View From the Bushes

Many weeks after first hearing about it, I finally managed to get out and see Garden State (that's actually a link to Zach Braff's blog, which is much wittier and humorous than my own... there go my last three readers...) I enjoyed it immensely. So good in fact, that my immediate impression on leaving the movie was, I have to see that again. Which puts it in the rarefied realm of movies like Star Wars, Shawshank Redemption, Fellowship of the Ring, etc.

The movie had lots of cool things about it, but there were two which stick out at the moment. The first is how good Natalie Portman was, without that hack (nee greatest filmaker ever) George Lucas feeding her lines Barry Manilow would be afraid to use. The second is how nothing improbably bad happened. Allow me to explain: Close to the beginning of the movie there is a party where lots of drugs are present. In any other movie someone would have died, but in the movie it goes about how most of those things go. Some people do some insanely dumb stuff, and it's obvious that the whole thing contributes to their general "loser" status, but nobody dies. One of the characters has epilepsy; in any other film it would be required that that character had a siezure before the end of the movie, but not in this one, and then perhaps most amazing of all, the main character is horribly late for a doctor's appointment, and it's okay. In fact, it may even be a good thing, since that's where he meets Natalie Portman's character. The point being that the movie wasn't as emotionally tiring as some of these other gut-wrenching indy films with cancer and suicide at every turn.

On Saturday I also got my last case of miniatures (at least for the foreseeable future), which I was moderately disappointed with. I already had two rares from that expansion, the carrior crawler and the halfling outrider, both of which I was kind of unimpressed with, so rather than getting a bunch of rares I didn't have, I got three more of each, plus three more of a couple of other unimpressive rares (the orc druid, and the bladesinger) leaving me with only four (maybe five if I miscounted) rares that were actually cool. Still, there were cool commons and uncommons as well, so it wasn't too bad. One final link before I leave: Slashdot gave 15 questions from their users to the Libertarian Presidential Candidate. It's interesting stuff, enough that I might switch my vote back to him, we'll have to see.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross