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I spent Monday morning through Thursday afternoon of this past week indoors, at my desk, not seeing anyone. And then I spent Thursday evening through just now almost entirely in the company of other people, with a little downtime for mornings and sleep.

I already wrote a little about Thursday and Friday. Saturday, Kam and I had falafel at a place in San José that's a cross between a falafel stand and a '50s diner (hamburgers, shakes, fries, falafel), and then drove down to Santa Cruz and spent the afternoon on the beach. Stopped by Stewart & Jessica's place in the early evening, spent an hour or so chatting with them and Lola & Gregg and S&J's twin kidlets. Then K and I went to Saturn Cafe for dinner, wandered around downtown Santa Cruz for a bit, then back to Palo Alto (where we saw Mya and Greg) for hot-tubbing.

Today, Beth came down and made brunch at my place. Unfortunately, my place really isn't equipped for cooking, between the lack of various essentials (no colander, no black pepper, no mixing bowls, no platter-sized plates, no whisk or eggbeaters) and the fact that almost every dish in the apartment is dirty. But we washed a bunch of dishes using the Just-In-Time Washing technique that's revolutionizing the dishwashing industry, and had a nice frittata. Then we rushed off to The Tech to see the giant-screen version of Disney's Beauty & the Beast on the IMAX dome.

(For those who've seen IMAX movies on a rectangular screen, I should mention that the IMAX dome is an actual dome-shaped screen that movies are projected onto, kinda like a planetarium dome but higher-tech.)

I'd been looking forward to seeing this for some time; I liked the original movie quite a bit, and I figured it would be even cooler at gigantic size, especially since I'd heard that Disney went through the whole movie and added a bunch of detail to things (like faces in crowd scenes) that were too small on a regular-sized screen for audiences to notice the lack of detail. Also a song, "Human Again," that got cut from the original movie.

And some of the new version was splendid. The panoramic vistas were great at this size, in particular, and the Beast was even more compelling and spooky than before with the giant sub-bass speaker aimed right at our heads. But I had forgotten that there's one big problem with enlarged animation: the distance that a shape travels from one frame to the next gets bigger. So in the opening scene, I started getting flashbacks to Speed Racer and other animated stuff that doesn't contain sufficient frames to look like smooth animation; Belle's head would jump from one spot on the screen to another without crossing the intervening space.

The new song was nice; I can see why they cut it, but I enjoyed it. And I'm a total sucker for several parts of this movie—the library scene in particular brought tears to my eyes. And I love the fact that here's a movie in which the protagonist and female romantic lead and fairytale heroine is a weirdo bookworm.

On the other hand, I also noticed a class issue that I hadn't thought about before: the servants (I think this is at the beginning of "Be Our Guest") make a big deal about finally having someone to serve again, and talk about how their lives aren't complete unless they can be of service to someone. It's so boring when you're not waiting on someone more important than you!

And the ending is still disappointing—all because of this stupid magic spell, Beauty loses the sexy deep-voiced dangerous-but-charming Beast and instead gets stuck with the insipid (and, to my taste, actually kind of ugly) prince. Sigh.

Oh, well; I do think Disney's made enormous strides on all sorts of political fronts in the past 15 years, and I think they deserve credit for that, even if they still have a ways to go in various areas.

And some of the writing is really sharp, particularly some of the lyrics. Got sad all over again about Howard Ashman's untimely death. (It turns out, though, that one of my favorite lines—"Flowers, chocolates, promises you don't intend to keep..."—was (says the IMDB) ad-libbed by David Ogden Stiers.) Whoever at Disney decided to have the songs done by the team that wrote Little Shop of Horrors was inspired.

I think it's interesting that Disney chose a total unknown (named Paige O'Hara) to do Belle's voice; also that O'Hara has a dozen credits at the IMDB, all of which are playing Belle in one form or another. Rather a one-note career: ten years of Belle.

Here's a question. I remember a scene from the original that didn't appear in this version; Beth says she doesn't remember this scene. Did I imagine it? It involved Belle dancing around her house singing about all the exciting adventures she wants to have and putting pushpins in a map. Maybe I just read about the original plan for that scene and imagined that I'd seen it?

Anyway. After the movie, we hung out at The Tech for a while, looking at some cool mapping software and stuff, then came home. I did a little bit of magazine work, then went off to see Sarah for an hour, then over to Ethan & co.'s for TV. Jeremiah continues to slide downhill; tonight's episode, not written by JMS, had even worse writing than we've come to expect from the series. Particularly frustrating because this episode featured the return of the villain from the series premiere, a fascinating character played by a good actor; if they gave this woman some real lines, she could do phenomenal work. I love it when someone manages to portray (in prose or on the screen) a character who's unapologetic about their own misdeeds and yet somehow sympathetic anyway. You have to take such a character on their own terms; entirely uncompromising, but not caricatured evil either. Very hard to do well. Would've been more successful tonight if she didn't have to spend a lot of time complaining about how rough her childhood was.

And then we watched the Star Wars fan-film special. Some very very funny stuff, with a weak ending. George Lucas talking about the final award of the evening, for which he chose the winner, was painful at great length. Incredibly wooden. He looked like someone was holding a gun to his head, like he'd rather be anywhere in the world other than having to express praise for these horrible fans who were messing with his films. After several repetitions of his comment that it was great that anyone at all could do cool special effects these days (his phrasing suggested the corollary that it doesn't take any talent any more), he gave lukewarm praise to the film he finally chose, which was imo all it deserved. Luckily, Kevin Smith as host gave the evening several much-needed doses of zaniness, and just enough of a touch of self-conscious irony to avoid descending into overhyping things.

And now I'm home, and figuring I'll probably avoid venturing out of my apartment for the next couple days.