Finally started getting my sleep schedule adjusted, only to send it completely out of whack this weekend.
Friday I just took a break from everything and caught up on comics. I read the first issue of Madame Xanadu (looks promising), re-read the first volume of Welcome to Tranquility and finally read the second.
On Saturday, we went up to LA to see The Drowsy Chaperone. It was the first time in years that I’d gone to see a play knowing little to nothing about it. It was a send-up of 1920s musicals, structured as a fan sharing a favorite from his record collection. It was fun, but I don’t really have any desire to see it again.
We ate at a restaurant called Tesoro, which turned out to be at the base of that amphitheater-like area below the Omni Hotel. I got lost earlier trying to get to it, because I got off the parking lot — excuse me, the freeway — a couple of exits before Grand, and figured that if I took 3rd I’d be able to catch up with where the directions said to be. Somehow I’d never noticed that there were multiple levels of streets with the same names. So instead of catching up to 3rd and Grand, we ended up in a tunnel underneath where we were supposed to be…
Today we went out to see Hellboy II, which was quite good. One of the things that makes it work is that, like Iron Man, it takes itself just seriously enough…no more. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but there’s a scene near the middle of the film that is absolutely WTF-worthy and hilarious, but it works. Also dropped into Borders to pick up the new Temeraire novel, and walked out with 3 books…
I also finished a novel, Ringworld’s Children, the fourth volume in the Ringworld series. I think my favorite of the series was probably the second one, The Ringworld Engineers. This one looks structured to be a final book, but then I suppose the others were too. It’s a series in the “Hey, I have another idea for this concept!” sense (or, in some cases, “Hey, fans pointed out scientific implausibilities, let’s see if I can come up with a story that fixes that”), not an arc sense.
I enjoyed The Drowsy Chaperone. What made it for me was the narrator character. He was funny, thoughtful, and unique/memorable. Everything else was just fun fluff, which I guess was the point. I probably wouldn’t see it again, though I might enjoy seeing what a completely different cast would do with the roles, you know?
Yeah, it definitely wouldn’t have worked nearly so well without the narrator.
The weird thing? The guy they had playing him in this cast looked (at least from the balcony) like Joss Whedon.
He reminded me pretty strongly of Michael Ian Black, more in mannerism than in appearance, but nevertheless.
I have also been lost seeking the Omni, and it is truly an awful mess trying to find it once you’ve taken one wrong turn.
I was half-convinced the directions were wrong, until I realized that since we had gone under Grand, there must be another 3rd St. directly above us on top of the hill. Then it became a matter of figuring out how to get from the lower level to the upper level.
Seriously, Downtown LA needs a 3D map.
Afterward, I found myself thinking of a discussion about the first film, in which someone brought up the scene where Hellboy is sitting on top of the roof, watching Liz and whatsisname…and instead of being a creepy stalker scene, he’s talking with this little kid, eating cookies (IIRC), and it becomes this funny, humanizing moment.
I’m going to have to track down more Guillermo del Toro stuff. We caught Pan’s Labyrinth during its theatrical run, and The Orphanage (which he didn’t direct, but produced), but that’s all I’ve seen. Pan’s Labyrith alone was enough to convince me he’s a good choice for The Hobbit, though.