- Ask me two questions wizard, and I will give you the answers
- Isn't it usually three?
- Yes, but with that you're back to two

Earlier this month the Sci-Fi channel ran an original mini-series based on Ursala K LeGuin's works called The Legend of Earthsea. I just got around to watching it this week (yay for TiVo!)

I've read some of LeGuin's novels, and I'm pretty sure I've read some based in Earthsea, but I've read so many of those basic "entertainment value only" fantasy novels they all kind of run together in my memory. While I was watching this the story kept feeling very familiar. It's possible this is because I'd read it before, but more likely I think it was just so formulaic that all those other stories I'd read were converging with it.

That said, this was still fun. Despite The Lord of the Rings there's a pretty serious drought of fantasy movies out there (and science fiction isn't much better.) I'm hopeful that the success of LOTR will encourage more entries in the genre. The key to success of the this Earthsea miniseries is it still had the attributes of TV I talked about a few weeks ago. Namely, it's not very dense. This meant I could watch it in several different sittings: only have 20 minutes before I have to run to the store, watch 20 minutes of Earthsea. It's jarring for me to watch movies in bits and pieces, there's too much going on. But something like this breaks down very nicely.

Yeah, the dialog was a little rough, and there were no award winning perfomances in there (although Danny Glover showed his pedigree, and really stood out against the others.) The plot was formulaic, but the story arcs were well conceived and worked well.

Sci-Fi will likely rerun this a whole lot in the near future, and I expect they'll release it on DVD before too long. If you're a fantasy fan, this is worthwhile from a fluff standpoint. My one caution, push through the bland first 45 minutes, it gets better.

What would be the scientific purpose of killing it?
Revenge.

Christmas night my family went out and saw The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I am a big fan Wes Anderson's other movies (Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums - and IMBD tells me there's another one I haven't seen; Bottle Rocket has been added to my netflix list.) Both of those movies had a lot of whimsy, but in his review Roger Ebert said this one has terminal whimsy, which I think is a great description.

I share Eberts confliction about this movie. I had a lot of fun, but I think that had a lot to do with the mood I was in. It was the end of the holiday and I didn't really want to think much, or deal with a real plot, or any of those other traditional things movies do. I just wanted to go on a fun ride.

The Life Aquatic doesn't really trouble itself with being a movie. If you're the kind of person that enjoys structure, or meaning, or even reason this one probably isn't for you. Me, I enjoy all those things - but if I set my expectation right I can let them go.

I will admit the movie dragged a bit. It's hard to keep people entertained on randomness and whimsy alone, but they make a pretty good go of it here. Plus the cast is fantastic; they're enough to carry most of the movie all by themselves.

The set design and general look of this move is fantastic. Along with all the fake animals it just adds to the whimsy. Where else can you see trained dolphins swimming with cameras on their backs, ridiculous fight scenes, deadpan and melancholy humor - all to a sound track of David Bowie in Portuguese (I'm not kidding...) It's just that kind of a movie.

I passed through the seven levels of the Candy Cane forest, through the sea of swirly twirly gum drops, and then I walked through the Lincoln Tunnel.

Merry Christmas!

In the spirit of the season I watched Elf last night. It was cute, and kind of fun. The biggest thing it had going for it was it was a Christmas movie I hadn't seen and appropriate for three generations to watch (have you ever tried to watch an "inappropriate" movie around your grandparents? It's an odd experience.)

I'm not a big Will Farrell fan. I think I like my comedy to come more from dialog then physical humor - which is his specialty. Actually, the only movie I've really enjoyed him in is Old School where the key was his physical hijinks played a supporting role to the other characters. I think this is best for him, it's tough to carry a movie on his brand of comedy.

That said, Elf was pretty good. Farrell didn't get ridiculous, the character he played was cute, and only could have been played by him. He was superbly cast (or more likely the role was written for him.) It was a nice bit of holiday spirit on Christmas Eve. Especailly since it's tough to remember it's Christmas when it's 70 degrees and sunny out.

Don't tell me we didn't make it. Look outside man, it's sunny all the time here. It's like manifest destiny.

San Diego is frickin' ridiculous. My family comes down here for the holidays to meet up with out extended family each year (we're having a small year this year with 23!)

I always enjoy it becuase the weather here defies reason. It's Christmas eve and I just went for a run, on the beach, without a shirt. Yesterday I went surfing for an hour without a real wetsuit.

Every year while I'm down here I joke about moving here, but they're all empty jokes. I'm afraid I'd start taking this all for granted like the locals here do, which would be even more ridiculous.

- We're doomed.
- Come on, he's one guy and he's French!

I saw Ocean's 12 last weekend but didn't really get around to writing about it until now. I guess that's a good indication of my lackluster feelings towards it. I had been looking forward to this movie quite a bit, since I really enjoyed the original and was impressed with the amount of talent involved, but early reviews reset my expectations a bit.

The movie was still fun. The characters are still smart and have the kind of fast paced, intelligent dialog I enjoy. But it was all just sort of whimsical. The whole time I knew there was something else going on, but the movie doesn't show you enough about what's going on for you to have a chance at knowing. So when they do the reveal I didn't care, it was like "ok, you tricked me by not showing me anything, that wasn't hard."

I still had a good time, but this is my genre. The movie wasn't really bad, but it wasn't good either. It was just kind of blah.

Which is why it took me a week to get around to writing about it, no real strong feelings one way or the other...

Where's the other half of Chris?

Today was my last official appointment for the intensive part of the 20/20 Lifesteles program. This is a crazy thing I've been doing at my gym for the last ten weeks that has taught me a whole new way to eat, how to exercise better, and completely transformed my body (it's not a coincidence that transformative themes were the ones that I picked up on most in The Return of the King earlier this week.)

The results? After ten weeks I've lost 30 pounds, dropped six inches off my pant size, lowered my blood pressure, greatly increased my exercise endurance, and am significantly faster when playing sports. All in all it's pretty cool.

I wrote a big long article about it, mostly focused on explaining it all and providing tips for you if you're interested in losing weight. You can read it here:
How I lost 30 pounds in 10 weeks

As usual, pictures say a thousand words. Full body shots are most dramatic, but I don't have any of those. In a pinch headshots will work though:

How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back? There are some things time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, and take hold.

I used that quote last time I talked about this movie, but it's still the one that resonates with me the most...

It took me two nights to watch the four hour marathon that is The Return of the King Extended Edition - and it was so worth it. Overall I thought this extended edition had more rough patches then the first two, but it was still excellent.

In the first two extended editions I don't ever remember thinking "yeah, that scene was a good cut and didn't need to come back." But there were a couple scenes in this one where I had that reaction. Nothing two strong, nothing too terrible, just some places where the scene was a little clunky.

But the reason that quote keeps resonating with me is because there is such a strong theme in this movie that some events change us so much we can't go back to who we were. Aragon, Frodo, Gandalf, Faramir, Theoden, Eowyn, Arwen, Pippin and Merry all experience these major transformative changes - and most of those changes happen in the third movie (fleshing them all out is the primary contributor to it's length.)

You'll note I left a few major characters out of that list (and also that the list differs from who has transformative changes in the books - most notably with Faramir.) Legolas and Gimli aren't there because they really serve as supporting characters in the movies. Legolas is there for cool stunts (and to look pretty for the ladies) and Gimli serves as comic relief. They don't have much of an effect of the plot. Think about it, what did they ever do besides kill bad guys?

Gollum attempts to change. And is doing quite well through the middle of the series. But he can't break free, the change is too great and the evil that has taken over his life causes him to tragically revert at the end.

Sam is the more interesting case. I believe that Sam is important because he doesn't really go through a transformation like the other characters. Sam just continues with the courage and hardiness he started with, never giving up. Through sheer will and determination Sam helps Frodo destroy the ring. Then when Sam goes on with his life we get the sense that it's the same life he would have led had he not gone out on that adventure. Only Sam can retain who he is through the whole series of events.

For me that's what makes the Lord of the Rings so brilliant. There are lots of characters, but they all have meaning, and give eachother balance. The best science fiction and fantasy creates alternate worlds to explore humanity without the constraints of our world and time. Next time you watch this trillogy enjoy the action, the incredible costumes, the spectacular cinematography, but also look at the characters - see how they change and grow, and how you couldn't show those kinds of transformations without setting up your own world to play in.

Now I get to watch all the special features, which have been universally excellent in the past. I can't wait.

One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to Bring them all and in the darkness bind them

My good bud Guy sent me an email last week saying he missed my blog postings, encouraged me to keep the faith, that kind of stuff. It turns out what's really been going on is I've been a casualty of my own format. You see, typically I watch a steady stream of movies and then I talk about them on this forum. But I make it personal because my thoughts about the movies I watch are often framed by the things going on in my life and my general mood. This all works great, except when I stop watching movies (and the title of the blog becomes sort of literal...)

No kidding, the last movie I saw was that Warren Miller movie. I've watched others release, bought movies on DVD, had Netflix deliver a few, but I just haven't watched them. There are a few reasons for this.

For the last few months I've been doing this great diet/exercise program that my heath club has. It's pretty comprehensive and includes time with dieticians and personal trainers. The whole thing involved me exercising a *lot* and eating fairly sparsely. I eat enough, and I'm not usually hungry, but by the time I get to the end of the day I'm mostly out of gas. I still need something to wind down with in the evening but I find movies are a little dense for that. That's what I really like about movies - there's a ton of content crammed into a relatively short amount of time. In good movies, everything is intentional. Every line of dialog, every camera angle, every cutscene, they are all in there via a conscious decision and have stayed in through many rounds of editing. This is great, because it makes for great content, but it also means my brain isn't in relaxing downtime mode most of the time when I watch movies - I'm thinking to much.

In contrast serialized content is perfect for down time. Good TV shows can be just as entertaining, but they're significantly less dense. This happens for two related reasons. People don't spend as much time in the creation process so there's just less content crammed into that hour and the creators have much, much more time to tell a story so they can take their time a bit. It's much easier to have a story arc run across 24 one hour episodes then it is to introduce the characters, set the stage, have stuff happen, and wrap it up in two hours.

With my lack of energy in the evenings this fall I've been watching a lot more TV and a lot less movies. This has made for a light fall at the movies for me. This will likely change as all the great December movies come out and all the movies I missed in the last few months hit DVD in the spring - I suspect a binge is in my future.

This has started to get better in the last month. My food intake has gone up and I'm more used to the diet, I have more energy. But in the last few weeks there's been another culprit for my lack of movie watching. As any good nerd I'm also a video game player. And this last month has been a spectacular one for video games. First Halo 2 released. It's fantastic and I played it a lot, until Half-Life 2 released a week later. At that point I stopped playing Halo and played Half-Life, since as good as Halo 2 was Half-Life was much better. But then, like in the Lord of the Rings quote above, World of Warcraft released a week after that and took over all of use gamers who were soft from the goodness of the games this fall. I haven't touched Halo or Half Life since.

Seriously, I think I'm a little bit addicted. I stay up too late, neglect my friends, get distracted by it at work (it doesn't help that my boss is also addicted - we talk about the previous nights play sessions daily.) I've been supremely impressed with this title, and I highly recommend it. Especially if you've thought about trying one of the massively multiplayer games, this is the one for you. It's super accessible to the casual player (at least on the scale of massively multiplayer games.)

So there you go Guy. It's your fault I haven't been watching movies or blogging (note to everyone who doesn't get this statement: Guy works for Vivendi Universal Games, who distribute World of Warcraft - it's his product that's sucking me into the void!)

Other notes:

The diet and exercise thing has been going great. I've lost of lot of weight, am in great shape, and have people claiming they have to do double takes since they don't recognize me at first. It's kind of nutty.

The last game I was addicted to like this was Knights of the Old Republic, and the sequel for that just released this week. I've read some good things about it, but I'm not going to bother to buy it now - I wouldn't play it. Maybe I can just quit work and play games all day for a bit, that'd be fun.

My Lord of the Rings quote just gets me even more excited for the Return of the King extended edition next week. I guarantee I'll take a break from game playing, sleeping, and other random life necessities to play with that one. My biggest curiosity is if they add any more endings...

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