Weekend Recap

Friday night was Girl's Night Out for Lauren and some of her school friends. Look out Olive Garden! I just hung out at home and watched Alexander. Or tried to watch it at least. I am a big fan of the (usually historic) epic. Ben-Hur. Spartacus. Braveheart. I even really liked Troy. This movie bored me so bad. I saw through the conquering of Babylon, which took about an hour. The battle scene was in some ways impressive, the aerial shots in particular were cool. But other than that it was just confusing and not well explained. I did not get to any of the romantic scenes so I cannot comment on them. I cut my losses and spent the next couple of hours cleaning the house. After Lauren got home we played a quick game of Through the Desert.

Update: Alan reminded me at lunch of the other TERRIBLE part of Alexander - the musical score. Vangelis has composed some memorable stuff, like the theme from Chariots of Fire, but the music in Alexander seemed wholly inappropriate. It wasn't rousing or epic, I really noticed the score while watching, and not in a good way.

Saturday morning I trekked to the cable company's branch office and managed to get a replacement HD-DVR (and yet another account adjustment in my favor). Finally I have a box that works on all fronts. This was just in time to record the Miami-Va. Tech game. What a stomping by the 'Canes. Saturday night we watched The Abyss. Lauren had never seen it and it had been awhile for me. This is really a fantastic movie, we watched the standard edition which I prefer. I like the extended edition's extra time with the NTIs, but it is just a little too preachy for me. Anyway James Cameron really needs to make more non-documentary movies, his stuff is so damn good. I was pleased to recognize Ken Jenkins, who plays one of the topside Benthic Petroleum guys in this movie. He is more recognizable as Dr. Kelso from Scrubs.

Sunday morning was the arduous chore of cleaning our oven. What a nightmare, I'll leave it at that. Seeing the G-Men win again was awesome. We watched Stuck On You which was a lot better than expected. This is the latest dumb movie I get for free as a result of my Blockbuster membership. There were the obvious sight gags but there was some pretty funny stuff in there too. The sports montage had some good laughs, and the way they filmed Walt's scenes in "Honey and the Beaze" was also clever and had some very funny moments. I'd rank this as better than Kingpin and Me, Myself & Irene, worse than Dumb And Dumber and There's Something About Mary.

Finally we watched the live West Wing episode. Of course it was only live on the East coast, and we recorded it on top of that. This is maybe the worst episode of the West Wing ever. Being live just made it look worse, because they tried to make it look like live video instead of the nice soft film look. The "it could only happen live" moments like the format departure or the heckler just came off as silly. Also I was hoping we'd maybe see some more behind the scenes wrangling. It ended up just being an exhaustively boring rundown of their platforms - has anyone forgotten that these are not real candidates and I don't need that level of detail? Hell, I don't even watch REAL presidential debates!