Viggo Mortensen Joined Michael Moore's Slacker Tour in Columbus Ohio on 10/30!

I am a huge fan of Viggo's, and a moderate fan of Michael's. I thought about seeing Michael when he was on tour in Pittsburgh a few weeks back, but he was in town during one of my trips out of town.

But here's a shot of Michael and Viggo in Columbus:



(*Sigh* and Columbus was only three hours away!)

After spending yesterday just hanging out, resting, and staying pretty glued to the Internet, today I was awake enough to rake my front yard and then go work for Kerry/Edwards. I leafleted a friendly Squirrel Hill neighborhood with Tracey, a woman who lives in DC but who's spending the next few days helping out in Pittsburgh. Then we walked from headquarters (with a third person, whose name was Cliff, I think) across town to Heinz field for a little visibility before the Steeler game. The weather was perfect for the walk, and we spent some time waving to the crowd.

Now, I'm home watching the Patriots playing the Steelers. Talk about your mixed feelings! I like the Steelers, but the Patriots are having a great year.

Torn...Torn...Torn...

Oh well...

The Lord of the Rings movies made me a huge fan of Viggo Mortensen. I was never much of a fan of his until late in the movie Fellowship of the Ring (when he tells Frodo he would have followed him to the depths of Mordor), when I realized that, with the right director and right material, the man is a magnificent actor. I even enjoyed him throughout The Two Towers, despite the focus on the battle of Helm's Deep (in the book The Two Towers, the battle of Helm's Deep lasts about 12 pages). And he's just great in Return of the King - it is his movie, after all.

So I've been debating for months - will I bother to go to Hidalgo (which is about horses, something I really don't care about) or will I not bother (though I'm now a Viggo fan)?

Ultimately, I love history. I was pissed off by the movie Elizabeth, despite the great performance by Cate Blanchett, because the history was just so wrong. At an amazing number of points in the movie, the historical facts do not correspond to the movie. So Elizabeth should never have been marketed as "a true story."

So I've decided to bypass Hidalgo. Movie studios should never promote a movie as "based on a true story" when it simply is fiction. I'd probably have gone to see the movie Hidalgo if it wasn't being promoted as "based on a true story." Oh, and the sand storm special effect looks so damned lame. Maybe I'll catch it on cable.

As a coda to this - my friend Laura may have seen the actors/production crew at the Hidalgo premiere:

Weird Movie Connections

I've been sick since getting home. The cold I picked up over Christmas seems to have slid into being the flu (aches, exhaustion), so I stayed home from work on Friday. I'm actually starting to feel a little better today.

Anyway, when I get sick, I tend to watch movies, as my concentration isn't generally good enough to read books. I'm not sure if this makes any sense or not, but as I was watching Witness yesterday, I found some weird connections between it and the Lord of the Rings movies.

True, there's the obvious connection - Viggo is in both. He plays Moses Hochleitner, Daniel's (Alexander Gudonov) brother. He has few lines (except for part of the "horse with one ball" story after the funeral and "hello" at the beginning of the barn-raising), is always smiling and wears a very light blue shirt. If you want to spot him, you see him most of all in the barn-raising sequence - he's the first person Daniel introduces to John Book.

Now that's a tad tenuous, so there are more odd little connections. There's little Lukas Haas, a fine actor a few years older than Elijah Wood. The sensative little boy roles Lukas got in the early-mid '80s, Elijah got in the early '90s. They even look quite a bit alike. If you check out a current picture of him in IMDB, you'll see that Lukas still has a hobbit-like face.

If some visionary director had made LOTR in the '80s, you can see Harrison Ford would have been a natural for Strider. Luckily, this didn't happen; while I like Harrison, and while he's a pretty good actor, I'm not sure he would have been up to it.

Finally, there's the "stranger in a strange land" theme, which is pretty obvious in both films.