Eragon

So this movie didn't suck. On an Epic Fantasy Movie Scale ranging from 1 for the travesty that was Dungeons & Dragons where the Waynes brother actually improved my enjoyment of the film--and I despise the Waynes brothers--to 5 for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I'd rate this one at a 2.5 or a 3. It was no Chronicles of Narnia, but the costuming and effects were decent and the acting while mediocre wasn't outright campy crap. The actors were pretty, the dragon was cool, and the setting was rustically beautiful stuff in Vancouver and Hungary.

The film's biggest flaw is inherited from the book series, and that would be the choice of Proper Nouns. "Galbatrox" is the kind of villain's name a ten year old would choose for his newly minted D&D campaign. It is a testament to Tolkien's dedication to his works that he took the language really, really, really seriously. If he named a character something, it had a deep meaning even if the reader didn't understand it. "Galbatrox" sounds like some prescription medicine or maybe a detergent. The names and excessive exposition at the start made it hard for me to get into it at first, and the run-length of just over an hour and a half was really too short to make it feel at all 'epic' despite the scope of the story.

A smart-ass reviewer I spotted at Rotten Tomatoes said "I left Eragon feeling like I'd just watched a Renaissance Faire stage its own production of 'Star Wars'". Pithy, makes for great reading in a review, but hardly fair. Uncle George made a big point of modeling Star Wars after the hero cycle and they all pretty much start with "orphan living with his uncle on a farm".

So, it was worth a matinee if you can see it sans crowds of loudly talking kiddies, but you'll have to ignore some really bad fantasy names to get into it. I'm sure it makes a bitchin' D&D setting for a home game.

1999

At the end of each year I pull out the files that are 7 years old and throw them out to replace them with the latest year. This year 1999 goes into the bin.

In my papers I found my student ID from graduate school. The picture is from 1994 and I'm stunned I ever looked that young. When I see an image of myself now I see my father's face. The person in this ID looks like a kid.

I also found an old calendar back when I kept a paper one. Flipping through it reminds me of just how hard 1999 had been. appleang and I separated early in the year and I moved into a little apartment where I spent the next 2 years. In Spring of 1999 I was going to school full-time trying to wrap up my graduate degree which I just wanted the fuck over. I then worked at a new job as Director of Technology for Kinesoft Development, which later hdan joined me at for a few more months of working together--probably the only bright spot for me in the fading years of the last millennium. Kim and I still had this lingering, festering wound of a relationship trying to become a friendship but burdened with an unbearable sense of abandonment. I cried myself to sleep many nights that year.

It was probably the hardest year of my life emotionally.

If only the pain of those years were as easy to put into the shredder to be forgotten as the bank statements.

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