Shrek

They used to be funny…

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When did Steve Martin stop being funny? It had to be sometime after 1991, when he wrote and starred in one of my personal favorite films, L.A. Story. I found out some time ago that Prairie hadn’t ever seen L.A. Story, finally managed to remember that while we were wandering through Blockbuster, and got to introduce her to it this weekend. As I expected, she loved it.

Still, I’d watched Bowfinger, a more recent Steve Martin comedy, earlier in the week and had been singularly unimpressed with it. Neither Steve Martin nor Eddie Murphy are nearly as funny as they used to be — in fact, these days I generally tend to avoid movies with either of them. Admittedly, Eddie Murphy has done some worthwhile voice work lately, as Donkey in the Shrek films and as Mushu in Disney’s Mulan, but his recent live-action work (Daddy Day Care? Dr. Doolittle?)…well, even the trailers make me cringe. Meanwhile, Martin, who has two of my favorite films in his past — L.A. Story and Roxanne — has been turning out such quality fare as Cheaper By the Dozen and Bringing Down the House (I’ll admit that I haven’t seen either of those — but again, the trailers don’t give me any reason to bother).

A shame, really.

iTunes “Blues Line” by Toyes, The from the album Toyes, The (1996, 4:13).

Tron

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Very, very cool. I just picked up the Tron Special Edition DVD during lunch today, and got to watch some of it after I got home. I jumped around a bit in the film itself just to take a look at it, then bounced over to the second disc for all the special features and watched the ‘Making of Tron’ documentary. Turns out that Disney’s DVD department has done their usual stellar job, and the documentary is a full 90 minutes long! Much better than the 15-minute fluff piece that seems to be the norm for so many studios. I didn’t get through any more of the special features tonight, but I plan to soon.

Oh, and possibly one of the coolest things about this disc — right at the end of the documentary (around the 1:23:00 mark or so), there are a few quick glimpses at concept art for a possible Tron 2.0! There’s also a very cryptic teaser when you load the disc that ends with this web address — www.tronkillerapp.com. I’m not sure if it’s early promotion for Tron 2.0 or not, but it’s a very interesting site…will be fun to see where this goes in the future.

In any case, if you’re at all of the age to have been as entranced by Tron as I was, this set is a definite must-buy.

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Back to the usual

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I’m back!

You’re thrilled, right?

Oh, well.

Okay, so Friday I got off work at 4. Spent a little time running around doing some last minute errands, then hopped online to chat until my ride showed up to take me to the airport. Got to the airport just in time to catch the plane, and headed up to Fairbanks. Kirsten and Jamie picked me up at the Fairbanks airport, and we headed back to Kirsten’s dorm at UAF (as she was kind enough to put me up for the weekend), where the three of us stayed up talking and BS’ing until way too early in the morning. But then — that’s the point of vacations, right?

Saturday was spent mostly with my family. Slept in, then walked down the hill from UAF about noon for breakfast with mom, dad, and Kevin. After breakfast we headed over to Emily’s work to visit her for a bit, then mom, dad, and Kevin headed off to do some shopping while I borrowed Kevin and Emily’s van to run around on my own. I ended up just tooling around Fairbanks for a bit, enjoying the sunshine and warm weather and listening to a great show on the public radio station called Mountain Stage — lots of really nice live acoustic bluegrass and country performances. Emily got off work at 4pm, so I headed back to meet up with everyone. We all went out to check out Kevin and Emily’s cabin (cute little one room cabin out in the middle of nowhere), then came back into town for family pictures at Sears and dinner at a local pizza parlor.

After dinner, Kevin dropped me off at the Backdoor bar, where I met up with fbkscpl2play, beckythesillygirl, meneleaous, b_converse, and ak_ghost_ryder (all chatters in the Alaska Yahoo! Chat room). We hung out there for a while, then fbkscpl2play and beckythesillygirl took me out to see a drag show at the Palace Saloon (a bar/showhall in Alaskaland). This was an absolute blast — the place was incrediby wild (maybe a side effect of having so little to do in Fairbanks?)! At one point, it was a toss-up as to which was going to be more entertaining — watching the drag queen performing on stage, or turning around and watching the people dancing on the tables!

After the show they cleared about half of the floor of tables and chairs and opened the place up for dancing. We made it until about 2:45am, then decided it was time to bail. I got dropped off back at the UAF dorms, talked with Kirsten for a bit longer, then passed out.

Sunday we slept late again and just hung out in Kirsten’s room until it was time for me to head out. She took me to the airport, and I came homeward bound. Miranda and Loren picked me up and ran me home, then they ran off to do some shopping while I kicked back and watched a few more Season 3 X-Files episodes. This show just gets better and better — unfortunately, I’ve now finished off all of Season 3, and have a few months to go until Season 4 comes out. Arrrrrrghhh! I hate cliffhangers!

Eventually I decided to get out of the house for a bit, and headed out to Century 16 to catch Shrek. This movie is just hilarious — it takes all the familiar fairytales we’ve grown up with, gives them a really wonderfully bizarre take, and has an absolute blast poking fun at Disney throughout the flick (especially the classic “princess singing with the birds” routine — I was laughing so hard after this that I almost missed the next few lines of dialogue!). Much as kids are going to enjoy watching it, I think it’s really the adults who are really going to get a kick out of all the jokes in the film — much of the dialogue is aimed squarely at the adults rather than children, and it makes for one of the funniest films I’ve seen in the theater in a very long time.

Then, not long after I got home, who should call but my friend Stacye — she was kinda bored and wanted to head out, so we met up at the Village Inn by my house, then headed out to ‘koots for a couple drinks. We sat there and talked until about 1:30am, when we realized how late it had gotten and each bailed for home to get some sleep before we got too far into Monday.

Today was a pretty normal day, just dead slow at work. Let a lady who works at GCI that’s expressed interest in buying my car take it for a test drive, though, so hopefully I may have found a buyer. Then came home, watched the extras on the X-Files set, and sold off a few more items from my online garage sale — the PowerMac 6500, SoundDesign stereo, and my old DJ equipment is now gone.

So, that was my weekend…now, back to the day to day drudge…fun fun fun!