the Dalaverse

Bleah. I am trying to head off what I can tell will be -- would be, if I succeed -- a massive cold that I just don't have the energy to fight at full strength. I've got chicken soup, I've got orange juice, I've got Tylenol Cold and Nyquil (o sweet Nyquil). We'll see.

I've also got, thanks to Jill, this week's Rolling Stone with Jann Wenner's Bono interview. Score.

I watched a bunch of movies recently. Seasonal: "Exorcist III" -- really, really surprisingly good. "Hellraiser" -- really, really bad, but fun to mock and chock full of good makeup effects. I've always had a thing for the Cenobite with the chattering teeth. "Friday the 13th Pt. 2" -- also a pleasant surprise, lots of good gore, tons of great fakeouts. "Batman Begins" -- very good, though I didn't feel it was up to the obsessive level of greatness that everybody seemed to claim this summer; I still think both "Spiderman" films were better. The supporting cast was excellent, particularly Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine, but I didn't connect to the heart of Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne (he's wonderfully menacing and scary in the costume, btw) the way I do with Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker, or even Hugh Jackman's Wolverine. I will admit that Batman has never been high on my list of favorite comic book heroes, so I might be biased. And this might be an unpopular opinion, but Cillian Murphy made no impression upon me at all, other than irritance.

And lastly, "Beyond Borders," which was kind of clumsily edited and paced, but an engaging film nevertheless, with outstanding performances from Clive Owen and Noah Emmerich (who knew Truman Burbank's pal and the cheating husband from "Love and Sex," my favorite-movie-no-one's-ever-heard-of, could actually act? It took me forever to even place him; I just now recalled "I work a lot with big red-assed monkeys") and powerful scenes of desperation and hunger, especially in the early sequence set in Ethiopia. I found Angelina Jolie serviceable if not great, and the love story less compelling than the actual setting/world of aid relief. One of the Amazon reviews brought up "Life Is Beautiful" as another film that attempts to personalize global horrors through a romantic relationship, and rightly pointed out that the effectiveness of the first is due to the fact that it begins with the love story and really binds an audience to the characters first, whereas in "Beyond Borders" the characters are first presented as our introduction to the horrors and then become the focus of the storytelling, which doesn't work nearly as well. I did like that it was Sarah rather than Nick killed at the end. Usually in this kind of situation you've got the man sacrificing himself for the woman he loves, and the turnabout of that cliché was the most interesting thing about the ending.

Hmm. I had more to say about that film that I thought. I suppose it deserves its own paragraph.

I'm debating skipping Museum Studies tomorrow whether or not I'm really sick enough to justify it. We get three freebies in that class, and I've only missed one, and the extra sleep certainly wouldn't hurt.

New "House" tonight! ::bounces::

ETA: and I decided to let Africa go. There is really no way I could afford it. There's always the possibility of next year.