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 Still catching up on things we watched for family movie night. It was time for a DVD we own but hadn’t watched yet. It would have been the next Buffy DVD, but Amy had taken that and watched it without the rest of us, so it was invalidated. So I picked at random from the shelf of such things, and so it was House: Season One, which I’d gotten for Christmas this year. Specifically, Disk One of Season One, which has the first four episodes.
The most interesting thing here was the first episode, which was the pilot. It was interesting of course because many elements were just not quite fully formed yet. The visual style was a bit different. And of course the characters were still in a sort of proto-form compared to even the later episodes on this disk, and definitely compared to later seasons. So that was fun.
I actually don’t think I’d seen any of these episodes before. I’ve watched House a decent bit, but I think I picked it up a couple seasons in.
Aside from the pilot which was just slightly different, the rest was just typical House though. It is fun to watch and I enjoy House, but the episodes do almost always follow a pretty strict structure. House is of course an ass to everybody throughout, although there are occasional lurches forward in his character. There is some melodrama amongst the supporting cast. And then there is the medical mystery that they get wrong several times before coming to the right conclusion in the last act.
This disk has the episodes “Pilot”, “Paternity”, “Occam’s Razor” and “Maternity”. As I said, I think the Pilot is most interesting just because it was the pilot. After that Maternity was the most compelling, just because of the babies.
Anyway. Good disk.
Next!
 So, I am way behind on these, but there is no time to catch up like the everpresent now. Way back a long time ago, we had another family video night thing. It was another old Doctor Who. This time The Romans a First Doctor story from 1965.
This was a fun story because it actually tried to be somewhat funny. People running around, missing each other, that sort of thing. Just a lot of goofing around. So, for a First Doctor story this was pretty good. I mostly enjoyed it. And we got to see how the great fire of Rome happened. (It was of course the Doctor’s fault.)
Four episodes, 25 minutes each. Probably would have been more than fine with half of that. But you know, that’s how old Doctor Who is.
I’m still anxious to hurry up and get to late 70’s and early 80’s Who, but we’re going through these slowly enough that they keep releasing more of the older ones before we get to the newer ones… so we’re still often in the 60’s, although we’ve made occasional forays into the early 70’s.
 The last movie night was a Brandy movie. The movie is Equilibrium. She couldn’t remember having actually added this to her queue and said she had never actually even heard of the movie. She thought maybe she added it just because it had Christian Bale in it.
The best description of this thing is an attempted rip off of The Matrix combined with the 1984 Commercial from Apple. Basic plot is that there is a Big Brotheresque government (except it is “Father”) that has used drugs to eliminate emotion from the populace in order to avoid war, etc. There is a sort of police force that enforces this. One of them misses his meds one day, then decides to fight against the system. The usual sort of hijinks ensue, with a predictable final result.
This was not a good movie. At best it was a distraction for a couple of hours. There were some parts that were unintentionally amusing. The big final battle thing was pretty anti-climactic. There were lots of plot holes. Etc. But you know, whatever.
Brandy wanted to stop watching at a certain point in the movie where they started shooting puppies. But we didn’t stop, we kept going.
I dunno. I didn’t hate it. But it is definitely forgettable. And there is definitely no need to ever see this again.
 So, at the last movie night it was once again one of my movies. It could have been someone else’s turn, but they hadn’t returned their movies. So it was my turn again, and also it was once again time for one of the AFI 100 Years 100 Movies list movies. This is #50 on that list. Slowly but surely, we work our way toward #1.
Anyway, Brandy hates westerns, so this was never going to be a favorite of hers, and I was lucky to get her to watch it at all. Amy actually seemed to like bits of it, but was not happy about the ending at all.
As for me, it was a little slow, but a decent way to spend a couple of hours. And of course I ended up curious about the actual historical Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid and ended up reading a bit about them and related subjects on Wikipedia. Not during the movie though, that would be wrong.
Anyway, the movie is somewhat amusing, and has some nice scenery and such while the pair are on the run. Worth watching if you have some time to kill, but I’m not sure I’d put it on a Top 100 list of my own or anything. It is just OK, not great.
First of all, let me just say I was sloppy and to get the timelines right, I should have posted this immediately before the picture of Amy in the Star Trek shirt instead of immediately after. I didn’t bother looking at the timestamp on the picture, and misremembered when it was taken. Oops. Anyway, nobody will care other than me, so let me move on…
We got to a Family Movie Night thing after having taken a couple weeks off while we had guests in the house. It was once again time for an old Doctor Who. This time it was a First Doctor story called The Rescue. This is a short little story, only two short episodes. It is basically a transitional episode where a new companion is picked up. So there just really isn’t much to it. The arrive somewhere. Figure out the mystery. Then when they leave they take the orphan teenager from the future with them on their further adventures.
There was a sad part where one of the crew kills a poor innocent monster thing. They were scared. They shot it. Turns out it was friendly. Oops.
And that’s about that for this.
There was nothing horrible about this story, and it was short. Which is much better than the ones that are basically OK, but last far longer than they should. This one was actually paced decently enough. Two short episodes for a total of 50 minutes was still maybe a little longer than it needed, but it wasn’t so far off that one got annoyed.
Well, at least I didn’t.
 So, back on July 17th I posted that we had watched this. I posted that it was Disk One and has the first four episodes, and the remaining 3 episodes were on Disk Two. Well, as it turns out, when we finally got Disk Two, it just had extras. Turns out the first disk had all seven episodes, and I had just missed an item marked “next” on one of the menus, so I prematurely sent back the disk and posted about it. When I discovered this I was of course distraught because this means the system we had used to pick movies had been distorted and wrong since July, since we hadn’t ACTUALLY watched this… at least not completely. Anyway, in the end it just meant we needed to watch it again, and this time watch the whole thing.
Inferno is a Third Doctor story from 1970. I think it is actually one of the better third Doctor stories actually. As with all stories from this era, it goes on a bit long, but in the mean time it is actually interesting. Well, and funny in the usual probably not meant to be funny but how can you not laugh at the man with all the extra hair stuck all over him fighting with the green goo? I mean, green goo!
The main interesting part is of course the alternate universe versions of various characters and seeing how they differ from the original universe. Not quite up to the level of Mirror, Mirror over on Star Trek a few years earlier, but the same kind of deal.
Anyway, decent, at least for a Third Doctor story. And Amy and Brandy mostly managed to stay awake. I can’t wait to get to Fourth Doctor stories. Of course, while I remember them fondly from my teenage years, I anticipate I may find they don’t age all that well. Oh well. I’m still looking forward to them. But if we are ever going to get there, we need to pick up the pace a bit! They keep releasing new early Doctor stories faster than we end up watching them.
 This last week’s video was one of mine again. Specifically Shine from 1996.
Bottom line on this one is that Brandy was bored and fell asleep. I thought it was OK but nothing special, and Amy surprised all of us, and herself, by really liking it.
For me, I thought the beginning was really slow, but it build up nicely. I started enjoying it right about the time the guy actually just snapped at a performance. It is definitely one of these slowly simmering movies where things just gradually happen and it is more about the atmospherics than the plot. It is not about watching things happen, it is about trying to instill a certain set of feelings.
Honestly, it didn’t pull on my hearstrings as much as many other movies. And the “triumph” was lukewarm at best. Yes, he came to some level of success despite his illnesses, but he wasn’t cured or anything, and his story was still overwhelmingly a sad one.
Oh, and yes, this is based on a true story, although there is a decent bit of controversy about how much really reflects reality, and how much was fictionalized, etc. But that is normal for this kind of film I guess.
Anyway, nice little movie. It won lots of awards. Personally, I didn’t find it all that memorable, but good enough for a weekend evening.
 This 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.
 So 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. 
 So, 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.
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