Well, as the title suggests, I am on vacation with my family this week, so this’ll be a short entry. I thought about skipping the whole thing, but then where would that leave you, avid reader. With so much randomness out there, we all need some constants in our life, right? So don’t worry, Niblets has got you covered.
I had a chance to see The Dark Knight again and it’s given me a chance to reflect on my initial reaction a little. The problem I have with the movie, I think, is that it tries too hard to hit the same marks the first one did without devoting enough attention to creating new ones, and consequentially both suffer. We all loved Batman Begins, but we can’t have those days back, we need to look forward and create new, exciting marks for our movies to hit. That, and it’s too long—although I guess that’s a mute point since almost every movie made in the past ten years has been too long (do I even have to mention Lord of the Rings?) and nobody’s bothered to stop it.
It is also obvious to me now more than ever that The Joker was intended to return in the next installment, if not to appease the fans then at least keep this Batman series from getting to spread out like its predecessor. Bringing back The Joker brings the Batman series back home to the Batman-Joker face-offs we know and love from the comics/cartoons/TV shows. It brings us back to familiar territory. The previous series lacked continuity because it insisted on introducing two new villains every time—let’s not make that mistake again (and let’s keep the same Batman while we’re at it, Clooney can stay home).
Other thoughts:
It enrages me that there exists a third Mummy movie (or is it the fourth? We can’t leave out The Rock’s installment, can we?). The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (or Die Mumie – Das Grabmal des Drachenkaisers as it is lovingly referred to by the Germans) opens this Friday and I’m almost at a loss words. As a fan of Brendan Fraser, it makes me sad to see him typecast and forced into bad projects repeatedly to make a living. And furthermore, there isn’t even a mummy! It’s just zombie Jet-li—which is a real waste when you think about it because Zombie Jet-Li is a movie I would probably watch. Honestly, when it gets to the point that you have to take seven years off to invent a new undead antagonist for Brendan Fraser to charmingly match wits with, then maybe it’s time for you to realize that the source material really just isn’t meant to support another movie.
With the DS release of Chrono Trigger on the horizon (November for those of you keeping score at home) I started thinking about the game again and realized it is probably the only SNES-gen RPG that survives as a great game by today’s standards. Don’t get me wrong, Earthbound, and Final Fantasy IV & VI are all good games in their own right, but Chrono Trigger just doesn’t feel like it’s lost any ground to the technological and narrative advances video games have made in the near thirteen years since its release. It’s amazing.
I’ve been getting back into Half-Life 2 again recently and I’m having some issues with it, but I think that’s another story altogether…
And now, Diane, there are just two other things that struck me earlier this morning that continue to trouble me, and I’m speaking now not only as an agent of The Bureau but as a human being: what really went on between Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys, who really pulled the trigger on JFK…
Thank you, and continue to have wonderful lives until we meet again.
