Night at the Museum (movie review)

Tara and I took this in at The Bagdad (right, no h). We both liked it, maybe for only partially overlapping reasons (e.g. the happy ending).

Like I was pretending to be a movie director, watching the camera angles. "Hmmm, competent" I heard myself thinking: just your basic storytelling, with some of our greatest comedy actors.

Dick Van Dyke turns out to have evil motives, but he's still chim chiminy under it all. And by the way, I do like the way Sally Field does her gig with Boniva.

Count me an admirer of this slightly (ever less a percentage difference, logarithmically speaking) older generation. Gervais: hilarious... Ben, you're great.

And Robin, again the president!

Sunday in Vilnius

I enjoyed a quiet Sunday in Vilnius with young Geoffrey French, author of gSculpt and gSim, plus a professional graphics designer using 3ds Max in the UK.

We ascended Castle Hill, a thousand-year-old site, then had lunch in Old Town, comparing notes on such topics as soccer hooliganism, South Park, Ali G, and Ricky Gervais in Extras and The Office (also meta-classes in Python).

We also visited an amber museum. Fossilized tree sap, oft times with "inclusions" (insects especially), dating back 40 or 50 million years (or more) is an important extract in the local ecosystem.

Baltic amber is typically mined off shore, or from a patch of "blue earth" in Russia. Tons of the stuff are recovered every year.

I bought some tiny dolls-in-within-dolls for Tara.