Mosher'sUnimaginativelyEntitledBlog
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After giving a quick plug to another puzzle site recently, I discovered Puzzle Baron. It’s along the same lines with around a dozen different mental games. You can play some online, some are available to print out as PDF files, and others you can do both ways.
Definitely worth a look. It’s the first site I’ve found with free logic problems (you know, the ones with the grids?) as well as a version of Boggle.
Enjoy!
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While I enjoyed Get The Munchies (or Go To White Castle in the US), I can’t say the same for Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay. Most of the (very few) laughs are bundled into the opening 15 minutes, the supporting characters are either superfluous or annoying and the editing of this Unrated Edition is dire in places.
Plot-in-a-nutshell: Fresh from the first film, Harold and Kumar get on a jet bound for Amsterdam. And then get promptly arrested and thrown into Guantánamo Bay as they’re mistaken for terrorists. Escape and an attempt to clear their name ensues as they try to get to Texas and the one person who can help them.
The film has moments, but that’s it – moments. The whole thing is disjointed, particularly in one party scene where it’s painfully obvious that dialogue is being dubbed from a scene that should be on the screen in front of you. Instead, I assume to make the most of the “unrated” label, the camera pans around a load of semi-naked women instead. I mean, naked chicks are all fine and good but that could have been done as well as the acting taking place off-camera.
Overall, though, the entire film plays as a lot of little scenes just cobbled together with no real fluidity.
As I said, the supporting characters are just annoying. Hell, even Kumar’s annoying in this one. Why anyone would stay friends with a complete ****** like this is beyond me. I know this is a comedy, and a stoner one at that, but the viewer still have to have some amount of belief in the characters and situation, surely.
Ron Fox (Robert Corddry) tips the believability scale far too far as an insane Homeland Security representative, surrounded by people who know he’s a dick. The scene where his “translator” can’t understand Harold’s parents because they speak English is simply painful. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not Corddry’s fault. It’s the character that’s awful to watch, not the actor. And the guy who plays George W. Bush couldn’t look any less like the “real” one – hell, my dad would do a better job and he’s got a beard.
Neil Patrick Harris, however, makes a welcome return as himself, and does a great turn in making himself out to be a complete drug-addled tool. Sadly, he’s the only standout in the entire cast.
John Cho has gone on to pilot the Enterprise in the new Star Trek film. Kal Penn has just been offered a job as an Assistant Director in the White House. Hopefully this will keep them away from making a third film.
Having a film all about drugs is one thing, but having to ensure your audience is ****** up to the eyeballs on weed to find any of it funny isn’t really good marketing.
Nothing To Lose is the twelfth Jack Reacher novel by Lee Child, soon to be joined by a thirteenth. It’s also, in my opinion, probably the weakest so far.
In this escapade, Reacher finds his way to a town called Hope where he’s welcome though just passing through – as ever. Just down the road is neighbouring Despair which is far less friendly. Of course, Reacher wants to know why they want him out of town so badly. Out come the old investigative skills and a small smattering of justified violence.
The thing is, Child seems to have used Nothing To Lose as a frame to hang some anti-religious and anti-Bush sentiments from and then shoe-horned a plot in afterwards. There are the usual number of pages, but not really enough story to fill them and when I got to the end I just felt a little cheated.
In fairness, this is partly down to having enjoyed the previous books so much. I think the main issue is that the overall premise (I won’t give it away) is just too far-fetched. Every clue Reacher comes up with is knocked on the head by the “bad guy” of the piece with a fairly acceptable rejoinder. The conclusion is more down to luck than anything else – is he really a bad guy or not? I’m just not used to this vagueness in a Reacher novel.
Otherwise, it’s as well written as ever. Plenty of detail, some good action, great descriptive work and no spoilers for earlier books in case you read them out of order.
I’d still recommend it, but don’t start the series with this one as it may disappoint.
Another (well, the second) Dan Brown adaptation and already things are wearing thin. I will confess that Angels & Demons is a better film than The Da Vinci Code, partly because of the beautiful scenery in Rome. However, the stilted dialogue still glares and a couple of the plot points from the novel are missing for no readily apparent reason.
Plot-in-a-nutshell: A new Pope is being elected, but the four main contenders have been kidnapped with a threat to kill them publicly released by the culprit. So of course, The Vatican calls in a symbologist. As you do.
The film is fairly close to the novel aside from the aforementioned slight discrepancies. Unfortunately, this means there’s a lot of scientific inaccuracy and a plot which is – to a large extent – fairly predictable. Oh, and awful dialogue. Don’t get me wrong, Dan Brown, or at least his publisher, is owed a thank you for bringing his type of novel into the popular mainstream. However, there are many authors who’ve done a better job of it than he has. His stories are good, but his writing’s dreadful. By keeping the film so close to the book, these weaknesses also transfer over.
Obvious differences are references to the events of the first film. Obvious as the original Angels & Demons novel was actually published and took place before The Da Vinci Code. If there’s anything more forced it’s that the film studio have offered Brown a fortune to write a third novel just so they can film that as well. Please, no.
Now don’t get me wrong. It’s not a bad film, as such. It’s just – like the novels – it could have been so much better. The story’s pretty good, the history (apocryphal or otherwise) is a good basis, the set pieces are well done but it’s just hand-holding story-telling. It’s A to B to C to climax with laborious explanations at each turn. In a novel, it’s easy to make this an aside but more of a challenge in a film. As the whole story revolves around historical events, there’s no end of explanation. Interesting, but very stop/start.
The cast are OK but like the film just nothing special – all by-the-numbers. Tom Hanks can do so much better and Ewan McGregor needs to pick one accent and stick to it. His Irish/Scots/English mash-up is just painful.
So as an adaptation, it’s not one of the worst being quite faithful to the original material. As a film, though, it’s a bit of a let-down.
The Andromeda Strain has gone through quite a few incarnations. This, the original novel, the 1971 film, a 2008 TV mini-series… and even a 1992 experimental film (The Strain Andromeda) where the original movie was re-edited in reverse, shot by shot.
I’ve not yet seen the original movie, but I was fairly impressed with the TV series as far as 4-episode television goes. From what I gather, the 1971 version is definitely worth a watch. I’m sure I have it kicking around somewhere – as I did with the novel for long enough.
There’s a copy of the book in a box under the house somewhere. I bought it years ago, but never got around to reading it. I then saw it in a charity shop in Perth, Western Australia earlier this year and picked it up. That copy is now sat here, finally finished, in Perth, Scotland.
It’s one of Michael Crichton‘s earlier works and published in 1969. The science inside is therefore a mixture of “out of date” and “second-guessing the future”. In honesty, I think he does a decent job of fusing the two. The list of references at the end is enormous, as is the number of in-text scientific asides.
The plot is fairly simple – a meteor lands, someone finds it and the population start to drop like flies as a result of some kind of disease. Instead of turning into a huge disaster story, the author instead concentrates on the efforts to determine what is causing the deaths (and how two people survived) while – to a large extent – ignoring the world outside of the secret testing facility where all the science takes place.
What’s surprising is that there’s no real drama. Everything is so clinical once the science part starts that there’s little to emotionally involve the reader. From a science point of view, it’s fun to try and second-guess things and there are a couple of “problems” with the hermetically sealed bunker that are obvious plot hooks waiting to be brought to life. However, when they come they do seem weak.
The way the book changes once the “action” moves from outside to inside is a shame, but perhaps that’s because I’ve been brought up on more action-oriented fare such as Outbreak. More of people running around and explosions. This is the direction the aforementioned mini-series took in its adaptation of the source material.
It’s still a good book, if you like your science fiction based heavily in science fact (and a large dollop of conjecture). I enjoyed it, and it’s easy to read but it just doesn’t seem “complete” the way some of his later books were. However, it was an early novel and led onto greater things so it can be forgiven.
And there are no bloody dinosaurs in it.
