My new years was pretty tame, I was up at midnight but not particularly paying attention to the time. I had dinner and a rented movie with the fam. I called the 'Phew a liar in front of god and everyone for the second time at a family gathering I can remember. I actually don't think he's a liar so much as he has the compulsive need to disagree with me. I don't know if he's sensed I dislike him more than I used to, or that I just don't hang around him enough for him to like me, but I'm beginning to get the idea he dislikes me. But he's fickle... sometimes he seems to like me. I don't know. It's pointless to examine the brains of small children, they don't have the same thought processes as grown ups.

Phew two seemed to take a shine to me, he's always been fairly shy but actually high fived me a couple of times and the like.

Today my dad and I hung out again, we saw Tom Cruise in the smash hit, "Tom Cruise wears an eyepatch." Valkyrie was fairly predictable, the sort of movie that's not bad enough to be bad but not good enough to be memorable. I dunno why, but I don't really hate Tom Cruise like normal people, and a lot of the other cast are people I love: Terrance Stamp, Bill Nighy, Eddie Izzard (sort of weird to see him in a totally serious role but he did well), and Kenneth Branaugh (I don't actually like him but everyone else seems to think he's awesome). And I did like the eyepatch, I dunno. Eyepatches are just cool. The last downfall is probably the fact that you know how it ends before you even get in there, and you really wish it didn't, because even if you hate Tom Cruise you generally want him to win vs Der Fuhrer.

Oh, the other movie I saw was Eagle Eye, which again fits into the not particularly memorable category, but it was okay. One, every movie with Shia Lebeouf in, I think "the beef the beef the beef" over and over, cause that's what his name is in french. Two, I had fun thinking of which stories I thought it plagiarized from. Like... technically, I don't blame Eagle Eye, because at least it stole from several different places and sort of mixed them into something new, as opposed to just stealing wholesale like most movies nowadays. But anyway, as everyone realizes, it's one part enemy of the state, one part I robot, and then like one part new stuff. But the really intriguing thing is it reminded me of this hitchcock movie, The Man Who Knew Too Much. Which, maybe I just want things to be Hitchcockesque, I was comparing The Happening to The Birds not that long ago, but anyway, several parallels: 1) normal people being coerced to help terrorists 2) the woman has to decide whether or not to save her child by helping the terrorists vs letting other innocent people die 3) the assasination being planned to happen exactly when one part of a piece of music is played, 4) the sort of ending where the person basically stops the assasination by yelling and making everyone stop what they're doing instead of actually really jumping in front of a bullet or engaging in any physical heroics (at least at the end).

So I guess the new bits were okay, and sort of jamming the three other things together is creative, but it seemed like parts taken from Enemy of the State and The Man Who Knew Too Much were done a lot more elegantly, believably and suspensefully in the orig. movies. It's not bad, but I would tell people to go see those other two movies first, and if they were still really bored watch this and skip I robot (which also has a small part with the Beef in it).

Oh, also today I read some short stories by Neil Gaiman. I actually bought the book back in my Borders days, and never read it until now, but I stumbled upon a hilarious note from Todd who worked there inside, which was totally awesome. As for the stories themselves--they're all pretty good but he ends every damned one of them on a mysterious note, nothing ever gets resolved. Plus he has some poems in there and I don't really care for that sort of thing.