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| Saoirse Ronan as Hanna. |
I saw "Hanna" today -- the trailer for it had seemed promising, but I was disappointed by it, ultimately. The fractured fairytale gloss of it fused with a kind of thriller element just didn't quite work -- the characters weren't well-developed enough for it to be character-driven, and the plot wasn't strongly drawn enough for it to be plot-driven. The action sequences weren't particularly stunning, and since everything was kept a step or two behind the curtains, there wasn't much to draw the viewer into the movie, alas. The title character looked very otherworldly, thanks to the striking young Irish actress, Saoirse Ronan, but the overall story just lacked the bones and weight to carry the premise anywhere. You've heard of damning through faint praise? Well, there's damning through faint film-making, and this had that. A lot of running, and yet going nowhere fast. Eric Bana did a credible job as her father/handler, and Cate Blanchett was steely-eyed (although she had precious little to do, really -- I'm curious why she took this gig, honestly), but there's something off about this movie -- I blame "Inception" -- I'll call it the "Inception Effect" -- faint film-making (I know a lot of people were sucked into "Inception's" seeming complexity, but it wasn't complex at all, was just crowded, and had many layers thrown into it to basically camouflage the meager fare of the plot to begin with. "Hanna" feels to me like a movie made in the spirit and/or style of "Inception," with the same meager results, only worse. The Inception Effect is like having a bunch of people crammed in a room at a party, but nobody's saying or doing anything interesting, and we're all supposed to overlook that, to be impressed by the volume of the chatter, without realizing that nobody's saying a thing worth remembering. Sorry if you liked that movie; I found it incredibly boring (except for the side plot that should have been the heart of the story, rather than the dream-caper aspect of it).
I bought a new camera, at long last -- I've had my old 6 megapixel (5x zoom) Olympus camera for many, many years now, and decided I wanted something stronger -- I got a 14 megapixel, 21x zoom Nikon DSLR camera. I'm well-pleased with it so far. I'll give the old Olympus to the boys -- B2 has already taken to playing with it, taking shots of his own. He and his brother'll be thrilled to be able to take pictures with it. I'm sure he'll have broken the camera in a week or two. Haha! I'll have to make a note of that, if/when it happens!
The weather was fabulous today -- 68 degrees and sunny. Windy, but very nice. It started out very cloudy and cool, but warmed up nicely. I went biking downtown. Really need to fix the alignment on my bike's rear tire, but have been putting that off. Now that prime riding season is beginning, I may attend to that.
