I am glad I did not spend money to see this.

It was narrated by Nia V… whoever did My Big Fat Greek Wedding.  It felt like it had lots of discontinuities in what they were talking about.  And it was full of Greek hubris, despite the discussion near the end about how Athenian hubris led to their downfall:  5th century Athens being something like the greatest flowering of human something-or-other.  And it wasn’t what I expected, either.

Half of the movie was about the explosion that destroyed Thera, on Santorini:  the archaeology of it, the discovery of frescoes, the timing of the eruption itself… that bit was pretty cool.  The second half was about Athens in 500BC – Perikles, the building of the Parthenon, drama… This bit was ok.  I was very impressed by the CGI reconstruction of the Parthenon, and their imagining of the statue of Athene.  And I really like the zooming over Santorini and Delos, showing the pillars and ruins.

Overall, I was quite disappointed.  Sigh.

Hey – I missed my 400th post!  How exciting!

So the third Michael Jackson in the top 15 wasn’t Thriller; it’s Remember the Time, which admittedly is a pretty cool song and a pretty intricate video clip.

later edit:

And the fact that number 6 is November Rain isn’t saying much for the age of the audience, either. Truly, Slash has/had an indecent amount of hair.  And Axle really is an ugly man… 

We did the double last night – Alien and Aliens.  Watching the first, I am actually not sure whether I have ever seen it, although Jonesy the cat was very familiar.  So if I have, it was a long time ago.  The second one really was fantastic.

Couple of interesting things:  I already knew about the close identification between Ripley and the queen alien, having read about that somewhere – bitches in space, both wanting to protect their children, essentially.  The other thing was, especially in the second but I think also in the first, was the frequent focus on hands. Hands creeping over a bed or a table top, trying to fnd something.  This is interesting because the larval thing that comes out of the egg, and latches onto someone’s face, looks exactly like an elongated hand.  I think this focus on hands is deliberate, therefore, to make people always unsure as to whether it is a human or an alien.  And maybe also to stress more conenctions between alien and human?

Not sure whether I have seen Aliens 3… surely I have… I know I have seen Alien Resurrection, and I’ve posted about Alien v Predator.  Hmm; might have to do the third and fourth (again), just for a sense of closure.

And truly, it freaked me out to see people smoking – inside a spaceship!  Imagine what that would do to the filters!

Does the fact that there are two relatively old Michael Jackson clips in Video Hits’ Top 100 “as voted by you” – in the top 15, and who knows Thriller might still get there – show that the audience of the show is actually my age, rather than the teenyboppers I always assumed?  And if it is, what does that say about the taste of those people??

Of course, it has also included Pink’s “Stupid Girl”…

It is Friday night, and I am lying in bed doing reports!  How sad is this!  J is playing with his new iMac, we’re ditching the bro-in-law’s get-together because it’s too far and J has other commitments… and, of course, I am Miss “It’s 3 weeks until it’s due I must start working on it now otherwise I won’t sleep!”  I have improved somewhat since uni (maybe some would disagree about it being an improvement…), but I do still get a bit frantic about this sort of thing.  I fret if it’s hanging over my head for a long time.  I might ignore it, but I am not one of those people who can enjoy ignoring it.

J checked the TV guide tonight, and was a bit excited – but more dreaded because of my expected reaction – to see that The Great Escape was on TV tonight.  However.  Turns out that it’s not THE The Great Escape. No, instead it is the two miners who got trapped and ABOUT WHOM I JUST DON’T CARE ANY MORE.

Stooged.  So, so stooged.

Church conference this weekend.  Topic was Grace – in fact, “Treasures of Grace”, organised partly by a guy whose last name is, no joke, Treasure, with a mascot called Pirate Pete (he was purple). 

Overall, it was good.  The speaker was great, althuogh I missed the last session because I volunteered for creche.  Grace is such an amazing concept; it was good to be reminded of it, and of how it impacts on my life.

It was spoiled by a few minor things – J had some issues with stuff he had loaned to the whole deal, and I had some minor existential crises – but overall I am glad that I went.

I’m reading this, again.  I decided I wanted an easy book to read this weekend, because we were at a church conference and I decided that I needed that something easy and completely off topic would be good.  So I am enjoying it, again, of course.  I really like the character of David Bowman; he’s cool.  For some reason I had really mis-remembered Frank Poole’s character; I thought that he was a bit of a nasty type, from memory, or just plain annoying.  But he isn’t; in fact, he is quite inoffensive.  There is nothing to choose from between David and Frank in terms of who you want to have survive or aything like that.  So that was good.

Of course, I will have to read the next three books too, now.  Which is just fine by me.