Via reddit: “`Daily Show’ to air reports from Iraq”

Ironic, while at the same time piquing my curiosity. We’ll see how it goes.

So, with me done with schooling, Maik and Johannes wanted to spend some quality time with me ( ), and so we all decided to go to the Simpsons pre-premiere on Wednesday night. I don’t go to the movies much, especially not for this kind of film (with, say, science fiction, the big screen and fine-tuned audio setup add to the immersion; that doesn’t really apply in the comedy genre), but hey, why not.

I had to improvise a little because I don’t have a “real” diabetes bag yet, so I took this extremely old belt pack I found in my closet:

There were three notes in there with elementary school-esque handwriting, and I don’t really have a clue who they were from, or what they are about (I’m about 95% sure it wasn’t my writing of the time), so I threw them away. Maybe I shouldn’t have.

The second part to improv was getting the jeans to fit. I’m still severely underweight (in fact, I lost a little weight again, for whatever reason), so all my pants are far too wide even when I wear a belt at the tightest setting, and while I can deal with that at home, it’s a bit of an embarrassing sight in public. So? I wore another belt:

This worked reasonably well.

Oh, right, the movie. We were worried for a minute or two that we wouldn’t be let in because of the whole “premiere” thing, but on the contrary, we were actually given free donuts as well as a short talk by someone who apologized that they were out of Duff Beer to hand out (heh), and then proceeded to give three bags containing some sort of gift from 20th Century Fox. Felt like a bit of a waste of time to me (the guy was way too talkative), but it also kind of made the movie presentation feel a little more ’special’.

I gave a brief review of the film over at Facebook’s Flixster/Movies app, rating it 4 out of 5 stars and writing:

Weak story, as others have said. There were good chuckles all around, the pig plot was adorable, and Schwarzenegger was hilarious, but the whole EPA thing was, sadly, stretched out way too far.

I thoroughly enjoyed the amusing yet not particularly insulting impersonation of Schwarzenegger as president, with a mock way-over-the-top Austrian accent and a total indifference towards any political decisions. I wish they had had more than two (major) scenes of that.

I’m not a hardcore fan of the Simpsons. I don’t regularly or even frequently watch it, but when I do, I tend to get good laughs out of it, and the not-so-subtle social commentary is appreciable as well. Unfortunately, this movie felt like little more than a very long episode. I find it hard to imagine they couldn’t have come up with a better story. A few subplots were adorable (the pig) or hilarious (Schwarzenegger, see above), but others felt completely out of place (isn’t a Bart who develops an interest in a father figure terribly out of whack with the one we’ve come to know from the series?).

It was good comedy; hardly a bad movie. The thing is, it’s been anticipated for so long that it was probably impossibly hard for the makers to get even close to meeting fans’ expectations. It’s as if someone were to make a Myst movie; you can’t possibly expect an “avid” fan like me to like it, because of the invariably tendencies of fans to frantically overanalyze.

Would I watch it again? On TV, later on, I suppose. At the movies, probably not.

I’ve finally watched Spider-Man 1 and 2. I suppose I could go watch 3 now?

They were surprisingly good movies. Decidedly more popcorn-esque than, say, “Batman Begins”, but I’ve enjoyed them a lot. (Isn’t the ’science experiment gone awry’ thing getting old and way too predictable, though?)

Then again, both movies also reminded me what I dislike about motion pictures as compared to TV series: lack of character development. Seriously, am I the only one who keeps wondering “what’s going to happen next between Peter and Mary Jane”? (Does that make me a hopeless romantic? ) Or who sympathized with the constant identity crisis he keeps on going through?

The mix of CGI and live action is just about right, though some scenes could have used a little less artificial lighting.

Why do I have a feeling I’d be instantly hooked to a series spin-off?