Weekend report

This weekend:

* Friday night: while channel surfing, I once again came in late to watching Love Actually. (I have never seen the movie in one sitting; I've watched bits and pieces over the years and figure I must have seen about 90% of it by now.)

I am curious to see it all because, based on partial viewings, it has always seemed an awful, awful film, displaying less emotional realism about love and romance than the first Shrek movie. Yet, it has its defenders, including friend and regular reader here Geoff.

Well, sorry Geoff, but after my longest stretch of viewing in one sitting, my opinion against it has well and truly solidified. I accept it may not be appropriate to judge it as a realistic film (apart from the ludicrous Hugh Grant as British PM, he appears to do the job from home in his spare time with a staff of about 3.) But, even allowing for 2 minutes of convincing crying from Emma Thompson, it just doesn't even ring true emotionally (for me, of course.) I actually find some of the plotlines rather creepy (oh, sorry, I have accidentally slipped into Hugh Grant talk), the use of the swelling orchestral score to make some scenes more "important" to be really irritating, and nothing in the film (unless it is in the 10% I still haven't seen) makes me laugh.

But don't worry, when appointed benevolent dictator, I will add aversion therapy to adjust errant opinions of this film to Medicare coverage. It is, after all, important that all people think like me.

* Sunday night: Speaking of partially watched movies, I saw some of Speed Racer. What an obvious dud of a film. How on earth was Lego ever convinced that there would be a market for a line of sets built around this film? (They were all heavily discounted after the box office failure.)

As many critics correctly noted, it is not possible to make car racing exciting when there are no laws of physics involved. Its directorial tricks were repeated endlessly, and it contains as much tension as watching an electric car racing set being played by a couple of kids for 100 minutes. Less, possibly.

* Sunday: Completing a movie theme post, the family went to Warner Brother's Movieworld for the first time yesterday.

It was an good enough day that the kids enjoyed, but two rides showed technical faults, and one needed some general cleaning up. One comedy routine was clearly in need of a re-write (no one watching laughed at any of the jokes), and the "character street parade" is embarrassingly short. (There are more characters from the Warner world than this, surely.)

As I suspected, if you have spent time in Disney theme parks, and seen the extraordinary commitment to perfection that they show, other theme parks suffer in comparison. It makes them just seem to not be trying hard enough.