Weekend Wanderlust & Watchmen Weview

Alright, so I've been sitting on it thinking about it for the last few days, and now I've got my head around it here's my ever so brief Watchmen review:

Watchmen

I think I almost cried when Watchmen finally started the other afternoon. I was so excited to see the damn film that I almost broke out in tears of joy. It took about fifteen second for that to change to damn near tears of despair. So the opening sequence was pretty damn cool, it looked great, but right from the get-go it felt off. It just didn't feel right. Three hours later it felt just as wrong.

First off the movie looked great. It was a well shot film. The action sequences, while lacking the visceral quality that made 300 so excellent, were well done. There were very few comedic moments, but the few that there were worked fairly well. As far as acting goes Patrick Wilson and Jeffrey Dean Morgan were good. Jackie Earle Haley and Billy Crudup were great. And Malin Akerman and Matthew Goode were bad, although the later suffered from lack of screen time and character development while the prior just made us all suffer despite the fact that she looked pretty hot, got naked, and had nice hair.

My big problem is that the story just never came together. It was really tough to care about characters in the film that in the comic you grew to really care about. I don't understand Zack Snyder's choices either. Cut out the island story line and Tales of the Black Freighter, got it. Those would take up huge amounts of time. Eliminate the squid alien, got it. Would seem a little out of place. But make what you replace those with make more sense. It just didn't work.

I liked the movie, I wanted to love it. I don't hold the fact that it didn't live up to the brilliance of the comic against it. The comic was all about what it made you think and feel. The movie just wanted to pay homage to that, and in a lot of ways it did. What I hold against the film is that the people who I brought to see it will never read the comic now because the movie just didn't work. They won't understand. Snyder tried to duplicate the results of the book. A noble effort indeed. But he would have done better to make a movie that made people want to read the comic. Even if it meant dumbing it down a bit, even if it meant simplifying the story line so that it made more sense to people not in the know, even if it meant aiming to make a really good movie instead of a great one. He didn't do that. So, yeah, I liked the movie, but I never came close to loving it.

Weekend Wanderlust

So last Saturday was the first night in weeks that I hadn't gone out and done something one way or the other. This week I haven't been out at all since Sunday. I'm still good though. Tomorrow night is the Manchester play so some of us Antioch people are going to that. Saturday I'm heading up to Boston with the guys to catch a Dropkick Murphys concert and go to the St.Patrick's Day parade. I was really excited when we first decided to do this. Not so much anymore. I've been under the weather all week and I'm praying I feel better by Saturday. Sean's already got a conflict with work so who knows what he's doing. I suddenly remembered that I haven't been to a real concert in damn near a decade and that I absolutely hate parades. But it is Boston, and this will be the furthest from home I've gone for more than a few hours in over five years. First time I've slept anywhere but my house or the church for Antioch in nearly five years. The first "vacation" I've had in five years. You get where I'm going here? It's been awhile.

Now some of the Antioch people might be getting together on Sunday, and I'm absolutely devastated that I'm going to miss that. I don't very often miss things the whole group is invited too, and I hate to start now. But things are different. You see there's always this count with me. Always this idea in my head that say anything I miss can't be replaced. You know like, there's fifteen more things we can do as a group, if I miss one there's only fourteen. If I miss another there's only thirteen and so on and so on. But I know that's not happening with this group. We've got too many things ahead of us to count. I sort of like that. So yeah I'll miss Sunday, and I'll still be pissed off that I do. But there will be other days. There will always be other days.

In other news. When I just hopped on the scale I weighed in at 363 lbs. That's 32 lbs. less than I was at the start of January. To be fair it's also only 2 lbs. less then what I weighed two weeks ago, but I've gone back and forth a lot since then and I haven't been trying nearly as hard as I should. So yeah, I'm making progress. I should be making more. And I'm going to have to take a good long look at whatever it is I try next.

So yeah, that's all for now. My head is still congested and I sort of feel like shit. Add to that the fact that I've put in a few late nights this week at the office and not been able to sleep and you could see why the drive up to Boston on Saturday is seeming pretty daunting. Not going to worry about that right this second though, I've got other things to do.