Movie Roundup

We've been watching a whole bunch of movies on DVD via Blockbuster Online, which has turned out to be a very good deal for us. This week, we saw Hellboy, which was not as good as in the theater, but not as good as seeing it in the theater. It seemed a bit slower this time, and the wit as a little less witty. We saw The Bourne Supremacy, which was better than in the theater, since the shaky camera wasn't as disorienting with a frame of reference around it. The action was still a let-down over the first, since you really couldn't tell what was going on most of the time. Also, we saw Sinbad, and the Legend of the Seven Seas. It was great - one of the better animated movies I've seen in a long time. So often it seems like the animated films I see are real gems. I wonder if the act of drawing each cell, painting each background, and leaving nothing to chance is such an overwhelming amount of work that it weeds out those interested in making loads of money, and leaves only those who'd rather make a good movie. If that were true, Pokemon should be a better TV show. Perhaps the lack of major stars' egos (after all, they just fly in, read a few lines, and fly out) gives the movie makers opportunity to make a better movie. If that were true, more independent films would be good.

On Sunday, I went to see Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The first review I read made the movie out to be awful. More recent reviews were mixed, and cautiously favorable. I thought the movie was disappointing. The humor was there, but it was muted - mixed in with regular conversation. It's the kind of humor that's much funnier in the retelling than in the watching, a fact proven by the lack of even a chortle from the audience during the movie, and the outright laughs at work when I was telling them about it. The movie was fairly funny in retrospect. In places. What was really disappointing about the movie was the change in the theme. I remember the Hitchhikers trilogy ultimately having no real point, except that life is trivial and capricious, shit happens, and the best we can do is get by and laugh at it. What's the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything? 42. God was real - he made the world, then popped out of existence after painting himself into a logical corner. In the movie, Arthur Dent, the last remaining piece of the supercomputer built to determine the ultimate question to "42", does patter by "How many roads must a man walk down?", but ultimately settles on love as both the ultimate quetion and answer. What a copout, especially for the Hitchhiker.