April 02, 2007 - 7:52 PM

Happy 60th, Mom!

Tomorrow is my mom's 60th birthday. And Liz's mom's 60th birthday. Isn't that an interesting coincidence?

Liz was just in VA for a week to hang out with her mom and her friends and to help throw her mom's birthday this past Saturday. While she was gone, I was taking care of Wallaby and feeling very guilty about leaving her alone for most of the day. Luckily, a co-worker of one of Liz's friends was able to walk Wallaby during the early evenings so that she could get her poop on outside, before I got there to play with her and feed her.

I'll be heading out to Arizona this coming weekend to be with my parents, celebrate my mom's birthday, and I guess do the Easter thing. Soph is coming out from Boston too, but Phil can't make it (he and Jen were just there in February). Can you believe that it's April already? Geeze.

And what does April mean? It means the start of Baseball season. I had the last of my three fantasy drafts yesterday- the big $550 buy-in draft with Tony. I can't gauge how well we did in the auction...I know there were a few times when we stopped short bidding on a player that, in retrospect, we would have preferred to go a few dollars higher on. I think we'll have to wait a month to be able to properly ascertain where we stand.

The other two leagues, I'm quite happy with the way I drafted and with the players that picked up. I had a definite strategy and targets in those drafts (I think i might have been way over-prepared for them, to be honest), and none of the guys I chose were desperation picks. $50 at stake in each league. Here's hoping I come out ahead, so that, as Liz pointed out, I can buy her stuff.

In addition to baseball, we have plenty of good movies to look forward to. Pickings were a little slim so far this year, but I haven't been too disappointed by the two that I did see. Matt, Sharon and I checked out the Korean monster-feature "The Host" yesterday after my draft. It's not a straight-up horror film, but more "scary-creature terrorizing your mind" like King Kong, with lots of humor thrown in all over the place. It's worth checking out in the theaters if it's playing near you, I think, but if it doesn't reach you, try to rent it on DVD when it comes out. It doesn't take itself too seriously, but still manages to have something to say (a little commentary on what a bunch of pricks the U.S. government is). And it was kinda moving, too. Can't really say that about Kong, can you?

The other movie I saw in the theaters was 300 a few weeks ago, with LDBL and Flori. Engaging, but not entirely filling is my assessment. Because of the limitation in the historical context, all the battles happen in one place, and so at times, it feels kinda small for an epic film, as if it could be a stage production with just one setting. When I see a period action epic, like Braveheart or Gladiator, I want to be transported from battlefield to battlefield, to see the large scale and the small scale wars. When every piece of combat happens on this one stretch of rocky coastline, the magnitude is lessened.

The extensive use of CG and matte backgrounds was also a little distracting, as if we were watching Ben Hur or the Ten Commandments where the fake scenery was very obvious. It didn't irk me as much as it did in Gladiator, where Rome looked REALLY fake to me, because I think it wasn't striving for realism as much as Ridley Scott's film was. Since I knew that they were trying to be stylized and to mimic the comic book's look, I was more readily accepting of the fakery.

The fighting was sweet, though. Real sweet. Well choreographed and superbly filmed, it certainly got the blood pumping. And seeing it on a giant IMAX screen was worth the money. The movie was letterboxed to stretch across the entirety of the screen, leaving black bars at the top and bottom. This was good because when we watched the Spiderman trailer before it, which was fullscreen, it hurt my eyes. There was just too much on the screen, going beyond the frame of my vision, and it seriously almost gave me a headache.

Now Listening To : Carina Round- e.p.
Random Thought : Ahh...look at those boxscores rolling in. I didn't realize how much I'd missed baseball until today.

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