Life has been busy lately. Work is hectic and my parents were in town all last week, which has prevented a lot of posting. I’ve also been using random bits of free time to try and complete the move to WordPress for this blog (more on that in another post).

Anyway, Leslie and I were at Van’s wedding this weekend. After the wedding, there was a suitably long gap until the reception and Jenny and Fred (one of my old managers and her husband) said that they were going to see Serenity, so I convinced Leslie to let us tag along. I had heard good things about the movie from Justin, but I wasn’t sure if it would be an experience like the X-Files movie. I was also unsure if dragging my girlfriend along was a good idea.

Anyway, I was impressed that they had made an effort to make the movie approachable to those people that had never seen the television show. Random statements were dropped to clue you in on relationships between characters and there was a nice little sequence that explained the social and political events of the time. The movie theater had a lot of people for a Saturday matinee, but it was by no means packed considering it was the opening weekend. I believe that I heard that they spent about $40 million on the movie, so at least they don’t have to make all that much money. In the end, I really loved the movie. I thought that it added a nice piece to the world of the television show. The special effects were not the most spectacular that I’ve seen, but they were solid and there is a space battle towards the end of the movie that was very well executed and incredibly fun to watch. The dialog was what you would expect from a Joss Whedon project (meaning sharp, witty, and on the whole, very good), and it was fun to see the cast together again. I give the movie 8.5 zibs. I should probably be giving it less (maybe 7.5 zibs) and would be if I wasn’t a fan of the tv show. If you are a sci-fi fan, I would say that it is definitely worth your money to see a matinee. If you’re not a sci-fi fan or haven’t seen the tv show, I would recommend checking out an episode (or even the whole thing, since it was only 13 episodes) if you’re feeling strapped for cash.

At the post move lunch, I was talking to Rus and Jake about Apple’s new Mighty Mouse. If you haven’t seen it yet, the selling point is that Apple is finally producing a 2 button mouse where the top third of the mouse is a touch sensitive surface. Along with this, the scroll button is a scroll ball (kind of reminds me of arcade golf games) and there is a force sensitive button on each side. Their opinion after trying one is that it wasn’t the most intuitive mouse to use if all you really want is a 2 button mouse, and I should definitely try one before buying.

It happened that I was wandering around Valley Fair later that afternoon and decided to stop at the apple store to try one myself. For anyone that hasn’t tried one, apple mice work by pushing down on the entire mouse. To use the two button capability, you put a finger on the right side of top of the mouse (without touching the left side of top) and press down. It was one of those things that you could probably get used to after a while, but I find myself wondering why I should need to get used to some sort of new mouse paradigm when I’m fine with current 2 button mice. In the end, I’m going to wait and see if they improve the interaction model, and I probably won’t buy one until/unless they make a bluetooth version.

I later found a pretty good review of the mouse on Macworld. It was perhaps a little nicer than I would have been but it wasn’t too Apple biased.

I realized that Chris was right and I originally gave War of the Worlds 7 zibs. I had originally thought I had given Batman Begins 7 zibs, which would place War of the Worlds at perhaps 6*. Since I have control over the blog, this has become the reality.

* There probably needs to be a post explain the zibs scale as Joe has recommended. The thing to understand is that if you plot zibs vs an objective scale of film quality, you really have to use a logarithmic scale.

I figured I’d do a quick review of War of the Worlds. In the end, I’d probably give it 6 zibs (out of 10). You could certainly tell that a lot of time and money had been spent on special effects. Overall, the story was pretty good even if there weren’t too many shocks. If you know how the original story ended, the movie’s ending won’t hold any suprises for you. The characters were pretty good, but if you’re expecting a great plot and award caliber acting, you’re probably not going to find it here. There’s even a great section of the movie with Tim Robbins playing a pretty standard crazy Tim Robbins character. It felt like half the theater laughed when they saw Tim Robbins come on screen. If you go into the movie looking for some good effects, pretty good acting, and fair amount of suspense, you won’t have wasted your money.

Since Joe asked for it, here is my review of Batman Begins. There are probably going to be some spoilers in here somewhere and some background for people who haven’t read a bunch of random Batman comics. All in all, I was fairly impressed with the way that they tied together some unrelated characters and packaged up his origin in what was mostly a neat little box. The movie plays a lot like Batman: Year One in terms of general tone and characterization, which is good since I still believe it is one of the most believable takes on the whole batman persona. They even threw in the bat summoning device in the boot from year one. The bat gear was pretty impressive, and I loved the depiction of Gotham.

On the down side, I wasn’t all that impressed with the fight scenes. The camera work was really jumpy. I had hopes for something more in the vein of Equilibrium, but it there were still some good action scenes. The other main problem with a movie like this one is that you spend a lot of time doing setup for the rest of the movie. The section of story in tibet was pretty good, but I felt like it gave too much of an impression that Ra’s Al Ghul was totally responsible for his training. In the end, I enjoyed it. I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first Spider Man movie, but it wasn’t too far behind.

For anyone interested in where the different parts of the story came from, there is a section on Danny O’Neil (the man responsible for Ra’s Al Ghul) in this week’s Lying in the Gutters. Christopher Priest is the one that came up with the whole “Bruce Wayne goes to Tibet to learn martial arts.”

For all of you eagerly anticipating the Fantastic Four movie, you can buy a “real” Dr. Doom mask.