Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Breakfast: fruit smoothie. This morning while waiting for the bus I saw a man sadly sweeping broken glass out the side of his parked Firebird. The entire passenger window was shattered; at least it wasn't raining, too. We don't live in a rich neighborhood, but we don't see a lot of crime, so this surprised me. OMG Margaret Cho finally updated her blog! Usual breakfast at the cafeteria. Usual lunch at Panda Express: chow mein, beef with broccoli, orange chicken. The orange chicken is spicier than normal today, so spicy I threw most of it away. My fortune: There will always be delightful mysteries in your life. At work: more CD-ROM DemoShield work: licensing forms. I had wanted to do CD-ROM building today, but needed to do Windows security updates. After work, Patrick and I wanted to do something fun. We headed to the movie theatre (our Daly City Century 20, so favored for no commercials except for Fandango and THX), and bought tickets ($19.50 total for 2) for Batman Begins, which opened today. We had a fast but less-than-satisfying meal at 88 Rice Bowl (about $10 for 2). Batman Begins was very good. Although it has a few flaws (what film doesn't?), they are nearly all easily overlooked while watching the film. The magic of this film, I realized while watching it, is that you sort of need to throw out most everything you already know about Batman because he's being reinvented before your eyes. You haven't seen this Batman before, and it's a little bit wondrous to see how this one gets molded anew. It carries the torch which has become popular with superhero movies lately of making the story more real, more realistic, by having the characters face the complexities of real life and real life relationships, as seen lately in Spider-man 1 and 2, The Incredibles, even Charlie's Angels. The first half of the film is more psychology and story and backstory, and the second half more roller-coaster action. A lot of the fight scenes are filmed closer than I'm accustomed to, but they still work. The pacing is also tighter than I'm used to—I felt left to fill in the blanks in a few places—but, again, it still works. I'm no comic book fan, but I'm certain that the film was peppered with all kinds of references which the readers of the comix will enjoy. The film makes fun of itself at times, cleverly, and fortunately we remain laughing with the film rather than at it (as was the case with some of the previous Batman films). I believe this film will successfully revive the Batman franchise, and I am already looking forward to a sequel.