Does this mean they got the

reference?

There were definite chuckles a half beat after the line, and not just from me. Since there wasn't anything else funny going on at that exact moment, I'm going with "yes".

We saw PotC3 last night. Very oddly for the middle of an urban area on what I would consider a weekend night, there were only fifteen people in the audience (I won a bet). Bob and I liked PotC2-- we saw it twice in the theatres. But this is what Bob said at the end of PotC3: "I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, it was terrible. On the other hand, I had so little idea what people were thinking, what their motivations were, and what was supposed to be happening at any one time that maybe it was great." And I pretty much agreed.

It's been about 40% slower than we predicted this weekend. I really thought Pirates was going to kick Spidey's ass but maybe there's too much else going on this weekend. I bet it will hold a lot better than Spidey did... but I've been wrong before.

Pirates... Long. Any movie which makes me think about my lunch, not doing so well.

Tsotsi

The director of that voted for Serenity at the Edinburgh Film Festival audience awards: true. Tsotsi took the audience award.

Don't know if it's opened in the states yet, but 28 Weeks Later is excellent. It's the sequel to 28 Days Later, the British zombie film from a few years back. I went into it completely blind (hadn't seen any publicity) and it helped.

Brego, Aragorn's horse in TTT and RotK is recovering from emergency colic surgery.

I knew that he had been competed in dressage but for some reason had no idea that he was a Dutch Warmblood.

(Hopefully, he is quite well now.)

Link isn't working, sumi.

Saw Pirates this weekend. Long and disappointing. By the time Jack and Davy Jones were fencing on a yard-arm in the middle of a maelstrom I realized that (a) that sounds cooler in theory than in actual swordfighting interest and (b) there hadn't really been any swordfights up until then. Some general melee but nothing like the cool blacksmith fight in the first one, or the uber-choreographed waterwheel fight in 2.

It felt like they'd lost the thread of what was most interesting about the story, and the characters' motivations were so muddled and conflicty. It made the characters seem incoherent instead of complex.

I had liked the second movie a lot, but this one was far less fun, far less interesting. Keith Richards was perfect though. Liked that. Chow Yun Fat was wasted. Everybody should go watch A Better Tomorrow and see why he's so esteemed.

Keira Knightly failed to convince me of her action hero bona fides. All the plot turns were potentially interesting, but in the end felt like plot turns instead of character developments.

Just got back from the Bloated Gay Pirate Movie and I gotta agree with David and others. There were moments I liked and character notes that were nice, but it was too much special effects and not enough character development. I think I'll just file it away with the Matrix sequels and just love the original forever.

I corrected the link -- I hope it works now!

Wow. I liked PotC3. Much better than 2--the couple who came with us wanted to know if they should bother to see it. Told them, only if they wanted to see a few cool stunts which didn't really fit into the story anyway.

As for 3...it wasn't as funny and surprising as the first one, but I liked the twists and turns, and didn't feel the length at all. I liked the ending, in which no one really got what they wanted, although there was some light for the leads. I was disappointed at the offscreen death of Admiral (?) Swan, but liked Elizabeth's despair. I also bought her random ascent through the ranks of pirates basically because she gave good shriek. Orlando Bloom took a few acting classes since the release of the first one too. I would definitely have liked more Chow Yun Fat, but that's pretty much my default state of being. There is never enough of him.

Oddly, the saddest part for me, the part where the deaths seemed most human was when they killed the Endeavour. Suddenly it felt like carnage. Not quite sure how that got me, and the rest were just what happens in movies like that.

Monkey was great.