Mmm, pain.

So I have a sore throat, I've had it since Friday. Here I am sitting at my desk at work, armed with a bag of Halls cough drops (cherry flavor), a mostly empty bottle of Advil, and some tea with lemon, dreading each painful swallow.

Out of any of the recurring, minor illnesses that one might get from year to year: cold, fever, cough, malaria, etc., a sore throat is by far my least favorite. I tend to get one maybe two times a year. I expect it. But never enjoy it, of course. Reason being is that with anything else, yeah you feel crappy, but you can always decide to just go to sleep and be oblivious to it for a while. (And with fevers, I usually get awesomely weird fever dreams.) But with a sore throat, although you can do the same, you do it with the knowledge that you're going to wake up feeling worse than when you went to bed. Because your throat dries out while you sleep and the pain when you wake up is magnified by a factor of infinty + 1.

Someone get me some local anathesia, stat!
...
So, I saw some movies over the weekend.

Munich - That now makes 4 of the 5 Oscar nominees for Best Film. This one also shouldn't win. Although it was good, it was a bit....clunky. For the most part, I didn't get any real sense of the characters, even Eric Bana's main character, at least not until the end. You'd think that 5 people sent out to assassinate 11 people that planned the Black September massacre at the 1972 Olympic games would have some pretty strong feelings about their mission and how it made them feel. But you really couldn't tell from the film. Only towards the end of the film, when Eric Bana's Avner started getting paranoid, did we really start to see how all this was affecting him. Otherwise it was a pretty good film.

Spielberg has a reputation for working very quickly and efficiently. Hell, in the past year, he's had three movies out: Munich, War of the Worlds, and The Terminal. That's pretty much unheard of for a director, especially one working in the big-budget Hollywood system. However, I don't think such a quick schedule benefitted Munich very much.

Nightwatch - Nightwatch is a Russian film I first heard about from my sister's column here. I'm not going to go into a full explanation, because that would be pretty long, as the film is pretty unique. Sufficed to say it's sort of a vampire movie, but not really. In fact, I'd put it more in the category of a faerie story. There are a group of Others, not quite human, that have special powers. They are separated into two groups: Light Others and Dark Others. Obviously they're not quite friends. They've been known to battle in the past. However, since they were so evenly matched and any true war between them would result in the obliteration of both sides, a truce was signed. Now they basically just police each other. That is until an Other of such power is born that his choice of which side he chooses, Light or Dark, will shift the balance of power. Of course this movie deals with that Other. Sort of. It also deals with a cursed woman and a big vortex. It's hard to explain, but enjoyable to watch. Very unique looking film. I'm intruiged to see more, so it's lucky for me that this film is apparently first in a trilogy. This was the best film I saw this weekend.

One oddity, however. Althought the film is in Russian with subtitles for English, there's some expository monologues at the beginning and end in English? I wonder if that was just thrown in for the American release.

Final Destination 3 - What can I say about this one? You know how it goes in horror franchises, rarely do they get better as they go along. However, knowing that going in, FD3 was at least fun. And that's really all one can ask for in this type of situation. In this franchise we're not dealing with a recognizable "face" for the bad guy. No Freddy or Jason or Michael Myers. Nope, just good old death, but death as a force with a will. And as we've seen from the previous film's, not a will easily thwarted. The centerpiece to this film is a rollercoaster ride gone lethally bad. Per usual, one teen has a premonition, and a handful of people get off the ride before everything goes bad. Death, of course, gets pissed and starts hunting them down and killing them in inventive, and suprisingly gruesome, ways. We're not talking Shakespeare here. But like I said, it was at least fun. You go to a FD movie largely to see some inventive dying, and FD3 delivered.