THE PRESTIGE and THE ISLAND and HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF BLOOD PRINCE

October 29th, Sunday-Saw the movie THE PRESTIGE. I wanted to see Wolverine fight Batman, but alas, it was just a movie about jerks who happened to be magicians. Actually, to say I saw the movie is a little bit of an overstatement. When I sat down in the very crowded movie theater, I immediately felt nauseated. I spent the first hour of the movie with my head buried in Daryl's arm. I could barely even look at the screen. Then I just couldn't stand it anymore and left to go to the bathroom. I thought getting a drink would help, but after having a bit of Coke and pacing up and down the aisle, I had to go to the bathroom again. Then, I just decided to watch the rest of the movie from the aisle since getting back to my seat required me to block half a row full of people. And I'd probably just have to get up again. In any case, I sort of figured out the gist of the movie which was kind of fun, until they introduced David Bowie as Nicolas Tesla. Seriously, who is going to believe that? Although he does have a weird quality to him, it just threw me that he was supposed to be a real person. Why couldn't the filmmaker's have used a fictional character, after all, he's the one that introduces a supernatural element into the story that I didn't like at all. Before that, the story was sort of an escalating display of one-upsmanship. There's a whole, here's my diary, oops, no it isn't, it's just a trick, thing that was fun, but neither guy would just let it go and people DIED in the process. Seeing people so divorced from morality like this was just awful and I couldn't really root for one man over the other. If I wanted to root for anyone I would have rooted for Micheal Caine's character (Batman's Alfred!) to completely avoid both guys. Hugh Jackman is all kinds of pretty and he also plays drunk well. I think he got the biggest laugh of the evening.

You know, it's odd, I watch this movie and then a few days later I watch THE ISLAND and I think, Scarlett Johanssen was in both movies? (People keep saying she doesn't care for the Hollywood "thin" look, but who really thinks she's fat?) She played completely different kinds of characters, although in all honesty, I don't remember her scenes in THE PRESTIGE as much because I was in the bathroom being sick. I thought THE ISLAND was a remake of the movie, THE CLONUS HORROR, which was a movie, quite rightly, made fun of on Mystery Science Theater 3000. In fact, I remember watching it when they heckled that movie, so I was a bit curious about THE ISLAND. There are all sorts of ridiculous things in the movie, like why they needed to grow whole human beings instead of just cloning the organs--it's easier, cheaper, and probably entails fewer moral problems. And not only do they clone whole human beings, but they also develop a huge infrastructure to house them and lie to them---and employ thousands of people to consistently lie to them! That I find unbelieveable in the extreme. But then again the whole movie is pretty much unbelieveable. The car chase scenes are fun and make no sense at all because how can they not catch two people that are WALKING in LA? The actors all did a great job being convincing even Sean Bean who had to be the bad guy. Djimon Hounsou was also good as the bounty hunter. And Ewan MacGregor has so much charm that I've loved him in everything I've seen him in, even in all of the Star Wars movies. The movie was beautifully shot and the architecture they developed for the clone's facility and the sets outside the facility looked great. I think the makers of THE CLONUS HORROR are actually suing the makers of THE ISLAND, which I find odd, but hey, I guess they did think of cloned people escaping their cloning facility first. I just hope I don't have to be on that jury.

October 31st, Tuesday, Halloween-Did I mention I got sick? Well, I was sick for quite a while so I read HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF BLOOD PRINCE in three days. Daryl was also working day and night---one night he didn't even come home, he slept on the couch at the studio!---so I didn't have a lot of company. Perfect time to read a good book. This book seemed overly expository, but I guess it had to. I'm thinking the last one will be almost all action. Harry once again goes through a trial, after which someone important to him dies. It's sad and I believe JK Rowling when she says that it was necessary. I can't wait til the last book. I checked out JK Rowling's official website and it's a lot of fun. She really thought about this story for a long time and did a good bit of research, considering that the world is nearly all imaginary. She's got backstory on a lot of people in the book that will probably never see print, and she's also catalogued a lot of the imaginary creatures that she thought of, too. I found out all this when I played around on her website. That was what I did on Halloween because I wasn't feeling well and no one came up to the door trick or treating, although I did hear them in the street! Really cute. I wish Daryl and I had had a chance to make costumes and enjoy in the revelry, but with him working like crazy and me being unwell, it just wasn't meant to be. I did leave out a bag of mini Reese's Peanut Butter Cups on the mailboxes, but we still have a bag of mini-Snickers.