The Weekend

In which I totally forgot it was New Year’s eve. I thought for some reason that was supposed to be today.

The weekend passed pleasantly enough. Friday night was the first dinner party we had in our new apartment, and the first dinner party we had as a married couple. It was a surreal, very “grown up” experience if only because the other couple there had recently gotten married in November, and except for The Wife, and my friend Eugene’s Wife, everyone there had known each other for about five or more years.

I had a weird moment when we were sitting at the table and remembering how the guy sitting at the table across from me used to play all-nighters at his office on various games, and now here we were, preparing dinner, eating it, talking about how their new house is coming along, and callig it quits before midnight, because people wanted or needed to get home. A bit of a contrast to playing Counterstrike until sunrise and then slinking off to the nearest hawker center just in time for breakfast before crawling into bed to sleep in until 4 or 5 pm…

Saturday was movie day yet again. This time it was The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe. Generally I liked it. I think the pace was a little off, with so much emphasis put on the character development at the start, that it left very little screen time for similar development in Narnia once the film shifted over to the enchanted lands. It was a shame, because while they did a wonderful job making sure you could really buy the character’s motivations for actions good and bad, the lack of similar screen time for the “Narnian” characters tended to kill–or at least mute, somewhat–the emotional impact of later scenes for them.

Still, aside from a few questionable make-up effects (The cyclops characters looked disappointingly cheap. ESPECIALLY by WETA standards) it was a grand looking movie, and if I were a ten year old, precocious, literate boy with a penchant for fantasy, this movie probably would have been the greatest of my life. I could really see how the director understood the archetypal appeal of what C.S. Lewis had written; the whole mundane-children-are-in-reality-destined-to-be-magical-beings-of-importance-somewhere else plot taps into profoundly universal children’s fantasy. It was handled right here, and I expect some kids will probably cite this film as an all time favorite.