Friday, December 22, 2006
My whereabouts and a couple of nano-reviews
Sorry about the light blogging yesterday -- couldn't be helped. I got up at 3:45 for a 6:20 am flight to Florida, spent the day in some very interesting meetings, and then returned last night. When I got back it was all I could do to watch an episode of Heroes on iTunes with my son.
Heroes, by the way, is excellent, but you have to watch it from the beginning. I had not done that, even though a friend of mine pointed out that you can download all the episodes from iTunes for a couple dollars each and watch them on your computer. I didn't do that, either. However, earlier this week I noticed that the download speeds in our house had decreased considerably. Investigation revealed that my son had spent a couple of days downloading every episode of Heroes. His penalty is that I am making him watch the entire series from the beginning with me, hunched over his computer. It's a lot of fun.
However, you won't miss much if you miss the movie Eragon. It is poorly directed -- the actors are very wooden -- and the story is a bit dumb. The dragon and related effects are very well done, but not worth the two hours out of your life. Yes, I am open to the charge that I did not like it only because I am the only member of the household not to have read the book, but the readers were outraged because the movie was insufficiently true to the novel. So if you've read the book you will be disappointed, and if you haven't the movie will hardly motivate you correct that personal defect. My recommendation: ignore Eragon entirely.
2 Comments:
By 
MrSurly, at
Fri Dec 22, 10:13:00 AM:
Heroes sucked me in too. The dialogue and acting can be pretty mediocre at times, but I give the show credit because I always want to know what happens next. It's a good old fashioned serial.
By Dawnfire82, at
Fri Dec 22, 12:17:00 PM:
"Hey, there haven't been any fantasy movies lately. Let's make one?"
"What will be our gimmick? We've got to have something cool or people will blow us off and wait for the next Harry Potter, or go rent LotR."
"I know! We'll put in dragons! Dragons rock!"
"Dragons do rock. We could even call it 'Dragon!' That just drips coolness."
"No, no, that's too obvious. We need a nifty sounding fantastical name. What we'll do is take the first letter of Dragon and make it the next letter of the alphabet. What's that do?"
"Hmm. Dragon; D to E... Eragon? That sounds cool, let's roll with it!"
"Oh, and be sure to license some crappy video games to be release *before* the movie too, to appeal to kids so they can annoy their parents into coming to see it."
"Oh right, of course."
Third person: "You know that there's a book about dragons with that name?"
"Sweet, we don't even have to write a plot. This'll be the best cheap fantasy flick ever!"
Dawnfire's version of what must have happened at the birth of Eragon.
