Oooohhhh, shiny new things to play with...

See what happens when I go off for a day to live in the real world? I come back here and the walls have shifted again and there are whole new rooms...all new realms.

I've been looking forward to this feature for some time (thanks, Brian; I know how busy you are), and now it is here and I'm not sure what I want to do with it.

I've got another blog, which has gone unposted-in for a couple of months due to aforementioned real-world stuff...mainly my mother's less-than-wonderful health. But here I am, starting up one here, as well.

So, who knows what will turn up here. Might be a film or book review. Might be social or political commentary. Might be almost anything.

This time I'll just say that I was in a movie theatre today for the first time since Christmas before last. Now that we've got a 3-dollar all day, every day theatre just down the street from here, I hope I'll be going to more movies.

It isn't a first-run theatre, but as I understand it, that will mostly mean that new films won't play there for the first week or two of their release. But the new Indiana Jones film is already there, so I suspect the wait for all but the biggest films won't be too long.

I probably wouldn't have gone today, but my best friend knew I needed some relaxation and took me off to see the new Narnia film (I guess it's new; it was new to me), Prince Caspian. I haven't seen the first film all the way through, and I've never read any of the books, so I was kind of hesitant to see it, but I really liked the film a lot. It was different than I expected it to be, although I can't describe that feeling any further than that.

The only thing was, I kept expecting Prince Caspian to say, "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." Which is really funny, because when I was browsing around the IMDB page for the movie, I discovered that the actor who played the prince claims to have based the accent he used in the film on Inigo Montoya's accent in The Princess Bride.

Prince Caspian was not the only film I saw today, though. During two visits today to the rehab center where my mother is recovering from the hip surgery she had a couple of weeks ago, we sat and watched parts of a couple of Charlie Chaplin movies on TCM. I saw a good portion of Modern Times and parts of The Great Dictator and another which I think was The Gold Rush.

I've only ever seen some of Chaplin's short films before, and enjoyed them but sort of wondered what all the shouting was about. But after seeing big parts of these films today, I realize why he is so often called a genius. There was a bit in The Gold Rush that had to do with a cabin hanging half over a cliff before it goes plunging into the abyss...one of the funniest bits I've ever seen in any film, anywhere. Later, watching Modern Times, I was laughing so hard that people were sticking their head in the door to see what was so funny. And Chaplin's send-up of Hitler making a speech...completely on point and completely hilarious at the same time.

How did I go so long without seeing these movies?