t continuous, so you can’t really follow someone through it from odd angles without using a blue screen (which they may have well done here). At any rate, it was cool to move through the ship and see it from angles we’d never seen and yet it was all so familiar.

I had heard that it was basically a rewrite of the show, which is completely not true. At one point, Mal points out that it has been 8 months since Simon and River have come on board. The movie is actually taking place after the series ends. This is also backed up by the way people act and what is going on (i.e. Inara is still off-ship as she left in one of the last episodes). As the movie begins, however, we get to see Simon actually break River out of the Alliance testing facilities. They then introduce us to The Operative, who is an assassin with no name who is sent to retrieve River (no more men in blue gloves), before flipping forward to after the series ends.

The movie builds on the show. We find out more about what the deal with River is (she’s actually quite the badass in the movie). We also learn more about the Reavers. The western side is toned down throughout. The music isn’t quite so twangy, although it’s not completely devoid of that western sound. The audio all sounded off to me. The background noise was often nearly as loud as the dialog. I’m assuming this had something to do with the theater I was in/where I was sitting. Everyone’s voice sounded a little off and it made the dialog, which is basically the same as what you’d see in the show, hard to follow. I’m guessing that’s not a typical experience though.

There was a total geek of character called Mr. Universe. This guy was truly pathetic, but in a good way. He lived alone on a planet hidden inside an ion cloud (I think that’s what it was..). He had a serious case of the hacker/information wants to be free attitude going on. He instead says “can’t stop the signal”. He picks up signals from everywhere so he knows what’s going on all over. This guy sits surrounded by screens. He’s so pathetic that he even made/bought a fembot and actually married it (apparently it was a Jewish wedding…). Anyone reminded of the stunt pulled by the evil trio of idiots on Buffy, Warren, Andrew, and Jonathan?

Although the movie was good, I think the show was better. But then, is any movie ever better than a TV show? Movies have strength in large budgets and the ability to do big special effects and such, but then again, when the special effects make the movie, it usually isn’t very good (made even worse by the fact that those “great” fx will look normal and even poor in the years to come). Shows, on the other hand, have lots of time available, and they can really develop the characters and the story. Anyways, the movie was more complete, but the show would have been given time and the show, of course, had much more time to develop the characters. I’m left wondering how I would have felt about the movie if I hadn’t already saw the show. There’s so much more depth to the characters that the movie just can’t show.

***SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ON**

I can’t believe they killed both Book and Wash. I was sad to see book die, but he was the most minor character of them all and he had only a small part in the movie. But then Wash too….. and the way they did it… he went out saying one of his standard style lines. It was effective in making you wonder who else might die though…This was made all the worse, of course, by what I was just saying. If I had never saw the show, I wouldn’t have much cared about the characters being killed off. It happens. But knowing these characters through hours of watching the show, it comes as much more of a blow.

River was totally a badass here.. I’m left wondering if she ever needed protecting in the first place. They should have just handed her over to The Operative to start with and she could have killed him and that would have been that…

It was interesting to see how the Reavers came to be. I thought it was odd when we saw them landing on a planet to start off with though. (just because I’d never thought they’d do that) I’m trying to remember that one episode where they find the ship that had been hit by Reavers though. I could swear that they said/implied that their victims could go crazy and essentially become one of them. I wonder if this is actually possible or if they just continue their craziness by breeding. Interesting note as well, the “1/10 of one percent” of the original population of 30 million on the planet means they started off 30,000 strong.

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