Happy Birthday, Ellen!

It's another birthday post. Happy 28th to my lovely wife, Ellen!

Don't Touch the Green Beer!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! I've had my corned beef and cabbage (lunch), and so I'm satisfied for the day. I celebrate any holiday that has a traditional food associated with it!

As for the green beer, I'm with Frazz:

As for dying the Chicago River green, that's probably the most natural it looks all year.

This post is also a test to see if the post shows up automatically, and in a timely basis, as a link on Facebook. The applications I've used before all were very slow to pick up blog posts. We'll see now.

Happy Birthday, Kalen!

Almost late, but I made up for it by wishing Kalen "Happy Birthday" a day early on Facebook, and then repeatedly through the day today in person.

Quick, spoiler-free, Watchmen review

I saw Watchmen tonight.

It looks great. And it is a reasonably faithful rendering of the graphic novel. Probably as good or better than anyone could have expected.

But, it still has to deal with the limits of a motion picture, and of a reasonable length for a film. So, it sacrifices a lot of the depth. Everyone should read the graphic novel either before or after seeing the movie. Probably better before, or maybe both!

The acting ... was not great. It was pretty stiff at points. Malin Ackerman looks perfectly like Laurie Juspeczyk, and is often pretty adequate acting, but has off moments. Jackie Earle Haley does a very good job as Rorschach. I always like Matt Frewer (Moloch) and Danny Woodburn (Big Figure). Others aren't quite so good, seemingly reciting more than acting a lot of the time.

The production values were terrific at times (Rorschach's mask in particular, and Archie, and Blake' apartment), and cheesy in a few others. In particular, some set pieces (doors in particular) don't seem very substantial, like they are the foam pieces that they probably are rather than anything with weight. Bubastis wasn't a convincing as he could have been. And the Nixon nose prothesis was a bad joke, but may very well have been intended that way.

They did keep the meat of the story, though, and it more than carries the movie. I think it's well worth a watch for anyone, but again, read the graphic novel sometime in there as well.

I look forward to the planned extended version on DVD as it sounds like it will restore a lot of the bits that are sorely missed (in particular, the newstand scenes), and fold in "Under the Hood" and particularly "Tales of the Black Freighter".

Happy Birtday, Ryan!

Happy 22nd Birthday to Ryan! A late entry, but he was wished happy birthday earlier, we had dinner last night, and he got cake tonight!