You hear that, Mr Andersen?

50s mags, Bro's B'day, Narnia

As part of the research I was doing for my 1950s Hollywood game, I stumbled across the Tacky Times 50s Hollywood Special, with copies of articles from movie magazines -- including several articles on what girls should do to catch a man, such as this gem where male stars of the time tell young girls that they should let the men feel manly by being useless, and they should suppress their needs in favour of the needs of their husband. Uck.

Much more amusing was the Women's Weekly magazine from 1953 that we found in the old abandoned farmhouse near my second brother's. "Is mother tired? Maybe she has an iron deficiency!" I may scan something in from it later...

Oh, I should mention my brother's birthday -- a mate had given a homekill sheep, so for his birthday dinner he threaded it with rosemary and stuck it in a portable oven. And he'd gone out to try to shoot a goat as well, but he ended up shooting his first deer instead; this meant we had venison steaks about as big as three handspans. Yes, dinner that night was full of meaty goodness. (I feel I should point out for those readers who don't know him, my brother has been living in a rural area out near Featherston; he's been enjoying being able to sit on his porch in the evening, rocking in his rocking chair and shooting rabbits. He doesn't drink or have a banjo, but he can play the guitar, and one of my sisters gave him a ukelele for chirstmas.)

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Random movie thing -- IMDB's bottom 100. Someone in my room pointed the page out, and I agree with one of my workmates that it's a crying shame that Spiceworld is on this list; however, my objection to it's inclusion may be based on the fact that I saw it with about twenty other people, and we went to the fourth Aliens movie straight after. (One of the evening's organizers pitched it as "a night of unrelenting horror"; good luck with the new house, J&H!)

Anyway, this list may have inspired me to watch The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?. Or at least to watch the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version. Or at maybe just a synopsis of it, or something.

But first, I think I'll watch Clone High, which Jenni has very kindly lent me. I've had several people recommend it to me, so I'm quite looking forward to it. If nothing else, it'll let me understand about half of Jenni's quotes. ;)

Other movie things -- I finally got to see Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe yesterday. I was very impressed with the lion, and by Jardis in her chariot drawn by polar bears (giving me a definite "Queen Boudicca" vibe), and the whole development of the father/war stuff was pretty cool. (Does the polar bears thing count as a spoiler? I don't think so.... but it does make me want to write "OMG WTF POLAR BEAR", which may or may not be funny, depending on whether you've watched Lost, and read a certain recap.)

Susan got many of the best lines, and I can definitely see her attitudes foreshadowing what happens in the seventh book. I was also interested to note that they kept in a reference to women not going to war, but diluted it somewhat. But... almost all of the animals were not animated to the standard of the lion. And the actor's make-up wasn't always much cop, either -- the faun's ears seemed like they'd been glued onto the sides of his head, for example. Maybe if they'd twitched and/or moved a little? And the story often felt quite abrupt... On the whole, I liked it, and I think I need to see this movie again, but I don't think I need to see it at the movies.

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Work has started again with a bang; or rather, with a nasty rattling sound. Thanks to my workstation's hard-disk developing an alarming noise, I've been forced to replace the box that I've had since I started working at Weta. I'm sort of sad to see it go -- I gave it the same name as my box at university, bolton. (All the workstations in the computer science department were named after eateries, and mine was a reference to the Bolton Street Cafe -- not the English town. Or the singer.) At least my new machine is named after a ship from Elite (props to the old-skool playerz who remember flyin' the wire-framez -- BBC Master for life, yo!); but it's meant that Friday has been a bit of a wash as far as productivity is concerned, since it's hard to do much when you're having to reboot every half hour to fix some small problem. (Or to be more accurate -- to get one of your workmates who knows rather more about Linux systems than you to fix the problem. Hi Tim!)

Anyway, I hope I'll get to catch up on blogs this weekend, and say nice things about the excellent work that Paige is doing. ;) And maybe post a bit more about my holiday, if I can manage to make weeding my garden sound interesting. G'night.

Posted by svend at January 13, 2006 11:17 PM