Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Back from the dead

Sadly for the internet community, blogging is extremely low on my to-do list. I have a great many school things to attend to, followed by a relatively high number of church things. I’ve been working on improving my social life, so that takes an increasing amount of time. Leaving me with negative hours in my day. How do I fit blogging (a very low dividend activity) into that schedule? The answer is simple. Avoid studying by blogging.

But now that I’ve established a time in which to write, what should I write about? I’ve got weeks and weeks of semi-interesting stuff. I’ve eaten both chili and pepper ice cream. I’ve visited Cedar Point, home of the highest concentration of rollercoasters in the world. I purchased a surround sound system for my apartment. I’ve thrown an American Gladiators Barbeque for 150 people. First things first: Spiderman.

I did see Spiderman at the midnight showing at the IMAX. We played Scum in line for a couple hours to assure we’d have a good seat in the theater, which is fairly ridiculous at IMAX. But it was fun nonetheless. I even put together a Spiderman quiz to test my fellow line-waiters knowledge of my favorite superhero. The highest score was a 60, which made me feel like a good expert of Spidermania.

The movie itself was awesome. I admit that I’m biased and any movie involving Spiderman will be awesome, regardless of the actual quality of the film. So objectively, it wasn’t as awesome as the first two movies. The first two were more coherent and focused than this one. In this “final” movie Sam Raimi experimented more, with mixed results. I liked the extra humor, as well as the variety of characters and extra horror elements. He took many of the elements from the first two films and magnified them. Consequently, the film is very . . . full. I don’t think it holds its own as well as the first two; however, I think it was a very good conclusion. The movie not only pulled together its own plot points, but pulled together the variety of themes from the trilogy. So while it certainly could’ve been a better movie, I think it was a great cap for the trilogy.

I was pretty happy with the various characters. Gwen was good, as was Sandman. I had my doubts about his inclusion (he’s just not as epic or sinister as I’d like) but he turned out very well. They made up a fair amount about the character, but they got the spirit of him right. I was also pretty pleased with Venom. I would’ve preferred comic-book Venom, who’s a 7 foot tall behemoth complete with tongue and slobber, but I’m not convinced they could’ve made him look right. The spider doppelganger they made him was good and more story appropriate. Green Goblin’s amnesia conflict was actually very in tune with the comics and a great (if unoriginal) device to use for Harry this time around.

So I fully support the movie. It’s the last movie I saw in the theaters, and probably the only one I’ll see until Transformers in July. Optimus Prime, you’d better be good.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Going for the record

I’m trying to recover from my weekend. I think I’m almost there, but I’m considering not having another one this week. Here’s what went down:

We started the weekend on Wednesday last week. We hit up our typical Brazenhead expedition to feast on ½ price burgers. Then we had our first social gathering of the week: Lost night. It was a great episode and a good time was had by all.

Thursday we crashed the Relief Society book club. It was really a very light crashing. For one, I had actually read the book earlier in the week so they’d have no formal right to protest. And for two, we had our own table where we discussed Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat, so we weren’t actually a part of their group anyway. We followed this up by having people over to watch The Office/NBA playoffs. We then had a group of about a dozen stand in line and watch Spiderman 3 at midnight.

Friday we had a ward activity where we hung out with the Stake Presidency at Deseret. Deseret is a privately owned neighborhood that some rich Ohio Mormon built, complete with a ritzy house for each of his kids, a pool house, indoor basketball court etc. Odd stuff, but fun. We were supposed to go to an Empinada party, but ended up gathering at Stacy’s for basketball.

Saturday we were invited to eat breakfast with a guy in our apartment complex. I got about an hour of stuff done then we had to go to a barbeque where a friend was showing off her nieces and nephews. That night I threw a Cinco de Mayo party where we all made smoothies, listened to mariachi music and eventually watched more NBA playoffs. It went until about 2, which was a little hurtful the next morning, but it was a pretty successful to-do.

Sunday I was in charge of running a potato bar immediately following stake conference. Baking 80 potatoes, transporting them to and fro and tricking the ward into singing in the choir while I set things up required some skill, but I was up to it. The lunch was my main event of the day, but I also ended up attending a birthday party, a memorial for the cadavers we dissected, a CES broadcast at the Bishops and a viewing of the SNL special. I didn’t really see my home until after midnight, and needless to say, got nothing constructive done.

Monday’s only planned event was a Ultimate Frisbee competition in the evening, but we ended up having a bunch of requests to use our enormous television. So we watched the Jazz game until about 1 in the morning, at which point my weekend finally ended.

Six days, with at least two parties per day. In some cases I had to stretch the definition of party, but still, it was an action packed weekend. I hope to not have one so full in the near future.