President Obama’s swearing in or Florida finally getting the results of November 6 election?
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-florida-20121108,0,5169368.story
Sometimes I weep for my state.
Seriously, though, the situation could have been a lot worse. Imagine if the election hinged on Florida’s results!
I like weird stories, and they don’t come much weirder than this story from HuffingtonPost.com involving one James Washington, who while in prison suffered a heart attack, thought he was going to die, and made a “death bed” confession to a murder he committed…only to not be quite as near death as he thought he was:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/05/james-washington-death-bed-confession_n_2076932.html
After surviving the heart attack, the man tried to recant his confession, but was ultimately convicted for the crime.
If the details of his crime weren’t so damn gruesome -beating a woman to death- one might be inclined to laugh at the macabre nature of the story.
At least the family of the victim gets some justice.
A few years back, the James Bond franchise hit a wall. The current actor playing the James Bond role had obviously played himself out, it appeared, to both audiences and the producers of the films. Realizing they needed to make a change, the producers of the films decided to go in another direction and bring us a more “serious” Bond. They wanted to make the stakes higher and minimize the “camp”.
The result, 1987’s The Living Daylights introduced audiences to Timothy Dalton’s James Bond.
Alas, box office history wasn’t made there nor, especially, in the second and last (and, IMHO, pretty terrible) Timothy Dalton Bond film, 1989’s Licence to Kill. Though its hard to judge and I may well be “mind-reading” here, I nonetheless had the feeling Timothy Dalton knew this second Bond film was a dud. His performance throughout was pretty dull and he looks to be having a terrible time before the cameras. It hardly came as a surprise, therefore, that he didn’t return for thirds.
Strangely enough, history essentially repeated itself afterwards. The next Bond, Pierce Brosnan, certainly looked great in the role of James Bond. However, I found his films to be…mediocre. Though I saw all of them, I’d be hard pressed to give you details of any of his films…other than the first, Goldeneye, which I consider the best of the lot.
So when Pierce Brosnan was let go, the producers of the Bond films once again decided to “go serious” and brought in Daniel Craig. Unlike the Timothy Dalton experiment, their fortunes were rewarded this time around even as history repeated itself in other ways. Like Timothy Dalton, the first Daniel Craig Bond film, 2006’s Casino Royale, was pretty damn great. The follow-up, 2008’s Quantum of Solace…wasn’t. In fact, I think I enjoyed Licence to Kill a little more than Quantum…though at least Daniel Craig remained more interested in his role here versus Timothy Dalton.
Which is my very long winded way of saying that I’m curious to see the new James Bond film, Skyfall.
But am I the only one who thinks Adele’s theme song for the movie is…pretty terrible? Don’t get me wrong: Her singing voice remains a pure joy to hear and, on the surface, getting her to sing the theme song to a Bond film seemed a total no-brainer.
The problem, in my humble opinion -and, no, I’ve haven’t sold quite as many of my own albums as Adele has! ;-)- is that they put “Skyfall” and words that rhyme with it a little too much into the song. It’s just a little too much, IMHO.
What are my favorite Bond theme songs? Three immediately spring to mind:
Goldfinger by Shirley Bassey. Perhaps what Adele was striving for?
Then there’s the rockin’ Paul McCartney “Live and Let Die”:
Finally, loved Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better”. Really liked the way she subtly threw in the movie title, “The Spy Who Loved Me” within the context of the song. Pretty much the opposite of the way Adele has Skyfall a little too pronounced in the song’s lyrics.
Good to see so many people in these parts participating in voting, though there have been controversies.
What else is new…for Florida?
The early voting hours were cut down despite the fact that there were long lines of people willing, able, and patient enough to brave the lines.
As for me, for the first time I applied for an absentee ballot for myself and my wife. Mine arrived in time to be sent out for this election. My wife’s? Still waiting for it. A website for absentee ballot information lists her ballot as being sent to our (correct!) address on Halloween, October 31st…needless to say, it should have arrived by now. Perhaps it got lost in the mail or perhaps it was delivered to another household by accident. Regardless, my intrepid wife will have to brave lines later in the evening when she gets out of work…unless the absentee ballot arrives today and we can simply deliver it to a place that accepts absentee ballots.
My prediction? I’ll have to go with the majority of pundits and say President Obama gets re-elected. A couple of months ago I made a similar prediction and felt on far firmer ground at that time. Today, the margins are smaller and Romney has certainly made some inroads (though he seemed to have primarily been helped by Obama’s non-appearance at the first presidential debate).
We’ll see soon enough…
First off, the 1927 Todd Browning/Lon Chaney feature London After Midnight is perhaps one of the more famous “lost” films of the silent era. Perhaps even THE most well known of them all, given the talents involved. (lists of famous Lost Films can be found here and here and here)
According to IMDB: (London After Midnight) is believed that this film existed until 1967. Inventory records indicated that the only remaining print was being stored in MGM’s vault #7 which was destroyed by fire in 1967. By that time, all other elements had been destroyed or were missing.
On TCM the other night, however, they aired a slightly under one hour “reconstruction” of the film. Since there is no actual footage remaining of the film, they used still and creative zooming/panning along with title cards to give viewers a sense of what this lost film was.
Visually, I have to say the film (or rather the still) sure deliver the goods. Lon Chaney’s vampire character is certainly memorable, as is Edna Tichenor as Luna the Bat Girl, the vampire’s assistant.
But the story…well…
Look, its silly. Perhaps even beyond silly. London After Midnight is, at its heart, a murder mystery. Five years before the patriarch of a family dies in what the detective in charge (Chaney) rules a suicide. But he clearly doesn’t believe this to be the case. Five years later, the house beside the deceased man’s estate is rented to what appear to be a pair of vampires (Chaney and Tichenor) who creep out the neighbors…one of whom may be a murderer.
Again, what follows is rather silly, storywise. If you must know, much of the vampire subplot is nothing more than a way for the detective to push the people next door into thinking that the suicide (actually murder) victim may be brought back to life…and therefore expose his murderer.
I am, however, pleased with the presentation, limited though it was to static stills. The people behind this “reconstruction” did a pretty good job of giving us what we needed to know so that we could at least visualize the lost film.
One remains hopeful, however, that sometime in the future a print of the actual movie will be found. Silly plot aside, I’d love to see the great Lon Chaney’s every scene as the vampire!
Don’t know if everyone out there in the United States is aware of this, but I heard a rumor that sometime next week we’re going to have a Presidential election.
Here in Florida, a “swing state”, that means a deluge of calls originating from strange numbers (thank you, caller ID…soooo much easier to ignore these annoying robo-calls!).
Now, not to get too political, but I made my decision a while back and find it hard to believe that many polls shows the race as “tight” as it is. Sorry, but there is simply no way in the world I can support a candidate who switches core philosophies depending on what he thinks his audience at that moment wants to hear. Voting for Mitt Romney, thus, is like voting for the unknown. Which Mitt Romney will you get? That’s not to say, however, that I’m completely enamored of Barack Obama, but at least he’s managed to (slowly, granted) bring this country out of the outright disaster left behind by his predecessor, who I consider the worst President to have graced the White House in my lifetime.
But enough of my politics.
The question on many people’s mind is: Who’s going to win?
While you can look in on any number of predictions (I happen to like the mathematical geekiness offered at fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/), Cracked.com offers the following 6 Bizarre Factors That Predict Every Presidential Election:
http://www.cracked.com/article_20139_6-bizarre-factors-that-predict-every-presidential-election.html
Yesterday I caught the latest episode of Fringe, “The Bullet That Saved the Earth,” the fourth episode of the show’s fifth, and last, season.
It occurred to me a while back that while I generally enjoy the show, one of its biggest problems is that the writers behind the series tend to make things up on the fly. At least this is my suspicion given the way the show started, progressed, and is now winding down.
The show has shifted abruptly since the last season to a bleak future where the mysterious Observers, a race of aliens originally presented as beings who could be in any time of their choosing and are extremely difficult if not impossible to kill but who are now much easier to pick off, have taken over Earth and are grinding humanity down.
But not if our intrepid Fringe division heroes can thwart them.
In this episode, what should have been a gargantuan story point was told in the waning minutes of the episode and, yes, to discuss it I should warn you…
SPOILERS FOLLOW!
Still here?
You’ve been warned!
In this episode, the now grown daughter of Peter Bishop and Olivia Dunham, Henrietta Bishop (Georgina Haig) dies at the hands of the “chief” Observer. The sequence should have been emotionally engaging and, at the very least, shocking. However, and this is one of the big problems I’ve been having with the show this season, things are happening at such a breakneck pace that, as a viewer, I haven’t been able to attach myself emotionally with any of these characters. Even the ones who have been around since the series started.
Not to sound too anaI, but did anyone notice how many minutes passed before our protagonist, Olivia Dunham, uttered a meaningful line of dialogue in this episode? I mean, she was around, but it seemed like we were in the show’s second segment before she had anything worth saying at all…and it feels like this is the way the season has so far gone.
The show’s producers are so busy trying to show us this new world/reality but have short shifted us on the characters. When Henrietta dies, we should have been floored by such an audacious and stunning plot development.
Instead, I felt…almost nothing.
You see, I barely knew the character. She hadn’t been given enough screen time on the show for me to develop any feelings for her. And her death, something that should have been shocking and emotional, instead felt like a cold, calculated plot device to make me feel something I simply didn’t. Her character hadn’t earned those type of feelings…at least not yet.
Worse, I suspect her death will only be temporary and lead to the show’s ultimate conclusion/happy ending: Somehow, Walter Bishop will undo the damage wrought by the Observers and “reset” time. Thus, that day in the park that Peter, Olivia, and the infant Henrietta will play out once again in the closing minutes of the show’s final episode, only without the Observers’ invasion.
And we’ll see Henrietta grown once again, thinking back to that childhood, perhaps along with the older Peter and Olivia as they bury Walter and think back to the beautiful life they had together.
Just a thought.
Anyway, despite these complaints, I’m one to complain.
I’ll be there to the end, despite it all.
My thoughts go out to everyone who experienced hurricane Sandy over the past few days.
Living in South Florida, one gets to see (and fear) the paths of hurricanes and tropical storms all too much. August, in particular, seems to be the “nail biter” month. That seems to be the month to watch out.
Though I’ve experienced my share of storm systems (including the devastating Andrew in 1992), one of the more memorable hurricane experiences I faced was back in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina.
Ironically enough, I was in New Orleans on a business trip about two weeks before Katrina devastated the city. The trip done, I returned to my native South Florida and then watched as the weather reports indicated a tropical wave might become something greater. Of course, it was August.
While many recall the devastation inflicted on New Orleans, Biloxi, and other areas in Katrina’s path, few recall that South Florida actually felt the first hit from Katrina. Of course, at that time the storm was “only” a Category 1 Hurricane.
The thing that I most recall about Katrina was experiencing the so-called “Eye” of this particular storm. I suspect most people are familiar with the term, but for those who aren’t, many well defined hurricanes have what is called an “eye” in their center. This eye is often a circular tranquil zone where there are no winds or storms. The eye wall around the eye itself, however, usually has the most severe weather attached to the storm.
Experiencing Katrina’s eye was an eerie experience. Katrina, if memory serves, struck us during the day. The weather rapidly grew worse with each passing minute. Winds blew heavy and the trees around my house were shedding leaves (and branches) by the second. Things got worse and worse. The electricity was knocked out and rain splattered against the window like ball bearings.
And then, all of a sudden, everything was calm.
We knew the storm wasn’t done. We knew we were experiencing its eye. I recall going outside the house and feeling not even the slightest breeze.
I went back inside, knowing that this wouldn’t last. Sure enough, the winds suddenly picked up and the storm’s fury was right back. Maybe an hour or so later the winds started dying down and the bulk of the storm was passed.
It would go on, of course, across South Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico where it would strengthen into a devastating Category 5 Hurricane before eventually hitting land near New Orleans.
As inconvenienced as I was by Katrina and, later in that same year the more devastating (to us) Hurricane Wilma, it was obvious we were lucky compared to those in the Mississippi area.
Now with Sandy, I can’t help but feel for those who faced that beast. Any hurricane, regardless of category, is something one must take very, very seriously.
Let’s start with this: I’m a BIG fan of Torchwood. In fact, for a while there I thought this spin off of the new Doctor Who was actually better than the already pretty damn good series it emerged from.
Torchwood retained the oddball energy present in the modern Doctor Who episodes but added a wild adult kinkiness to the mix. In our protagonist, the immortal Captain Jack Harkness (John Borrowman), you had a very liberated bi-sexual being who was willing (most willing) to sleep with anything with a pulse. Jack Harkness presides over the Torchwood organization, a super secret group whose function it was to find and deal with the extraordinary. His motley crew of agents in the first few seasons of the show would change, though principle among his group was Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles), a woman who was, essentially, the viewer’s proxy.
Though there were a couple of clunkers here and there, the first two seasons of the show were -again in my opinion- delightful. The show was episodic yet there were stories within the stories that continued throughout the seasons. Then, for the third season, the makers of the show did something different. Instead of presenting several episodes, they offered a five part, one main story mini-series entitled Children of Earth. The general reaction to the series was very positive, but unlike Doctor Who, it appeared that getting further Torchwood episodes off the ground was a more difficult prospect.
However, in 2011 the U.S. cable channel Starz decided to fund a new Torchwood series. Like Children of Earth, this would be one single story presented in a mini-series format. Unlike Children of Earth, this one would be presented in not five episodes, but in ten. The series was titled Miracle Day and, after waiting far longer than I intended (being such a big fan of the series, after all), I finally got a chance to see it.
Going into the series, however, I was worried. The fact of the matter is that those who saw the series when it originally aired on Starz were, to put it bluntly, not all that impressed. In fact, for the most part the reviews appeared mostly negative and, a year after the show aired, I find it fascinating how little anyone -even Torchwood fans- is talking about this series. But, as I said before, being a fan of the series meant I’d give this one a try. Even if Miracle Day wasn’t as good as some of the other Torchwood seasons, there had to be some enjoyment to be found within it.
Right?
…right…?
Alas…
Miracle Day, if nothing else, is an ambitious work. It attempts to present some very big story ideas/concepts in the context of a science fictional setting, from media manipulation to the potential evils/abuses of big pharmaceutical companies to an exploration of how modern society could devolve into one not unlike 1930’s Nazi Germany. And while I certainly can appreciate the ambition the writers had in creating this work, the fact of the matter is that once its all done, you can’t help but feel that this is a misfire.
To begin with, the two characters we most want to see in Torchwood are the two principles, Captain Jack Harkness and Gwen Cooper. Unfortunately, for large portions of the series we’re forced to follow the other (new) characters presented, and I’ll be brutally blunt here: They were a chore to watch.
The two most important of these new characters are CIA agent Rex Matheson (Mekhi Phifer) and CIA computer specialist Esther Drummond (Alexa Havins). They’re meant to fill up the Torchwood group and provide us with American heroes to follow, but Rex Matheson is presented for the most part as an arrogant jerk while Esther Drummond is more often than portrayed as an exasperated/melancholy/confused/scared person who always a few steps behind everyone else. The other two main characters we’re following are wild cards: Child molester/murderer Oswald Danes (Bill Pullman) who “miraculously” survives his scheduled execution and Jilly Kitzinger (Lauren Ambrose), a P.R. rep who wants to make Danes a (in)famous celebrity.
Yeah, that’s just the motley bunch I as a viewer want to spend time with. Especially the child molester/murderer.
The plot of Miracle Day is as follows: One day, everyone on Earth stops dying. The population of our planet, therefore, rises exponentially. Worse, those who were/are about to die or suffer some kind of accident(s) (life threatening or not) continue living…in pain or crippled or what have you. Thus, the “Miracle” of Miracle Day is ironic. Resources (food, water, medicine) are in threat of being quickly used up. And, added to all that, the immortal Captain Jack Harkness realizes that while everyone else has become immortal he has become…mortal.
The mystery is thus set up: How is Jack’s status related to this sudden immortality on Earth? And, further, how can we get back to the status quo? And should we?
As I said before, the series was most certainly ambitious in its scope, imagining this new society of immortals and presenting all the potential problems inherent in a world of immortal beings. But, as I said before, too much time is spent with the “new” characters that, frankly, I found little reason to root for or care about. There were times, in fact, that Captain Jack and Gwen seemed to be guest stars in their own series. And as the show progressed, it also felt like ten episodes were simply way, waaaaay too many to spend on this story.
Once we got to the resolution, most of my initial euphoria of seeing a new Torchwood series was gone, and rather than enjoying a rip-roaring conclusion I just wanted the series to end. The final twist involving the character of Rex Matheson made me cringe. Did I want to see more Torchwood episodes featuring that character?
Nope.
Given the muted reaction by the masses to Miracle Day and the fact that I’ve heard nothing about more Torchwood series coming in the future, I suspect this might well have been the series’ last hurrah.
If so, its a shame. I can’t say every minute of the entire ten hours of Miracle Day were terrible. The mini-series certainly had its moments here and there (I really, REALLY liked the way Captain Jack appeared before Gwen Cooper toward the end of episode one). But, ultimately, Miracle Day was a series that could –should– have been much more.
So, unless you’re already a big fan of Torchwood and, like me, have to see Miracle Day to complete your Torchwood viewing, you’d be better off catching any of the first three series and ignoring this one.
Love this list, which appears on Time magazine’s website:
There are an awful lot (29!) of films mentioned, and some of the “headscratchers” may be more a function of lapses in logic with the screenplay.
For example, there is no way to understand or explain why the alien invaders from the movie Signs decided to target our planet when it has the one item (water) that can effectively destroy them. The sad thing is that, for the most part, I enjoyed the film, but that lapse in writing logic really sunk the movie.
The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, presented an ending that was also very ambiguous, at least in parts. As the article states, one realizes that there is story structure clearly evident before and after protagonist Dave Bowman’s “psychedelic” trip. The monoliths that take the Earth explorers out to Jupiter, and subsequently had Bowman enter a monolith floating out there and transform into a “cosmic” star child, indicated this was the next step in evolution. The scene also neatly replicated the first part of the movie, where we witnessed the evolution of apes to humans via touching the monolith and gaining an understanding of using tools. The question, of course, is then: What about the elegant room Bowman was in? His aging? His meal? Dropping the glass of wine? If you look closely at the scenes, Bowman is aging. He appears first as the astronaut he is in his full spacesuit. He subsequently (I believe, anyway), is allowed to live out what is left of his life in comfortable surroundings. Perhaps it is a gift of the alien race. Once he ages to the point of death, it is then that he is reborn as the star child.
At least that’s the way I saw it!
If you make it far enough into the list, at 29 they mention another headscratcher that, like the Signs example, I feel is a major writing flaw. The movie is the 2009 reboot of Star Trek and the issue cited is the convenient way the young Kirk meets the old (now alternate reality) Spock on Delta Vega following the destruction of Vulcan. When that scene played out in the theater I was watching it, I couldn’t believe it and for the reasons cited in the article. Far fectched doesn’t begin to do justice to the astronomical coincidence involved in Kirk and the elder Spock meeting in that barren planet. Yet the scene plays out straightforwardly and no one in the film questions Kirk’s incredible luck.
Anyway, the list is there for you to read, should you be interested.