Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone. Why the heck would you be surfing the web when you should be doing something Christmasy?

Today in the Valley of the Sun its a nice, cloudless 77 degrees heading on up to the high of 81 today. Carmen the Ice Cream Truck Guy just drove by playing that "It can only be music from an ice cream truck" tune.

Got in a hard 3,000 yards today with drill and thats my plan for the weekend. I am not ashamed but alittle p.o.'d to admit my vacation had more to do with hanging with Mo, the Mighty and watching movies and playing video games than training. A decent case of Common Man Syndrome.

I would like to tell you about some movie reviews, the job I would most love to make money in besides what I do now, except that as you can read by this blog I have zero writing experience.

War of the Worlds. (Tom Cruise, Directed by Speilberg) Boring. Once you get past the cgi its a slow movie, much like the book which I read last year. (I like to read a couple of classics each year-currently Heart of Darkness by Joesph Conrad).

The Machanic. (Christain Bale) Great. Bale just played Batman in Batman Begins but his first movie, Empire of the Sun (also directed by Speilberg) is his best work. His favorite movie of his IMHO is American Pyscho. If you have not seen it rent it, it is a disturbing social commentary on the 1980's. Except for the murdering, I had a friend that had the same OCD that Bale exhibits.

The Machanic right. Bale is a solid 180 pounds but lost 60 pounds for the movie. Thats right he weighs 120 pounds in this flick and its a big part of the plot. A very slow cooker in a Hitchcock sort of fashion, so if you enjoyed Hitchcock you'll like this. Bales character, Trevor Renzor, has not slept in a year. He is exhausted and filled with anxiety. He starts to believe that his co-workers at the plant he works at are conspiring against him after an accident that he caused and admitted to. Then he starts to think maybe he is going crazy from lack of sleep. I must admit I have a 3 setting fast forward on my DVD and played this at FF1 with the subtitles on. Lots of long shots and pans. The ending is very good.

Munich, one of my top movies of the year, no really. Again a Speilberg directed movie staring Eric Bana. Bana is brilliant, other than the Hulk which I blame on Ang Lee, he commands every movie he is in. This is more a movie of events than acting so I will tell you his best roll IMHO is in Chopper an Aulstralian flick and my favorite character he has portrayed is Hoot, the Delta Team Operator in Black Hawk Down.

Munich is about the hunting down of the 11 masterminds of the Black September raid on the Israeli Olympians in 1972. Its really a Speilberg piece and finally a good one. Avner, played by Bana is probably his most fully developed character since Indiana Jones. Watching this movie I was a little pissed off that he did not put as much effort in the characters of his last three Star Wars movies as he did in this.

This is not a movie of vengence as much a movie about consequence. The consequence of gunning down Olympians on the world stage, the consequence of doing nothing or killing Palestinians in return. I had read there was a fair balance of both sides. I didn't see it. I liked that the Palestinians are not all seen as the bad guys, not that any are shown to be good, but more a story of how the Israeli's may not be as rightous as they want to be.

Throughout this whole movie, as an American, it was hard to not extrapolate our current Global War On Terrorism from what Avner and his team go through. Do we have teams doing the same thing in our GWOT? I firmally believe so. And so I think does Speilberg who's two characters in a final verbal climatic scene shows the New York skyline circa 1973. The last lingering shot before the credit roll is the Two Towers in the distance reaching out of the downtown.

There is if I recall a similiar movie about this called the Sword of Gideon starring...damn I can't link to imdb...the guy from Scarface, Pacinos buddy...Steven Baur.

BTW I think my favorite movie of the year has got to be off the top of my head, A History Of Violence with Viggo Mortenson and Maria Bello. I will have to check my movie notes to be sure.