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| Monday, January 3, 2005 08:31 AM |
| Easing on into the New Year |
 by Fëanor |
I'm home from work today, taking care of some chores--and taking care of poppy, who's sick with something or other (sore throat, sniffling, etc.). I've been trying to make myself do some work on my website over this long weekend, but pretty much all I've managed to do is get a bit further in Knights of the Old Republic and Third Age. I think I'm actually nearing the end of KotOR; as for Third Age, I've apparently barely begun--my save game informs me that I've completed only 5% of the game, despite having played it for quite a few hours now! This doesn't discourage me; in fact, it makes me very happy. So much game still to play!
Admittedly, Third Age is not as deep as one might hope. It's the typical, Diablo-esque RPG, wherein you go about killing things and making your character better via leveling up and finding newer, better items. It has other modes and extra features, but these are generally disappointing. Evil Mode, for instance, is just a series of fights set in an area you already beat as the good guys, but this time you play as the bad guys and defeat much weaker versions of the good characters. For going through this, you are rewarded at the end with one or two new items. It's worth it to get the items, but not in itself very exciting. Even being able to play as a Nazgul doesn't add much to the experience.
There's also something called "Travel," which basically means going back through an area you've already been in, but this time all the treasure chests are empty and there are no story segments, and you just get in a lot of fights. It's kind of repetetive and dull.
But like I said, the extras aren't important, as I'm perfectly happy with the straight-out, normal game as it is. Kill stuff, get stuff, level up. It's all good.
Other things I've managed to do: finish watching Return of the King (as mentioned in the comments of my previous post), and finally watch The Red Shoes.
I still don't feel like I can give a final opinion on RotK, as I have yet to be able to really experience it as a movie in itself. I find myself instead forced to watch it as a collection of film adaptations of various scenes from one of my favorite novels of all time. Basically, I sit there waiting for certain sequences to occur, and then as I'm watching them, I analyze them for accuracy. This isn't something I want to do; it's something that happens automatically, without me being able to stop it.
That said, I do enjoy many parts of the film, and yes, it makes me cry, multiple times, every time I see it.
The Red Shoes is a film that I missed the beginning of many years ago on TV. There were things about the movie that bothered me, and I've always wanted to see it again, this time in its entirety. But it's a very long film, and very emotionally draining, so when I finally received it from Netflix, I let it sit on my shelf for months and months, during which time I found myself always either unable or unwilling to watch it. But last night I finally decided to stay up and give the film the second viewing it deserved. The upshot is, I raised my rating of it on my list half a point, thus giving it the full four stars. It's truly a great film.
The Red Shoes is about a famous ballet troupe run by an extremely powerful, cold, and arrogant man named Lermentov. For him, ballet is a religion--nothing in life is more important to him. When a young woman named Vicky Page crosses his path who feels the same way about dancing, he hires her immediately. He also hires a talented composer named Craster. Together, the dancer and composer will help create an incredibly successful ballet of Hans Christian Andersen's story, "The Red Shoes." The story is about a pair of magical red shoes. A young girl buys them to attend a dance, but finds herself unable to stop dancing--the shoes won't let her. Finally, they dance her to death. This story is tragically paralleled by the film's main plot line. Lermentov plans to mold Page into a great new dancer. When she falls in love with Craster, Lermentov is furious and (though he would almost certainly never admit this to himself or anyone else) jealous. He fires Craster in the hopes of splitting them up, but Page leaves with him and they get married. Vicky is still torn, however, between her love of dancing and her love of Craster, and eventually these two loves, and these two men with their own powerful desires, will tear her apart.
What originally bother me about the movie is that the ballet sequences are done using film techniques and special effects such that they could never actually occur on-stage. This seemed silly to me--to show us, in a movie about ballet, a ballet that could never really be an actual ballet. But this time it didn't bother me as much. It's supposed to be ballet translated into a surreal, imagined, film version of ballet, so it makes sense. It also bugged me that Craster and Lermentov are such bastards to Page. Craster in particular--with his blind, selfish assumption that Vicky will just give up what she lives for to be with him--really pissed me off. But, of course, that's the whole point of the story.
The film is directed by Michael Powell (also responsible for The Thief of Bagdad and Peeping Tom, both of which I highly recommend) and Emeric Pressburger, and has plenty of great acting, especially by Anton Walbrook as Lermentov and Moira Shearer as Vicky Page. Definitely check it out, even if you don't care for ballet.
Anyways, tomorrow it's back to work for me. And actually, I'm kind of looking forward to it. It'll be nice to fall back into the old routine, and have stuff to keep me occupied again.
Of course, I may not feel that way by tomorrow morning, but we'll see. |
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