After flying down two Fridays ago for Susan’s housewarming party, we attended the Incredibles wrap party on the following Saturday. This involved a bit of dressing up: a full tuxedo and vest for the first time in my life. Apparently to office mates, I “clean up well”. Hmph. Needless to say, Susan looks better even when I do clean up.
First, there was the movie premiere at the Paramount Theatre - this year we apparently masqueraded as a insurance company stockholder meeting. The Pixar singers (including Susan) outdid themselves for their tenth anniversary with a medley including music from a certain 80’s song by Bonnie Tyler (that I actually have on my iPod, scarily enough). As for the movie itself, it was great. Not quite our best work - to me, Toy Story 2 still holds that title - but it was funnier throughout than Monsters and Nemo, definitely on the edgy side, and still touching without being mawkishly sentimental, all at once. And of course it’s nice to see Pixar finally doing movies with explosions and giant robots, and the gratuitous special effects count was way up there. There’s a cute short in front (”Boundin’”) that I have to admit I’m a little less enthused about, and we saw a surprise after the credits which I’m not sure will make it to the theater, but I’m guessing should be on the DVD. (But everyone reading this will stay through the credits, just to see our names, right?)
The excellent party afterwards was held a air hangar at Alameda naval base - definitely an improvement on the space situation from last year’s version. Sadly, this is one of the few decent pictures I got all night, since my camera definitely doesn’t do well in the dark. It’s the outside of the air hangar, lit up with the Incredibles logo.
After a short week to recover, this past weekend included opening night for Seattle Opera’s rendition of Rigoletto. Setting it during Mussolini’s time period was an interesting choice, although to me it didn’t have much emotional impact other than costumes and settings. Kim Josephson and Norah Amsellem were amazing together as Rigoletto and Gilda, Frank Lopardo much less so as the Duke, although I suppose I’m forever ruined by recordings of Pavarotti in the role.
That’s about it for two weeks. levork.org seems to have yet another bad hard drive (although it could have been something to do with the upgrade to Fedora Core 2) and Speakeasy has been having outage issues, which hasn’t made connectivity and blogging easy. Vonage VoIP service at least has been painlessly set up - more on that later.