Serious productivity today

We totally rearranged our living room, sorted and filed our videogames, bought curtains for our big glass doors and build ourselves a new media stand. Our living room is a lot more conducive to company, now, and it would be a great space to play boardgames in if, you know, we had any friends around. What's more, there's now room for a real live Christmas tree, which I know mi hermana will be happy about. It also feels more... adult, somehow. Like we've arranged the furniture in the manner of real people, not college student sensibilities, and that makes me feel happy. There're still not much room for our huge honkin' dinner table, but you can't fix everything. We haven't gotten the curtains up yet, either, because I think we're going to need a drill, which we don't have here at the apartment.

So anyway, boring and inane stuff out of the way. On Monday we're going to launch into the second half of my Ottoman Empire project, which I think is going to be okay, I'm not sure. I know it's going to start out strong, with a modified version of Diplomacy which is probably going to take up the entire afternoon.

Also, I hate to be opportunistic and awful, but it seems as though current events are working to give me more discussion material for my class, which is a great aid. I think I've got more than enough material to cover the last two weeks.

I'm on this Saturday, so it's going to be a six-day work week, and added on top of that is the fact that it's my evening shift on Thursday and I've agreed to stay late on Saturday night in order to help with a school event. So I've got six days of work, two of which are eleven to thirteen hours in length. It's going to be a little rough, especially because now I have to leave my swanky new living room, and of course my wonderful lady.

Oh, bee tee dubs, I went out with Lily and Kari and saw Enchanted. And, truthfully, I liked it a lot. It's funny, but I am exceptionally impressed with the fact that they made a movie so good out of a premise which constructed a trailer which was so sophomoric. Some basic thoughts:

Con: The first ten minutes of the movie made it so horribly apparent to me that Disney can still do two-dimensional animation and make it astonishing, so the fact that they are not doing so is positively a crime against entertainment. This point made me really, genuinely irritable.

Pro: The movie slowly grows towards being good over the first half an hour, though the "That's How You Know" number is nothing less than sheer brilliance, and made me laugh aloud with merriment and then grin for five solid minutes.

Pro: The movie goes to a place where I knew it could but didn't think it would. So, way to capitalize on, uh, actual character development and complexity, rather than the opposite. Giselle really is charming, thanks in no small part to Amy Adams, who sells it to the N-th degree.

Con: Resolution is, maybe, a little shaky, maybe a little lame.

Con: Um, your villain can't be cute. That doesn't work. It sends mixed messages.

In general, good stuff. I wouldn't own it, nor would I go so far as Ryan would as to say that this is an assurance that Disney is back on the right track-- and you know, as far as recent Disney films go, I would say that if you haven't seen any of them then you should probably go ahead and view Meet the Robinsons first, but Enchanted is by no means a waste of your time, especially if you are, like me, a twelve-year-old girl at heart.

Also, a thought: Judging by the trailers, The Golden Compass is going to be somewhere between "satisfactory" and "wonderful." But you know what? Considering the difference in scale between the beginning and the end of the trilogy, in my mind The Golden Compass almost doesn't matter. They just have to nail the end of The Amber Spyglass, and that's it.

Not that I wouldn't mind three astonishing movies. But, frankly, this trilogy is already down both Peter Jackson and Howard Shore, so at the moment I'm sort of taking what I can get.