The living dead.

I just spent my Christmas book voucher on the Essential Calvin and Hobbes anthology. Yeah, real highbrow. I think perhaps the giver of said voucher was hoping I would buy something more... literary? But I don't buy books as such, novels, and in my humble opinion there is not a cartoon more humourous, beautiful, crazy, and poignant than C&H. I'd like to meet Bill Watterson one day. I think we'd get along well.


I also saw Marie Antoinette today. Overall impression: pretty and boring. Well, I don't know much about the French revolution, but I imagine the politics and riots would make for an engaging film. Not this one. Maybe that wasn't Sofia Coppola's intent. Maybe she was more interested in portraying an extravagant, frivolous lifestyle in all its technicolor frills and thrills, but it wasn't so over the top as to be fascinating. It was just... empty.

Happy Feet: I really quite liked this film. I thought the plot was thin and not very well developed, but singing penguins don't need a plot. It was a big, vivacious film. Sometimes funny ("I heard an animal once do that and when they rolled him over he was dead"), corny, scary (I don't like water), and poignant (there goes that word again!). When the film was over I felt like a dumb foolish human.

Night at the Museum: This was my favourite of the three movies I saw this week. A guy gets a security job at the museum of natural history where the exhibitions come to life at night under the power of an ancient Egyptian tablet curse voodoo hoodoo thing. It was the characters that got me: you can imagine, a film with Theodore Roosevelt, Sakagawea, Attila the Hun, Jedidiah the cowboy pioneer, Octavius, cavemen, an Egyptian king, a talking Easter Island head, wild animals, and a dinosaur... what a line up. It was fun. It made me want to learn history. And it reminded me of the crazy imaginations children have, which we seem to lose along the way.