Sometimes I wish. But that's just because I feel left behind(in a non- Kirk Cameron way) by a lot of it and feel like I need time to catch up. Rationally, I know technology makes me life possible.

t Shrug

By this point I've calmed down enough that I'm interested in seeing the movie, just so I can tell how much was only in my head.

Beau and I are going to see Trance this evening. Wish us luck.

We came back from Trance. My standard phrase: entertaining movie, but...

Definitely entertaining, definitely adult content with full frontal nudity for women (none for men), a lot of violence. The plot is interesting: art heist gone wrong and the main character hid a painting and cannot remember where he hid it.

The plot has a number of twists and turns and the movie is way over the top. I think I would have preferred a bit more restraint - some of the twists were unnecessary it seems to me. I was with the movie until around the last 20 minutes, then I'm like: "what the fuck?" After a couple of twists, the internal structure of the story doesn't really make much sense.

I am not sure I would necessarily recommend the movie. You won't be bored, but the plot falls apart.

So, I thought I'd ask Buffistas if that sort of thing ever happened to them. Maybe a friend LOVED something and kept trying to get you to watch it, or your queuelooks like mine, as if four people make the decisions and it's mostly just you.

I easily reach a saturation point when I feel like an overwhelming number of people (or even ads) are telling me I Must See the Awesome Thing! I think that's part of why I've never seen Parks and Rec and Avatar, among other things. Too much pushing, too many ads, too much Tom Cruise (which is to say, any Tom Cruise), too much on mu Tumblr dash. After a while I just go all Bartleby about it.

Yeah, ever since Pulp Fiction there's a threshold of friendly pimping beyond which I will dig my heels in and refuse to watch something.

Yeah, I suppose so. Especially since "Avatar" turned out, visuals aside, to be a mishmash of stuff I've seen in other movies, and kind of...well, dumb, imo. But I was pleasantly surprised by "Sleepwalk with me"

I don't find that the volume of pimping has a clear relationship to whether or not I'll like the piece. Certainly not one where much pimping means I'll dislike it. I just evaluate the recommendations from where they come--from my sister, pressure means one thing, from that guy on IO9 it means another.

I used to not see things just because they were so popular, but it turned out to be a dumb criterion, and I missed stuff I could have been enjoying from the git go.

So I remember watching Master and Commander when it first came out, but recalled very little other than Paul Bettany walking on an island, and lots of ocean. But I've spent the last eight months or so listening to audiobooks of the Patrick O'Brian novels, so after I finished Far Side of the World (the novel on which the movie is officially based), I figured I would watch the movie again.

And I have to say, it was really enjoyable. Mostly, however, because I recognized the characters (though Billy Boyd was woefully miscast as Bonden), and because Peter Weir didn't really base the movie on Far Side of the World. That novel involves a chase around Cape Horn and into the Pacific, ending rather anticlimatically when they find the antagonists have wrecked their ship on an island; as a result, there are no great sea battles in that book, unlike most of the others.

But Weir used the framework of the book to basically include as many little tidbits from all the other books he liked. So we have big sea battles and stormy weather at sea; Maturin naming a Galapagos tortoise after Aubrey; and the "lesser of two weevils" joke; and Maturin amputating the arm of one of the "squeakers"; and Aubrey playing the trick with the lamps on the raft; and Aubrey pretending to be a whaler (which doesn't actually work because whalers have crowsnests and men of war don't). It doesn't have the ridiculous business where Maturin falls out the stern window and Aubrey jumps in after him and they end up captured by female Polynesian cannibals, thank goodness.

Anyway, the movie does do a good job of showing the cramped quarters, easy loss of life, and ridiculous amount of alcohol that characterized the Royal Navy in the early 1800s. And both Bettany and Russell Crowe are good, though their characters are somewhat different from the ones in the books (although Crowe is much closer to Aubrey than Bettany is to Maturin, who is a small, ugly, clumsy man who also happens to be a spy and a natural philosopher).

I have yet to see Avatar OR Titantc