between Mel and Kevin

Today is Kevin Costner's 55th birthday. It feels weird to think that he's barely 4 months older than me. As for Mel Gibson, who is 8 months younger than me, my wife says I've aged more gracefully than he has.

2007's "Doctor Strange"

I watched 2007's "Doctor Strange" again this afternoon. I say 'again' because, being a fan of the Doctor, I had bought the DVD when it had first come out. I had found it wanting back then, but I wanted to give it another chance. This time around? The animation remains adequate, but I liked the story slightly better. Yes, it is faint praise. I was annoyed that the sorcerers tended to beat the mystic crap out of each other with swords conjured out of thin air, instead of relying on, for example, the Bands of Cyttorak. Maybe the Bands had a gig playing elsewhere. Anyway. The story has callous surgeon Stephen Strange lose the use of his hands after a terrible accident.



He turns to his only remaining hope, the Ancient One, a Tibetan sorcerer who offers to train him by first having him scrub his retreat's floors in exchange for rather sparse lodgings and, a few days later, finally, a hot bath. I dare not think what Strange must have smelled like by then, as one of tasks up to then had involved dragging big blocks of stone around - with great difficulty, until the Ancient One told him what his problem was.

"You perceive these stones to be heavy, so they are."

Eventually Strange gets some training in actual mystic arts. Just in time because a Balrog... I mean, the Dread Dormammu is trying to break thru into our world from the Dark Dimension. Why that Dimension is dark when its main inhabitant is literally on fire, I don't know.



What a surprise, Mordo, who was part of the Ancient One's group of sorcerers, most of them the mystical equivalent of Red Shirts, turns on his boss, who probably didn't appreciate his suggestion of killing children upon finding that the comatose tykes are being used by Dormammu to come thru to the Big City.



After a bunch of flying mouths chew up lots of people, and after the Dormammu Troubles are resolved, the only ones left standing are Strange and Wong, who plan to train a new bunch of sorcerers. Presumably they won't tell their postulants what happened to their predecessors. It ends with, finally, a reference to Clea.

It could have been better.
It could have been worse.

The costumes are neat anyway.