Ah, Monday night...

[cabbitzilla]

Yes, 'tis Monday night, and some things are actually in the 'all is well' category.

• Shado's over his self-induced (and deserved! :p) hangover.


• My new tights arrived today!


• I've only thrown up -once- today.


• R is back, seems to have had a -delightful- time, and actually seems HAPPY! YAY!


• My impromptu afternoon nap seems to have made the headache go away.

Getting up tomorrow morning for the 'personal history workup' portion of my intake for therapy isn't going to be fun, though. Unless I'm mistaken, it's a 15 minute block... sufficient for most folks, I'm sure, but they're going to need a -lot- more time for me if they want to even do a half-assed job... We'll find out tomorrow.

I had a chance to sit and watch all of the 'Dune' miniseries that the SciFi Channel had done... the one with William Hurt playing Duke Leto Atreides. My thoughts on it are a focused 'hmmmmm'. Coherent, yes? Let me try and sort it out a bit...

• The scenery/landscape work was awesome... much better (I thought) than the feature film release, and far truer to my own interpretation of Frank Herbert's classic.


• The costumes had a -nasty- tendency to look plastic and fake. It seemed the 'richer' the garment, the cheesier it looked. Pretty sad, actually, and tended to be very distracting.


• Baron Vladmir Harkonen. This is a problem. The book paints him as a morbidly obese megalomaniacal psychopath... and this version reminds me more of Brian Blessed's 'Prince Vultan' from the 1980 Dino DeLaurentis production of Flash Gordon. Sorta like Santa Claus on acid, bobbing around on his little repulsorlifts... which is kinda disturbing in its own right, but wasn't at all what I was hoping for.


• God help me, the guy that played Paul Atreides/Muad'dib reminds me -so- much of professional wrestler Chris Benoit.


• The stilsuits... while the design is better than some pictures/paintings I've seen... the closeups reveal it all to be stitched-in-cloth-padding. No substance to them at all. I -really- thought that a SFC production would pay more attention to details like this. VERY disappointing.


• On the other hand, the buildings were delightfully -real- and blocky, giving a very solid feel to the towns and outlying buildings. Sietch construction was similarly lovely, reinforcing the feel of -age- to the Fremen outposts.


• Giedi Prime had always struck me as a darker, grittier place. An artistic point, to be sure, and what -was- done with the Harkonen homeworld was quite satisfying. This is less a grumble than an aside... maybe I need to reread those passages.


• The Bene Gesserit. Okay, I've got -serious- issue with the 'babbling schoolgirl' motif the producer/scripters seem to have pushed on the Sisterhood. They're supposed to be reserved, formal, and subtly intimidating... not fawning around like a bunch of Mana groupies trying for autographs! (not that there's anything wrong with that... I'd -love- to meet Mana and get an autograph *purr*... but these are the SISTERS we're talking about!)


• I liked the conceptual image/animation of the Guild Navigator. While not what I was expecting, it was damn cool. :)


• Ship design was brilliant, from the giant Guild transports to the Atreides Ornithopters. Very nicely done, with lots of the conduit-and-blockiness I associate with functional gear. Even the mobile spice factory was an impressive looking piece. Obviously the majority of the budget was spent on the tech stuff... which is why the costuming is for crap. Sorry to carp about it again, but some of it is really really bad.


• What the heck was up with the incredibly silly-funky outfits that the Mentats and Doctor Yueh were wearing. I realize that they're of the 'highly trained and distinctive individual' class, but is there any reason to make them look utterly ludicrous? Come -on-, folks... this isn't 1950's serial TV.


• There are a couple of outfits I'll give major points to: 1) Chani's dress in the final sequence (Paul's duel with Feyd) - simply stunning, and the head piece was gorgeous as well, 2) Doctor Liet-Kines just about anywhere - this man is a snappy dresser, and just generally pounceable. Pity he dies, but his dream lives on. 3) Shadout Mapes just about anywhere - to my mind, the wardrobe people did a flawless job with this character.


• The acting, with the exceptions listed above, is really quite good. I would have been -impressed- if some of the flaws had been less distracting.

So much for the mini-review. Or not so mini. So sue me. :p I'm enjoying a spot of delightful roleplay with an equally delightful dolly, and wondering just when the spastic email I'm expecting from my Mother will arrive. You see, -she- is one of the ones mentioned in an earlier entry that was pestering me for gift ideas/suggestions... she's not a reader of this journal, I don't think (I would have heard about it by now if she were), so when she repeated her request in firmer tones via email, I sent her the information on my Catalog City wish list. That was /way/ late Saturday night. I'm still waiting for the eruption I know is coming... but in all honesty she's known about this mess with me longer than anyone besides -me-. She needs to either come to terms with it, or take a hike. *sigh* I -know- that sounds harsh, but I'm at the point of knowing what I have to do to survive, and she's thus far standing in my way; that's not a condition that's going to make me more accepting of her.

Anywho... I'm gonna go away, now. :p I suspect I've done enough damage.

*hugs, smooches, and caresses*
~Ellie-chan