December 17, 2006, 3:45 am : A random spouting of information.

I haven’t blogged in a little while so I thought I should make a post. Unfortunately I don’t have anything too important to talk about so I’m just going to spout a bit of news and ramblings that are running around in my brain.

First off, Rose Parade news. Apparently I’m no longer walking in the parade in costume. This is awesome since this is something I really wasn’t looking forward to. If I had awesome looking stormtrooper armor it would be a different situation but a pseudo-Imperial Guard costume doesn’t really do it for me. Supposedly now I will be inside the Endor float helping out with the Ewoks, Chewie, C-3PO and anyone else on the float who needs help. It may not sound too glamorous but it’s a lot more my style. So, if you planned on looking for me in the parade you’re not going to see me, but I’ll be there. Communication regarding the parade has been sketchy at best and no one has officially told me that my job has changed; they did mention it to Kelsey though so I think it’s for sure. Kelsey will still be on the Naboo float wearing the black dress from Episode 1. I’m excited to see her in all the make-up. It should be really cool.

Tonight we went to the Lucasfilm Holiday Party. It was pretty fun. Parties aren’t really my thing but it wasn’t bad. There were three floors, which were essentially three different parties. On the first floor there was a sort of classically themed party. There was a jazz band playing when we first walked in, later in the night there was another band doing Sinatra songs. Also on that floor was an art exhibit consisting of art submitted by employees. You can imagine that a company such as Lucasfilm would have some amazing art submissions, and they did. What I thought was most interesting was the fact that a lot of my favorite work in the exhibit was submitted by people who aren’t in any sort of art departments at work.

The second floor was more modern and looked a little too much like a high school prom (a very cool prom though). There was a mystery band set up to play here and there was a lot of speculation as to who the band would be. I heard rumblings of Los Lobos and Santana. When the band finally came up it turned out to be Super Diamond, a Neil Diamond cover band. They were actually really good, the singer sounded exactly like Neil. If I was just listening and not seeing it I would have thought it really was the Diamond!

The third floor was decorated like hell for some reason. Behind the stage there was a giant 3-D hell-like mural thing, complete with demons and Satan. In this room there was a live salsa band. Despite the awesome décor we didn’t hang around there much on account of the salsa.

I met a few cool new people, saw several familiar faces and tried my best to be social but there were several people I was sad not to see at the party. All in all it was a pretty fun time. It was nowhere near as cool as the Halloween party though. Oh well. Sorry for not having any photos of this event, both our camera batteries were dead. If someone else I know posts some I’ll link them here.

The last thing buzzing around in my brain is about the movie Eragon. If you don’t care about it or you don’t want any spoilers you can just stop reading now. I’m not a movie reviewer and don’t typically write long drawn out posts about movies I’ve seen, but when a movie comes out that I really care about, such as this, it’s nice to be able to get some of this out of my head.

Eragon, and its sequel Eldest, are two of my favorite books of all time. They’re just amzing. So, when I heard they were making a movie about it I was really excited. Fast forward to Friday, I’ve been waiting a year and a half or so for this movie. I’ve seen the trailers and it looks awesome. I’m excited. But as we all know, when a movie is based on a book, bad things can happen. Things get changed. Characters get omitted. Whole plotlines go unseen. To say this was the case with Eragon would be an understatement. The differences between the movie and the book are staggering. They basically took the general plot and characters of the book and changed everything else.

One obvious thing that doomed Eragon a bit from the start is the Lord of the Rings films. Let’s face it, most books in the fantasy genre like Eragon and LOTR have similarities. The plots may be completely different but the general “world” is similar. There are elves, dwarfs, castles, all of that. The filmmakers who created Eragon were obviously trying so hard to keep the look of Eragon different than LOTR that they ended up having to change a lot of the details. We all know that elves have pointy ears, but not in Eragon. We all know that dwarfs are tiny little guys with beards, in Eragon, not so much. It really feels like they looked at all the visual elements of Eragon and thought “how can we change this to make it different than LOTR”. Some of the results are a little disappointing and some are an acceptable change. Two quick examples. In the book the urgals, the main army of “bad guys”, are supposed to “resemble men with bowed legs and thick, brutish arms made for crushing. They have yellow, piggish eyes, twisted horns protruding above the ears, and greyish skin”. In the film they just look like big fat guys, human in every way. I wouldn’t be shocked if the whole Urgal army consists of the Oakland Raiders and Denver Broncos. I’m sure they were trying to keep them looking different than the orcs of LOTR but come on, they could have done better. On the other hand, Jeremy Irons looked amazing as Brom who, in the book, looked very similar to Galdalf from LOTR. I’m not going to go through and name all of the other multitudes of changes made from the book to movie since that would take me forever but trust me, there are many.

There were a lot of great things about the movie. ILM did an amazing job with Sephera and the other dragons in the film. I think they really got the spirit of what a dragon should look and move like. The scene when little baby Sephera is hached is one of the cutest things ever. Jeremy Irons and Ed Speelers both did well in their respective roles. Durza looked great and was truly a freighting figure. And the Ra’zac, while nothing at all how they’re originally described in the book, look amazing.

After watching the movie I came to a conclusion about myself: my views on movies have matured greatly. If I would have seen this movie about two years ago I would have been bitter. The kind of bitter some “old school” Star Wars fans feel about the prequels. But now, I was happy. This movie was still a lot of fun! It was nothing like the book that I truly adore and nothing like I was expecting, but it was still great. After all the hundreds of movies I’ve watched, after all the movies based on books, comics, graphic novels or video games that I’ve seen I’ve finally got to the point where I can really separate the movie from it’s original source and accept it for what it is. Sure I wish they had followed the book as accurately as LOTR or even, to a lesser extent, the Harry Potter films, but they didn’t. And it’s still a good movie.

That right there is the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written in my life.

December 7, 2006, 1:54 am : Kelsey’s Famous!