This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
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 I started this DVD like 8 times. Then I’d forget where I was and start over. So I think I’ve seen “When She Was Bad” the first episode on this disk just way too many times. Actually, I think that is true of all four on this disk. That would be “When She Was Bad”, “Some Assembly Required”, “School Hard” and “Inca Mummy Girl”.
The latest time through was when I was making some recent plane flights back and forth to Seattle a few weeks back. I started out watching another DVD I had with me… The Last Temptation of Christ… which was on my NetFlix list because many years ago somebody once mentioned that I should see it. So I started watching it. Just a few minutes in they are nailing some guy to a cross. (Not the main character, that comes later I guess.) And it is all bloody and violent and stuff. At that point I realized there were two under 10 types in the seats next to me looking over and wondering what I was watching. So I stopped and put in Buffy.
Over the course of a couple of flights I finished off the disk. School Hard is one of those episodes that survives multiple reviewings. What with the Spike and all. When She Was Bad is OK too. Inca Mummy Girl starts wearing thin after being watched a few times. And I dreaded watching Some Assembly Required for the umpteenth time. But I did, because I had to watcht he whole disk in order, and remember I had done so for it to count!
And so I did.
 Going back a bit again, over the Thanksgiving weekend Amy picked a second movie for us to watch. Robots. I’d thought it looked cute when it was in the theater, but we never got the chance. So we watched it. And I was right. It was cute. A few crude jokes I could do without, but for the most part it was a fun little movie. I am remembering not enough of it right now, but it was fun. See, I really have to get better at writing these up right after I see the movies rather than weeks later. My memory is really bad and fades quickly. Right now I am in an airport waiting for a flight and a few feet away from me is a guy asleep on one of the seats snoring loudly.
Oh, the movie? Lets see. Little robot goes to the city to make it big. Gets disillusioned. Then when all seems lost things get better. See, typical robot movie. :-) There was one part that when I saw it I thought to myself, “I must remember to mention that when I write this up!”
But of course I do not remember what that was.
 Over thanksgiving break we watched an Amy chosen DVD for the first time in many months. Her Netflix movie at the time was Roger Rabbit. She had already watched it, but she really wanted us to watch with her. So we did. I missed a few seconds here and there, and we had an interruption during the final credits, so I almost considered not counting it, but in the end rationality prevaled. I did watch the movie. It does count.
I hadn’t seen Roger Rabbit since I saw it in the theater I don’t think. I’d seen parts of it, but never sat down and watched the whole thing. Given that the last DVD I watched before this was Fantasia, it was a lot of fun seeing “half the cast of Fantasia” near the beginning. And there were some other bits I didn’t remember from the first time around.
I remember really liking it when it first came out. NOw I just sort of thought it was OK. I think Roger himself is annoying. The part that was the most fun for me was actually just all the cameos of the Disney and WB cartoons. That was fun.
Anyway, twas an OK movie choice and a good way to spend an evening.
Next…
 So, thanks very much to Ron, who answered my appeal, I had a copy of Fantasia to watch as part of my slow (very slow) effort to watch the AFI 100 Years 100 Movies list. I started at #100 back in around 1998 or 1999 or so. I’ve now reached Fantasia, which is #58 on the list.
This week I had to take a trip to the West Coast and this seemed like a perfect thing to watch on the plane. (And I wanted to watch it pretty quickly so that I could get it back to Ron.) So after the food service (small crappy turkey sandwich) came through, I pulled out the laptop and started the movie.
Soon after I started, the man in the seat next to me leaned over and said “I am old enough to have seen this at the movies when it first came out!”. It came out in 1940. So to remember it the first time arond he would have to be over 70… maybe over 75 depending on how well he remembered his early childhood. He didn’t look quite that old. So if he really was, good for him. But he may have been remembering one of the rereleases.
In any case, at various points he leaned over to make comments about it, and once I told him this was the first time I was ever seeing it, he seemed very concerned that I was watching it on a laptop with cheap headphones in a noisy plane. He thought I really should watch it for the first time on a high quality large screen TV with a high quality sound system. I assured him that I am sure I will eventually watch it in such a way.
In any case, it was a good movie to watch. These are stressful times for me for a variety of reasons, and just sitting back and listening to the classical music while watching the animated imagry of various sorts during the movie… nice and relaxing. A very different kind of movie. More just a wash of music and experience than a normal movie. (And of course that is what I expected.) I think I liked the Nutcracker part the best. And yes, although I’m not sure I would have noticed if I had not read about it in advance, the part where they edited out the politically incorrect character who was there in the original release was QUITE obvious.
My battery died about 10 minutes before the end of the movie, which was frustrating.
I finished it this morning, and am writing this up right before heading to the airport to come home.
Anyway, Fantasia nice and relaxing.
 It has been a while since we watched one of these. Weekends have been busy and other things always came up. But last weekend we finally got back to it over the course of two days. This episode was actually aired before the last one we watched, but it was just released on DVD since we got that episode, so we went backwards and watched it. The story summary is here.
I was having some difficulty getting into the second Doctor’s style here. This was a kind of abstract story set in a place outside of normal space, where fictional characteres became real. It had some moments, but out of the 2nd Doctor stories we have watched (this was the 3rd and currently last 2nd Doctor story available on DVD), I think I’d rank this one lowest. Even though it was 5 full episodes, it seemed like a transitional “filler” story that would have done just fine a bit shorter. Wasn’t aweful or anything, just not as much fun as the other two.
Next Doctor Who DVD on the agenda will be a 3rd Doctor story, in fact the first 3rd Doctor story. And it will be in color!
 When it was first on TV, I’d watched a couple episodes, but never really gotten into it. And it was a busy time, so I just plain didn’t get to a bunch of them. Of course, as it turned out, Fox had scrambled up all the episodes and shown them out of order so they made no sense, to the point of what was supposed to be the first episode that set the context for everything else was actually the last one they showed. Urgh!
Anyway, this summer SciFi started replaying all of them, in the correct order, from the DVD versions, which had been fixed up to be back the way they were supposed to be, both in terms of what order they were in and in adjusting a few scenes that were changed around because they were shown out of order.
Well, given all the hype about how good the series had been and with the upcoming movie and all, we had been watching it. And getting into it. Of course though, by the time the movie came out, we hadn’t quite watched all of them, and we missed a couple on the Tivo for whatever reason. So we got the DVD set. Where we left off via TV was actually in the middle of Disk 3. We watched two episodes from there, but it wasn’t a full disk, so I didn’t post here. Disk 4 was the first full disk we watched. It had three episodes. Two of which hadn’t aired on TV when it was on the first time.
The highlight was the third episode “Objects in Space”, which was also the last episode of the TV series. (Although it was not aired last.) A bounty hunter came on board, and River outsmarted him. I thought about seperately talking about each episode, but I don’t feel like it.
In any case, we finished up the TV series. It was great. A real shame it was canceled before they had even aired all the episodes that had been filmed. We had a blast watching them all summer though.
And the extra features on this DVD were fun too.
 I am getting really bad about doing these things in a timely fashion. It has been at least a couple weeks, maybe longer since we watched this. It was a birthday present, but we didn’t watch it for around a week after my birthday. Where does that put it? Anyway, too long ago. I actually have another DVD and one theater movie to report on to catch up. But I won’t do them all in a row.
Anyway, we watched the new Hitchhiker’s movie. I’d wanted to see it when it was out, but we never got around to it. It was OK. I laughed. But I can’t say I was blown away. H2G2 was a favorite book in my teenage years. This just didn’t seem to quite do it justice. It had a bunch of the right parts, but it just didn’t seem to come together quite right for me. Brandy and Amy liked it more I think.
One of my problems I think was that I had the image of the old TV series in my head the whole time. This seemed a little less British, and of course a lot more rushed since it was a movie rather than a whole bunch of TV episodes. But the comparison was definately always in my mind.
So much so that the absolute highlight of the whole movie for me was when the Marvin from the TV show made a cameo appearance. He didn’t talk, but I was very excited. Cause this was the REAL Marvin!
Having said all that, it was still a good present. Can’t go without your guide. Or your towel. Any versions of it.
42!
 Um… what the hell was that? What an odd movie. It came from Brandy’s Netflix list. We’d actually ahd it for months, but hadn’t gotten around to watching it. Well, we watched the first 30 minutes right after we got it, but then it was months until we tried again. Then Amy unexpectedly joined us, even though it was a rated R. I was trying to concentrate and all, but had gotten into an all flustercated mood. So I left in the middle to walk the dog, and then went to bed while Amy and Brandy finished the movie. A few days later, while on the plane home from a trip for work, I watched the whole movie straight though.
And yes, my only thought on finishing it was “What the hell did I just watch?”. Very bizzare little movie. Pretty much only one set, just different colors… And some people talking… and the occational booby trap.
Very odd. But in a good sort of way. There are apperantly two sequels, although I’m not sure quite what they will do with them. The enxt one was next on Brandy’s list. So we have it now. Not sure how many months until we actually watch it.
Oh yeah, and Amy really liked it. Despite the occational blood and gore. Um, actually, probably BECAUSE of the occational blood and gore. She laughs at that stuff. :-)
 We actually watched this almost two weeks ago, but Brandy fell asleep during the last of the six episodes, and so we didn’t put the DVD in the mail to return until yesterday when Brandy finally got around to watching the last episode again. :-)
This story did very little for me. I just wasn’t into it. It has the Ice Warriors. Yawn. It did have an amusing trip in a rocket and the doctor running around defending himself with trashcan lids with light bulbs stuck to them. So you have that I guess. But that’s about it. Oh! And wait, the Doctor running in terror from soap suds! I didn’t even notice that the Doctor wasn’t in the 4th episode at all until I read the summary online. Well, OK. I kinda did. He had been knocked out and spent the time unconcious.
I find myself hankering to move along and get to the 4th Doctor episodes. Or at least the third. And color. Color would be nice at this point.
The one we just watched was going to be the last 2nd Doctor episode in our sequence as we went through the stories available on DVD… but just last week they released another one. We’ll be watching out of sequence because this one aired before the one we just watched, but that is OK.
 Last weekend we took advantage of Amy being away to watch a movie that one of us had picked. Sleepy Hollow was actually from my Netflix list, although I have no memory of how it got there, or why. It doesn’t seem like a movie I would normally pick. Most likely somebody told me I would like it or something.
Anyway, I did like the visual stype and everything. I like Tim Burton’s stuff on those lines. And this was not an exception. I can’t say I was overly impressed with the rest though. And I know it wasn’t supposed to track the old short story, but to me I think it lost one critical element. Namely that you never knew if what was happening was real, or just in Ichabod’s head, or perhaps was other people in the town playing tricks. That ambiguity was part of what made the story the story. In this, not only is Ichabod a detective rather than a schoolteacher (OK, whatever) but that uncertainty is completely tossed aside. It is clear by fairly early in the movie which of those is going on. They don’t even really encouage any doubt past a certain point. And it wasn’t the one of the three options I would have picked, or which I think would have been the most interesting. And that just bothered me.
But I did like the visual style and stuff.
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