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After an eight day visit to Indiana to see our families for Christmas, we're home. New posts soon.

Happy Holidays!

The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug - The Discussion

It's been a week so I presume a lot of people have seen the movie by now. Below are my thoughts (positive and negative) about the film.

SPOILERS BELOW!!

First, the positives.

 - While the slow pace of the previous film, An Unexpected Journey, turned off many people, I liked that the story took its time to unfold. For DoS, however, that wasn't a problem. The film flew by. If anything, there were a couple of times I wanted the story to slow down a bit. But still, better paced overall.

 - Smaug was great. Beautifully voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, the design and movement of the dragon was incredible.

 - The dwarves continue to delight. In the book, the dwarves really are indistinguishable and do little to differentiate themselves. In fact, they don't do much of anything except get saved by Bilbo. In the movies, the dwarves all have their own personalities, do help from time to time, and if you pay attention, you can tell them apart. I didn't get enough Bofur and Dori in this movie, though.

 - Beorn was really well realized, though I would have preferred the book's introduction of him to the dwarves. Also would like to have seen more of him. Probably will be more Beorn in the extended edition.

 - I loved that Bilbo could understand the spiders once he put on the ring. Nice touch.

 - I liked Tauriel. The film needed at least one female and I liked her. She was earnest and kind and attractive. And I liked the flirtation with Kili. There, I said it.

 - The prologue in Bree was great, and I imagine they'll include Gandalf's flashback to getting the map and key from Thrain (which we've seen in previous trailers) in the extended edition.

 - I LOVED the butterfly scene. But then it's a fantastic scene in the book too.

Now, the negatives.

 - Peter Jackson seems to have lost all sense of geographic distance. Gandalf tells Bilbo that they'd have to travel 200 miles north to go around Mirkwood and twice that going south. But the orc band following them quickly goes from Northern Mirkwood to Dol Guldur in the south and back again in no time at all. Sheesh.

 - While I thought the action sequences were less CGI-driven than in An Unexpected Journey, some of the action was still WAY over the top. Especially the battle against Smaug. Thorin actually rides a tray on a river of molten gold. Come on. I appreciate that Jackson added in some direct confrontation between the dwarves and the dragon (something it never occurred to me that the book needed, but nice catch, Peter), but the dwarves are apparently indestructible.

- The journey through Mirkwood and imprisonment in the Elven King's halls didn't convey any passage of time at all. They seemed to happen all within a couple of days. Would rather they seem to have taken time and would have loved to see them carrying an enchanted Bombur through the woods.

 - While I enjoyed the barrels out of bond sequence, it did get too ridiculous. I liked that the elves ended up actually protecting the dwarves, but geez, how many orcs could there possibly have been? And their wholesale slaughter by everyone really undercuts their menace.

 - The fact that Bilbo has killed a whole bunch of enemies (orcs, goblins and wargs) by the time he kills the first spider totally undercuts one of the great moments from the book. In the book, Bilbo grows after he kills the first spider because he does it on his own and alone. It's a huge character moment. The movie blew that by making Bilbo a killing machine well before Mirkwood.

 - I liked many of the Dol Guldur scenes, but I'm not sure how I feel about the confrontation with the Necromancer and the imprisonment of Gandalf. I understand why Jackson did it, just not sure I like it.

 - I REALLY don't like how powerful the ring is at this point. In the books, during Bilbo's ownership of the ring, it was mostly dormant as Sauron was still not restored to power. Consequently Bilbo uses it a LOT in the book. In the movie, he's constantly getting flashes of evil and it's affecting him way too much. It begs the question of how he could possibly survive in possession of the ring for the next sixty years.

 - While I'm ultimately happy to see links between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, there is a timespan of sixty years ahead before Fellowship. Too many of the things happening in the story have been ramped up to 11 so that it seems ridiculous that another sixty years will pass before the war of the ring comes to a head. And once Gandalf finds out about Bilbo's ring, he's really going to seem stupid for not immediately figuring out that it's the One Ring.

That's all for now. I'm sure I'll think of more later. I did really like a lot of the movie. I just wish Jackson was exercising a little bit more control over the story and relying on the CGI a little bit less.

One more year, then it's all over.

The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug

Just got back from seeing it. Loved it. (No spoilers below)

It's much better paced than An Unexpected Journey and has fewer of the ridiculous, physics-defying battle scenes than the first movie. I liked the additions to the story and some of them even made more sense than the way Tolkien handled it. This movie flies by.

My favorite thing, though, was spotting Stephen Colbert. Yes, he is in this film and I noticed him immediately. Very happy about that.

I am looking forward to seeing it again.

Comedy Gold

Below is just one short bit of narration from Police Squad!, probably the funniest show ever to air on network TV. It ran only six episodes on ABC in 1982 but later inspired the very funny Naked Gun movie series.

Det. Frank Drebin: [narration] My name is Sergeant Frank Drebbin, Detective-Lieutenant, Police Squad, a special detail of the police department. There'd been a recent wave of gorgeous fashion models found naked and unconscious in laundromats on the West Side. Unfortunately, I was assigned to investigate holdups of neighborhood credit unions. I was across town doing my laundry when I heard the call on the double killing. It took me twenty minutes to get there. My boss was already on the scene.

Read that sitting at my computer and started laughing out loud.

In case you thought I'd forgotten . . .

THE HOBBIT, BABY!!

Sadly, I won't be going at midnight tonight as Rachel isn't home from school until tomorrow. But tomorrow night, I will be there. Oh, yes, I will.

Woo hooo!

Best trainwreck ever!

You know how the Republicans have built their entire political future on Obamacare being, in their words, a “huge trainwreck”?

Yeah, not so much.

From Oct. 1 through Nov. 30, almost 365,000 people enrolled into private health insurance via the federal and state marketplaces and more than 803,000 were deemed eligible for Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program, according to the department. Link

This means that millions of families, including children, will have access to regular healthcare for perhaps the first time. This will make a huge difference in the quality of millions of American’s lives. A difference that Republicans want to take away from them. And these numbers don’t even include a flurry of enrollments since Dec. 1.

The Republicans are going to eat it for this one. Happily, they’re still deluding themselves that they’re going to sweep the 2014 elections.

Reading Material

Last year my family gave me a Kindle Paperwhite for Christmas. I love having it on my commute as it’s far easier to carry than an actual book. And since I’m now reading while commuting, the volume of my reading has increased over the past year. Last month, after I finished Richard J. Evans fantastic three part “Third Reich” series, I was looking to read something a little lighter, as one can only take so many Nazi atrocities. I had long had a hankering to read Ian Fleming's James Bond novels.

We've been members of Amazon PRIME for a few years now. We like the access to streaming movies and TV shows and, of course, “free” shipping for a lot of stuff available on Amazon. Another of the benefits of PRIME membership is the Kindle Lending Library, which I hadn’t used. I looked into it and was happy to find that all of the James Bond novels are available and I could read them for free. Hooray!

I “borrowed” the first in the series, Casino Royale, a couple of months ago and I read it last month. The story was pretty straight-forward, Bond must defeat a bad guy at baccarat to bankrupt him, and the Daniel Craig movie version is surprisingly faithful to the book. Bond doesn't globe-trot and there aren't a lot of action set-pieces, but the writing is good and with the intrigue, violence and sex, you can understand why the series became successful in the 1950’s. Bond is pretty misogynistic, though, and that took some getting used to.

In publication order, next up was, bizarrely, Live and Let Die. I’m very familiar with the movie series and Live is the eighth movie and stars Roger Moore as James Bond. So this being the second novel took a bit of adjustment in my mind. Plus, I’m picturing Sean Connery in all the novels, regardless of the story.

I liked Live a good deal. The story is much more expansive than Casino Royale as Bond travels more and there is a clear attempt to humanize the character. What's fascinating is that the story is very different from the movie except for the few scenes in Harlem. Even more interesting is that two of the action sequences don't appear in the movie of Live and Let Die but do appear in Licence to Kill and For Your Eyes Only. Not to be outdone by the misogyny in the first novel, this one has a good amount of racist language, which again, took some getting used to, although it's certainly of the period.

Last week I finished Moonraker. Written in 1954, there's no way the novel could be anything like the movie since the movie deals with multiple space shuttles and an operational space station. The story of the novel involves a Richard Branson-esque British philanthropist who's building Britain's first ballistic missile, modeled after the German V-2 rocket. I found the first half of Moonraker to be really great and surprising. Bond is invited by M to an exclusive card-players club to see if the above-mentioned philanthropist, Hugo Drax, is cheating at bridge. And the entire first half of the novel just deals with the card-playing action at the club. It was really, really interesting.

Once the action switches to the missile launch site, it's more of a standard action thriller but still really good. Bond survives more by luck than skill at times and I had figured out what was going on way before Bond did which made me think he wasn't quite as clever as he needed to be, but still. Good stuff. Plus, less misogyny and no racism!

After I finished Moonraker, I returned it to the Amazon Lending Library and went to download the next novel, Diamonds are Forever. It was then I made a horrible discovery. You can only borrow one book per month. What?!? I had read three books within a six week period.

I dug into the rules until I figured out what had happened. I had borrowed Casino Royale before November. When I finished it, I borrowed Live and Let Die in November. I finished it in early December and immediately borrowed and finished Moonraker. Six weeks, three novels, borrowed during three different months. And now I can't borrow anything else until January. D'oh!

I want to read Diamonds are Forever when we're visiting family for Christmas, so I went ahead and bought that. The individual Bond novels are only $6 or $8. Then I'll borrow the next one in January. Over the next few months, I'll probably end up buying half and borrowing the other half.

I enthusiastically recommend the Bond series. I'm enjoying them immensely.

A sign you may want to rethink your political allegiance

Nelson Mandela will live in history as an inspiration for defenders of liberty around the globe. He stood firm for decades on the principle that until all South Africans enjoyed equal liberties he would not leave prison himself, declaring in his autobiography, ‘Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.’ Because of his epic fight against injustice, an entire nation is now free.

We mourn his loss and offer our condolences to his family and the people of South Africa.

Sounds pretty reasonable, right? (Maybe some subtext about standing in principle against Obamacare). But it's a decent statement of condolence over the death of Nelson Mandela, a man that millions revere as one of the foremost transformative figures of our time.

Shockingly enough, this was written by the usually morally and sanely-challenged Republican Senator Ted Cruz.

But when you are part of crazy town, they don't let you leave. Check out his Facebook page and the comments.  The ugly, racist, disgusting comments. Even Ted Cruz, wackaloon right-winger isn't far-right enough for these folk.

Want to see even more craziness, check this out.

More Facebook Stupidity

I really need to stop creeping on Carol's Facebook page.

Someone who used to be a close friend, and whom I used to consider reasonably open-minded, posted a couple of moronic, anti-Obama articles. And the language he used in his posts to introduce the articles is pretty hateful. It's especially unbecoming because until recently he was a United States Army Chaplain and he's badmouthing his Commander in Chief.

Anyway, here's my response to the two articles.

Charges that the Obama administration is "lawless" and "throwing out the Constitution" are baseless. In fact, they're not only baseless, but they're mind-crushingly stupid, callow, disingenuous and ignorant. In no sense is anything the Administration is doing outside of the Constitution or illegal. There are some areas (NSA surveillance, drone-strikes) where you might reasonably argue that current policies are going too far, but suggesting that the President isn't following the Constitution is idiotic. And the fact that you didn't raise these concerns when W was President and doing the same thing is pretty damn telling.

Secondly, "Unclegate"is not a scandal. No one cares whether or not the President knew or didn't know his fraternal Uncle when he was young. Whether he honestly didn't remember briefly living with the Uncle or if he lied about it (for what reason?), WHO CARES. It's another nothingburger in the same vein as the IRS scandal, Benghazi, and fast and furious.

If you believe that either of these things are important, you are an idiot.

It's definitely the pants, not me

Yesterday I wore a new pair of pants for the first time and I discovered an unusual, nay unprecedented, problem.

The fly is too small.

I thought fly-size was pretty standardized. Whatever it is, four inches, five inches, pretty much the same across all pants. But on these new pants, the fly only zips down so far and it's not the usual distance. The shortened vertical distance means that the fly opens less horizontally and so the pants are more difficult to use when I'm doing my business. I've never heard of such a thing.

Someone should notify the pants authorities.

They're not falling for it

A towering figure in the history of the 20th century, Nelson Mandela died yesterday. Republicans in Congress immediately accused Mandela of trying to distract attention from Benghazi.

Just who are the barbarians in this situation?

GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter of the United States Congress thinks we need to use the stick, not the carrot, on Iran.

HUNTER: “I think a ground war in Iran with American boots on the ground would be a horrible thing and I think people like to toss around the fact that we have to stop them in some way from gaining this nuclear capability. I don’t think it’s inevitable but I think if you have to hit Iran, you don’t put boots on the ground, you do it with tactical nuclear devices and you set them back a decade or two or three. I think that’s the way to do it with a massive aerial bombardment campaign.”

“To be frank, with Iran’s government, the way that it is driven by radical extremist Muslims, that’s different from self preservation mindset that North Korea has in kind of the old Soviet model, that’s different from Iran’s government,” Hunter said earlier in the segment, espousing the so-callled “martyr state myth.” He added: “When you’ll blow yourself up for your God that makes you more dangerous than the sense of self preservation that most people and most countries have.”  Link

The Iranians are lead by radical extremists, so we should murder millions of them; men, women, and children. Because that would make us safe.

Who is the more dangerous person here, the Iranians or the Congressman who wants to nuke them?