Blogging and Other Failures (aka Recap: 7 September 2008)

So, I've kind of been slacking on blogging lately. It's not like my content here is ever all that amazing, but still, I try to keep up with it usually. I have three excuses.

1. August and early Sept. movies sucked for the most part (as evidenced by the fact that this past weekend was the slowest movie weekend in five years). Sure, there were a few bright spots (Tropic Thunder; Bottle Shock, which only made it to limited release; some might argue Pineapple Express, though I would not), but all in all it's been a pretty dismal five or six weeks.

2. I have been swamped at work. Horribly, soul-suckingly, terrifyingly swamped. On Friday, I worked 11.5 hours and ended in the same place I started, if that's any indication. Sadly, the swamp does not include scanning projects at the moment, which means no movie-watching for me. So, on top of seeing next to nothing at the theatre, I hardly watched anything on DVD either. I've had the same three Netflix DVDs for an embarrasingly long time because I just haven't had the energy post-work to commit to two hours of concentration. I usually sneak in blog posts while I'm at work, too, but the workload simply hasn't allowed that recently.

3. I haven't been writing. I seem to blog more when I'm in the midst of a writing project, and I'm currently awaiting feedback on my beta draft of MUTE. I should be getting back into editing on that this week, but I don't have another writing project scheduled until Nov. 1. However, once I've finished up MUTE, I'll be able to focus completely on planning my 2008 NaNo novel, which will hopefully breed some ideas for blog posts.

So those are my excuses. Not good ones, really, but that's life. That being said, I did get my Netflix queue moving again this weekend, though, with my viewing of The Last King of Scotland (4 stars) and Children of Men (4 stars). Both lived up to the hype and were excellent. I'd been fearing LAST KING would be rather boring, but it actually zipped along quite well, and James McAvoy had me glued to the screen. How did he not get nominated for an Oscar for his performance? Crazy Academy. I mean, Forest Whitaker was great and his Oscar was deserved, but McAvoy really carried the film in my opinion.

Oh, and in case you're curious how the worst movie weekend in five years was divided up, here you go.

1. Bangkok Dangerous ($7.8 million)
2. Tropic Thunder ($7.5 million)
3. The House Bunny ($5.9 million)
4. The Dark Knight ($5.7 million)
5. Traitor ($4.7 million)
6. Babylon A.D. ($4 million)
7. Death Race ($3.6 million)
8. Disaster Movie ($3.3 million)
9. Mamma Mia ($2.7 million)
10. Pineapple Express ($2.4 million)

To put that in perspective, The Dark Knight made $155.3 million on its opening weekend. This weekend's Top 10 made a combined $47.6 million, which is about 30.6 percent of TDK's take. Ouch.