Give And Take At The Movies.

Live Journal has been down for the past day or so because of a major power outage at the company that hosts their servers. My more personal blog exists on this system (as does my girlfriend's and several other dear comrades that I have gotten to know over the past year and a half), and not being able to read what my friends have been up to in the past 48 hours has started to give me a case of LJ DT's. According to their status report page, they're working their asses off to get things right. And no, conspiracy theory buffs, this outage has nothing to do with their recent acquisition by SixApart. So sorry.

Tara and I saw House Of Flying Daggers last night... second time in a row that I've gotten to see a Zhang Ziyi movie on its wide release US opening night, the first being the long-awaited American release of Hero that occurred only because of a Quentin Tarantino ass-kick to the collective ass of Miramax/Disney. This time around, the film was flowed to movie houses by Sony Pictures Classics. Absolutely beautiful photography and direction - I would have expected no less from Zhang Yimou based on the other films of his that I've seen, including one of my all-time favorite films, The Road Home (Zhang Ziyi's movie debut, for those of you that didn't know), but this was the best I've seen from him. Can't wait for the DVD of it to come out. (Come to think of it, I have yet to get the US release of the Hero DVD. This week, definitely.)

Tara was iffy about seeing this film at first, as she is normally not into "martial arts" films, but after we left the theatre she said that she could see herself buying the DVD when it came out. I mention this because she wants to take me to see the film White Noise, which is not normally the kind of thing I would go to myself. We'll probably do that this coming week, in spite of the bad reviews that have been flowing about it. Last week Tara and I went to see Fat Albert the night White Noise premiered and there were signs up stating that all of that evening's showings of the latter movie were sold out. Whoa. The last time I saw something like that happen, I had been in Calgary with a previous girlfriend and we, along with some of her friends, attempted to see The Blair Witch Project on opening night at a Famous Players cineplex but every showing was sold out that night too.

I changed the look of this blog a little. This format seems easier on the eyes than the all-black look I had before. Links coming soon.