Dragons and Film Festivals

On Saturday morning, Sasha slept way, way in.  At 10:00, he slouched out of his bedroom groaning that he'd forgotten he was supposed to go on a field trip with the film and video club to the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and they were leaving at 9:45.  Oops.  He begged me to drive him over to the high school and see if they'd left yet.  I took him over there--it's only three minutes away--and we found the bus just getting ready to leave.  So he lucked out there.

A bit later in the day, I took Aran and Mackie to see HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON.

It was great fun.  I liked the dialogue and the characters quite a lot.  I'm not sure why they decided to have the adult Vikings talk with a Scottish accent and the kids talk with an American accent, but whatever.  The best line in the movie is when Stoick, the dad, hands Hiccup, his ne'er do well son, a warrior's helmet.  "Your mother would have wanted you to have it," Stoick says.  "It was half her breastplate."  Aran and Mackie couldn't figure out why I was laughing so much.

A couple of caveats, though--you definitely don't need to see it in 3D.  Unlike AVATAR, the 3D elements add nothing to the film.  Don't bother paying the extra.  Seriously.  I've also come to learn that Dreamworks ordered movie theaters to clear 3D screens for DRAGON (bumping ALICE IN WONDERLAND).  Theaters that failed to comply would not be allowed to show DRAGON in 2D.  I wish I'd known this before I went--another reason to see it without the stupid glasses.

The movie itself is worlds better than Dreamworks' last production, the horrible MONSTERS VS. ALIENS, though, and worth seeing.

Wii Flix

Yesterday we got in the mail the disk that connects our Wii with Netflix.  It lets us stream Netflix's "play now" movies through the game system, which is much nicer than watching them at my computer, which I generally refuse to do.

I had to do some finagling.  Since I moved the Wii upstairs, its Internet connection refused to work and I hadn't gotten around to fixing it.  The passwords were all correct and the system was finding the signal; it just wouldn't connect.  I finally just deleted the connection and started over.   Ta da!  Access!

Now we can stream a whole mess o' movies and TV shows, including SPARTACUS.  I'm glad about the latter.  I'd been wanting to watch it, but the Star network won't allow DVRs to record it, for some reason, and I don't watch live TV.  No show is =that= important to me--I can wait for the DVD, if I remember or get around to it.  But I saw it on Netflix's streaming list.  Cool!

This is the future of in-home movie watching.

Put One Mark in Front of the Other

Yesterday and today I wrote quite a bit.  I'm in the home stretch of the supernatural book now, with only about 3,000 words to go.  I'm not expecting difficulty in the rewrites, and I've always been fast on those anyway.  (The first draft is the slowest part for me.)  Barring a Dreadful Circumstance, I'll have it done well before deadline.

I also graded a huge stack of mythology papers today.  Unfortunately found a pair of students who copied their work from each other, which means a discipline referral and phone calls home on Monday, yay--and got all the way through their latest project, a children's book based on a myth of their choice.  Very creative stuff, and some good artwork, too.

Then wrote my weekly Book View Cafe blog entry.

Now me is total fried.  Can me haz day off?