Caught The Matrix: Reloaded last wednesday. Still not sure what I think about it. There was so much anticipation and so many preconceived notions that it's tough to be ojective. What I will say is that, five days later, I'm still thinking about it and discussing it. There were a few convoluted plot points and a lot of things left open for discussion. All in all, I'd say it was pretty uneven, with lots of action for about two hours, then some really important plot and story development for about ten minutes. By the time the actual thinking part comes in, you've been lulled into action-movie mode, and I for one was pretty lost for a while and didn't really understand what was going on until I had a minute to think about it. All in all, it was really enjoyable, if only for the spectacle, though I'm sure there's more to it than that. It's been a long time since I'd been that excited to see a movie. Actually, I don't know that I'd ever been that excited and optimistic about a movie ever. There was no way it could have been as mind-blowing as the first movie. That one was released with almost no hype, and totally blew everyone away. I don't think I've ever seen a bigger gap between expectations and results. This one, everyone was expecting so much that there was no way it could deliver. Anyway, I remember after seeing the first movie having a very long conversation about violence in movies and entertainment, and to a lesser extent, different philosophical beliefs, but after seeing this one all that's talked about is the movie itself. I guess that kind of sums up the difference between the original and the sequel.
Over the weekend, as we did last year, we went down to the OTB and put some money on the Preakness horse race. And as last year, after winning on the Kentucky Derby, all parties involved failed to win on the Preakness. The only person to collect on a winning ticket was ex-roommate Josh, who won a 4 dollar show bet, after spending 6 dollars to place the bet. We picked five horses, and bet ten different trifecta combinations, where you have to pick any three to finish 1-2-3 in any order. Naturally, one of the five we didn't pick ended up finishing second, so we got screwed.
After that, spent a good time at Matt's playing NBA Street Ball 2 on his Xbox. Then, as promised, I met Miss Charming Melodee in Manhattan for a nice dinner on me, courtesy of the United States Treasury Department. We decided on a nice Italian meal. Of course, I was rather later meeting her, though I thought that was an appropriately European thing to do. Still felt like a jerk though, for letting her sit there by herself for 15 minutes. It was kind of a cold night, and though we were in a heated area outside, I was seated outside the radius of the heaters and experienced a chilly bum for the evening. The food was just ok if you ask me, a little disappointing for what was paid. I decided to take a chance on a grilled wild boar dish, and I could taste a lot more of the grill than the wild boar. They told me they cooked it medium rare, which was a good think, because the taste might have been indistinguishable from a piece of charcoal if it was cooked any longer. Not only that, it was cold upon arrival, and it arrive well before Miss CM's food it, which is one of my restaurant pet peeves. Everything besides my main dish was satisfactory, however, and I do enjoy taking Miss CM out for a nice meal, since we can do it so infrequently. Though we do it more than we should.
I also finally ordered a damn iPod on Friday. Between that, the dinner, and the losses on the horse race, not a very fiscally responsible weekend. So much for the tax return.
I finally finished reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Toward the end of the 600 some pages, I got the same feeling I got toward the end of the matrix sequel, that being that there's just not enough time to bring all these ends together and resolve the story in a remotely satisfactory way. There was so much going on, and though in retrospect much of it tied together throughout and didn't need to be tied together at the end, the ending seemed sort of arbitrary, like it could've gone any number of ways. Still, I found it a largely compelling read, and have started Murakami's short story collection The Elephant Vanishes. The first chapter is actually, I'm assuming, an earlier version of the first chapter of the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and it's interesting to note the differences between the version that's a short story and the version that's a chapter in a 600 page book. Actually, while reading it, I often got the sense that the whole book was a collection of different stories, fixed up here and there and arranged into a book with just a small undercurrent of a common theme. It worked rather well, though, as while I was reading the book, I often had trouble distinguishing dreams from reality, and on one particularly ominous night, thought I was going crazy.
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