That the central character has survived The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, and is highly knowledgeable in the arcane symbols of the world means he ought to accept somethings on faith, right? No. Apparently he isn’t willing to believe what others tell him.

I finished The Lost Symbol only to see how it ended, and I skimmed some sections rather then reading them word for word.

This year I’ve decided to add a new posting for each book I finish reading. The posting will indicate whether or not this is a first-read or a re-read, and it will included, thanks to my Amazon Associates account, a link to the book on Amazon. If you should follow that link and make a purchase, I’ll get a pittance in return.

Once before I used a spreadsheet to track my reading habits for a calendar year and if my memory is right I read about 75 books that year, with perhaps 45 of those being new, first-reads, and the rest being re-reads. My guess is that I’ll read about 50 books in 2010.

Why did this movie have to be in 3-D? What did we gain by having to wear polarized glasses in order to view the movie? In my opinion, nothing. In fact it made the movie nearly un-watchable. I wear trifocal glasses as a result of LASIK eye surgery 3 years ago. One of my eyes sees things up close and the other far away. I was unable to see the screen through my glasses and then the polarized oversized glasses needed to put the images in focus. I ended up taking my glasses off, which allowed the 3-D focus to work, but resulting in a nasty headache by the end of the movie.

Adding insult to this injury was the significant up-charge on the admission price. Instead of $9 per person we paid $11.75 each. The additional charge was for “the 3-D technology.” Right.

Finally the movie had obviously been “Disney-fied.” The portion of the story that outlined Carl and Ellie’s life was beautiful and poignant. No words, no dialog, no talking dogs, much less dogs flying biplanes. Wall-E suffered from the same duality, the first half of the movie was stunning, creative, and incredible. The last half had clearly defined good guys, bad guys, a moral, and some growth. I am looking forward to the day when Pixar gets to make a whole movie that is theirs, and not one that has been fed through Disney’s “It’s A Small World After All” think tank.

It will be a long time before I ever consent to watch a 3-D movie again.

Great story, lousy presentation.