(the background in popcorn grease-yellow)

January - zero
February - zero
March - one to date
December - three to date

Movies seen by video rental:

Time Bandits. C-

I saw this years ago. My memory must be horrid, or else I must have been about five years old. Bad. Poor. Boring. Concept intriguing (time travel), execution pathetic. The Monty Python crew can do better than this, but they have always been an uneven lot of actors. Sorry I rented it.

Mars Attacks! B+

Hokey, yes, but decent, and all the politicians get good comeuppance. Some very clever moments herein.

Movies seen at the theatre:

Titanic. B+

We arrived for the matinee showing of Titanic at the local Gigaplex -- although this place has been standing for several years now, this was my first time through the doors. The place is huge, brightly lit, pricey, and plastic. We found seats for the showing, and settled back for three and a half hours of cinema -- and, amazingly enough, it didn't feel like three and a half hours. I didn't get antsy, sitting there in the dark, captive in that seat.

It's a large screen extravaganza, extremely well photographed, and filled with enough pricey special effects to make the Gigaplex downright puny-looking on our way out. (Although the mob scene exiting felt uncomfortably enough like the mobs pushing to get egress from the lower decks of the ship to give us pause...)

Not to spoil the ending, the ship sinks.

The story is told as a flashback from the point of view of one of the (fictional) survivors living today. While the scriptwriters took liberty by inventing the two main characters, they stayed true to the Titanic story. Our two intrepid characters spend the first half falling in love, and the second half exploring the icy wet bowels of a sinking ship -- if they were cats, they'd have used up pretty close to nine of their lives. Our hero, Jack, is your typical Hollywood piece of teenage heartthrob eye candy with the standard heart of gold and no character transformations. He's a vehicle for the script, but this generally works. The young woman, Rose, his love interest aboard the Titanic, carries the film. She's a fully realized and believable character, able to transform and change as the story evolves.

There seems to be a lot of attention to fine detail in this movie. The clothing, the social attitudes of the times, the decor and ambiance, and the ship's ultimate and costly destruction, all seemed to be well-researched. I'd recommend it, although I suspect that it won't translate as well to the small home screen, which is where I'm sure the plot and characterization holes will show up more.

Movies seen broadcast on the One-Eyed Tube:

None so far. I do watch the X-Files (sometimes), but haven't seen the movie.