The cable modem took a couple of days longer than anticipated, but we finally called for it Saturday morning, and the cable guy showed up Tuesday afternoon.  The installation went pretty painlessly, though it took several hours longer to get both of my PC towers working online via a new router.  Malaya is not going to change her laptop from her old Earthlink dial up account just yet, so she's using PC #2 for now, and we put plenty of miles on it tonight, let me tell you.

So just to make most of you guys jealous, here was my afternoon/evening.  Comcast guy comes to set up the CM, which my girlfriend was very eager to have working since she loves to surf and do things online with me.  Just after he finished she had to dash over to the gym for her daily hour-long work out, since she wants to get into really super shape.  I checked email and surfed a bit and worked on getting the other machine working while she was gone.  When she got back she helped me figure out what was wrong with the other machine (needed a driver for the ethernet card, but don't have win98 CD and couldn't get it online or get the floppy drive working).  With that about done, she went to cook some dinner, which was a super tasty recipe for deep-fried battered spinach leaves.  We ate that together with some super garlic dip and shared a Pepsi, and had some quick-fried shrimp for a chaser.  After that, to test out the new cable modem-ness and router, Malaya wanted to play some Diablo II.  We're working up some new characters in the v1.10 patch, so we had several happy hours working through the end of Act 2 and then Act 3 with mid lvl 20 chars, mine a bowazon, hers an assassin.  We've now concluded our time on that with a bit of surfing, before we'll be retiring to the large and comfy bed for some um, quality time.

Returning to the initial topic, the cable modem is working fine, and while I couldn't blog (or anything online) the last few days, I was not entirely idle on the writing front.  I have a good 4 or 5 days worth of blogs written now, articles about all sorts of things, and I'll be posting one or two of those each day until they are all gone.  Today it's one I wrote a couple of days ago about the movies I've seen recently.

Tomorrow I'll probably make some more comments on recent stuff, including reader emails, since there were several good ones over the last few days.  And also because the one thing that I don't have working properly yet is the outgoing email.  I set up the SMTP stuff, and it looks fine, but just as I try to send myself a test email it locks up and I have to eagle-claw to kill the poor dazed Netscape.  The Comcast CM set up automatically put the info into Outlook Express, but I can't stand to use that fucking Klez-bait program, and I've never been arsed to DL Eudora or any of the other useful alternatives.

Read about movies below, and kitchen porn and some more weird U-Haul rental stories tomorrow.

aving seen two of the big summer blockbuster movies recently, I suppose I should write something about them.  The two I saw are/were Terminator III and Pirates of the Caribbean.  As is my habit, I shall now write a rather substantial amount of words, words loosely inspired by the films, words that the casual observer might mistake for a review, but words that a more careful reader will soon realize are just me taking my viewership of the films as an unlimited license to bullshit about them.

The following will contain some minor plot point spoilers, about as many as your average review does, but no major plot-ruining revelations.  So you can read this without having seen the movies yet and be pretty sure you'll still enjoy the surprises in the films, but at the same time I'm talking about things in the movie and how I liked (or didn't) them, so these will be more entertaining to read if you've already seen the movies yourself and can compare your reactions to mine.

Now that that's cleared up, here we go.  Terminator 3 first.

I saw T3 about a week ago, with Malaya, on a very hot Monday afternoon.  We most wanted to see Pirates that day, but when we got to the theatre Pirates was 30 minutes underway, while T3 was starting in 2 minutes, and LXG (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) was starting in 12 minutes.  All three were on our "to see" list, so since the choice was between T3 and LXG, and neither of us had a preference, we flipped a coin at the box office.  Literally, I pulled out a nickel and said, "heads we see T3" and flipped and caught it, and there it was.  Thomas Jefferson's head, staring up at me.  Or possibly Aaron Burr.  Or Lincoln.  Like I know who's on the fricking nickel.

Our course thusly determined, we bought tickets at the semi-reasonable matinee price ($5), and dashed into the theater, knowing the movie was about to start.  Malaya, proving her gender, had to go pee, so she dashed towards the ladies room while I went over to the right towards the theater.

We were seeing the film at the old theater in Lafayette, the small bourgeois (or "bougie" as Malaya likes to abbreviate it) town that is also host to our post office box.  It's a tiny theater, or so you'd think, and is old, with the big neon box office sign and all.  However they are pretty good at scoring all of the big summer movies; currently they're showing LXG, T3, Pirates, and Bad Boys just opened.  Matrix 2 was showing there previously, and was replaced by Bad Boys.  Not bad for a tiny hick town.  Of course it's a tiny hick town with an average housing price of like $350k, populated entirely by rich business professionals who live there or in the other surrounding hick towns since they are picturesque and safe and community-styled, yet still within an easy commute of SF or Oakland or even the Silicon Valley.

You're probably thinking that none of this has anything to do with anything, in my typical undisciplined "going off on a huge tangent" way. And usually you'd be right... but not today.

This is relevant today since T3 was showing in a medium-sized theater upstairs, and since the theater is old and not their main one, it was black as pitch when I walked into it.  I don't mean it was dark, I mean your closet at midnight, under a quilt.  No floor lighting whatsoever, no wall lighting, nothing.  I could vaguely see that there were seats there, and could see the screen, but of course the only thing on the screen during the first 5 minutes of T3 is blackness and silver text and occasional thermonuclear explosion.  None of which provide sufficient illumination to pick your nose, much less walk down into a seat.

I waited by the entrance for Malaya, and when she came in a moment later, I had to physically reach out and take her arm so she would stop and wait, since there was no way her un-dark adjusted eyes could have picked out anything in there.  We stood waiting for several minutes, hoping for some sort of daylight scene, but settled for twilight with explosions, and ventured down the side aisle towards open seats in the middle of the theatre.

Malaya was in the lead, at least for about five steps, until she fell over backwards as an unseen step down was encountered. Fortunately she was moving slowly with her hand on the side rail, and just stumbled and half sat down, but I could easily see someone pitching head over heels with a big box of nachos and a drink, and falling down about eight steps.  We descended the next few carefully, and basically felt our way over to some seats, having trouble moving towards them even when we were feeling the row in front of us, since the theater was very steeply downhill, so the next row only came up to about our knees.

Seriously, it was dangerous moving in there in the pitch blackness.  I've never seen a movie theatre that dark, one with zero lighting at all other than the screen, and we spent some time laughing and joking about it afterwards, wondering if some employee there turned off all the lights by accident, or in an effort to save a couple of bucks, or if it's just such an old theatre that they can get away with not meeting the current safety requirements.  I lean towards human error myself.

Unfortunately for T3, the most interesting thing in the entire movie was our near-deadly entrance. I didn't dislike it, but Malaya was in the process of actively hating it, and her ongoing reaction provided me with both a distraction and inspiration.  I must admit that her main point about it has taken resonance within me though.  She said that the whole movie was booty, and that it could easily have been a 5 or 10 minute flashback at the start of T4, which, if they ever actually make it, will be what we've all been wanting since T2; the actual future world, post apocalyptic, where the machines try to bring about the extinction of all humans in the death camps, and nearly succeed before John Conner appears and leads the humans to ultimate victory.  Or at least leads them (us) towards ultimate victory, pausing at the end to repeatedly send Terminators back in time to try and save his younger self from preemptive termination.

I'm not going to get into the entire plot of T3 here, mostly for spoiler reasons, but also since I don't really give a damn.  There are some clever twists and revelations, at least if you buy into things, but I didn't feel myself real involved in them while watching it. Probably since most of them are entirely irrelevant and self-serving, since the entire movie could easily have been a 10 minute flashback intro to T4.  (Well, I guess it would have actually been a flashback intro to T3, since T3 should have been what T4 probably will be.)

I liked some of the action scenes, but none of them really felt that exciting, though I thought some were clever.  The Arnold model Terminator is pretty cool and very smart and ruthless, doing his best to battle the vastly-superior Terminatrix model with the insufficient technology and weaponry he has at hand.  There are some scenes that should have been quite cool; chase scenes, a crypt defiling scene, an ending battle scene, and the final ruthless plot twist, but for whatever reason, Malaya-inspired or not, I viewed them all with such a cynical and jaded eye that nothing really surprised me.

I bitched about it pre-movie, and my opinion was not changed at all by actually seeing the full work.  Claire Danes looks about 45 in this film, and could more realistically play John Conner's mother than his love interest.  I guess she's 30 or so, maybe younger, but damn the years have not been kind.  I don't require that they cast a supermodel for the hero's love interest in every action movie, but she never seemed gorgeous or hot or sexy, nor did she seem like a future warrior for the human race. There's one point in the movie where they try to show that she can be tough and a fighter and all of that, but her big action is to seize a machine gun and shoot something before it kills them.  Better than nothing, but at the time it happens you're wondering why John isn't doing it himself, rather than just lying there.

That was another thing that bothered me, that John Conner was 1) stupidly still in the nuke-bait, Terminator-friendly, LA area, and 2) that he was a big pussy.  Yeah he can do some technical stuff like wiring bombs, but he never shows any real technical ability or marksmanship or survival skills, other than moderate driving ability. A few times there is human to human conflict, and you're always afraid he's going to get his ass kicked by any random person on the street since he's just a big puny white boy.  For God's sake, he's beaten up and locked in a cell by an unarmed female veterinarian in the first 15 minutes of the movie.

True, he thinks that the future has been changed by the actions he and mom and the Terminator undertook in T2, but he's also staying out of official records and sort of half expecting a Terminator to come after him at any moment.  So why half-prepare, while not completely preparing?  Mom's been dead for years, and she's still far more prepared for war than he is, as events in the film demonstrate. 

I'll have to see it again on DVD at some point, probably w/o Malaya watching, and I can see how it all works for me then.  I imagine I'll enjoy the stunt work more, but the plot less, since I sort of feel like without the surprises and revelations, it would fall very flat, and the surprises are only surprises the first time.

As you'll recall (or not), we missed seeing LXG by the flip of a coin.  Upon arriving home from T3, I got online and looked up the critical mass on Rotten Tomatoes.  T3 was running at about 70% approval, while the just-opened LXG was being slaughtered, garnering about 10% positive reviews, and even fewer from major critics.  Which made me glad the coin toss had gone as it did, since seeing 50 reviews saying that LXG had a good opening and premise, and then a totally incoherent and scattered plot and stupid illogical development totally put me off any interest in seeing it.

I hadn't seen much promise from the trailers, and all of the mid-shooting reports were of huge conflicts between an inexperienced director and a prima donna star (Sean Connery).  There were also sets that burned or were destroyed by natural disaster, cost and time overruns, and many other harbingers of disaster.  Yet a few of the sneak peek geek reviews on AICN said it was actually pretty good, so I had sort of gotten my hopes up.

And I'd rather not have seen that and had it suck, then seen T3 a few days later and had it sorta suck, before finally seeing Pirates of the Caribbean, which... was okay.

As for Pirates of the Caribbean, I was underwhelmed.  It was cute in places, had some good characters and special effects and sets, the plot was clever with all the double crossing and humor, but I think it was a bit too light for my taste.  There were casualties, but only to silly unimportant characters.  There were several executions, but it always seemed clear that the heroic character about to be executed would escape in the nick of time.  There were evil bad guys, but it was pretty clear they'd never really do anything that bad to anyone important.

I liked the idea of it, and it looked great, but there was no real weight or menace to anything in it.  The bad guys weren't really that bad, the good guys weren't really that good, and even the annoying characters had their redeeming qualities. I suppose all of that is a good indication why it's such a big hit and most audiences are really loving it, but I guess I just wanted more adult of a movie.

I didn't dislike it, but there wasn't anything in it I would want to see again; no big action scenes or awesome stunt shots.  The best things overall are the acting performances, with Johnny Depp doing a really good job, most of the time, and Orlando Bloom and the cute chickie also filling their roles well.  The semi-evil pirate captain is pretty good also; he at least does what you want him to do, though I'd have liked him to be a lot more evil and ruthless. He threatens murders aplenty, but like everything else in the movie, his bark is a lot worse than his bite, and nothing bad every really happens.

Oddly enough, Malaya liked Pirates a lot, far more than I did, and far more than she liked T3.  Her explanation was that it was all about expectations.  She really wanted T3 to be great since she loved T2, and when they put the hated Claire Danes in it she was disillusioned, and then there were lots of dumb things early on in T3, she got turned off and it was all downhill from there.  While she expected Pirates to be dumb and not very good, and when it was pretty good and relatively smart, she really got into things.  She's going to blog about that sometime this week, so I shan't paraphrase her thoughts any further at this point.

I think I will be interested in seeing a Pirates 2, even though I doubt it will be as good as the first one, and even though I didn't think the first one was that good.  I'll be interested to see how the plot goes; if they could work in half as many double crosses and clever plot elements as the first one had.  They're starting production on it, seeing how big the box office and reviews were for the first one, so we'll find out in a couple of years.

I'm not so eager to see it that I'll be there opening night, and I'll definitely see the reviews before I commit to attending it, but I'm curious.

Of course I'll go see T4 as well, if it looks even half good.  Especially if it really is set in the future world during the robot wars, as the end of T3 makes (seemingly) certain.  The problem there is that it might just look like a pale imitation of the Matrix future world, and also that they'd need a gargantuan budget.  Also, I can't see how Arnie could have any meaningful role in T4, unless they want to change the entire plot to have John Conner with a helpful reprogrammed Terminator by his side, a development that would be hella cheesy, as well as pushing credibility with Arnie being like 60 by the time they might make it.

T4 needs a fresh start, no Arnie, no helpful Terminators, just back to the anarchy and hard-scrabble of post-apocalyptic earth with dirty humans fighting technologically superior robots. I'd also like a much better actor in the John Conner role, and it should go without saying that I'd dump Claire Danes as well, since I thought she brought nothing to T3.  Any younger (looking) unknown actress could have done her role just as well, if not better, and an equal performance would have been better since an unknown wouldn't have brought the "didn't you used to be famous for some cult show no one ever saw?" Claire Danes' baggage.

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