An overdue update, since I'm a slacker and haven't in awhile.

Yikes, been a few weeks since my last update, not much exciting over the holiday's, but I guess I've seen a few new movies and dvd's.

First, I enjoyed the new King Kong quite a bit, I think he did a very good job with the movie and it was a very enjoyable 3 hours, I would never have even looked at my watch if I didn't have to pee towards the end from the large cherry coke... A couple of the cgi city scenes did look cgi/bluescreened, but on the whole it looked great. The story breaks down to about 1 hour in the city, 90 minutes on the boat/island, and then only about 30 minutes back in the city. Kong is displayed as both very brutal and a inhuman, yet shows enough emotion and feeling over time that you gain sympathy for him over time without it being too forced(besides the ice skating...) I definitely recommend the movie to everyone, it totally lived up to my very high expectations.

Secondly, Chronic-what-cles of Narina(if you don't get the "-what-" part, look it up on google) I enjoyed this and it looked very good, though nothing came as a surprise since I saw it in the cartoon form oh-so-many years ago as a kiddie. No blood or gore, very family friendly but with one tear-jerker moment for the little kids, I heard at least 5 or 10 kids sobbing at this scene in the movie, and it's tragic and all, but I guess I'm just a heartless bastard(and I knew the outcome of it anyway...) I felt they took a little too long to go from the 1940's england to the narnia stuff fulltime, I think nearly the first hour isn't in narnia(short of one scene) Tilda Swinton did great as the villain(a female meant to be a female, unlike many of her other roles) and was plenty evil and vicious. It's funny, the guy playing the queen's henchman I could have sworn was deep roy, but apparently it's not...though looking at their pictures together, they do look a bit alike still after comparison.

I finally got around to watching Hayao Miyazaki's masterpiece Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind on dvd. Mr. Miyazaki is known as the japanese walt disney and I have to say that almost doesn't seem good enough in some ways. I've seen about 6 of his films and have yet to dislike a single one, some of them are outright amazing works of art that are memorable for months and years afterwards. His movies have a definite japanese feel, but once you get into them and get into the world and begin to care about the characters, it just totally puts you in a totally different world. This movie takes place about 1000 years in the future, after an apocalyptic nuclear holocaust that also unearthed some amazing beasts from under the ground, to help clear up what remained. The Valley of the Wind in the title is an area that has managed to carve a niche for itself, away from the deadly spores and creatures that remain, and also stay out of the politics of a couple nations that have formed and are at war with each other. It sounds very convoluted and odd, but the story is told with very little exposition at all, just because of how well it flows and the world and characters just develop. It beat my expectations by quite a bit and may now be my favorite Miyazaki film, very close with Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away though.

Hmm, I've been picking up the Warner Brothers' Batman and Superman: The animated series dvd's and sat down and watched the second volume of Superman, about 15 episodes or so, and have to say that this is really some of the best Superman storytelling and really should be what the comics and movies are like. Both of these series are some of the best comic storytelling around and should bethe very first thing someone should look at when they begin to either write for the comic, a tv series, or a movie involving these characters. I'm glad this style of cartoon is still around with the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited series that cartoon network show, they are all part of the same universe and use some of the same art and voice acting throughout, for the most part. If you like Batman or Superman but you don't care for the comics or movies as much, these should be what you are looking for, the purest form of these characters(in my eyes)

On the gaming front I've been playing some City of Villains, World of Warcraft, Animal Crossing(for the nintento DS), and Luminese(for the psp) It's hard to believe that I bought about 8 or 10 games between october-december and I'm just playing these 4 games most of the time(only cov and animal crossing were purchased in that time period, the others date back at least 8 months or more) I guess it's similar to my dvd buying, buy 10 dvd's a month, watch one... I've also been trying to read the second book in the George R R Martin "song of fire and ice" series but that's been slow going, I don't really like any of the characters very much and with it going in such different places than I imagined, I try to take my time reading it to not miss potential clues/foreshadowing of future plot twists. I'd love to be plowing through some books, but I just hate having more than a couple books "active" at once, I have a Peter Straub book I started several months back but I lost interest in(the throat is the book, for the curious) and if I start anything else, it will almost be like giving up on those before it.

TV has been dead the past month or so, but should start picking up again now with Battlestar Galactica and 24 starting, and several other shows coming out of the christmas break period(Lost for example) I have 9 episodes(11 hours worth) of The Amazing Race: Family Edition on tivo, I can't build up enough interest to sit down and watch them yet, the season started off awfully and I hear it never recovered. I'll be glad when the new season starts and gets back to the regular 2-person teams(without little kids...) The season before Family Edition was great, minus the awful producer-adjusted final flight that should never have been toyed with(one team was so far ahead, the producers delayed a flight to get a second team on, who then went on to win...)

So that's about it for an update, as boring as it is. Stay tuned as I potentially watch more dvd's or play more games in the future...or not, who knows.