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| Tuesday, January 4, 2005 07:30 AM |
| Random Items |
 by Fëanor |
- I am part of the surge in blog reading and writing being discussed in this article. None of my relatives have blogs (in fact, I'd be willing to bet a good number of my relatives are in that 62% who don't know what blogs are), but almost all of my friends do. Does this mean I'm ahead of the curve in my family, or just a weirdo? Probably a little of both.
- I read James Wolcott's blog, when I can bring myself to, because it's witty, well-written, and informative. Unfortunately, it is also often depressing and horrifying, as it is in this post from the first of the year.
Well, only four more years, right? Heck, less than four, now! Whoopee!
Of course, Bush might extend his term by declaring himself the Pope of America, a position which would no doubt with life-long rulership. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
- On a happier note, Spirit and Opportunity are still running strong on Mars and learning all kinds of interesting stuff. Like, apparently we now know there was definitely water over there, which means there may also have been life. Awesome.
- Last night, poppy and I, both rather sick and tired, but also bored and looking for something to do, decided to pop in the next Mummy movie in the Legacy Collection: The Mummy's Tomb. The whole series of movies, excepting the first one, appear to be named after random possessions of the Mummy. I wondered whether we might eventually get to films entitled The Mummy's Ankle or The Mummy's George Foreman Grill. Unfortunately, it's also starting to appear as if the whole series of movies, excepting the first one, are really quite bad. This one reacquaints us with the previous film in painstaking detail, going so far as to make use of large portions of actual footage from that film. It also brings back a couple of the characters from that first film, only to kill them. This didn't particularly bother me, as I didn't like those characters much anyway. I was really disappointed, though, when the Mummy failed to kill the bland, conservative main character from this film. Which brings me to why I think we tend to root for the bad guy in horror films (as Sarcasmo pointed out some time ago): the good guys tend to be personifications of society at large; regular fellas trying to maintain the status quo. They are thus really boring and lame. The monster is always some freakish thing creeping along the edges of society, creating chaos and shaking things up. In other words, really cool and interesting.
Strangely enough, however, the mummy isn't really the main villain of the film. He is only a slave to an evil foreigner who wants our white women! Seriously. The dude's plan is to kill all the folks who defiled the tomb in the first movie, but he's distracted by the girlfriend of the main character, and decides to send the mummy to get her so he can marry her and they can live together forever. It never seems to cross his mind that living forever with a woman who doesn't like you would probably not be very fun. Anyway, the mummy is an innocent pawn in all of this, and really seems against the idea of kidnapping the woman. He just wants to kill tomb defilers, which seems like a fine occupation to me.
Unfortunately, even when you're rooting for the mummy, The Mummy's Tomb is not very entertaining. Pretty much everybody in it is a terrible actor, the dialogue is really bad, and the story is ridiculous and unbelievable. Apparently the mummy is played by Lon Chaney, Jr., but it's pretty hard to tell under all those bandages, and anyway he's not a very good actor, either.
The movie was made in 1942, and near the end, WWII suddenly and rather incongruously intrudes on the storyline, as the main character is recruited as an army doctor, and decides to quickly marry his girlfriend and take her to the army hospital with him. Both of them are very excited and patriotic, of course, and sadly the mummy and his amorous master don't quite manage to foil their plans. And after the credits, The Mummy's Tomb encourages us to buy war bonds and stamps.
- I don't really have anything else to say. I just wanted to make another bullet point. Have a good afternoon, everybody.
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