(no subject)

Great weekend to report, lots of dance time, some lovely tea time with friends, some good down time, and even time for a movie. Can't ask for better than that!

It was nice having a Saturday night that required nothing more taxing from me than reading some comics. Though I must say it felt decidedly odd to have nothing pressing to work on. Nice, but odd.

Sunday I could no longer resist the lure of "Nightwatch" and got to see it with cyranocyrano. That almost never happens as his schedule is so wacky. I'll keep this as non-spoilery as possible, but will say that this movie is not a horror film in any way, shape, or form. For some reason Fox Searchlight seems to want to bill it as one, but if you go in looking for "The Ring" you're going to be sorely disappointed.

If I had to compare it to anything I'd say more "The Matrix" or "Underworld", only not sucky. The universe created in this trilogy is engaging, and left me and C- discussing the questions we were left with the entire way home. Basically the war between Light(Nightwatch) and Darkness (Daywatch) is treated much like the Cold War, with a sufficient amount of moral ambiguity and the constant underlying threat that if the truce is violated it will mean utter annihilation for both sides.

The main character, Anton, is deeply flawed and seems to be uncertain if he made the right choice by joining the forces of Light when he awakened as an Other. And the other agents he works with (a couple of shapeshifters and a seer) are certainly angels with dirty faces as well. Nobody's hands are clean among the Nightwatch, not even their stoic leader/healer. The only downside of the film is that so much time and energy is spent on the Anton character and his journey that many other intriguing characters get rather short shrift. It was especially sad that his new partner, Olga, had so little to do.

And the end was a little too Stephen King-y for my taste, but I want to watch it again and see if maybe I missed something the first time through. I've also pre-ordered the translated novel to see if most of this stuff is better fleshed out in it.

In all, two big thumbs up, and C- and I both agreed we'd totally role play in this universe. I'm also thinking it'd be all too easy to do crossovers between that series and HP. Too damn easy.

Edit: Forgot to mention how great BSG was this week. Best. Swerve. EVER. Ron Moore nearly made my head explode in the first ten minutes of the episode, but in a good way. I actually forgot to breathe and Aelf actually screamed. People may respond with some spoilery stuff in comments so if you haven't seen the episode yet you may want to avoid them. Just a head's up.

Go Team Venture!

Almost forgot to mention, Adult Swim was running a commercial Saturday night saying the new Venture Bros. eps will start in June! Happy birthday to me!!!

Mission Accomplished Redux

The Rude Pundit discusses what will inevitably be the new Right Wing talking points regarding the increasingly inevitable civil war in Iraq:

So let's just say it up front here: over here in Liberalburg, we weren't happy when Ronald Reagan was cozying up to Saddam Hussein back in the 1980s. We weren't happy that the United States was backing a brutal, murderous, raping thug, giving him weapons and such. We weren't happy with the first Persian Gulf War. We weren't happy with sanctions that decimated the poorest people in Iraq. We weren't happy that the President wouldn't allow weapons inspectors to finish their work.

We weren't happy with this war to start with, saying, for instance, that a civil war was the inevitable outcome. We're not happy to be proven right. We're not happy, simply, when people are dying for no good cause, with no good outcome on the horizon, and no good way out. Frankly, oh, dear, sweet right wing, on the whole, we'd've rather been wrong and had tens of thousands of people not killed, tens of thousands of America soldiers not wounded. We'd've eaten the crow and, trust us, wonderful, fair right wing, you'd've shoved our faces in the plate of that black bird.

But since we were right, maybe, just maybe, someone oughta pay a political price for being so goddamned wrong. Instead, though, the right's gonna try to turn it around and blame the left and those who "didn't support the war" for its failure. Which would, for all intents and purposes, finally seal the deal on Vietnam redux.