Books Lying Open
¤ Middlesex, Jeffery Eugenides
¤ The Dilbert Principle, Scott Adams
¤ The Color of Magic, Terry Pratchett

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ Dominant hand anxiety.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Because it's fricking cold!

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your "of the days" begin to overlap in sinister fashion.

n today's blog I've got weather discussion, Xmas trip pondering, Malaya chapter two feedback, and I was going to include/conclude my email correspondence with the CAP Alerts guy, but since he stretched out my last email to great length with every sort of nit picking comment, it would have made today's blog almost as obscenely-long as Friday's was. So I'll save that part for Wednesday's blog, and just wrap things up today with my review of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Suddenly, winter is upon us. Well, autumn, at least. Highs were in the mid 80s or low 90s for about two weeks, with a few conveniently-cooler days last weekend, when mom was visiting. Once she left on Monday the temperature was turned back up into the high 80s again, with nary a cloud to be seen in the daytime hours. Even Friday was much the same, and then when I got up Saturday noonish and opened the sliding glass back door and sat on the couch to indulge in some college football... I soon felt an unfamiliar sensation. A sort of tightness and mild pain across my bare feet and shirtless torso.  Eventually, after an hour or so, I realized what was happening. I was cold! Ahh, low temperature, my old friend.

So I went and put on my house pants and faux-Ugg boots and a t-shirt and was pretty comfortable. Malaya was gone much of the day, Saturday, and yes, I was left cold and alone. I was up until about 5am Saturday night, which is actually pretty early for me to turn in, but there you have it. It was cold out when I went to bed, but dry, and when I woke up at 10 and went to pee it looked sunny outside, but I couldn't be bothered to investigate, with the warm bed beckoning me back. I haven't been in bed for more than 6 hours at a time in a week or more, but I've been really dragging at night lately, so I figured I'd try to actually get 8 hours or so, for once.

I didn't, since I was in bed for maybe 7.5 hours, and awake for at least .5 hours of that, but it felt nice to go back to sleep at 10 and not get up until nearly 1. I woke up long before that, thanks to the invasive sleeping habits of our felines; Dusty wedging himself up so tightly into your crotch that you think you're a human wishbone does tend to wake you up from time to time, and during this I was wearing Jinx on my right ankle like the weights Malaya velcros on when she heads off to the gym. But I persevered in my efforts to lie there with my eyes closed, and succeeded admirably, until I woke up at 12:50 and decided to get up. That's a strategic time for the west coast NFL fan, since the early games start at 10, end around 1:05, and the late games start at 1:15. So turning on the set at 12:45 or so lets you catch any good finishes from the early games, catch some highlights between games, and then see the start of the late games. It's like a full day of football without wasting more than an hour in the process!

Of course I actually ended up watching the first hour of the late game, despite not giving any sort of a damn about Cleveland or Dallas, and then left it on in the background when Malaya called to say she was on her way home, and pissed away another hour or two later in the day flipping back and forth between highlights and World's Wildest Police Videos on Spike, but such is the curse of cable TV, a remote control, and your girlfriend on the couch beside you.

My point, before I got completely lost in this football-fueled digression, is that I got up Sunday noonish, saw sunshine outside, opened the door long enough to do some pull ups out back on my newly-rehung pull up bar, and realized that it was cold out. 62 or so, despite the sun, and that sent me scurrying back inside for warmer clothing. It's now midnight Sunday, and while it's 68 in here, it's down into the 50s outside. I love it, needless to say. I love cold weather, or at least what we consider cold around here, which is to say 40-70º temperatures. Actual cold weather, the type that leads to that strange white powdery stuff falling from the sky, is another matter.

And while we didn't get any snow, we did get a ton of rain Sunday morning. Unfortunately for me, it all came down after I went to sleep and before I got back up. I love the rain as well as the cold, and I could have had them both, and I slept through it!  I do, at least, feel really energized by the cool weather and evidence of precipitation, and while hanging out with Malaya and being distracted by the TV have limited my productivity thus far today, I've still got a few hours of lucidity left, and I'm going to try and make the most of them.

Tragically, the forecast calls for an almost immediate return to hotter weather, with our two-day cold front courtesy of a storm down from Alaska fading as quickly as it came. Happily, it's already late September, and with the cold weather here really beginning in earnest in October, and then lingering for a solid 5 months after that, this is my happy time of the year. It's Malaya's as well, though for her it's as much for the weather as the Halloween/Xmas celebrations, and other factors. My Xmas/New Year's is so up in the air now that I'm not sure if I like it or not.

Malaya's best friends are going to be in Vegas after Xmas and through New Years, and since their parents own some property there, we can go along and stay for free.  At first we were going to be there the whole 7 days they are staying, but as my recent experience in the smoke/drunk-filled Tahoe casinos reminded me, I hate those places, and didn't want to spend a whole week there not gambling and nursing a noise and smoke-borne headache. So it occurred to me that Vegas was just a short flight from SD, and that I should visit my parents down there when I have the chance, being as it's Xmas and such. So I was planning on doing a few days in Vegas, then a few in SD, and getting back here about the same time Malaya did.

However, before I could act to even consider finalizing those plans, Malaya busted out the huge Vegas itinerary and started listing shows we could see, museums we could visit, Hoover Dam ideas, strip clubs and sex shows to tourist at, and all sorts of other interesting, non-gambling stuff that sounded like fun to me. Not to mention the fun of seeing that stuff with my girlfriend.  Plus, when mom was here last weekend, she asked when Malaya could finally come visit SD with me, and Malaya said maybe in January. So now I'm confused. It seems silly to fly from Vegas to SD and back to Oakland in 4 days around the 28th of December, and then return to SD for a few more days a couple of weeks later. Not to mention expensive and time-consuming.

Adding to the confusion, we still don't know if her friends are driving or flying to Vegas, and if they're driving if they'd have room for us to go along and split gas, or if they'll be taking a lot of things with them and won't have room for two passengers and luggage. And since they're taking stuff with them to their parents in Vegas, they might have room on the way back that they didn't have on the way out. I also don't know if Malaya wants to just be in Vegas for a few days, or if she's going to stay the whole 8 days her friends are there, or how set she is on going to San Diego in January.

So I'm confused. I might just go to Vegas with her and we'll spend 4 or 5 days there and come home and go together to SD a couple of weeks later. Or I might go to SD in late Dec, spend several days there, fly to Vegas, do stuff with Malaya, and drive back with her friends.  Or I might go to Vegas with Malaya, stay there for a few days before flying to SD and then flying back to Oakland a few days after that, when Malaya might or might not be available to pick me up at the airport.

And yes, half the reason I'm blogging about this is just to get the options semi-straight in my own head, and get elicit Malaya's advice when she reads this entry Monday morning.

Speaking of Malaya's advice, she's gotten through about 1/3 of my mighty (long) chapter 2, and she's finding much more to like and much less that needs severe editing. The better stuff in the chapter all comes in 1/2 of the way through it, with the really cool stuff at the end, so hopefully she'll enjoy it more as she goes. And yes, the fact that it's taken my fast-reading, novel-devouring girlfriend a week to get through less than 1/3 of one chapter in my ongoing novel is a sign that it might be a tad wordy, in spots.

Of course he didn't like Thunderbirds, and gave it just 1.5/4 stars. He loved Sky Captain, gave it 4/4 stars, and didn't say a word about its commercial prospects. Funny how that works.  Then again, Sky Captain made more on Saturday than Thunderbirds made in its entire US commercial release, so there isn't too strong a comparison to be made.  I'm not sure what the audience is for a faux-black and white, 1930s evoking, almost-entirely CGI action picture with quality but sub-blockbuster stars, but apparently Malaya and me are in it, since we saw Sky Captain opening day.

How was it?

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
Script/Story: 4
Acting/Casting: 7
Action: 6
Humor: 6
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 7
Replayability: 6
Overall: 6

(Click here to see these categories explained.)

I wanted to like it, and I wasn't bored, but it never really grabbed me. Admittedly, I'm not a true film geek, and thoughts of 1930s type cliffhanger pictures give me zero thrill. Ebert loves that type of old-fashioned swashbuckling stuff, as do other amateur film geeks like Harry Knowles, and they both loved this picture to death. Loved it enough to overlook all of the flaws in logic and plot holes, and loved it enough to keep their disbelief suspended for the entire running time, no matter how heavy that disbelief got. I didn't, and frequently thought, "Well that was entirely impossible." but it wasn't so bad that it ruined the movie for me. It isn't as if Sky Captain is some perfectly-realistic movie with just a few convenient lapses in the laws of physics. The movie is, start to finish, unrealistic and unbelievable in almost every physical reality sort of way. But since it's so consistently absurd, you get into it and go with it. It's like an old Flash Gordon flick, or some other world-in-danger cliffhanger with mad scientists and devilish robots and astonishing future technology. And if you sit there and wonder where the army is, or how the robots AI is better than anything that can be built even 90 years later, or where these flying landing strips came from, or how there are amphibious flying planes that don't exist even now, you won't enjoy the movie at all. Don't take it literally, don't apply the same logic that exists in our world, and suspend your disbelief for the comic book aspects of it, and you'll probably have a pretty good time.

Sky Captain is running at 72% on RT now, with 91/127 reviews positive, so clearly most critics are okay with it. I guess I'd recommend it, but only if the previous paragraph doesn't turn you off entirely. You've got to have a lot of un-jaded ten year old boy in you to buy into the movie, but if you can unplug your logical nit picking for the duration, it should be good.  If not, you'll wind up like Michelle Alexandra of Eclipse Magazine, and spend your entire review embarrassing yourself with comments like this:

You have to have seen the movie to grasp why her comments here are so misguided, but trust me, everything she says here makes perfect sense in the film. To be fair, I only noticed her review for Sky Captain since it's one of the few negative ones, was on top of the RT reviews page, and since I remembered her laugh out loud comments about LotR:RotK where she was completely puzzled by why the film repeatedly cut between Faramir riding towards Osgilliath and Denothos messily eating tomatoes while Pippen cried and sang a sand lament.  Nevertheless, another one of those and she'll find herself compiled on my Wacky Movie Critics page.

One of the nicest things about the film is that they didn't give away the entire damn movie in the trailer. The best visuals, almost all of the plot info and twists, and pretty much every scene from the last 30 minutes is kept completely out of the trailers. As a result I had no idea what was going to happen next, and was actually interested in the plot. True, I didn't end up caring a great deal, and when the secrets were revealed quite a few of them were absurd or made no sense at all, but hey, at least I didn't know all of them in advance.

Script/Story: 4
This is my lowest score, since this movie was like most action pictures, and had a script primarily designed to drag the lead characters from location to location, so weird and wild things could happen once they got there. It served that purpose, but it was far too much of a coat hanger for me to rate it more highly. I'm actually going very, very easy on the logical flaws and plot holes here, and continuing to suspend my disbelief, or I'd have to give this film about a -3 here. A nit picking review with a full list of the plot details that were unexplainable or made absolutely no sense would be longer than the movie's actual screenplay.

Acting/Casting: 7
There have been a lot of complaints about the allegedly-wooden acting, but I think that's mostly since reviewers knew this whole movie was done in front of blue screens and were therefore looking for flaws. I knew it was all CGI as well, and I didn't think it was dreadful, but it wasn't perfect either. There aren't any full on CGI characters in Sky Captain; just various robots and such that they have to run from or fight, and those were done well enough. Human actors seem to be pretty good at pretending to be in terror of something that's giant and not there; see Jurassic Park and most other horror/action movies of recent years for examples. Apparently most anyone can pantomime terror of a giant lizard/robot/tentacle beast/etc while actually looking at a grip holding a tennis ball on a broomstick. 

The hard part is having the actors interact normally while in front of a blue screen. Or act terrified as if they're on a high ledge while they're actually just on a blue bench with a knee-high drop to a cushion. With today's computer technology, it's easy to paste in the background graphics and make it look like the actors are on the edge of a yawning chasm. The hard part is getting the actors to act like they're in tremendous peril, and that's why my low-water mark is Star Wars Episode 1 and 2. My high water mark is the way CGI and Gollum were handled in LotR:RotK, where you could really believe what you saw was happening. I never believed that in Star Wars Episode 1 and 2, and though much of that was due to the dreadful dialogue, the actors never looked confident in their roles.

Sky Captain was no LotR:RotK, but it was certainly head and shoulders above the high school drama class quality of acting in most of Episode 1 or 2, and it was never so bad as to be distracting. And when you're dealing with as much CGI as Sky Captain had, that's about all you can ask for.

Action: 6
There was a lot of action, but I didn't find it that thrilling, in large part since almost all of it was so unbelievable. And I don't mean that in a good way, I mean it in a "that could never happen" sort of way. The movie doesn't sink to Charlie's Angels levels of unreality, but I can't recall an action sequence where there weren't a few actions or events that took me out of the film. But as I said, I wasn't all that successful in suspending my disbelief throughout. The actual action sequences themselves were pretty good, but somewhat nonsensical or unimportant, as the things the heroes struggled to do made no real difference in the long run, until the very climax of the entire film.

Humor: 6
Surprisingly, Sky Captain had several good laughs, most of them prompted by two running jokes. The plane's fuel line mentioned above was one, and yes, it was funny, and yes it was enough to endanger the pilot. Of course it was, that was the whole point of the joke.  The other was when reporter Gwyneth lost her bag of extra camera film, and spent the last half of the movie seeing one incredibly-amazing sight after another, none of which seemed to be good enough to waste one of her last two photos on. When she finally brought herself to take a picture, right at the end of the film, it's played for one last big joke, and it was funny, but not as funny as they meant it to be in the script. Still, I laughed several times at things that were supposed to be funny, and that's several times more than most action flicks manage to intentionally amuse me.

Eye Candy: 8
As you can see from the trailer and still shots, the movie is all about eye candy. That's the whole point in doing so much of it CGI; they'd have needed a Lord of the Rings' sized budget to do the whole movie as it was done with actual sets, miniatures, etc. Sky Captain done in that fashion might have been a better film, but since it wasn't a realistic possibility, they did what they could with CGI, and it worked out pretty well. In an unusual state of affairs for a modern movie, the best stuff was not in the trailer and in fact, the stuff you see in the trailer is far from the best or most interesting stuff in the film, and it's far from the most eye candy-licious.

I didn't give the movie a really high score in this category because while there were a lot of really pretty things, there were other things that weren't pretty at all, and because a number of scenes were just too soft-focused and deceptively-lit to look real or satisfying.

Fun Factor: 7
I probably graded this one a bit high, but eh... The movie tries to be fun, and it keeps moving and switching venues constantly, so I can see that it was trying to be fun. That I didn't personally enjoy it all that much is probably more about me than the movie.

Replayability: 6
This is obviously a guess at a score, having seen the film once in the theater, but I'd like to see it again, someday. Just not any time real soon.

Overall: 6.5
I didn't enjoy the film enough to give it a high score, but it didn't suck either. As you know if you've read a number of my film reviews, I tend to grade pretty harshly, so from me, anything over a 6 isn't such a bad score.