The global conspiracy of confusion.
Not today.
Okay. One. And it's not major, honest.
This is how I wanted to see one scene go:
MULDER looks at SCULLY'S face searchingly.
MULDER
How can you give up, after
what we saw last night?
SCULLY
We saw a train and some bees,
Mulder. That's it.
Okay, here's another one that's been bugging me: Isn't it, like, really cold in Antartica? And if it's summer in London, wouldn't it be, uh, winter in Antartica? Just curious.
The X-Files the movie is much like The X-Files the show: long on tease, short on substance. There is substance, some things do get explained. For the most part, however, the "big stuff" is always handled like this (and if you're a fan of the show, you'll recognize this dance):
- Eerie music wells up.
- Something completely normal, like a truck, appears on screen.
- Mulder and Scully give one another significant glances, as though this finally proves their case...somehow.
It happened so many times that I began to think that I was just stupid, somehow, not getting the significance of what this Ford truck meant. And it never gets explained. Or hardly ever. It's annoying.
I'd say go see it if you're a fan of the show, because one major arc element gets explained and you go, "OH!" But I don't think it's a good stand-alone movie.
Fernando called me this morning at 9:30 and woke me up, which I found really odd--I knew I wasn't going running this morning, but I've been waking up at 6:37 precisely for the past week or more, so I don't know why I slept in today. He asked if I wanted to see The X-Files and I said okay.
I had a doughnut for breakfast. This actually accomplished two things: I'd been craving doughnuts recently so I got rid of that craving, and I discovered that I was hungry again a half-hour later, which I never am after my bowl of oatmeal. So I shan't go the doughnut route again for quite some time.
We met at the AMC in Burbank and sat in the theatre for 45 minutes waiting. We had a discussion about having adults-only theatres--that is, theatres where only people who could act like intelligent adults would be let in, which would leave out the inane teenagers behind us who actually responded to the slide show that prompts one to "Applaud if you are seeing double double."
After the movie I asked Fernando if it had made any sense to him. He said yes, so I asked him to explain the conspiracy to me. "Well, I don't know if it's a conspiracy..." he said.
"Okay, then what are the old men doing?"
Fernando haltingly put something together, and what he said made a butt-load more sense than I thought the movie did. Perhaps I am just jaded. Perhaps I am tired of the tease.
One thought that kept flitting through my mind watching this movie is that the transfer to video is going to be hell--it was hard enough making out what was on-screen during great parts of the film: on video, where the range of brightness is lessened, the screen will be black unless the transfer is done really well.
What a nerdly observation on my part.
I came home and read The Concrete Blonde, thereby ending my run of Michael Connelly novels.
Then Darin called. Yay! He's alive and well and kicking ass at MacHack in Dearborn, MI. He evidently did really well at the Programming Contest, solving more problems individually than any other team did as a team. (Darin was part of a team, but he solved 4 of the 6 problems that they solved, and he almost had 5 but time ran out.)
He's also run into some people he hasn't seen for a long time, which I'm really glad about--that's one of the reasons I wanted him to go, even though I knew I would be sacrificing our precious Snuggling Time. Down here in LA he's not getting the face time with people that he would get if we were still up north, so he's falling out of contact with them. I don't want him to have the contacts just for jobs (which doesn't hurt) but so he can talk about programming and computer stuff with his peers.
Tomorrow I have 2, count them, 2 parties to go to. It's like I'm having a social life while Darin's away.
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Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com