Mon 22 May 2006
I didn’t take any photos this weekend. It turned out that we didn’t do any sight-seeing. On Saturday, we had a very nice breakfast out on the patio deck of the tennis club resort we were staying at, then went back to the room. As Mr. W took a nap, I went to the lobby and got on their computer to research local movies. 100-degree weather is not one to randomly wander around in and keel over from heat exhaustion. The adult pool was full as we were leaving breakfast already. I found a theatre half a mile away from our resort that was showing DaVinci Code, so I went back to the room, killed some time and then we walked by foot to the theatre. This was a great idea, since Palm Springs was pretty uncrowded so we weren’t in a line hundreds of people deep trying to see this movie (as we would have been back home), AND the theatre was large with reclining leather seats and armrests that you can lift out of the way and tuck between the seat backs. And, all movies before 6pm (I think) were only $6! The movie was pretty good. I don’t know why the reviews have been lukewarm. It stayed true to Dan Brown’s novel except on a few minor points of deviation which I agreed with. For example, the casting of Tom Hanks as the hero Robert Langdonwas odd because the character in the novel was described as young and muscle-clad, which Tom Hanks no longer is, if he ever was. So they killed the inkling of romance that the novel hinted at in the end between Robert Langdon and the young French officer Sophie Neveu.
As an aside, on the drive to work today, I found out why the reviews were so mixed. A radio personality on a local hip hop radio station did movie reviews, and if his IQ were higher than the number of appendages on his body, he wouldn’t have hated the movie so much. His complaints, after he attempted 6-7 times to even pronounce DaVinci Code correctly: “This is why I don’t go to church! It was sooo boring! There were some kids playing in the aisle, and I wanted to go play with the kids, I was so bored. There was too much talk in the movie. And there were subtitles! When I go to the movies, I don’t wanna read! But in one scene there’s subtitles when they’re speaking another language, and then in the next scene, the same characters are speaking English again. I’m like, Why can’t you just speak English through the entire movie, then? Why you gotta speak in another language and make us read subtitles? And there was this dude who was all pale, brotha needed a TAN or something, but in every other scene he’s standing there naked in front of a cross and you see his back and his ass, and he’s torturing himself! I don’t know what the hell was up with that, he needed to go out and get a tan! I don’t understand why Tom Hanks was out by himself at Biblical times, all by himself, just this one American. I don’t know what he was doing there. And there were symbols everywhere, there were symbols on the floor, on the wall, on the ceilings, all this code and symbols and stuff. I didn’t like it AT ALL.” I’m not even going to bother getting into how RETARDED this guy is, but you’ll all know if you watch the movie or have read the book.
So anyway, we were walking back to the resort from the movie theatre when we passed by a ticket store for a traveling show called “Cirque Dreams.” Mr. W is really into Cirque du Soleil stuff, so I got us tickets, even tho it’s not a Cirque du Soleil production. I thought it was gonna be a bite off of Cirque du Soleil, but it was great! Altho it’s less theatrical than Soleil shows, I think the acrobatics and stunts in this group was better, riskier, more advanced than Cirque du Soleil. Plus, this troupe was more male-dominated, which fit in with the sexual orientation makeup of current Palm Springs well, and men are just stronger and can do more stuff than women. We caught their last show, they’re now traveling out of state.
Sunday, since we had just a good experience with DaVinci Code, we walked to the same theatre to catch Over the Hedge. That movie got a few chuckles out of me. It was clever and funny and witty, with some big names on the cast (Bruce Willis, Wanda Sykes, Avril Lavigne off the top of my head). It still maintained the feel-good moral-learned end of any movie aimed at kids. I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that the plot wasn’t darker.
It was weird to leave such bright and sunny weather that required misters to spray off of restaurant ceilings onto the poor parched sidewalk-trudging pedestrians, and drive into cold overcast Los Angeles threatening to rain.
