One weekend, two movies

Usually, I'm so tired when the weekend rolls around that one movie at the theaters is about all I can handle, and, even with that, there's no guarantee I'll be watching it headache-free. For the past few days, however, I've been trying a new tactic. In three days, I've gotten as much sleep as I previously got in a week. Not half bad. All I do is set a "bedtime alarm" - the hard part is making myself stick to it, but so far so good.

Anyway, all this extra sleep has allowed me to see both movies I wanted to see this weekend. If you've paid any attention to the poll on the top left corner of this blog, you can probably guess that those movies are The Time Traveler's Wife and District 9.

With The Time Traveler's Wife, I ran into my usual difficulty with movies based on books. I have a very hard time not comparing these movies to the books they were based on, and this one was no exception. I thought it was an ok movie, which saddened me, because the book was more than just ok. Although I haven't read the book in a while, I was able to tell that scenes had been cut out and I was even able to remember quite a few of those scenes. For the most part, I wasn't particularly bothered about any single scene being cut out or changed (except for the ending), but I felt that, taken together, these things being left out lessened the movie's emotional impact in comparison to the book. It probably also didn't help that the movie couldn't give the audience the same view into Henry and Claire's minds that the book could. I did have certain scenes I really enjoyed in the movie, though. I think my absolute favorite is the part where Henry meets his mother on the subway.

I knew almost nothing about District 9 - I had no idea, for instance, that it was going to be so gory. The parts that made me cringe the most weren't the ones with people being blown up, however, but the parts where the main character was going through his metamorphosis. Ew. The documentary style used in the film was interesting and, I think, made the aliens seem more realistic than they might otherwise have, although it got a little awkward when the story couldn't accommodate it. At first, it was kind of hard for me to tell that the scenes I was watching weren't supposed to be things filmed by some unknown cameraperson anymore. Of course, these past couple sentences probably made no sense to anyone who hasn't seen the movie. Anyway, it's a pretty good movie, although I got a little impatient with its pacing at times. Its ending packed more of an emotional punch than I had expected.