Ginger's Bread

So a busy week for me, these past few nights…

Tuesday night, I did as so many others did and saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Now, I went because I’m a geek. A healthy number of people did. But there was an unhealthy number of non-geeks there for my liking. Midnight showing are a fad now, it seems. If it’s a movie franchise, an expected big hit, instead of just the nerds who know the source material, you get these douches who are there because it’s a midnight showing. I saw this happen with Wolverine as well. This has probably been getting more and more prevalent for a while, but it’s something I’ve only noticed more recently. And it actually takes a little bit of joy out of midnight showings for me. You don’t get that campy fan atmosphere where the audience laughs together at little instead jokes and cheers at the nods to them. You get a bunch of frat kids stumbling in drunk and commenting throughout the movie about fucking Megan Fox. … I should probably talk about the movie itself but now I’m all grumpy old man about the experience… But really, it’s giant robots beating the shit out of each other. What more could you possibly need? (A plot? The whole franchise is a toy commercial… But yea, there’s some plot too.) The fights are a bit better as they had the animations for the robots better worked out and could actually have zoomed out fights. But it’s still Michael Bay action sequences, so you need to go by the robot colors. Also, given more screen time, we get more personality to some of the robots.

Last night, Wednesday, I went and saw Ha Ha Tonka play with Via Audio and that was great time. The show started after 10 but thanks to a couple websites saying 8 I ended up there early and so just hung with the bands for a couple hours. The show was excellent, with much dancing abound. The audience could have been a bit bigger though, so if you get the chance to see the bands play, you go and do it. I wish I had taken some photos or video but my digital camera is, what the French call, a brick o’ shit. Wait, that’s not a French term… Oh right, I don’t know French. So a shout out to Ha Ha Tonka, Via Audio, and Kyle, from Antenna’s Up, who was also there.

And one last bit of music fun: Friday evening, I’m helping supervise/lift stuff at the library’s “Battle of the Bands” (more of just a concert of ultra local bands… we found 3!) that’s part of the Summer Reading Program. I have to tell you, the urge to find and invite a bunch of hipsters to this thing is overwhelming, but for the sake of the kids, I probably shouldn’t. I have no idea what to expect from this show, since only one of the bands appears to have a web presence and even that is a single, poor quality YouTube video of them covering a song. It’s a band of six 6th graders. But after last night’s show, they’re going to have to rock pretty hard to entertain me.