Across The Universe

We just finished watching Across The Universe, the movie (musical?) that uses Beatles songs to create a fictional story set in the late 1960s. My sister hadn't seen it before, and she rented it along with a bunch of others - not realising that I already owned the DVD!

If you haven't seen the film yet, and are at all interested in the Beatles' music, watch it as soon as you can, as it is totally made of win!. The film doesn't actually feature the Beatles at all, though - it's a fictional tale similar to but NOT in the same realm as Mamma Mia.
It helps to know a bit about the Beatles' history, as there are a lot of in-jokes and references to the band; most of the characters in the film have names that reference the Beatles' back catalogue - the six main characters are called Jude, Lucy, Maxwell, JoJo, Prudence, and Sadie!

As in most musicals, every now and then a song starts up out of nowhere, but it's interesting to see how the director has used the songs in a way that changes the original meaning - Oh! Darling becomes a duel between two band members; Dear Prudence is a "coming out" song of a more literal kind; and the turbulent struggles of two men dealing with their demons is the backdrop of Strawberry Fields Forever, one of the best sequences in the movie:

The movie has been presented extremely well, and features some striking imagery and fantastic choreography. And the actors have been well cast - they have done a sensational job of this, and I hope they all go on to other good projects soon!
We've all been singing songs from the movie since we watched it. But what's weird is that my sister didn't even know half of the songs from the movie! Like, where has she been?
So... I guess I'll be loaning some of my CD collection to her in the next few months!

Did the Earth move for you too?

Okay, stuff has happened since the last post.
Well, that's a bit bloody obvious, isn't it? It's not as if stuff stops happening when no-one bothers to update their blog!

• Krissy has spent the past fortnight attending classes at Tafe, and freaking out about the work she has to do. It seems that there is a tutor there whose method involves throwing the students into the deep end, ie. giving them instructions on what they need to do, and then basically telling them to do it without explicitly telling them how. Which I think is reasonable, but it can be disorienting for new students, especially those who have come into art with all the pre-conceived ideas on "What Art Is Supposed To Be". His aim is to get the students to learn these methods through exploration, rather than through rote learning, but it can be very stressful and confusing for the novice. Oh, and to those of you who have already been through GippsTafe's Art Department, you all should know exactly who I am {p.b.} talking about. :D
  
• We had an earth tremor here last Friday. At about 9pm, we experienced about ten seconds of the earth wobbling about us. It was a reasonably big tremor, too. The epicentre was in the Korumburra/Warragul area, but it was felt across most of the state, including Melbourne. It was all perfectly normal, and nothing got seriously damaged, but a lot of people were worried. It freaked the hell out of my sister; she was saying, "God, my chair moved across the room!!!" Yes, because that's never happened during an earthquake before.
• Also, Krys found two big spiders in her son's bedroom last week, though not at the same time. One of them was a huntsman (which is big and icky but not dangerous), the other a largish white-tail (which may or may not be dangerous, as I mentioned here). Both of these spiders are frequently found inside houses, especially when the weather changes from warm to cool, so we're trying to keep our windows closed as much as possible now!
  
• There's also a tropical cyclone threatening the Queensland coastline, not far from where my Dad and other family members live. Cyclone Hamish is presently heading south-east, away from where they are, and it seems to be weakening now, but there are still a lot of communities worring about this, and preparing to bunker down. I haven't called up my Dad yet, but I'll do that tonight, if I'm able to.
• Krys' man Andrew scored the part of Gaston in the local production of Beauty and the Beast - awesomeness! He's been practicing his singing in preparation like a good actor should. Also, they've been rehearsing for the other play that they're both in - more details as they come. I'll actually be able to post pictures of them this time, since I only had Dinkycam with me for the last one, may it rest in peace.
  
• It's been the Labour Day long weekend, which means two things: one, work at the service station/s has been really frickin' busy (doesn't help that we're short-staffed again) and two, we had a problem with the EFTPOS facility. Okay, get this, when I went in to work on Saturday, I discovered that we had a *new* temporary EFT console/pinpad thingy, which wasn't integrated with the register like the regular one was (and which, hopefully, will be fixed soon). Luckily, it didn't require a major in electronics to figure out how it worked - it just required a few extra steps, and I was able to cope with the day's trade.
  But, when I opened the shop the next day, I discovered that the *new* EFT console wasn't working, because something had tripped off the fuse on that particular circuit. Long story short, the AC adaptor some black box thingy that the power supply goes through had burnt out during the night, and I mean that literally - it had scorch marks on it. So... we spent the next two days of the long weekend filling out dozens of manual paper vouchers. At least the shop didn't burn down.
  
• Oh, and Krys wants me to mention this - A few nights ago, I spent two hours gagging on a piece of tuna. All that happened was that I ate some canned tuna, and it didn't go down well. I don't know, I guess it got stuck on the way down, though I wasn't choking or suffocating. This seems to happen sometimes when I eat something starchy, like bread or rice, and usually if I have a drink of water it goes away - but this time it seems the water didn't help.
  Anyway, I must have sounded really bad from the bathroom, because my sister could hear me from her room, and she asked me if I was okay. I said yeah, I just had something to bring up. She spent the next hour or so freaking out about me, thinking I'd got food poisoning or something, wondering if I needed to go to hospital, and then she promptly fell asleep! Sympathy fail?
  So, I spent an hour in the bathroom, sipping water and gagging into the sink - and then I spent the next hour in my room with a bucket, because standing in the bathroom was boring and I wanted to finish playing Twilight Princess.

My god, that sounds really sad. "I threw up tuna while playing Zelda." I have to get a hobby or something, I don't think the blogosphere was designed for such lame-ass postings.

Well, so much for my update. How was your week?