Oi, it’s a late one tonight. But, that’s because the Ho and I had a movie night, at home! Been a while since we did one of those.
We still do one blu-ray mailing service from Netflix, which is cool, if only because we set our queue, and then don’t really think about too much and a movie comes when we send the other one back. I load it up with movies, obviously, that would fun to see in in full HD and surround sound. Or, at the very least, that aren’t on any of the premium channels and can’t be streamed. “The Searchers” for example, was great on both fronts; beautiful in flawless HD, and not available unless you get the disc shipped.
It was also really cool to have a night together with popcorn, both microwave, and caramel/dark chocolate holiday popcorn from trader joe’s, plus some clementine tiny oranges which are in season right now and SO FREAKING DELICIOUS.
So, we watched “Europa Report” tonight, which was a little “meh.” It is one of those “found-footage” movies, a la “Paranormal Activity,” and more appropriately analogous to “Apollo 18,” which was just about the most boring freaking sci-fi horror film ever made.
Oh my god, have to take a moment here to say that Liz, lying next to me and watching “It’s Judy’s Life” on her iphone, nightly ritual, just smacked herself HARD on the chest because she wasn’t holding her iPhone well enough. We giggled.
So, back to “Europa Report” — I do understand why this movie was commended by many because they *did* take pains to make most of the stuff scientifically accurate. And they *did* pay proper respect to what a mission such as one to Europa would mean historically. It’s nuts that we haven’t left our planet’s orbit since 1972. I mean, that was 50 freaking years ago! What is wrong with us?!
But, when it came to delivering beyond that, the movie was pretty bland. Liz doesn’t do well with scary movies, and even she was like “dude, that wasn’t scary at all.” And it wasn’t. They also made the decision to leave things out of sequence, which in a couple cases, really took the tension of out what we were watching because we already knew what was going to happen. A lot of it, I think, was due to how tiny they had to keep the budget on this, but still…there are cheap ways to make stuff suspenseful and scary. Limitations, so often, are an asset to creativity, and there just wasn’t much bold decision-making on this one in the thrills department.
For me, though, the science backdrop of the film was enough to help it avoid being a complete waste of time. It wasn’t. It was fine. I’d tell a bored person to watch it. And it was refreshing to see the “sci-fi thriller” tag avoid going completely into the horror realm. “Apollo 18” did that and it was so unbelievably stupid, I was only glad I was watching it on Cinemax as opposed to ever having paid for it.
Ugh. It’s so late. This post will say 11:50pm, but really it’s almost 2am. I just change the time so the date is correct ;P
Tomorrow is Sunday, which means agility, football, and some work. Today was gloriously work-free, I took an epic nap, and was able to spend the entire day with the Ho. That somehow *always* means for a good day…and today was 🙂