Monthly Archives: March 2011

Headache Log

My doctor has asked that I keep a headache log. Seems to me that the databasing of my blog makes for a natural log. So unles my headaches interest you I would advise skipping any post with this title.

03/15/11

Morning headache starting about 9 am, could be caffeine induced as I have had no caffeine this day. Took 1 pill of the rx, but it seemed to have little effect. By 3 pm the headache was completely gone.

9:30 pm headache returned, dosed again.

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Sunday Night Movie: Spider Man 2

This is going to be a short Sunday Night Movie post — I think — as my fingers are hurting and it’s been a real day for me.

Anyway I had today off — doctor’s appointment — and so I knew that length was not a factor in whatever film I selected last night, however my mood was quite up in the air making it hard to settle on a film. I stood at the case, sliding potential DVDs and Blu-rays out a bit, so they stood out from the rest, and when I had then all ready I’d decided from the smaller set. At least that was the plan. The moment i looked at Spider Man 2 I knew that was the film for last night. A film serious enough to feel meaningful in the dramatic points, light enough to suite my mood, and competent enough that I knew I would enjoy the full ride.

Of the three Spider Man film this is easily my favorite. It doesn’t have the heavy lifting and predictable structure of an origin film. (Really nearly all superhero origin movies have the same three part structure. 1- Introduce hero and background, see the powers come to the fore, 2-the hero speeds around the scenes tackling bad guys far below his pay level and rescuing people and cats, 3-a big bad equal to the hero arrises and we have the real test which of course the hero passes so we can get on to sequels.) With that work out of the way Spider Man 2 could concentrated on the story that they wanted to tell. Of course Spider Man 3 is a pile of chaotic plots and characters that is full of sound and fury and goes nowhere. (I own it on blu-ray but only because it came package with the  PS3.)

I loved everything about Spider Man 2, the production design, the special effects, the fights, the characters, the performances except the ending, that  bugged me a bit. Spoilers ahead.

The entire film is about the tension in the duality of Peter Parker/ Spider Man and the choices Parker has to face to resolve that tension, both as a hero and as a man in love. All well and good, handled well with drama, pathos, and comedy. At the end of the film Doc Ock has fashioned a fusion reactor that is self perpetuating and will soon go critical, break contained, and level half of New York City. Ock, return to a non-madness frame of mind tell Parker that there is no way to stop it now that is it self regenerating., then reverses himself and says that the fusion reactor, the power of the freakin’ sun, can be drowned in the Hudson River like a unwanted puppy. Ock sacrifices himself insisting he will not die a monster and taked the reactor into thr river himself, saving the city but dying in the process.

Keeping with the duality theme of the script the resolution should have turned on Peter Parker’s brilliance. For example, when told that the reaction cannot be stopped, Parker might have suggested making a breach in the contained to create a rocket, and that way the reactor could be quickly dispatched far from the city, exploding harmlessly up high. Doc Ock can still be the one to fly the thing, dying a man and not a monster, but it would have taken both Peter Parker’s brilliance and Spider Man’s abilities (beating Doc Ock back into his senses) to save the day. A nice unification after the division that Peter/Spidey  had gone through in this plot.

Other than that I have no fault or problems with this very fun superhero film.

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Movie Review: Battle Los Angeles

Despite the horror that is daylight savings time and the foolishness of of staying up late on the night that the time skipped ahead by an hour I got up this morning and with a pal went to catch the first screening for today of Battle Los Angeles, and latest Alien invasion movie.

I was pleasantly surprised and thoroughly enjoyed myself at the screening this morning. The plot is simple and mostly what you could have expected if you had seen the trailers. Aliens, apparently in a bad mood, making water landings around the world, just of the coasts of major cities, and then without any fanfare proceed to the shoot and smash portion of their package tour. While the entire world is at war and we get flashes of news and information about what is happening elsewhere, this movie like the title suggests, is about the battle in Los Angeles.

Aaron Eckhart plays Staff Sergeant Nantz, a career Marine who is now haunted by the ghosts of soldiers under his command that fell in the middle east. Tired, worn out and beginning to fail physically Nantz wants to retire. Eckhart plays the role wonderfully understated. This is a US Marine, he doesn’t cry and moan about his troubles, but you can see them in his eyes. Of course his plans for retirement are suspended when the aliens attack and he is assigned to a new platoon and green lieutenant for action.

I have heard people compare this to an alien version of Black Hawk Down, and I can understand where they are coming from with that idea. This is a gritty style of filmmaking with an focus on making the scene look, sound, and feel realistic. To my limited knowledge that got the military aspects of the story dead on. With an unsteady handheld camera and lots of fast editing the film conveys the chaos, confusion, and calamity that is combat.

One of the aspects of this film that I really applaud the writers, producers, and director for is that this is a very personal point of view. We follow the story by way of these Marines and never do we see Generals, Secretaries, or Presidents in the story. The story is about these characters in this fairly limited time frame.

That is not to say that this film is not without flaws. The science at one point becomes more than ludicrous abd worse yet it did not need to go that far.

Some years back, 1990 in fact, a small genre film named Tremors burst upon the scene. One scenes in Tremors has the main characters trapped on a rock speculating where the monsters came from. Each characters proposes a classic SF trick that has been used to explain monstrous beasts in other films, mutated animals, aliens, government projects, etc. What Tremors never did was as a film tell you where the monsters came from because it was unimportant to the story. Battle Los Angeles should have learned from that trick, instead they try to explain why the aliens are invading. Why is unimportant to our plot, that’s for people of a much high pay-grade than Staff Sergeant and it should have been left on the editing room floor. I personally rationalized away the ‘explanation’ as merely the blathering of network talking heads and not anything based on the films ‘reality.’

Aside from that there is nothing to cause even a moments pause in recommending the people see this film.

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A new software suite coming soon

So, in order to get my sweetie-wife the speed she needs for her own internet needs I have purchased a second computer. (A used iMac a little faster than my current system.) I’ll take this second computer as my own and this system I am now using will becomes hers in the bedroom. (Or vice versa I will really leave it up to her.)

Anyway along with this change I will be transition most of my writing from the software I use now, Pages, to MS Word. Le Sigh. Word, and MS in general are not things I an enamored with, however there are a number of really good reasons to make the switch.

Foremost, Word is very much an industry standard and it will make my life easier once I started selling. (yes, I am still expecting rather than hoping to sell consistently someday.)

Also Word has a number of features that Pages either lacks or has in a less well-defined version, such as the ability to merge files and Track Changes. I write my novels in chapter files, each and every chapter gets its own file and them I have to cut and paste together into a final assembly. Word would allow me to do it just by merging files.

rack Changes is something I am just learning how to utilize and I can see the real advantages to it for copy edits, particularly when someone else — such as the wonderful Sweetie-wife — has done those edits. With both os us using Word she can make the changes, I can use track Changes to see and approve or reject and so get a clean copy with less paper used.

Buut I will use more MS product. Oh well.

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Not the best of days

I awoke with a headache and it has been with me all day long. It’s skimmed the edge of migraine several times, but always stayed on the just painful side of it. I stayed at work the whole day and I will finish my edits on chapter 1 tonight but I will not get much more done.

I did find a movie that I added to my Nextflix instant queue, A genre film from 1965 starring John Saxon, and with Basil Rathbone and Dennis Hopper. Gods, with a cast like that how can I NOT check it out.

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Sunday Night Movie:The Return Of The LIving Dead

I selected last night’s film based on a couple of different criteria, firstly that it was a shorter film, just over 90 minutes, second that it was not too serious nor too funny but something that struck just the right balance for my mood, and thirdly  I had not watched this film is quite some time so it was due for a screening.

The Return Of The Living Dead is a small low budget zombie movie that has had one clear and lasting impact on the Zombie genre and that is the incorporation of Brain Eating. Not generally known is that this film is a direct sequel to 1968’s Night of The Living Dead, subject of an earlier Sunday Night Movie here. Romero’s partner and co-screenwriter for that classic and far influencing movie, John Russo, had rights to make a sequel just as George A. Romero. Romero famously went off and created in 1979 Dawn of The Dead the archetypal zombie apocalypse movie, a film copies and referenced today more than 30 years later. Russo first crafted a serious script for his sequel but when Dan O’Bannon was tapped to directed O’Bannon thought it better to avoid directly ‘stepping on romero’s toes’ and to instead make a comedic sequel. Of course, being Dan O’Bannon one of the principle forces responsible for Alien, this was not going to be a friendly feel good comedy. O’Bannon rewrote Russo’s script and crafted a unique movie thought one yet unmistakably stamped with’s its period.

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