Tikatu's Travels Through Time

Inspired by my former background at twitter (a pale gray background with slightly darker gray stripes and gray cats), I've created my own tileable graphic in GIMP. I've posted it to my twitter feed and, frankly, I love the way it looks. I used the colors and the cat of my personal logo (along with another cat from that particular font), staggered them, and put them on a striped background.

Yeah, I'm sure this is beginner stuff for some of you but... ;)

We rented four movies and watched them over Saturday night and today. Here are the movies we watched, in order of watching them.

Detective Dee -- a Chinese action/detective movie set in China's past. We've heard recordings of the "Judge Dee" stories, which were based on a historical figure named Di Renjie from the Tang dynasty. So, to some extent, we were familiar with the character, though this took a lot of liberties with him. The sets were fantastic and the fight scenes were choreographed by Sammo Hung, who had an American TV detective show of his own some years back. The funniest part was the disconnect between the English subtitles (which we had on so my husband could understand the dialog) and the English dubbing. The subtitles were probably a more faithful translation of the Chinese, especially since the word "beetles" in the subtitles (referring to "fire beetles") was translated into the English dialog as "turtles"! (Believe me, when you finally saw these things, you knew they weren't turtles at all!) Lots of fun for us.

The Three Musketeers -- This was the most recent one, with airships and martial-arts style fight sequences. The dialog could be terribly corny with the French nobility sounding like a whole lot of modern-day Americans. Even Cardinal Richelieu says something as crass as, "Yep." Hubby was particularly affronted by Richelieu's swordplay in the movie, though he never uses it against the Musketeers. Not a bad romp, but horribly unfaithful to the story. Of interest: D'Artagnan's horse is named Buttercup, and Athos quotes from The Princess Bride.

Kung Fu Panda 2 -- Loved this film. So much I could say about it, but I'll just stick to this one thing: Po finds out about himself and who he is (and may actually be reunited with his father in the next one. There better be a next one.)

Finally, Tintin -- We saved the best for last here. We have a huge selection of these books thanks to my BIL from Hong Kong (who knows what his brother likes). This script merges three different books: The Crab with Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham's Treasure. The motion-capture and CGI are really good here and the characterization is spot-on. I love Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock! Lots of action, adventure, flying bullets, and spunky dog sidekicks. I think one of the best scenes occurs near the end when Haddock and Sakharine (the villain) basically duel with dockside loading cranes.