Prince Caspian

Kristin and I just came back from watching Prince Caspian. My recommendation: do not read the book immediately beforehand, and if you know the book very well, try to forget it before you see the movie. I learned my lesson with The Two Towers: sometimes its best to judge a movie on its own merits, instead of judging it by the book.

This is especially true of Prince Caspian, where the filmmakers radically changed the personality of one of my favorite main characters. However since I was forewarned about the change, I actually enjoyed the movie very much. The filmmakers added a few character arcs, but I thought the storyline was better for it. I cried a bit when Lucy's character arc resolves near the end of the battle sequence (you'll understand once you see it).

In my opinion, Prince Caspian is a stronger movie than LWW. But it takes a few extra liberties with the character development (especially Peter's). Try not to freak out about it. :-)

Wicked the Musical

As many of you already know, during my blog hiatus Kristin and I took a trip downtown to see Wicked right after Thanksgiving. At first I wasn't all that impressed. At the time I thought the hype had raised my expectation too high. But the next day, neither Kristin nor I could get the songs out of our mind. Two days after the performance we bought the soundtrack. And now I'm completely convinced: Wicked is a phenomenal musical!

Wikipedia summarizes the plot as follows:

Wicked tells the story of Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West and her relationship with Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Their friendship struggles through their opposing personalities and viewpoints, rivalry over the same love-interest, their reactions to the Wizard's corrupt government, and, ultimately, Elphaba's public fall from grace. The plot is set mostly before Dorothy's arrival from Kansas, and includes several references to well-known scenes and dialogue in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.

Kristin and I hadn't seen a musical since before Kathryn was born when we saw Les Miserables (unless you count the Disney's Beauty and the Beast musical we saw with Kathryn -- I don't). I normally don't like musicals, and I consider Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicals particularly loathsome for some reason. Stephen Schwartz composed the music and wrote the lyrics for Wicked, and I'd never really noticed him before. After we bought the soundtrack I looked him up on-line and discovered that he'd done the music and lyrics for The Prince of Egypt as well! I'll have to seek out some of his other works like Children of Eden or Godspell.

All in all, though it took a little while for me to fully appreciate much of the music, Wicked is amazing! There are too many fantastic songs, but my favorite has to be No Good Deed (about how all of Elphaba's good intentions end badly). The songs Defying Gravity, For Good, Popular, and What Is This Feeling are all close seconds. And Dancing Through Life is amazing to watch, since the cast seems to go through four or five set or costume changes during the course of that one song! If you've seen it, leave a comment and tell me what you thought of it.

Random Musings

"Do you have any idea how hard it is to lead worship with a half-chewed Communion wafer in one's mouth?" -- me, after an unfortunate miscommunication between the pastor and those of us on the worship team.

For those of you who don't know, my dear college friend Violet Chaos has a very funny blog over at LiveJournal. She's got a great sense of humor. Over the years in which we've known each other, I've noticed that our phraseology has grown more and more similar (which is great for me; not so great for her). My personal favorite is her Lexiambicon, which is probably the safest introduction to her writings. :-)

I recently added a few pictures of our trip to the Sears Tower. We took the train down to Chicago, walked over to the Sears Tower, rode to the top, came down, walked back to the train station, and rode home. It was a long day, but Kathryn really wanted to go to the top of the Sears Tower. There's also one older picture of the girls cuddling together on the couch.

And here's a cute video of Rebecca. I was testing my new camera, and I couldn't get the camera down low enough to take a decent video of Rebecca crawling. So I inadvisedly put the camera on the floor...

I'm back

Now that several friends have started blogs of their own, I've got the itch to update mine a bit. It's been almost exactly one year since I posted anything here... I barely remember how this thing works!

So I'll start slowly. I posted some pictures on my Facebook page so you can see how much the kids have grown in the last year.

The first set is from our Cooking Night. Kathryn and I made our Shepherd's Pie together while Becca played on the toy horse.

The second set is from Kathryn's last swimming class. It's amazing how far she's come in eight weeks. Originally she wouldn't even lower herself into the pool. But now, though she's still scared, at least she overcomes her fear and swims anyway. I was a little concerned myself when on the first day of class the instructor put Kathryn and the rest of the Level 1 swimmers at the deep end (12 feet), while the other swimmers stayed at four feet! The instructor pointed out that kids learn better when they have absolutely no chance of touching the bottom. I was not relieved, but at least I understood her rationale. I attended the first class and the last class. Kathryn was so terrified during her first class that it took all my willpower not to run in and "save" her. We decided that it was best if I just stayed away for the rest of the classes. So I didn't come back until her last class so she could show me what she'd learned. :-)