Today I did very little. Read a bit of Mac OS X Internals, which I bought earlier in the week – finally; I’d had my eye on it for a year or so – and played some games, and whatnot. I was trying to motivate myself to keep going through my New Zealand photos and whatnot, but, it didn’t happen… tomorrow, for sure. ;)
I watched two movies today – The Dukes of Hazzard: The Beginning, and American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile. In that order. I was quite disappointed with the Dukes of Hazzard prequel… the acting was a little cheap, the accents really annoying and way over-done, and the storyline just a little flaky. There were only two or three places where I actually laughed out loud. Not very good at all. Apparently Netflix’s user ratings are not to be trusted. Bad Netflix users!
But then the American Pie spinoff – which features only one of the American Pie trilogy cast members, Jim’s dad, so it really could be any generic teen movie – was surprisingly good. On par with the main American Pie movies themselves, which is really surprising for this style of spinoff. Pretty much the whole thing is about sex, of course, as is the style of such movies, but it was actually pretty tasteful… well, maybe that’s not the word, but… it was clearly comedic and not overtly sexual. That’s in contrast to a few movies I’ve seen lately where the attempted innuendo has been just gross.
Which reminds me… the one thing I really didn’t actually like about Knocked Up was the graphic depiction of her giving birth at the end. It would have been entirely appropriate and completely hilarious to do the conventional style in that scene – just show the reactions of the various people, and none of the things they’re actually looking at. Instead, they did show all the bits and pieces, repeatedly, in a way I just found vulgar and completely unnecessary. Maybe I’m getting all old and conservative, but, the recent trend in Hollywood of throwing subtlety and restrain by the wayside is really getting on my nerves.
It was compoundedly odd, too, because on cable TV here they typically remove anything sexual. It’s okay to spend 90 minutes showing people getting brutally murdered, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before two people get frisky. And yet there it is, on the big screen, and nobody seemed to mind (myself aside). I don’t get it.
But yeah, a completely unproductive but pleasant day. :D
