Category: Movies

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The Top 10 Things I Hate About Star Trek

[doug]Okay, I’m really a fairly big Star Trek fan, despite being very disappointed by the latest film, but this list on the Happy Fun Pundit site is too delicious to pass up. Somewhere down the page you’ll find my own comments.

Here’s item one from the list, to give you a sample:

Noisy doors.

You can't walk three feet in a starship without some door whooshing or screeching at you. My office building has automatic sliding doors. They're dead silent. If those doors went “wheet!” every time a person walked through them, about once a month some guy in accounting would snap and go on a shooting rampage. Sorry Scotty, the IEEE has revoked your membership until you learn to master WD-40.

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We Were Soldiers Once … and Young

[book][film][doug]Seems to be a good week for finishing books. We Were Soldiers Once â€¦ and Young—Ia Drang: The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam, by Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (Ret.) and Joseph L. Galloway, is the book on which the film We Were Soldiers is based.

The film, although gritty and graphic, is probably one of the finest war films ever made, and actually does a better job of integrating the stateside events and human drama with the events on the battlefield than does the book. The book, of course, is more detailed than the film, although I was surprised at the high level of accuracy the film obtained—many historically-based films tend to sacrifice accuracy for drama.

The book covers the events portrayed on screen, including a second (or perhaps continuing) battle that happened nearby shortly after the primary battle ended.

Both book and film are excellent, illustrating the importance of training, leadership, and coordination of forces that are vital to a successful campaign. The book included a criticism that was not in the film—Due to President Johnson’s failure to declare a state of emergency and extend the active-duty tours of draftees and reserve officers, any soldier who had less than 60 days to serve on his enlistment would not be deployed with the First Air Cavalry. This left them both understaffed and cost many of their best-trained men.

There were other Presidential errors as well—the North Vietnamese were allowed to retreat as needed into nearby Cambodia; US forces were forbidden to follow. Overall, though, these are mentioned more for historical background than anything else.

Due to the improved emotional story of the film, I would actually recommend seeing the film before reading the book—something I would rarely prescribe.

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The Matrix Reloaded

[doug]Note: I have tried to keep this as spoiler-free as possible. In the first 15 minutes of the film, I wasn’t actually sure I was going to like it. Although the opening featured quite a good look at the long-mysterious city of Zion, it was mixed with a somewhat drawn-out combination of scenes of a mass dance ritual in the “Temple,” (a bit reminiscent of some parts of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy) intermixed with an uncomfortably erotic scene with Neo and Trinity. After that, though, things really took off.

Reloaded is significantly more complex than The Matrix. Obviously, the war against The System is not over, the machines have improved themselves somewhat, and much is revealed about how various programs operate within the system, and about the world of the Matrix in general. We are also given a much better understanding of how Morpheus and his crew fit in (or fail to fit in) against the backdrop of Zion’s culture and its military and political leaders. The origins or reasons for existence of some key charactes and “programs” are explained, but without the horribly unfitting and disappointing treatment Lucas gave to the Force with his Midichlorian explanation in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

There were a few disappointments, but not many: One of my favorite characters is not there—although his absence is explained. The background music is not as fitting (or as good) in several places, and sound effects were not quite as good as before, although I have been spoiled by viewing The Matrix in Dolby 5.1 surround at home where every bullet shell casing hitting the ground can be heard, and my son John [john inline] complains that the bass rattles stuff off his desk upstairs. To a certain extent, mostly due to the film’s larger scope and greater number of both protagonists and antagonists, the film, at times, feels to have been run by a different director.

The combat scenes (and we’ve all been jaded by knock-offs in everything from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to Shrek) were astonishingly well done, intense, and wonderfully choreographed—truly beyond anything I’ve seen on film. It was not the “same old, same old.” The depth of plot and concept far exceed the first film, and overall it requires far more thought cycles to process. Ultimately, this is an amazing film.

Coming in November, The Matrix Revolutions (and if you are patient enough to sit through the credits and music that reminds me of Erci’s cube at MediVation, you’ll be treated to a preview of what is to come).

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Nightmares About Dinosaurs—An Unusual Solution

Most children are fascinated with dinosaurs, and our boys are no exception. However, when David was three years old, he kept having recurring nightmares, from which he would awake screaming and generally require staying in bed with us, about dinosaurs.

To complicate matters, he kept begging to watch Jurassic Park, having seen the dinosaur pictured on the DVD case. Of course, given his nightmares (and having some negative leanings toward showing somewhat-violent programming to small children), we did not grant his request.

But the nightmares continued for weeks. Finally, I reasoned, he was already having nightmares about the dinosaurs, what harm could there be in letting him watch Jurassic Park? As I recall, we did skip over the scene where the T-Rex attacks the jeep with the kids in it.

After watching the film (actually, after watching all three JP films), his nightmares went away. Go figure.

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Wake up, Neo . . .

It’s going to be a great (and long-awaited) summer for fans of The Matrix. Two parts of a series of animated short sequences have been released (and are available for download or via streaming), with more coming soon. The animation was done by Square, the folks who brought us the luscious Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within film.

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Why does the weekend end so quickly?

Quite a bit going on this weekend. The primary task was to get a project for CenterWatch finished, including using a combination of MS Word's Table of Contents feature and some Excel formulae to generate an index of Companies by Therapeutic Specialty. I discovered a goof on my part; I needed to have one specific named style for the therapeutic specialties on each page, but not use that style for anything else on the page. Every time I would do a search-and-replace to fix this, Word would crash. Finally I gave up, created a second copy of the file, and deleted everything but the therapeutic specialties that was in the style I was trying to index. The section was, of course, 350 pages long! I'm making a list of notes for next year.

We had some good family time for a change (with Nichelle sick/me overworked for the past couple of months). We watched the newly remastered Chitty-Chitty, Bang-Bang, which should have been in Widescreen, but has not been issued that way (except for the opening race scene and credits and closing credits). The sound and picture quality are superb, and the DVD features a cool “sing along” feature for the musical numbers. I need to start a Web petition going about the widescreen/pan-and-scan issue … I’ve e-mailed MGM’s customer support several times, but not once received an answer.

Sunday afternoon we watched the new Veggie Tales Jonah film. I should add that Nichelle and I both fell asleep partway through. The kids liked it. Big Idea did a good job of explaining what the job of an Old Testament prophet was. David, after his class on Sunday night, presented me with his coloring sheet of the 10 Commandments, and said, “This is a message from the Lord.”

Sunday night I jumped over to Shine! to make a quick edit (remarking out a live performance that had past). When I went to check my work, I discovered that the site had been defaced by some juvenile crackers with an obscene anti-war message. Apparent Interland had a little security problem sometime early Saturday morning. Other evidence indicates their mail server was commandeered as well. Just what John Harris needs—his site defaced on a day when people were likely to be visiting the site to get directions to the performance Saturday evening.

The war news was negative for the first time so far. We have six people from our church on active military duty, plus another moved-away friend (he started riding our bus to church when he was in fourth grade—right now his neice is in Nichelle’s and my 4th grade Sunday school class.