A Night Out

Tuesday night Maxine spent the night with Grandpa and Grandma. It was her first time to spend the night without Mommy and Daddy.

Apparently she woke up around 3 a.m. This has been standard for her for quite some time now. Not every night, but most nights. I get up, go to her room and try to calm her down. Sometimes it takes less than a minute, sometimes 30 or 40 minutes. Grandpa and Grandma were not successful, I'm afraid. She stayed awake until the sun came up and well into the morning. She took a long nap in the afternoon, and came home to me in the evening. Last night she slept the night through. Happy Daddy.

While Maxine was playing with Grandma and Grandpa, Horyon and I went out to dinner (Burger King, when only royalty will do) and a movie (Deja Vu, starring Denzel Washington and a slightly pudgy Val Kilmer). We liked the movie, and didn't start poking at the holes in the plot until we were halfway home. I checked the website trying to find Brad Pitt, because somehow I got it into my head the Val Kilmer was Brad Pitt. I still can't quite separate them in my head. Fortunately, Horyon was there for me, calling me an idiot and accusing me of making a joke.

So yeah, it was Val Kilmer.

Anyway, I found that it was released in November back in the States, while just hitting theaters here a week or two ago.

Leading to one thing that I will miss once we move to the States: Here it is pretty easy to go see a movie without reading/seeing/hearing a review, or even a trailer. I knew nothing about this movie, and Horyon only chose it because a coworker recommended it. The first review I read online gave away some major plot points, things that I really enjoyed having revealed during the course of the movie. I won't tell them to you, because I hope that you have the chance to enjoy the movie as it is, without preconceptions. So if you don't want preconceptions, stop reading. Go on to the next post.

If you want to do a SF movie, please get a hard SF writer to make sure that you aren't making your scientists look monumentally stupid. Sure they make mistakes. Who doesn't? But if they say that sending your guy back through the time machine will completely kill him, and that everything they sent through died completely, then that should be true. It shouldn't be just a matter of landing him in a hospital. And if you are going to make a typical SF device (like a time machine), please make it consistent. Is it just for viewing the past, or can you send stuff back? "We can only send something small, like a piece of paper. Or a human being. But you can't take your gun, because it would weigh too much."

For that matter, time travel makes for complex stories. This story made a fantastic effort, but seemed to have no clear idea of how to handle paradox. Branching time means that the new branch would be different from the original. No paradox and no branching means that everything that happened still has to happen, somehow. It seemed to me that they were trying do both.

In the original timeline, the detective went to the girl's apartment because her dead body was found. In her apartment he found blood and a message from himself after saving her. The problem is that in the timeline with the dead girl, he hadn't visited the apartment, and in the timeline in which he saved her, he would have to reason to go there.

Yah. It's all beside the point, except for one thing: if you think too much while you are watching, it becomes distracting. Keeps you from enjoying the movie. But as Horyon pointed out, it was very much character driven. The characters were likable, sympathetic, and not too dumb. Horyon cried at some bits, I didn't. I was too distracted by the bad science.

Enough of this. You don't come to Roblog for movie reviews.