Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian

So let me talk about cell phones for a moment.

The Motorola [motorola.com] company was founded in 1928 by Paul and Joseph Galvin, as the Galvin Manufacturing Company. It was renamed to Motorola, a portmanteau of motor and Victrola, when the company began to manufacture radios for automobiles in 1930. Later, it —

Wait, roll back. Let me talk about cell phones in movies.

The thing that sticks out most in my mind about Journey to the Center of the Earth — I make no apologies for spoilers; the movie was awful, 3D or no 3D — was the scene where the kid's cell phone rings while he's in the middle of the sea in bad weather and uncounted miles below the surface of the earth.

Conversely, Hoshi no Koe — or by its English name, the equally poetic* Voices from a Distant Star — revolves around a not-technically-impossible text-message "conversation", but a decidedly implausible one. (I suppose the Lysithea could have acted as a relay.) Since this really is the central plot device of the movie, it and its associated concepts get a free pass as the one unicorn in the garden.

The cell-phone bit in Battle of the Smithsonian, on the other hand, was completely arbitrary, utterly gratuitous, and yet managed not to worry me in the least. (The movie is about figures in a museum coming to life due to ancient Egyptian magic. The premise easily subsumes a multitude of lesser sins.)

The rest of the movie was also largely hilarious, especially the sequence where the three monkeys essentially acted out a Three Stooges skit. I have spoiled nothing.

Downside: the reference to π grated on my historical and mathematical sensibilities, for multiple reasons — here, have a link. (Sure, I'd have used π, but I'd have gone a lot farther than a lousy eight digits; you can go 32 before you hit a zero. Oh, and it's terribly convenient that the numbers happened to be in telephone arrangement, rather than (say) boustrophedonically... I should really just relax, shouldn't I.)

Other downside: the romantic subplot. It was fine for most of the movie (the putti notwithstanding), usually adding directly to the comedy, but the last bit was kind of depressing, really. No, after that; the bit that the movie closed on.

Still, it didn't exactly pretend to be high art, nor educational; and unlike your average so-called "romantic comedy" or the abomination they've made out of Land of the Lost, it was genuinely funny. It gets a 1/1, and a lack of impassioned rant.

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* I mean this quite literally: "Hoshi no Koe" is potentially the first line of a haiku, while "Voices from a Distant Star" fits nicely into either iambic or trochaic pentameter. (And no, I don't care that the official translation uses of in the title rather than from.)