Angel and I went to Renaissance Orinda Theatre this afternoon, after a mini-adventure involving dropping of his girl friend (and her guest, who came up to visit Angel this weekend) at the Richmond Amtrak station this noon. It was an adventure because when we got there, Antonia and her friend discovered that they had left their train tickets back at our apartment in Berkeley! It was 12:30 and supposedly the train to the Central Valley would be arriving at 1. So, we zoomed back to Berkeley, cutting through the residential areas around Gilman Street at semi-breakneck speeds to get back to our pad behind Soda Hall north of campus. fortunately #1, cops were asleep on this lazy Sunday afternoon and, fortunately #2, after Angel had found the tickets, which had fallen behind a mirror, we saw that the train departure time was for 1:20. but this still didn't leave us much time. we got back to Richmond shortly before the train arrived, all in one piece.

we left Angel's car parked there, and BARTed it over to Orinda, where we met up with Jonathan Shelley, a student in TIC. it was he who yesterday invited me to come over and watch Titan A.E. at the cool, retro Renaissance Orinda, and i accepted with alacrity, considering that it was who had bugged me about seeing Titan A.E. for a while now, and i found out yesterday that it was no longer playing in Berkeley or Oakland! grrr. anyway, i've always liked seeing movies in theatres i've never been to before. alas, the movie was showing in one of the smaller sub-theatres... tiny! some Hollywood moguls have bigger private screening-rooms. *chuckle* but the egyptian trompe l-oeil (sp. you French speakers?) made me want to come back sometime and check out the main theatre. perhaps if X-Men screens there!

anyway, check out Jon's review of Titan A.E. in his new weblog. yay! hopefully this will start a trend in TIC of doing AIC-style weblogs in addition to individual and group website projects; think about it this way if you want to, TIC kidz: doing a weblog will guarantee you that + after your grade ;-)

as far as my review of the movie: it rocked! the story and plot were pretty straightforward, and the screenplay kinetic enough. but it was the lush animated spacecraft and alien worlds that held my attention throughout. some of the earthling ships looked very much like the ones rendered on my favorite tv scifi show of all time, Babylon 5. supersmooth, and the CGIs were just spectacular. i particularly loved the world with those red hydrogen flower-bubbles, or whatever they were. echoes of the underwater city in Naboo, in Phantom Menace. the ending also called to mind that in The Fifth Element ... without giving it away totally, both had to do with energy transformation.

another weblog review of Titan A.E. is David Hunter's of July 9th. (If you go to that link after July 9, just click on the date on his calendar.)

as i mentioned to Jonathan sometime during the afternoon, a great complementary movie to watch along with Titan A.E. is The Iron Giant. if you missed it when it came out last year, go rent it on video or DVD. Tom Fletcher and i went to see it the first day it was released, and we both felt the transportive magic of it. where Iron Giant takes place in the America of the 50s, Titan A.E. takes place in the 31st century. both movies have their charms, and both have a place in the pantheon of superb animated films of the 90s and the new millennium. check 'em out.

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