My message board is hosed at the moment. It stopped responding at all on Monday. The browser just showed the wait icon and eventually it timed out. So I contacted my ISP support. The first thing they did “got it working” again while simultaneously rolling back the clock to 2009. I do have a backup from about six weeks ago, but I think the interim posts will be lost. I wish it was easier to migrate to another board while preserving the history, but this one is not an easy one to port to a more reliable system. I’ll have to give it some thought.
I went to see Pacific Rim last night. Good film. Exhilarating. Lots of big robots fighting big monsters. After a while those scenes got a little mind-numbing. What good does throwing a monster into the water do? Demonstrably nothing, yet they do it again and again. The “rules” of how to defeat a kaiju seemed a little vague. Why wait until the last moment to whip out this massive sword that works when bashing the monsters in the face doesn’t?
At least there were some good substories interwoven to break up the fight scenes and a touch of (overplayed) comic relief, though I did like the final scene with Ron Perlman. A little bit of characterization goes a long way. I thought they’d do more with the 3D, but it was mostly quite subtle. The starfield at the beginning was impressive, but I didn’t really notice it after that.
The cast was good, consisting mostly of “that guy who plays” actors. People you’re more likely to recognize from previous roles instead of their names. The guy who plays Jax on Sons of Anarchy (as well as the guy who plays Clay). The guy who played Stringer Bell on The Wire. The guy who played Owen on Torchwood. The guy who plays Mike on Homeland. The guy who was Mack on The Unit. I was especially taken with Mana Yashida, who plays the young Mako in a flashback sequence.
I’m not sure what the future holds for the film. I went to see it at a 5:30 pm showing and I was the only one in the theater at 5:10. It was only playing in one of the 20 or so screens in our community. More people did come along eventually, but it seems to be fading fast in the theaters and this is a film you definitely want to see on the big screen. I went by myself because I thought this was a film my wife wouldn’t like, but in retrospect I think she might have enjoyed it.
