The Happy Carpenter

ET

My kids are watching ET for the umpteenth time.

I still say it sucks.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

I enjoyed it, but don't take the kids. My 5 year old wanted out after 20 minutes, my 7 year old wanted out after 45 minutes, and my 8 year old wouldn't let Mommy leave her side until she had fallen asleep.

If you're reading this, I'll assume you've read the book, but if not, be warned: SPOILERS TO FOLLOW.
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The new Dumbledore is OK, but not great. Taking that job was like following Bear Bryant at the University of Alabama -- a no-wing situation. They made just a few changes to the book's plot; some I liked, some I didn't, some were just editing to save time.
It's interesting to see how the imagination of the movie people is in some ways better than my own, in some ways worse, and in most ways just different.
I have no problem with the characters, since I saw the first movie before I read any of the books. They're growing up, and some of the changes are striking. Neville and Draco, for instance, have grown a foot or more since the 2nd movie. Hermione is going to be a beauty. Ron and Harry have grown about like you'd expect. Hagrid seemed bigger -- how do they do that?
The hippogryph was way cool, the werewolf less so.

But overall, the movie was much darker. The dementors were just scary as shit. Not different from the book, but the movie makers gave the horror of them an intensity that went way beyond my own imagination.

One more thing. The movie made very little effort to bring people new to the series up to speed on background. By all means, if you haven't seen the first two movies or read the books, do so before you go to this movie.

**** Four stars but leave the kids at home.

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

While poling around The Washington Post to see what the non-bloggers are reading, I stubled across a list of the $100 million movies, of which there are 295. This struck me:

Rank The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
6 The Return of the King" $373,359,557
8 The Two Towers $340,478,898
13 The Fellowship of the Ring $313,837,577
#1 Lord of the Rings $1,027,676,032

Put those three films together and you'd have the #1 film of all time by almost double. Whoa. Some might point out that the same could be said for all the Star Wars movies if they were all put together, but I would say No; those were not conceived and written as one.

Starsky & Hutch -- movie review

The Happy Wife and I took in Starsky & Hutch last night. It was a lot funnier for me than for her because she's young enough to have escaped platform shoes and huck-a-poo shirts, whereas I had one leisure suit before the 70's thankfully expired.
Anyway, back to the movie. It was weird in this way: There were a lot of funny scenes; in fact every scene was funny. There was good dialog, there was good character development for a movie like this, some of the bit parts were unusually good, a little T&A, but it didn’t add up to a good movie. Not sure why. Maybe this is where editing should have stepped in and made the flick tick, or some other background industry insider type stuff. I don’t know. This movie would be fine for a matinee or a video rent, but it’s not worth full price. Sorry, I like both main actors Stiller & Wilson, but this movie just doesn’t add up.

The dophins are back!

New Year moonset over Three Rooker Bar

Low tide, at about 5:30 AM a few days ago. It's very beautiful here. And these Kodak digital cameras are awesome. This was from my Kodak EasyShare DX4900 at 4.0 megapixels and 3X optical zoom. If you look at it full size, you can see the ibises, spoonbills, wood storks, herons, and egrets picking the little fish out of the tidal pools. The light on the horizon to the left of the moon turned out to be a shrimp boat. I love January in Florida.