dev_chieftain | the rich folk get their money back when the bank goes belly up

10:30am:
11:00am: no paycheck info forthcoming.

Mysteriously, we're not getting paid today. 'Probably monday', they say.

Just in case it wasn't clear, this makes me pretty angry.

Yesterday we watched The Return of Captain Invincible, which Danny had sought out either because he wanted to see Christopher Lee be awesome, or hear more music composed by Richard Hartley, or possibly because he wanted to see Alan Arkin.

Bret! Hey, Bret. Remember your concerns about Captain America and how I said maybe there was another movie that did what you were talking about? This is that movie! It is MADE for you. It is about a bitter superhero who's washed up and drunk because McCarthyism screwed up his life, who wants to go back to his glory days in 1950. Also, it's loaded to bursting with the comedy of awkwardness. Honestly I can't imagine any of the gang not liking this movie. It was pretty awesome. But it specifically addressed the things you were talking about, so I thought of you!

We also watched Gattaca last night, which I had watched at age 12 and found kind of slow and boring. Having rewatched it, I must say that 12 year old me was right that it is slow and CAN be boring; but with the help of subtitles and being older, the movie worked for me a lot more. It's a cool plot, kind of complex for a sci-fi movie, honestly; there's a murder mystery going on alongside three separate important character storylines, which is pretty ambitious and works out well BECAUSE the movie's so slow and takes its time to address everything. It's not exactly a subtle movie, except in a couple of places where it is. The world proposed here isn't really a feasible one (but it did make me think of the SMBC about 'genetically perfecting' one's children and how that would immediately get out of hand), but it's still an interesting problem.

One critic apparently already raised this point: I do think it's fair to say that the plot is a little weak since it revolves around the idea of someone who's likely to have a heart condition wanting to become an astronaut anyway. In real life there's a lot of legitimate safety concerns around wanting to make sure that people who go into space are as physically and mentally healthy as possible. Maybe this is not so in the sci-fi setting of Gattaca.

The story ultimately becomes the tale of three concurrent suicides, and that's probably what made this the worst possible choice to watch right before bed. There's a guy who murders someone and is willing to suicide in terms of his career and being put in jail, all for the sake of his pet project; there's a guy who literally commits suicide; there's a guy who knowingly puts himself in a situation that, given the uncertainty of whether his heart will give out or not, is likely to result in his death-- he doesn't expect to make it back, and he doesn't care. There's a sort of cold horror to that that really screams 'yes, this is sci-fi!' to me.

So it was a good film, but overwhelmingly depressing, and maybe a little unnecessarily so.

Oh yeah, also, there was exactly one woman and one black guy. How is it that the movie from the 70's with multiple scenes of half-naked men and women giggling about a supervillain ex-Nazi who wanted to purify New York by killing all of its ethnic groups is less racist and sexist than you, Gattaca? Howwwww?!