I kept waiting for somebody to slap her good

Last week I did something that, in all my thirty-some years of being a southerner, I'd never done before: watched the entire movie Gone With The Wind.

What did I think of it? I thought it was one of the best period pieces I've ever seen. But it got to the point where I was just waiting for somebody, anybody, to slap the heck out of Scarlett O'Hara. She was way too hung up on Ashley Wilkes for her own good and it cost her everything: in the end she's this poor delusioned woman clinging to vague hope that it'll all be somehow better. In a way I can kind of empathize with her though: she didn't want to be alone in this world... but to resolve that she tried to have something that wasn't meant to be hers at all.

Anyway, it's a pretty good movie, even if it's soooooo long. I don't know if I'd ever watch it again but at least now I've cinematically lived up to my southern heritage.

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Weird Al's coming STRAIGHT OUTTA LYNWOOD on September 26

After a week of tantalizing teasers, yesterday "Weird Al" Yankovic revealed the title and full cover artwork for his newest album. Straight Outta Lynwood arrives in stores on September 26th. Here's what it'll look like:Maybe it's just me, but this title and cover seems to be a lot more "serious" than the typical Al album. Guess I was expecting something along the lines of the covers for Bad Hair Day or Running With Scissors. But whatever it is he's got on this new album, you can be sure that I will be buying it on September 26th!

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Four years ago today...

...I became the happiest man on the face of the earth.

Happy Anniversary, my dear Lisa :-)

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"Game over man, game over!"

A little bit of cinema history: it was twenty years ago today - July 18th, 1986 - that the movie Aliens debuted.

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PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST review

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is one of those movies that just gets better and better the more I think about it, now four days after Lisa and I watched it at a theater in Newport News, Virginia. It was a really neat movie experience to wrap up what was a terrific - if completely unplanned - vacation. Now with some time behind me that was spent on "digesting it all in, I feel like commenting on it.

Let me go ahead and state something that everyone else seems to be saying: this movie is a lot like The Empire Strikes Back (Philip Arthur makes note of many similarities in his review of Dead Man's Chest). But it's like a lot of other movies too. I thought the ending seemed very much like The Matrix Reloaded and maybe I'm the only one seeing this but the East India Trading Company as its depicted in Dead Man's Chest seems an awful lot like Weyland-Yutani - otherwise just known as "the Company" - from the Alien movies. But there's nothing wrong with any of that. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is a smart amalgam of plenty of classic elements and story devices... and as the first half of a two-part story, it's just about perfect.

When we last saw young Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann (Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, respectively) had just helped pull off an escape for Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). Dead Man's Chest opens with the repercussions of their aiding and abetting the scoundrel, as they are arrested - on their wedding day no less - on orders from Lord Cutler Beckett (Tom Hollander), who represents the East India Trading Company (and who it's strongly implied had a run-in of some kind with Captain Sparrow years earlier). Beckett is willing to cut a deal with Will: steal Sparrow's seemingly-broken compass and he'll let them go free... but fail to get the compass and Elizabeth will "dance the Tyburn jig" from the hangman's gallows.

It's around this time that Captain Jack Sparrow - the hub around which everything else revolves around in this movie in one way or another - is brought into the picture. Remember how Sparrow makes his first appearance in The Curse of the Black Pearl? Well, his first moments of screentime in Dead Man's Chest are just as memorable and perfectly true to his outrageous character. Onboard the Black Pearl Sparrow has a spectral visitor: Bootstrap Bill Turner (Stellan Skarsgård) has come to tell Sparrow that it's almost time to make good on a debt he owess to none other than Davy Jones. So it is that the events are set up: Will Turner is going after Sparrow, while Sparrow is desperately trying to escape his fate, and it's not long afterward that Elizabeth is going after both of them. And above it all lurks the tragic story of the devil-of-the-sea himself, Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) and the mysterious chest that is about to become sought by all.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is foremost a movie intended to give fans of the first film what they've wanted most: more Captain Jack Sparrow! From beginning to end, everything that happens in this movie does so as a ripple from the presence of Sparrow landing in the pool. Johnny Depp is obviously having fun with this character. This may be the portrayal that he'll forever be known for, as much as Sylvester Stallone is known as Rocky or Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker. I'm of the mind that Captain Jack Sparrow is one of the few wholeheartedly original characters that movies have given us in the past several years. If you enjoyed him in The Curse of the Black Pearl you'll love him even more here and if you've already seen Dead Man's Chest, it's only another ten months before we arrive at World's End and get more.

Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley are fine in this movie, as are the others that have returned from the first movie (including Pintel and one-eyed Ragetti, who is trying to study-up on the Bible since he's now mortal). We are also introduced to several new characters, including the Voodoo priestess Tia Dalma (Naomie Harris).

But the real standout of this movie, apart from Depp's Captain Jack, is Davy Jones and everything associated with him: his ship, his crew of the damned, and the man/thing himself. Jones is a completely computer-generated character and for the first time in five years, at least since before WETA ran away with the artform with Gollum and the rest of their stuff in The Lord of the Rings, Industrial Light and Magic are back on the ball with digital animation. My biggest complaint with ILM's CGI work has been that their stuff has looked too "shiny and new". In Dead Man's Chest they've finally learned to get away from that look. Davy Jones looks frickin' real, in a way that ILM has never done anything before. WETA's Gollum set the benchmark for what's to be expected from CGI and now ILM has more than surpassed that goal. As for the Kraken... well, the least said about it to the uninitiated, the better.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is pure fun with a bag of popcorn and hopefully someone to share the experience with. It's not a completely perfect movie (there seems to be too long a lull in the action in the second half, but remember this is just part one of a two-part story) but it's a great summer flick that from the start of the closing credits will have you hungering for the next installment. Highly recommendable.

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Pictures from our Hampton/Virginia Beach/Norfolk/Newport News excursion

Lisa took a lot more pictures with her film camera that I'll probably be adding on to these eventually, but here's a look at some of the stuff we did this past week after arriving in Hampton, Virginia:
U.S. Navy aircraft carriers docked at Norfolk

Another Navy ship berthed in Norfolk (we caught this pic on our way back home.)

Tuesday I got to do something that I've been wanting to do for years: drive the length of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. We paid $12 at the southern entrance in Virginia Beach and entered the 19-mile long (17 miles of it over and under the water) causeway:On the bridge-tunnel's south artifial island we stopped at the gift shop and I got to take a very special picture of Lisa: I've been on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel twice before, in 1984 and 1992, and both times I had my picture taken at the northern-most point you can get on the island. Well, a few days ago I took this photo of Lisa at the exact same spot:Here's the reason why the Chesapeake Bay Bridge has two tunnels: so that boat traffic (like Navy ships such as this one out of Norfolk) can glide across the bay and into the open waters of the Atlantic unimpeded:Driving through the first Chesapeake tunnel:We drove a few miles on Virginia's eastern shore and then turned back around for the return trip to the mainland (since we were returning within a 24 hour period from our initial crossing it only cost us $5 for the return drive).

Here's Lisa later that night, on the "boardwalk" of a beach in Hampton:

The next day we visited Yorktown, where British forces under General Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington, thus ending major fighting in the Revolutionary War. Here I am standing with the victory monument in the background:

And also at Yorktown, here is the "Poor Potter's" kiln and earthworks... which actually turns out to have been the first major pottery operation of its kind in colonial America (linked image is larger so you can see the detail of the archeological work done at the site):

The next day (Thursday) we visited the Virginia Air and Space Museum (which also has an IMAX screen showing Superman Returns in 3D, but we didn't watch that again). Here's me standing in front of the command module from the Apollo 12 lunar mission:

After we finished there we returned to our hotel for awhile, then went to the mall nearby where I bought the latest Mad Magazine, and then came back and rested a bit before heading out to eat dinner and seeing Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest at a theater in Newport News.

And, that's basically our trip in a nutshell. We had such a great time that we're planning on going back in the fall when its cooler, and then take in such sites as Colonial Williamsburg and the Jamestown settlement.

Look for pics from Lisa either here or on her own blog soon :-)

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Return from the land of a thousand 7-Elevens

Lisa and I pulled back into home about 2:30 this afternoon, four days after taking off with no idea whatsoever where we were headed. All we knew was that we were going to head out of town and we didn't care where that put us. And I think the original plan was to try and make it at least as far as New Jersey and maybe take a quick jaunt into New York City. But in the end, Monday evening saw us marginally lost in Virginia Beach, headed up I-64 to Hampton, where we stayed until leaving this morning. And given our lack of planning, we had a heck of a trip! Tuesday I got to do something that I've wanted to do for years: drive across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, all 17+ miles of it over and under water then turned around and made the return trip (cost seventeen bucks to do it but I thought it was worth it). Lisa and I got to play in the surf at Hampton and Virginia Beach (finally using the boogie board we bought at the Outer Banks three years ago) and on Wednesday visited the site of the Battle of Yorktown, then took Colonial Parkway past Colonial Williamsburg and the site of the Jamestown settlement (will have pics of those up soon hopefully). Then yesterday made a visit to the Virginia Air and Space Museum and caught Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest at a theater in Newport News.

Yeah, darned good trip! But what I can't figure out for the life of me is why are there so many 7-Elevens in the Virginia Beach/Norfolk/Hampton area? I swear, there were three located within about two blocks of each other at one spot in Virginia Beach. We didn't visit any but they were plenty ubiquitous enough.

Anyhoo, that's where we were for the past several days. We may visit the area again sometime this fall.

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