Easter Movie Marathon

Whew... so, I made it through Easter relatively unscathed. Normally Easter is the crest of the Blockbuster Big Movie season, and since it coincides with a long, long four day weekend it's practically compulsory to deprive yourself of sleep and see as many movies as you can, for better or for worse.

Movie damage so far:
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Friday)
- No movie on Saturday... rest
- Hot Fuzz (missed 10 min of climactic plot expounding) (Sunday)
- Hot Fuzz (it was that good) (Monday)
- 300 (Tuesday)

I really am a big fan of Simon Pegg who did Hot Fuzz and before that, Sean of the Dead. He's got a wry sense of humour and his own distinctive style of cinematography and story-telling which is pretty rarely successful these days. Most times people will stick to the tried and tested and succeed in spite of unoriginality, or they'll try something different with terrible results thereby encouraging everyone to be the same.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was only memorable for the last line of the movie where Michelangelo proclaims "Argh! He's in my mouth... he tastes... disgusting!" which, when you have a peurile sense of humour you can take out of context and it's quite funny ;)

300 was... underwhelming. The first fight was good, but after that the mechanics of the situation made it too predictable and there was nothing new to do, really. I mean, there's only 300 of them against a million. So they're not going to win. And not too many of them can die at a time or the movie will be over already!

On Sunday, the day of rest, I went out to dinner with mum, dad, boubou, phoebe and mum's friend Katie. We went to the chinese place at Greenwood in North Sydney. Big mistake. The Greenwood Tavern had some really loud rave going on at the same time; I couldn't stop bobbing my head to the music. Some of the people in the restaurant had the wristbands on that proclaimed that they had spent their $40 or whatever and were simply lining their stomachs with the greasiest food they could in preparation for the night ahead.

One particularly noisy bunch right behind me were really annoying. There were three of them, two boys and a girl, who looked to be in their early twenties and they were celebrating a birthday with way too much food for the three of them, plus a bottle of champagne. I was concentrating on my dinner when i heard the owner of the restaurant suddenly shouting out "WAit! WAIT!! Hey wait!!!" What do you know, the three noisiest diners from right behind me had finished half of the food and champagne that they ordered and then bolted away without paying for it. It kind of put the whole restaurant in a bit of a subdued mood after that. A small mood-lifter after dinner when we were walking to our cars was when two kids handing out flyers to the next all-night rave tried to give their flyers to boubou and Phoebe. I assured them that they had already got their tickets and we shared a bit of a laugh.

Earlier on Sunday, Mindy had just arrived in London. She sounded like she'd taken the long flight pretty hard. She was tired, scared, headachey and was bleeding from her ears! I wish I'd been there to baby her and tuck her in and fuss over her until she was feeling a bit better =(

Monday was a pretty good day. I got up late, talked with Eugene and Gareth for a bit before inviting them to come hang out with Luke and Ceez for a while before seeing 300 at Imax. Gareth wanted to get on with some work, but Eugene was keen so we headed around to Lane Cove. We played on the Wii for a while before realising that Luke was a bit handicapped in Splinter Cell. We were creeping along corridors, sniping and strangling guards and generally slipping through the shadows with ruthless efficiency until we came across some lazer trip wires. I naturally stopped when i saw them, but Luke continued edging forward. I assumed he knew some trick to slipping past them, so i watched in mute amazement as he sidled right up to the, extremely close, and then into them... blowing us both to bits. Game over. It turns out that he couldn't see the red lazer beams at all. Blast his colourblind eyes!

Luckily Ceez had made a perfect chocolate gateau to distract us from our failure. Brunet rated it as very good and I agree - it was really rich and soft - not too dense at all - and quite sweet without being sickly. The layer of syrupy jam in the middle was still warm from being melted too =)

After the cake we headed into the city to get to see 300 at Imax. Eugene had asked us if we already had our tickets, but we assured him that not that many people went to Imax and we'd have no problems getting our tickets for the 9pm session after dinner. Nevertheless, we decided to get tickets before dinner, just to be safe. So we rocked up at 6:30pm, two and a half hours before the movie, and were confronted with sold out signs all around! Damn it, Eugene was right. So we got tickets for the 6pm session for the following day on the Tuesday.