This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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End of Days

End_of_days_ver5This last movie was a Brandy pick. End of Days. The Governator. 1999.

I’m really not to sure about what to say about this movie. To be honest, as I’m sitting down to write this, almost a week after actually watching it, I tried to remember what it was about, and my mind blanked for awhile. After a minute or two I remembered some very vague things about it. It took reviewing the Wikipedia summary to really remember much more than that.

Brandy finished it saying that the movie sucked. I actually didn’t mind it much. I thought it was kind of amusing. Mindless. Insubstantial. Arnold. But it kept my attention for 122 minutes. And that was a fine way to start a weekend.

I think once again this is the kind of thing where one would never want to pay for this on its own, but as one of the things you get when you have a Netflix subscription and don’t pay per movie… that’s just fine.

Video: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 3: Disk 1

btvs-s3So last week’s family video night ended up being one of the “something we own but have never watched” category, and we picked randomly from the shelf full of available such things. What came out was a Buffy. I had to look up in the archives where we left off, as it had been so long, but we had finished Season 2, but hadn’t yet started Season 3. So Disk 1 went into the DVD player and off we went.

There were four episodes on this disk: “Anne“, “Dead Man’s Party“, “Faith, Hope & Trick” and “Beauty and the Beasts“. The highlights of these were basically Buffy coming back from LA, Faith arriving, and Angel coming back a hell dimension (probably something like LA).

They were all decent episodes, but for me the main fun here was watching Amy watch them. She was getting all excited and into it, and it seems like every few minutes she was capturing more quotes into a quotes file thing she is keeping these days of memorable quotes she wants to remember. And of course Buffy is just full of those.

We were going to just watch two episodes, then save the other two for the following week, but Amy begged, so we watched more. And for that matter she has been asking for more Buffy almost every day since then. We’ll see. There is a pattern that has to be followed for family movie night after all! But I’m sure there will be more Buffy soon enough. :-)

Video: Pretty in Pink

pipW350So, this weekend was another Family Video Night. Amy had finally returned her previous movie, so although it should have been her turn weeks ago, we finally had an Amy night. Her movie this time was Pretty in Pink. This was another movie I had never seen.

My first thought while I was watching this was just that it was considerably better than Sixteen Candles, which I pretty much hated. I was actually enjoying most of the movie.

Until of course the last five minutes or so. Then my only reaction was “Huh?”. It veered away from the direction you expected it to go in (well, at least the direction *I* expected it to go) and then had the critical characters all suddenly veer from the paths they had been on in order to tie up a silly ending in a little bow. Now, switching gears for a surprise ending is fine, but it wasn’t done well here. It was just all of a sudden, all issues and conflicts were miraculously resolved in the matter of a few seconds.

Brandy tells me that this is in part because they changed their mind about the ending at the very last minute while making the film, but whatever. Now, don’t get me wrong, the ending I was thinking about would have been fairly trite and predictable too, but at least it would have meshed with the overall arc of the movie. To me this ending was just jarring, and seemed disconnected from all the events leading up to it. I didn’t like it.

Anyway, disliked the last few minutes, but overall it was a fun movie I guess.

Video: Blue Planet: Seas of Life (Discovery Channel Version): Disk 4

So, yes, we did another family video thing. And yes, I’m switching how I title these posts to “Video” to recognize that in the future not all of these will be DVDs. Anyway, this took us two weeks, but it was once again “One we own but haven’t watched yet” and that meant the next disk in this series.

This time the two episodes were “Seasonal Seas” and “Ocean World”. My basic thoughts on these last few episodes were that the first few were better. I think seasonal seas has a few interesting bits, but my memories of it aren’t that sharp and there was nothing that really stuck out as memorable.

And for Ocean World… the text of the narration made it clear that in the BBC version of the program, this was the FIRST episode, while in this Discovery Channel version they put it last. It was essentially an overview of the whole series, with a lot of things like “In this series we shall see”… which of course was all stuff we’d already seen. So instead of a preview of things to come, it was a retrospective of things we had mostly seen before, although I guess not completely.

In any case, as a whole the series was a great series. I think the first few episodes were the best, but they all held up pretty well, at least if you like this sort of nature documentary. Great visuals, and you learn a few things about the ocean ecosystems. Good stuff. They were all worth watching.

There is a 5th disk, but I think it is all “making of” sort of stuff. I would be very interested in that, but I’m not sure if it will make it as a family movie night thing. We shall see.