The Mummy
Today I had plans to go with Subrata, Ben, and Mark (gaming buddies, all; darn, I really must make a cast list for this journal to see The Mummy at 11:30 am. So I set my alarm for 10:00 figuring that would be the latest I could get up, shower, and drive to Subrata's for that time. In fact, I woke up around 9:00 and got up half an hour later (after much cat-petting).
I actually cut it fairly close anyway, since I checked my e-mail first, and got to Subrata's at 11:15, which meant we bought our tickets and walked in right in the middle of the first preview. (The only notable preview is for Inspector Gadget, which will be a Disney film starring - get this - Matthew Broderick. It actually looks fairly amusing.)
I'll talk more about the movie at the end of this entry, so you can skip it if you want to avoid spoilers. The short version is: Amusingly bad movie. Very silly. Worth seeing for the first two minutes, which feature stunning special effects. But skip it if you're squeamish about the suggestion of torture (i.e., the camera cuts away right before the messy parts).
It turns out that Ben never showed up, but another Appleoid, Scott, did. So after the film we decided to go get lunch. I stopped for gas on the way, and Subrata spotted me some money since I didn't have cash and Arco doesn't take credit cards. (That may explain why they're about 8 cents a gallon cheaper than Chevron.)
We went to downtown Mountain View and had Thai for lunch. Thai food out here is quite excellent. I've become especially fond of the yellow chicken curry (just what it sounds like, with potatoes). But I noticed right below it on the menu was Muslim chicken curry, which was chicken in coconut-based curry sauce with potatoes, carrots and peanuts. Hey, just take my favorite Thai dish and add several more ingredients I like, why don't you! So I got that, and it was yummy.
After that we walked down Castro St. to do some book shopping. At Printer's Inc. I picked up The Essential George Booth cartoon collection, and also The Onion's book Our Dumb Century. I had been skeptical when I heard about the Onion publishing a book, but when I thumbed through it I knew I had to have it. Rather than being a humorous history text, the book is page after page of front page reproductions from The Onion throughout the century. Yes, they're all fictional (The Onion is not yet ten years old, I believe), but it's what the Onion does best: Funny newspaper parodies. It looks hilarious!
And BookBuyers next door, I thumbed through the graphic novel section and found a very nice condition copy of Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes for only $14.95. It's one of the early collections of comic book stories from the 1940s. This hardcover book is actually somewhat valuable (not that valuable, but worth more than 15 bucks!), and I owned a very tattered copy. This one, as I said, looked great, with a cover over the dustjacket, so I figured I'd get it. Now I suppose I can sell my old one, unless my Dad wants it, since I believe it was his in the first place.
While walking around, I asked folks if the weather we're having - sunny, highs in the low 70s, lows in the low 50s - is still spring weather for the area, or if we've moved into summer. Subrata replied, "We have now moved into the eternal summer." It will get a little warmer than this, and perhaps substantially warmer for a week or two, but basically, this is it. Cool! I think my car will be able to handle this without any problem, too.
After that I dropped Subrata off at home and drove up to Palo Alto to drop in at Know Knew Books, another used bookstore, but I didn't find anything there. So I headed home.
Tracy's moving into a condo soon, so I figured I'd call her to wish her good luck, and hopefully before the packing had gotten too nuts to talk. We chatted about my life out here, how things are going at Epic and with some folks I know back there. Quite a bit of news, actually, but then it's been three months! I'd love to be a fly on the wall to see how some things have changed at Epic (especially on my team, obviously) since I left (and because of my leaving). But the gossip is enough.
This is actually the first time I've really lived somewhere where I have a bunch of friends across the country who I can call. Beyond my friends in Madison, I have my friend Charley in Boston, and Matt - now in Atlanta - who I saw regularly when I went back to visit my folks. But I don't really keep in touch with people from college, or anyone else from high school. So it didn't really strike me until today that I have five or six (or more!) people in Madison who I'd feel comfortable calling out of the blue, and who would probably enjoy hearing from me. It's neat, actually!
For links to lots and lots of articles on the cancellation, see the May 10-14 entries of Laurel Krahn's Weblog, as well as some later entries.
As I said, the first two minutes are amazing: This incredible panoramic view of ancient Egypt. Not especially imaginatively directed, but the SFX are amazing.
The rest of the film, well... it's clearly very, very heavily influenced by (okay, pretty much a rip-off of) Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are sets in the film which seem like they were reconstructed from stored materials used to build the Raiders sets, such as the set when our heroes first descend into the underground, and the airfield set where our heroes get the British captain to fly them to the lost city. Instead of snakes, we have bugs. We have a glib, brown-haired hero wearing lots of leather. We have the large, bearded Egyptian native. Instead of the Ark of the Covenant we have lots of sarcophagi. We even have a riff on the shooting-the-guy-with-the-sword routine. It was really eerie.
Afterwards I commented to Subrata that movies made by people who want to recreate late 70s and early 80s films will probably result in a marginally better class of films than those made by people who want to recreate late 60s and early 70s television shows. Whoop-de-doo!
Contrary to widespread report, the film does have a plot, and it's actually not a bad one. It does, however, telegraph pretty much every plot twist well in advance, and it does eventually devolve to the point where our heroes are doing stupid things (or delegating tasks to the stupid characters) just to get another thrill out of the audience. We also unfortunately have a female lead who is initially portrayed as a klutz - if not a ditz - and who has to be rescued by the hero.
It's not a good film, but it is entertaining. It is also the film that drove home for me that no matter how good CGI is, we're now at a point where we realize that what we're seeing is entirely artificial. At least in Raiders we could watch it and (mostly) say, "Hey, they built that!" In a true writing sense, I think being limited in that way made them focus more on the story, whereas The Mummy behaves as if any old story will do.
I give it a C-minus. With better dialogue it might have gotten as high as a C-plus.
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