The Diary of A Simple Man

We finished reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader last week. Sebastian enjoyed it very much. So we started right in on The Silver Chair. That has been going very well, too.

The library has a DVD of the British TV series of The Chronicles of Narnia, or at least the first three discs (which cover Lion, Caspian, Voyage, and Chair). We watched the first disc, and well...it was pretty silly. The special effects were awfully cheesy, but that was pretty much to be expected. The pacing was much slower than the movie, of course, and Teri was bored out of her mind; but that was to be expected too (Sebastian wasn't bored at all).

But what got to me was the terrible British overacting. When a British actor is good they're outstanding, but when they're bad they're terrible. And there were a lot of actors in The Lion who were just painfully bad. "Bellowing scene-chewers" seems the best way to describe them. The Witch, in particular, was like a black hole of bad acting. She kept trying to shout her lines louder and louder, and it was simply awful.

When I was in stairflight's production of Romeo and Juliet, some of the other actors urged me to shout more to show that I was angry. I refused. I knew damned well that you can often convey far more anger in a softer voice, and that constantly screaming your lines can be surprisingly ineffective.

Eventually the bad acting got to me. I cracked and started MSTing (that is, commenting on the action MST3K-style). When the Witch's face was on the scream, I dubbed for her "I need some more TOILET PAPER!!!" with the requisite hamminess and eye-rolling. Sebastian completely cracked up, and made me say it again and again for the next two days.

Aslan was quite amusing too. For one thing, he was obviously stuffed. His mouth movements weren't synchronized with his words. So when he was on his way to the Stone Table to be sacrificed by the Witch, and Lucy asked him what was going to happen, I emoted "She's going to cut out my STUFFING!!!". More wild laughter from Sebastian. Ah, the fun. :D

The show of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is far less silly. The sea-serpent actually scared Sebastian a little (lots of spiky teeth). The effects were better, as was the acting. In The Lion talking animals were played (painfully) by people wearing costumes, and other creatures were portrayed with quite amateurish cartoon effects; in Voyage there was only one talking animal, Reepicheep, and although he was played by a (little person? Is that the correct term?), he was relatively well-played and not too irritating.

Apparently it may take a while before videos of the panels that I was on are posted, but here's a link to an mp3 recording. You may find it interesting...or not, of course.

It's a recording of the "We Want It On DVD!" panel.

http://n1jdu.org/Fandom/mp3/We_want_it_on_DVD_64k.mp3

Saturday was a busy day.

Now, I worry a lot about all the television that Sebastian watches. So after we dropped Teri off at the animal shelter, I decided to take him with me to buy the groceries I'd need to make calzones. But on the way, I asked if he wanted to stop at the library for a little while. Of course he did.

We ended up staying in the library for two and a half hours. He did a very cute little puppet show, singing quiet little songs from behind the puppet stage; a mother who was sitting near me smiled, obviously charmed by his show.

He also spent a lot of time playing with the large-sized lego-type blocks, building Godzilla, Mechagodzilla, and Jet Jaguar. A couple of pretty little girls were playing near him; one was perhaps five or six, while the other was certainly under two. The five-year-old kept asking me to play with her "Will you be a giraffe? An elephant?", while the two-year-old was simply fascinated by Sebastian. She kept coming over and trying to help him, bringing him pieces he didn't need and picking up things he didn't want picked up. But he was quite good about that.

We also ordered a number of books. And for the first time, he asked me to help him find a book on an educational topic: he wants to be a paleontologist, so he took out a book on dinosaurs. I also looked up and ordered books about drawing Avatar, and a children's book called "Meet Godzilla!". Finally, we borrowed a DVD of Mothra vs. Godzilla. He hadn't seen much more than clips of any Godzilla movie before, for all that he's a huge fan; Teri was worried that they might be too scary for him. But Mothra vs. Godzilla was made in 1964 - the year I was born, coincidentally - and wasn't really frightening at all.

He loved it. After he watched the English-dubbed version all the way through, he watched quite a bit of the subtitled Japanese version. I have a feeling we'll be watching a lot more Godzilla movies in the years to come! :D

I'm thinking Real Hard about buying RealDVD with my next paycheck. Anyone know anything interesting about it? Have you tried it yet? Apparently Hollywood is suing to get it off the market, so I'll probably need to pick it up soon!

Don't blame me. unquietsoul5 tagged me with this meme.

Oh, who am I kidding? I could have ignored it. I'm just taking the opportunity to brag about all my DVDs.

1. Total number of films I own on DVD/video:

DVDs: Currently 155. But that counts 10 DVDs of Sebastian's, and Teri's Disney DVDs. It also counts 13 multi-disk TV series sets (generally including 5 or more disks each) as one DVD per set. Plus there are other multi-disk sets, including two which I'll be getting in the next week or two. So 155 is the low end; the high end is easily over 200.

But then, I'm an early adopter.

As for videos, that's almost impossible to calculate. There were 9 pre-recorded videos on the DVD shelf. I know that Teri has almost every Disney movie on VHS someplace, but I didn't see them. Sebastian probably has 40 vhs tapes too. But if you're talking vhs of all sorts, I probably have over 300. That includes ones on which I have three movies taped on each; for example, The Terminator, Aliens, and John Carpenter's The Thing are on one tape. Not to mention thousands of hours of SCTV, Monty Python, MST3K, and rarities from the early days of Comedy Central.

Unfortunately most of them aren't labeled, and 95% of them are in boxes in the basement. :(

2. The last film I bought:

The last film I got was Spirited Away; it was a birthday gift. I can't remember what the last DVD I bought was, but the next two I'm buying are SCTV Vol. 3 and the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy miniseries.

3. The last film I watched: Yellow Submarine. We've seen it at least ten times in the past two weeks. It's Sebastian's new favorite, and I couldn't possibly express how cute it is to listen to him singing along with all the songs.

4. Five films that I watch a lot or that mean a lot to me:

The Third Man
Army of Darkness
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension
Big Trouble In Little China
Casablanca

Of course, that leaves out TV series (like SCTV and The Prisoner), which would otherwise be on the list. And there are lots of others, of course. There's no exact order, except that The Third Man is absolutely number one.

5. Tag 5 People and have them put this in their journal:

Oh, they're not going to like this...
tprjones
tcpip
klyfix
charibdis
kahlage

Sorry!