Wall-E and an interesting weekend!

So my parents are away in sunny old Minehead for a week! Pot noodles for lunch and takeaway for tea now...
But seriously, it'll be a bit of quiet in which I can do what the hell I want (but no houseparties, the walls have just been re-painted). Here I am blogging away at this godforsaken hour with my music on speakers, the lights on, drinking fizzy drinks and eating fajitas. Its a fun evening to end a really nice weekend which went something like this

Friday after work, Louise comes over! Louise, who I haven't mentioned much so far as the posts have been about personal projects, is my girlfriend of almost 3 years. I won't steal her thunder by describing everything, but instead link you to her blog for her course, HERE. The evening however involved Louise sleeping off the middle bit of a heavy cold, so I got on with making the gun as seen in the previous post. It needed to be done so all in all it was a productive evening for on saturday Lou woke up quite refreshed and much better and I posted the gun off to Matt without too much hassle. Then we went to see Wall-E.

REVIEW: spoilers alert!

Wall-E as you probably know is the brand new spangly and much lauded film from Disney-owned Pixar featuring a robot left on earth for 700 years compressing trash. My initial skepticism was that the film would lack emotion and the content would be somewhat lacking storywise. How very wrong could I be.
The first half an hour, and for that matter most of the film contains very little proper dialogue. Within the opening it's even more present as the feeling of isolation that Wall-E experiences. Amazingly huge landscapes and real film style camerawork based in a rendering engine pixar had to design to cope with the level of detail created such an immersive and somewhat eerie world. Here was Earth, portrayed in a way that looked almost real, but in a state which is totally uninhabitable, deserted, devoid of life. In a way this is unsettling, and as the plot moves on you realise that under the "lonely robot meets friends/saves humanity" is a sci-fi plot that although not complex, does raise a couple of issues; destruction of our environment and our responsibility for it. Also it reminds NASA our spaceships should look as good as the ones in this film, or no-one will buy into space travel.
I digress. The film is gorgeous; the graphics are amazing, it benefits from the low amount of dialogue by impressively making the body (chassis?) language do all the work, the camerawork is "live action" in style so it looks like an acted film would, the story and pace are good the whole way through(even if the ending is a bit idealised), and there are enough laughs for everyone. Once on the ship "Axiom" (definition here, number 3), the later scenes reference 2001 A Space Odyssey numerous times. A mark of how good this film was was shown by the rapt attention of the massing hordes of kids less than 7 in the packed cinema, whilst the atmosphere when leaving was of intent, happy discussion by the other cinema-goers. Keeping that many kids quiet for 98 minutes is no mean feat. GO SEE IT! Next major project may well be a lego Wall-E

The evening was spent lounging around the free house, drinking some cider, browsing the net and such, but included tidying my room. Chronicles of Riddick is also a damn good film, but kept us up past midnight. Sunday was very much a lazy day with an awake time of noon, and a curry at 4pm. A frankly most relaxing weekend, up until louise left and I started playing half life 2, episode 1,(millwall 1), at which point I got a massive adrenaline buzz which I'm currently trying to dissipate.
Keep it surreal!

Just also like to say thank you Louise for such a cool weekend! <3