The Day After Tomorrow

So we went to The Day After Tomorrow on Saturday. All I can say is wow. I expected special effects to beat the band and the random destruction of both east and west coast cities. But what I didn't expect was to actually care about the characters. Nor did I expect to think about it much longer than 5 minutes after I left the movie theater. But I did care about the characters and I have found myself thinking back on it several times in the last couple of days. While it wasn't the most intelligent summer blockbuster to ever be made, it is a lot better than the mediocre reviews it's getting might indicate.

Sure, the science is totally whacked. This kind of scenario could never happen in the time frame that is set up in the movie. But what did reviewers expect? Did they expect this to happen slowly over the course of 20 years and by the end of the movie all the characters that we were introduced to hadn't aged at all or were played by other actors? It was the fact that it did come on so fast and that it was a life or death type thing that drove the human element of the story. It was so nice to see that the story of the people being affected by the storm was not ignored.

It was also great to see that they didn't blow all their great special effects shots in the first 20 minutes of the movie. I mean, hell, the famous frozen New York City scene didn't even show up until at least an hour into the movie--and it was probably later than that. Heck, it took a long time for the storm to even affect NYC. I thought for certain that would be the first thing to happen. But thankfully, it wasn't. The pacing was, if not perfect, pretty damn good for a summer effects picture.

But according to Wendy, Jake Gyllenhaal has lost all his indie movie cred now that he's been in a big summer movie like The Day After Tomorrow.

So it's Memorial Day and I work in an hour. Still getting used to the schedule and I'm kinda irritated about not really having a day off this week because my day off will be Friday and we'll be flying to Arizona that day. It'll be okay though. I'm going to try to walk to work today because it's a totally beautiful day out and I'm wondering if I could do that and drive less. Plus that'd be a way to get some much needed exercise in my life. So who knows. We'll manage, as we always do.

Oh, and here's one more cool link. I'm not sure how this works, but it's a blog that's blogging 1,000,000 love songs. Take a look. This week's are pretty interesting. If what they've done so far is any indication, at 30 songs per week, it'll only take 641 years to finish. Guess they better get crackin'!