Happy Friday!

It’s been a busy week. Work, paperwork, more work. Yeah. I haven’t really had time to do as much writing as I would like so you get this instead of one of the other posts I’m working on.

Enjoy the new trailer for Steven Spielberg’s latest film Lincoln. Or don’t. You could hate it too. Tell me if you do, I’d be curious.

I am indifferent, personally. I was quite excited about this movie and now I’m merely interested. The trailer’s a little too… feelgood for me. I tend to hate trailers for being silly oversimplifications of the movie or giving too much away or just being terribly cliched. I’m hoping this one is an oversimplified representation of a complex story and character.

Abraham Lincoln is a controversial figure. Maybe not in the general public, but with people who’ve done deeper research he’s either very well liked or despised, at least from what I’ve seen. History majors, poly sci people, or those otherwise obsessed with the Civil War period tend to have pretty strong opinions on the man. Some are of the opinion that Lincoln was more of a pragmatist than a great crusader. Ending slavery was politically expedient so he did it. Others believe he did it of a deep moral conviction. This trailer seems to lean heavily toward the latter depiction of the man.

I don’t know. I expect the truth is somewhere in between. One thing all historians agree on: Lincoln did not hunt vampires.

Well hopefully it’ll be good. It does have top notch production value and a slew of great actors. So that’s promising. And Spielberg’s done some great historical films in the past like Schindler’s List and my favorite war movie ever, Saving Private Ryan. I guess I’ll be cautiously optimistic for this to be really good.

What else is there to get excited about this year? The Hobbit? Pff. I was starting to get excited about that but then Peter Jackson had to go and make it a trilogy. Now I almost don’t care. I’m sure my tune will change closer to release. I have to stop myself now before I rant about that.

As a funny aside: I started typing “Lincoln vs.” into Google. The first three autocomplete suggestions were “zombies,” “Cadillac,” and “vampires.” The fourth suggestion was “Lincoln vs. Douglas.” Oh the times we live in.