Sat through three more Harry Potter flicks. Still not impressed.
They look like they are trying to get darker but they’re not. They simply follow the age of the teenagers and that period of life involves a lot of brooding. They’re just “exploring feelings” and such… oh, how my weeping ovaries hurt after watching these things! There were some good parts, some cute scenes but as a whole I’m not interested in watching awkward teenagers fumble with puppy love. Twilight… Harry Potter… Ehhh, not my gig.
Some of the stuff I liked turned out to be the overdone, cliche and expected parts. The lightsaber duel was pretty cool looking. Helena Bonham Carter playing a crazy bitch… Umm, haven’t seen that one before…
I’ve still got the last movies (two parts) to watch. Hopefully it ties it all together. I’d like to see at least one well-planned and clever turn and not just pulling some Star Trekian magic out of their ass at the last minute. Consistency in the magic world would be nice too.
I’d also like to care about any of the characters. I wish I had one single character that I wanted to understand, one person I wanted to know more about. This thing is like reading the Book of Numbers, there’s a hundred new characters on every damn page. Every time I start to feel “close” to a character, they take them out of the story to make room for the new ones. The main three? Whining bitches all of them, I hope they die. Dumbledore? They never made him likable enough. I didn’t care at all when he died. Hagrid? He was my only chance but he’s barely in the damn movies anymore. I keep thinking Snape is going to get more time but they never give it to him. To be honest, if I hadn’t promised to watch them all, I could just leave the story right where it is and be just fine.
I’m sure they get plenty of explanation in the books. (Or at least, I hope so…) I’m willing to give her credit enough to believe that this universe is fully and properly explained in the books. But these are movies, not books. If I have to read the book the movie is based on to understand, feel or care about characters in the movie, then it is a failure of a movie. It may make money, it may spawn sequels (most of that coming from an existing fanbase) but if you take a ‘great’ book and can’t successfully condense it into a movie format, DON’T do it! The “you have to read it to understand” excuse is complete and utter bullshit. A movie should stand on its own.
Whenever we have time, I’ll watch the last two back-to-back. So far the entire movie series looks like it’s probably a good story to tell in two, maybe three movies. Not eight.
The three of us were out to dinner. ”Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” was playing quietly in the background. During a lull in the conversation I look up at my wife and daughter and say, “I’ve never really liked U2.”
The hurt look on their faces still haunts me in my sleep…
My job title has the word “engineer” in it. That’s no big fucking deal, just about everyone can use that word to make a menial task seem important. The word has become diluted and meaningless to the common user. I’m not an engineer, I’m a field tech. I used to be an engineer, long ago and before the bubble burst I used to design systems and make decisions.
I got into some “office politics” trouble once because they promoted a secretary to the engineering group to keep her off the lay-off list. She was some guy’s wife and I really laid into management saying, “You can’t just put a new hat on this bitch and call her an engineer, you’ve got to know what you’re doing…” After the lay-offs, I ended up working for a new manager. It was his wife that I had laid into…
But I was a damn good engineer though, mostly because I was a field tech for years before that. So I knew what “the real world” situation was. Now I’m back to being just a “field tech”. Even if you give it an official title that sounds important, I can only do what “they” tell me to do…
But dammit, I’m not only a great engineer, I am a GOLDEN GOD of techs!!! I know what the fuck I’m doing! And most of our engineers know this. When Morgan says he has an idea, you shut the fuck up and listen! I was not working with one of our regular engineers last night.
(Oversimplifying:) Imagine a very cumbersome wire run into a series of 25 very hard to reach points. So, the wire runs from A-B-C-D-E…to Z. They call you and tell you that they want to incorporate a new point. They originally skipped “W” and now they want you to install W. This guy has me rewire A through V! I told him it would be easier to just leave A-V and rewire XYZ. His answer? ”Well, that’s not what’s on the paper here.”
After a short period of disbelief, I close my eyes and remember that this “major” work I’m doing at 7:30pm was not on the schedule until 1pm this afternoon. Someone just doesn’t have their shit together. So I spend 30 minutes running in a new cable on top of the old cable I’m tearing out. A two minute job ran 45 minutes because “that’s how some other guy wrote it up”.
You can tell when the engineers have never seen anything other than the spec-lab. It should be a requirement to have worked in the field before you are allowed to decide how to run the field…
I saw the trailer for “Red Tails”. I’m interested for the first few seconds but then they lost me.
I’m not sure if this is a remake of “The Tuskegee Airmen” (which I liked) or a sequel or if this is something new. But when the trailer used modern electronica music over the WWII dogfight scenes… I stopped wanting to know.
I know this isn’t the first (or last) time I’ve seen modern music used anachronistically in a trailer for a period piece, but it was the most jarring. It may have its purpose, drawing in young kids or something, but it turned me off in a major way…
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