Still Alive and Rambling

I bought Troy on DVD today, and I have to say it’s no Gladiator. I mean, it’s better than the Gladiator boxing-movie that had Brian Dennehy, but not the Russell Crowe film. I mean, I have to say that it’s not without flaws; the stereo separation is quite good, particularly when someone’s spilling blood off to the left or right of the screen. But I think the inherent problem with it is the fact that it’s a larger-than-life epic that’s told on the human scale, which just doesn’t work on a fundamental level. Furthermore, there are a lot of actresses out there who are considerably better-looking than the one they got to play Helen of Troy, not that I could understand what she saw in that pansy Legolas. On the plus-side, I’m going to say that Brian Cox has been having a great couple of years, what with this, the two Bourne movies and Super Troopers.

A couple of Gladiator-style beheadings would have also been nice. And some of the confrontations between the Greek and Trojan armies are just way too obviously computer-generated, making WETA’s work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy (the latter two films in particular) look even more spectacular. I’m not looking for pixels, but in Troy, the rushing army seems to all run in the exact same way, hold their shields in the same way, making them utterly stilted and inhuman.

I’ve been playing a great deal of World of Warcraft and Metroid Prime 2 lately. Both are absolutely fantastic games, managing to suck copious amounts of time out of me. This is a good thing, since I used to just go out and drink after work. The drinking itself wasn’t necessarily bad, but it ended up costing me a fuck-ton of money over the course of a month. When I considered that I could get a game like Metroid and get tens of hours out of it for the cost of a few nights’ drinking, it all justified itself.

And I just realized that I totally forgot about the only thing I do religiously around Christmas, and that’s watching E.T., which I guess I’m going to have to do tomorrow night or the night after. Basically, I watch E.T. only once a year so the movie never gets old. I go through most of the movies in my collection once every couple of months, but E.T. is the only one that I deliberately watch once a year. As such, this will mark the fifth time in my life that I’ve watched the movie; an astounding fact, since it’s over twenty years old.

And, for anyone from Fubar, no, I don’t look at Drew Barrymore in that movie and go, “Man, she turned out hot.” That’s an honor I reserve for Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire. … One of these days, I really have to do a running-commentary on a movie. I think that the front-runner right now for that is Live Aid, since it just frees me to ramble for about eight hours. Unfortunately, between work, videogames and general laziness, I have to find some time to do that.

AIM: therbmcc71