Hero vs. Purple Butterfly

This weekend was nicely bookended by movies.

Friday night I went to dinner at the B&O with Shane and Cathy, then back to their place to watch Hero. It was excellent. I didn't manage to see it when it was in theatres, but it's definitely a movie I'll be picking up on DVD. Soon. It was beautifully filmed throughout and parts of the story stood out as better than others (to me), but the ending is what nailed it for me. The conflict between what the emperor wanted to do and what he had to do was fantastic, well done, and counter to how Americans would have wanted the ending. It was perfect. Really and excellent film.

Saturday I went for comics with Seth, did some of the mounds of laundry left over from the holidays, and went to work to play City of Heroes with a bunch of people. My boss has a friend in from home and we got together there to play for a few hours. It was a good time and Gil (the friend) is a really good guy.

That evening I went to a birthday party for some old co-workers. They're good friends who both have birthdays around now, so they invited all their friends to a big bash in the back room of the Bad Juju Lounge. I'd been to the Bad Juju a couple of times before, but I had no clue that it had a back room. It does, but it's more of an emptied-out attic with some lights, a sound system, and a bar installed. It served as birthday party central pretty well. I picked up Shane and Cathy on the way over and since we didn't know anyone other than the birthday girls we mostly ended up talking to each other. Luckily we get along great, so we had fun. I got home around 2:30.

Sunday morning I woke up around 8:30, said, "No, uh-uh, not getting up yet," and went back to bed until 11:30 -- a bit later than I thought I'd get up -- and went for breakfast. On my way I played good Samaritan. I saw a little black dog almost get hit by the car in front of me, so I pulled over and called it to me. He came bounding over, no questions asked and I scooped him and up took him to the address on his collar (about a block away). No one answered, so I went for breakfast and left him in the car. When I came out I checked him out again and found that his collar had a phone number, too, so I called. The lady was very happy to hear her pup was safe and I drove over and dropped him off. Ain't I the best? Super cute puppy, though.

I spent a couple hours at work getting some things taken care of, but nowhere near as much as I needed to get done before Seth and I hopped in the car and drove over to the University district to see Purple Butterfly at the Grand Illusion theatre. The movie was . . . not bad, but not good either. It seemed like an experiment in telling a story with as few words as possible -- even to the detriment of the storytelling, characterization, and plot. Quel bummer. There were some good moments, but I was underwhelmed, despite the fact that the idea of a conspiracy/espionage story set in 1920's China sounded like it could be pretty cool to me.