I've never actually seen "The Sound of Music" all the way through. My mother, brother, and sister went to see it at the theater in Belleville while my dad and I were with the Cub Scouts who were deploying pooper scoopers at a dog show elsewhere in town. But we must have owned the soundtrack album, because there's not a single song in the movie that I'm not familiar with. Of course, I keep seeing bits and pieces of it on the Family Channel, because daisy_knotwise will flip over to it if she sees it running and there's nothing better on. I just haven't actually watched the whole film from beginning to end.

What I've read from beginning to end are the not one, but two different Mad Magazine parodies of the movie. One of them was the fairly straightforward parody of the movie, "The Sound of Money". The other, however, grabbed the songs and constructed a sort of musical about the Mob, "The Sound of Murder". And what's particularly bad is when my brain starts grabbing the lines from both of the parodies and starts doing a weird little mash up.

"Just see how I race up this steep mountainside without ever losing a beat.
You'd think that my lungs would give out up here over ten thousand feet.
And though you may think that I'm hard as nails, still I'm soft underneath.
I'll mourn at the wake and I'll send a big funeral wreath."

Oh, yeah. There's the sort of tutor that I want for the kids...

daisy_knotwise and I engaged our neighbor to do some babysitting and proceeded with friends to catch "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince". I liked it quite a bit, although it's clear a good many things were left out. But it's a very thick book.

After that, we all came back to the house and grilled some burgers and dogs.

I have to do the ISFiC Press financials soon, but this wasn't the day for it. :)

Until Thursday night, I'd expected that we'd be spending Valentine's Day mostly at home. Then our friend, Jennifer, called and offered to babysit for the girls until mid-afternoon. This sounded really good to us, so we dropped Katie and Julie off around 10:30 AM and headed out to Schaumburg for lunch and a movie. Because we needed to be back around 3 PM, timing was a bit tight, so we ended up having lunch at the restaurant in Gameworks because it was next to the movie theater. Fortunately, we got perfectly acceptable burgers there.

We then headed off to the theater and caught a matinee of He's Just Not That Into You. The Tribune reviewer didn't much care for it (1.5 stars); daisy_knotwise and I like it a good bit better than that. But we actually like light romantic comedies. :)

Then it was back to Jennifer's to pick up the girls. This was followed by trips to Sam's Club, Home Depot, Menard's, Lowe's, Oberweis (for carryout milk), and Sweet Baby Ray's. We arrived at the last at 6 PM on Valentine's Day with no reservations. What were we thinking?

So they seated us. We had a fine dinner, the head chef brought us chocolate-covered strawberries after we finished dinner (and they were really good), and a wonderful time was had by all.

Now, we're back home. I've assembled the new reading lamp for Katie's room. It should be very helpful when I'm reading her Winnie the Pooh stories at bedtime -- we're now through chapter six. :)

And tomorrow, I'm going to install the new outdoor light fixtures to replace the ones that I installed to replace the really cruddy ones the builder put in 12 years ago. The replacements have clearly seen better days, the brass plating now looking like anything but brass, so it's time for them to go. And the fellow at Menard's gave us the 15% discount on our entire purchase, not just the items that would fit in the 95 cent reusable green shopping bag, so we saved nearly thirty dollars.

But tonight, we're watching a Pooh DVD and relaxing. And that's a fine thing.

daisy_knotwise and I found a babysitter and ducked out for a few hours this afternoon to watch Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. We liked it. :) Actually, I think I like it better of any of the films save the original Raiders.

My favorite line? "They weren't you."

daisy_knotwise and I watched 27 Dresses tonight. It's pretty thoroughly formulaic, which is pretty much what I want to see in a romantic comedy. I get really annoyed at romantic comedies where girl does not get boy, girl gets killed tragically, boy gets killed tragically, etc. I rather prefer happy endings.

(Yeah, I know. The Grim Roper. Who'da thunk it?)

But I watch romantic comedies not so much for the plot as for the journey and the acting. Katherine Heigl does a fine job with the part and watching her I conclude that there's some serious danger that she's going to get all the parts that Diane Keaton used to get, which is a pretty good career path, all things considered. James Marsden demonstrates that he doesn't have to play a stick, unlike in the X-Men movies. And Malin Akerman (who IMDB tells me is about to be in the new Watchmen film) could be stealing Cameron Diaz's parts shortly.

So it's a pretty happy little ensemble. And the movie isn't laugh out loud funny, but it's fun to watch.

That'll do nicely.

To celebrate the successful completion of the taxes, daisy_knotwise and I decided to go see an early movie. We checked the schedule and the winner (based more on timing than anything else) was The Break Up.
( Spoilers inside... )

daisy_knotwise and I headed out to the cheap theater to see the new Wallace and Gromit movie, Curse of the Were-Rabbit. We hadn't realized it was preceded by a short cartoon featuring the penguins from Madagascar, which was quite a bit of fun in the old Warner Brothers tradition. (We haven't seen Madagascar yet.)

The main feature was a lot of fun. It felt maybe just a little long, but I think mostly because we're used to seeing the characters in the short form. And we're going to have to get the DVD just so we can hunt down all the gags in the background. Dogwarts University, indeed! But the story was solid and silly in the way that Wallace and Gromit usually are, the claymation looked just fine, and poor Gromit suffers and suffers and suffers.

I'm assuming that my niece still likes Wallace and Gromit. I'll bet she liked this. We did.

Sam, Bonnie, and I went to see Sky High last night. daisy_knotwise was feeling under the weather and decided not to come.

It's a fun romp. It beats the conceits of the comic book genre to death while merging them with high school teen angst and romance.

Two of the actresses (Danielle Panabaker playing Layla and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Gwen) look remarkably familiar, but IMDB doesn't show them as being in any roles that I would have seen them in, so I dunno. It's possible that Panabaker just looks a lot like a red-headed Amber Tamblyn, but I have no idea why the other actress looks familiar to me. *shrug*

Courtesy of Mark Evanier, this link to a trailer for a movie that may seem familiar to you. But in this alternate universe, the studio apparently decided the movie was going to bomb and the only hope of getting the audience to show up -- for the opening weekend, at least -- was to make them think it was a very different movie than the one that they'd actually filmed.

I say it's space opera and I say good for it!
( Spoiler-free Serenity review inside... )

Serenity review tomorrow, as I'm off to the Cubs final night game for 2005 tonight.

Just got back from seeing Serenity with daisy_knotwise and hundreds of fans. More about that later, because it's much too late to start on that tonight.

Meanwhile, the Sox lost to Detroit tonight, so their lead over Cleveland is two games with six to play. This will not improve Brad's mood at work...

daisy_knotwise and I went with Bonnie and Sam to see "The Incredibles" tonight, making us about the last people in the world to do so. (At least, among those who intend to see the film.)

If you ever enjoyed reading a superhero comic, this is a fine film to see. If you didn't, you might just enjoy it anyway.

We're up to Saturday now on our return voyage from Hawaii.
( Good news today... )
Gretchen and I watched De-Lovely, the Cole Porter bio pic, in the ship's theater last night.
( Capsule review, very minor spoilers )
We had a bit of unscheduled excitement today.
( Catch! )
Gretchen and I survived the rehearsal for the talent show earlier today. She's off getting a manicure now while I type up this entry. The show goes up in a little over an hour. Wish us luck!

(One of the other fellows in the talent show is from Elk Grove, Illinois, plays the harmonica, and reads science-fiction. We're sending him a flyer for Capricon.)

Well, it appears that the movie reviewers for the major Chicago daily papers have given the new Catwoman movie two stars.

The bad news is that would be one star from each of them.

Chicago Tribune (registration required)
Ebert hated it too

Of course, Warner Brothers might have done better if the story had any relationship to the DC Comics Catwoman other than the name. Not even the name of her secret identity survived.

(Ok, Selina Kyle is good-looking and so is Halle Berry. But what an awful costume they put her in! I'm sure someone must find it sexy, but I'm not that someone.)

Gretchen and I went to see "The Terminal" this afternoon. It was an ok film, except I was a bit disappointed in the ending. Suffice it to say that I prefer happier endings in my escapist viewing.

Before the movie, we saw the trailer for "I, Robot". After watching it, I realized that they'd attached the name of the wrong property to the (so I've heard) pre-existing script.

The property they should have licensed was "Magnus, Robot Fighter".

There were plenty of leftovers from last night's party, so I fired up the grill again for lunch and made some hamburgers. ladyat and bedlamhouse were shocked that I hadn't seen "Field of Dreams", so I pulled out the laserdisc that I'd had for some years but hadn't got around to watching and the four of us cried a lot at the end.

Then we headed off to Wrigley Field, where the Cubs beat the Sox in dramatic fashion by a score of 2-1 on a bases-loaded walk in the bottom of the ninth.

We didn't manage to see any fireworks this year (at close range), but other than that, a pretty complete success so far. :)

No, not mine. Christopher Hitchens' actually:

Review Inside

I don't think he liked it...

As long as I was searching Google, I realized I could probably find out what the heck "The Chronicles of Riddick" is, since we saw the trailer at "The Return of the King". It turns out it's a sequel to a Vin Diesel film called "Pitch Black" which I never heard of.

Plot Summary from IMDB

Was the original any good? Inquiring minds want to know.

It looks like it's going to be a good year for scifi movies. (We'll see how many of them are SF. :) )

We saw a trailer for "The Butterfly Effect" that looks promising. We also saw this one:

Three Laws, Count 'Em Three!

And then there's "The Chronicles of Riddick", whatever that is.

Oh, and something about that Potter kid. :)

Gretchen and I caught this movie on Friday. It's definitely funny, definitely R-rated (mostly for nudity and a lot of simulated sex acts). A lot of very predictable things happen, but they happen in an amusing way, so that's ok by us.

Anyway, if you're going to put the gun on the mantle, sooner or later you need to fire it. :)