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| Thursday, June 16, 2005 05:48 PM |
| Adventures |
 by Fëanor |
- First of all, some great links from Super Tarzan:
- Quicktime clips from a Turkish movie that stole much of its footage from Star Wars, and much of its music from Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are no subtitles, and I don't know Turkish, but even if I were able to follow the dialogue, I suspect this film wouldn't make much sense. They seem to have chosen scenes from Star Wars pretty much at random, and in some cases actually reused them multiple times.
Btw, the second clip listed on this page is particularly hilarious; it includes both the worst training sequence of all time, AND the worst romantic sequence of all time.
- A trailer for Mirror Mask, a film based on the writing of Neil Gaiman, directed by his long-time artist collaborator, Dave McKean, and constructed by the Jim Henson folks. Sounds like a sure-fire hit, and it does look visually quite astounding, but it also looks like it could be really lame and corny--you know, like Neverwhere (sorry, Peccable). We'll see what happens.
- An interesting opinion piece examining the competition and animosity possibly lurking behind the "friendship" between George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. It makes some good points and insightful observations, and is also quite entertaining.
- Second, some links of my own:
- The Lost...Girls?! I guess that could work. Probably not, though. The Movie Blog dude certainly doesn't think so. I really love the original, though I haven't seen it for years (hmmm...movie night?), so given that and Hollywood's track record with remakes, I'm betting that in my case the Movie Blog guy will probably be right, and I will despise the film.
- Also via the Movie Blog, the trailer for Terry Gilliam's latest film, The Brothers Grimm. My reaction to this was kind of the opposite of the dude's on the Movie Blog: I was excited about this movie before I saw the trailer; now, not so much. I mean, it starts with the phrase "In a world," which I thought we'd all agreed was a ridiculously cliche and meaningless way to start a trailer. And the movie itself just doesn't look all that exciting. I see mostly lame jokes and clumsy slapstick. Yeah, there are some neat visuals and some promising ideas, but all in all this doesn't look like the exciting, fantastic, imaginative, genre-busting film I've come to expect from Gilliam.
But they've made bad trailers for good movies before. I'm hoping this is one of those times.
- Now, it's story time!
Tomorrow, poppy and I make settlement on our new condo. Exciting stuff. When you do this closing thing, you have to hand over a big chunk of money to the folks on the other side of the table and, for some arcane reason, you don't know until you actually walk in the room exactly how much money that's going to be. And the majority of it has to be paid via a cashier's check, or some other such thing, and, for another arcane reason (or possibly the same one; who knows?), this check must be made out to yourself. Well, I discovered recently that I can get one of these cashier's checks pretty easily from a credit union with whom I have an account; they have an office a couple blocks away from where I work. But I've been putting off going to get it because our mortgage guy was supposed to get back to us with a more exact estimate of the closing costs. Well, he finally contacted us this morning, gave us the estimate, and I headed out around lunchtime to go pick up the check.
Now, I was confident that I had enough money in my account for the check, but I wanted to make sure I'd have enough left over to, you know, live on, so I called up my credit union to check my balance. When the line picks up, this message plays explaining that their Franklin Square office has been flooded due to a water main break, and is closed. I was hoping that was not the office I was walking toward at that moment, but I was pretty sure it was. I became more sure when I approached the building and found it surrounded by scaffolding, various vehicles and tubes and equipment, and a long line of Hispanic workers sitting down having their lunch.
Great.
Well, I talk to a few folks inside, who are set up in the lobby at a makeshift desk, and it turns out my best bet to get what I need in time is to head on up to the King of Prussia office. Poppy was quick to mobilize her parents to our aid, and her Dad agreed to come into town, pick me up, and drive me up to the office. So I grabbed a couple of pop tarts and an iced tea out of the vending machine for lunch, jumped in the car, and off we went.
Unfortunately, neither of us really knew how to get out of the city going the direction we needed to go, and whenever we needed to turn in a particular direction, there were signs telling us we couldn't, or streets that were blocked off by buses. By the time we got out of the city, ran into traffic, and it started to rain heavily, I began to suspect that there was a God, and that he didn't particularly like me.
But, luckily for poppy and I, things did not continue in this vein. It was a fast, freak rain storm, the traffic cleared up quickly, and soon enough we had arrived at the credit union and the check was in my hand. While we were at the office, we saw lots of folks milling about, delivering computers and equipment, or squeezing into new workspaces next to other folks. Their Philadelphia office--which, I want to mention, I have only ever had to visit twice in my life, despite having an account with them for years and years--must have literally just flooded in the last couple of days, and they were still scurrying to recover. Awesome! It's like they did it just for me!
But honestly, I didn't mind the whole adventure that much. It made things a little more exciting, it got me out of work early, and it also made for a good story, I hope. Plus, at least one thing always has to go wrong in situations like this, and I'm hoping that was the one thing, and now the rest of the process will go smoothly. We'll see... |
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