This show has already be hit hard by the critics.  Again it was one I thought looked interesting in the reviews.  It was almost exactly what I was expecting.  There was a surprise or two in the movie, that I will not give away here.

Anyway the basic story is a superhero with a drinking problem.  Like superman he can fly, is very strong, and bullets don’t seem to hurt him.  He tends to do more destruction than most superheroes and is not in good favor of the city officials.  In fact there is a warrant for his arrest.

He does save a struggling ad man who decides to revamp his image. I liked the struggle Hancock had with his personal problems.  Even though he was physically superior to normal humans, his emotional levels are not up to normal human par.  A good portion of the movie is dealing with this emotional problems, and this did make it slow at times , but I did like that part   After Hancock works through his problems, the movie takes off again.  And into the couple of surprises I mentioned.

Anyway I think for adults this is just a fun movie.   It really won’t get you thinking, it is way to spend an afternoon or evening.  There is some adult humor, and some violence.  The main character is a drunk at the beginning of the movie, so that may be a factor in your viewing pleasure.

So all in all it is a good movie, not up to par with the best superhero movies, but definitely well above the worst.  If you don’t go into it looking for too much, you may have as much fun as I did.

The surprise plot twists are also interesting.

In June of 1981, just after I graduated from College, Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in theaters. At that time video rental and purchasing was in its infancy. Machines were expensive, and there were the “format wars”. So the movies in the theaters ran much longer than they do now, and they were often in cheap theaters for years after the initial release. I saw Raiders with friends during the summer of 1981multiple times, and I eventually saw it with my future wife in 1983. It was a fun movie.

In 1984, The Temple of Doom was released. I was able to see that movie in theaters as a newlywed. While we liked the movie, the dark atmosphere of the second Indiana Jones left us wanting the first movie again. Finally the price of VCRs became more reasonable, and Raiders of the Lost Ark was the one we added to our collection. After it was released to Video, we also added the Last Crusade. It wasn’t unit 2004 that I added the Temple of Doom to my collection.

This spring the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones movies was released. It marked the first Indiana Jones movie I did not see with my wife. Being a widower made that impossible. Still, I went with the two daughters still living at home. I went in a partial Indiana Jones costume. At the movie I wore my hat, my brown pants and beige shirt. It was too warm for my leather jacket. And only a few noticed. But with the audience, I’m sure most weren’t seeing movies at the time the last movie hit theaters.

Some time early in my marriage, my wife and I were shopping and we stopped in a small store in the local mall. There was a felt Fedora. My wife thought it looked good on me, so she bought it for me. She called it my Indiana Jones hat. It was just the thing to take on our vacations. I had that hat for years, until I left it in a coffee shop, one time too many. I hope whoever picked it up enjoyed it. After that I found a much cheaper version of the hat, since I was sure I would misplace it again. And I used that hat for a few years. 2 Christmases ago, my four daughters pitched in to buy me an official Indiana Jones fedora. I was very touched that they would do that. So if you check my ‘About’ page, you will see a picture of me in that hat.

At times I wish I could have been the adventurer that Indiana Jones was. Searching for lost artifacts, ancient civilizations sounds like great fun. The more conservative, stay-at-home, take care of the family person almost always won the battle of personalities. When we took trips to more wilderness areas, the adventurer showed his face (and hat). We hiked many a mile through the gorges of SE Ohio, the Black hills and Bad Lands in South Dakota, and even the wilds of amusement parks and zoos. I’ll never be that adventuring soul, except in the inner reaches of the mind.

That’s about it for Indiana Jones and me, until the last movie is release on video. It will be added to my collection. Maybe by that time, I’ll be able to get the whip, and a more authentic leather jacket.

Two days in a row with minimal sleep, and I’m now exhausted.   I’m surprised I have kept going this long.   Not much going on except that my youngest is in another play.  She just finished one, and starts another 2 days after closing…

Being the person that I am, I will probably help out is some shape and or manner on this show too.  Lighting, rounding up kids backstage (it is Childrens’ theater).  I’m sure the director will find plenty of ways I can help out.   Even if I complain, I’m happy to do it.

Night all…

Ok, it is late at night, early in the morning again.  I had about 1/2 hour nap earlier today, and I’m wide awake again…  So my list of favorite books.

1 – 4  The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings Trilogy  — Tolkien

5-11  The 7 Harry Potter Books  — Rowling

12-14  The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant Trilogy  — Donaldson?

15 – 20    Maybe more, but since I’m going by memory…  Isaac Asimov’s  Robot/Foundation Series  He went and tied many of his books together, I like all of them

21 A Christmas Carol  — Dickens

22 Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe

23 Complete Sherlock Holmes  — Doyle

24-26  Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant  — Donaldson

27-28  Mirror of Her Dreams/A Man Rides Through  — Donaldson

29 Isaac Asimov GOLD

30 Isaac Asimov Silver

31  Chronicles of Narnia — Lewis

32  Ring World  — Niven

33  Journey to the Center of the Earth  — Verne

34 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea — Verne

35 A Wrinkle in Time  —  L’Engle

That’s a start, I can add more later

I remembered a book I enjoy yearly that was made into a movie. It was an animated movie, but it was a movie.

Long before Peter Jackson made the “Lord of the Rings” series, Rankin-Bass made “The Hobbit”. This was actually a decent handling of the book. This movie was designed as a family friendly TV movie. That is exactly what it was. There were a number of things that were different from the book, but what can you do in a 70 minute movie.

This little animated movie actually set the stage for the animated movie I wanted to talk about. Rumors were rampant about the quality of the animation for the “Lord of the Rings” in 1978. I think that is the only thing that made the movie interesting. A 132 minute movie trying to fit a trilogy the size of “The Lord of the Rings”. There was a lot of stuff left out in the 10+ hours of the Peter Jackson movies, how did they think they could do any of this justice.

Well, they didn’t. For me, the animation had some problems, mainly with the big battles. They didn’t look like they fit with the rest of the movie. Other than that, I don’t remember much about this. My problems were with the story adaptation. There were many things missing in the story (of course) and the way the characters were drawn and written, made me wonder if anyone read the book. There was no depth to any of the characters. No drive in the Hobbits. Gandalf just seemed like an angry aging wizard (standard issue). And other characters seemed flat.

Before Peter Jackson made his films I thought of getting this movie just for a collection. I’m glad I waited.

Stole this one from Tanja’s site. It looked like fun.

The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, estimates that the
average adult has read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.
How about you?

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (multiple versions)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Partially)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (Not Yet)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Marte
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure -Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’sWeb – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I counted 41 read from this list. Some of them I had to read for High School or College,
and can not remember them. Others on the list I’ve looked at but
could not get through the first chapter. Some I haven’t even heard
of. The list is lacking Science Fiction, not even Jules Verne or
Isaac Asimov. I feel both authors have better books than the Dune
Series by Herbert

In 4.5 hours I need to be up and getting ready for work. For some reason I just couldn’t sleep. Not much new in this, but it is new that I was asleep and then woke up after an hour or so, and I was wide awake. No strange noises in the house, just the usual late night sounds. Dog is softly snoring. No sounds from the girls’ room. Frogs, crickets, and other night time animals are making their voices heard. But I’m used to all this.

I got on the web, hoping that reading the news and such of the day would be boring enough to put me to sleep. No such luck. It was boring, just not enough to make me tired. So maybe I have something in my head that needs to be written. But since I’m writing about not sleeping, could that really be it?

So I’m just going to re-hash some of the news I read this evening. I’m not even going to supply links, you’ll have to look it up yourself…

Experts predicting gas at $7.00 by the end of the summer, this after an announcement that Saudi Arabia found a new oil site. IMHO, panic is driving the current price of gas through the roof. Some of these so called experts should think before they open their mouths.

The Detroit Tigers won today putting them over .500 for the first time this year. The White Sox beat the Cubs, so Detroit didn’t advance any… I had such high hopes at the beginning of the season. Oh well, I survived 2003 as a Tiger fan, I can survive this year too

Spain wins the European Football (Soccer) Championship. I find soccer very boring, why didn’t this put me to sleep?

Wildfires are still burning in California, flooding still happening along the Mississippi. (I can still spell Mississippi without adding too many “S’s” or “P’s” or “I’s”. Not bad from a non-speller, just don’t ask me to spell bananananana 😉

Buffalo are roaming again in Minnesota. And we have some not so far from here in Fremont IN.

The Pixar movie WALL-E made 62.5 million over the weekend. It is a cute little movie.

On a somewhat sad note, Southwick Mall in Toledo Oh closed its doors. Once a wonderful shopping area in South Toledo, this 36 year old mall has been going down hill for years. I remember taking dates to what was called “Old-Towne” where there were a lot of small frontier style shops and novelty stores. This later became a movie theater, that added to the theaters already there. It was a very open mall that at one time held a wide variety of stores. One by one the Anchor stores left, and this area became an eyesore. Not sure what will become of it, but I really wonder what they did or will do with the wonderful Carousel they had in the mall.

Uga VI, the University of Georgia Bulldog mascot, died of heart failure. He was only 9 years old… He started as the mascot at the age of 1.

There was a lot of other news that I don’t think needs repeating. Politics as usual, and other nasty headlines were prevalent.

Down to 4 hours until I need to get ready for work… I’m still not tired, but I guess I should try to relax a bit.

I’m not going to write about how good the show was (again).  I’m just going to write a little bit about some life lessons I’ve learned over the years at our little theater.

Many hands make light work.  After the shows we usually need to tear down the set to make room and clean up for the next production coming in.  This is much easier with a large cast.  Many people working on various parts of the set will bring it down quickly.  Smaller shows, we beg and plead for people to come and help.

Help others when needed.  At times people will forget their lines, or forget to enter when needed.  It is up to the rest of the cast to keep the show going.  Ad-lib lines here and there,  line prompting during a hug, someone else saying the line (if this works), or just smoothly skipping by the flub, are ways we help each other on stage.

Not everyone is a Star.  You can’t always have top billing. Sometimes you need to support the front people.  It is part of theater, it is part of life.

Even the Star needs support.   Even in shows with only one actor on stage, usually has many people behind the scenes.  From lighting to props there is always somebody looking out for you.

All jobs are important.  That backstage manager that never shows up on stage is sometimes seen as unneeded, until the day they can’t make the show.  Then the props aren’t on stage where they should be, and the flow of the show just goes down.

Satisfy the customer.  If you don’t do a good job, and leave the customer satisfied, they won’t be back.  Repeat business is  essential.

Relax, have fun! One of the most important things I’ve learned.  If you are relaxed and having fun on stage everything flows more smoothly.  It works in the real world as well.  You can’t always have fun in theater or real life (some jobs are just the pits), but you can try relax and make the best of the situation.

Be ready for the unexpected.  In live performances almost anything can happen.  Be prepared for it.  You may never need to know what to do when something on stage breaks, but you have to go with the flow.  In life, this makes very good sense too.

Do your best.   No matter what job/part you have do your best, it makes it easier for you and for those around you.

Do your job.  If your job is telling people what to do, do that.  If that isn’t in your job/part description, refrain from doing it.   Sometimes it is nice for new actors to get a helpful hint from other actors, sometimes not.  Make sure that your helpful hints are just that.  They should not sound like directives, those should come from the director.

But then again,  Share your knowledge.  An additional note about the above.  Telling someone what you do to help remember lines, or stage directions is a good thing.  Helping someone get over a bit of stage fright, also good.  Knowledge of any field (except secret stuff) is best shared.

Goodbyes can be hard.  We all need to say goodbye to someone every so often.  Sometimes you know you may never see the person again.  Make the best of the time you have with people, it will show benefits in  your life.

Life is a stage, where we are the actors and the audience…

I was privileged to work the light booth for another wonderful show.  The time is drawing near when the last curtain will be dropped.  In most cases, this is a mixture of joy and sorrow.  Happy that the show is finally over, but sadness of a cast breaking up.

It is our custom in this theater for some sort of gifts to be exchanged during the run of the show.  Gifts from cast to director and/or director to cast.  This show was no exception, except for the type of gift.  Most gifts tend to be ‘gag’ gifts or little reminders of the show.  This plays gift from the director was a CD full of pictures taken during a dress rehearsal.  So we get to see the costumes and actions on the set.  The other gift was a well framed cast/crew picture.  It is a treasure.

As the light booth guy, I’m preparing my gift for the cast.  A little something I hope everyone will like.  As there is a cast member or two that read this blog, I can’t give too much information.  It’s just a little something that can be added to the programs most actors keep.

It has been a good run, and I will miss seeing it every night.  From the guy who has seen the show for a week longer than its run, that is saying something.  From the light booth, I’m generally tired of the show after the opening night.   It is a wonderful show, and some what of a challenge to set the lighting just right.

And next week, I can write about different things, and not pay so much attention to “Little Women”

I’ve been writing a lot about all of the comic book movies I’ve seen, but not to often about books that became movies. This may be a on going series in books that eventually became movies. I was talking with one of the other bloggers around here, and something brought this up. (Old age is creeping up on me, so I can’t remember what it was.)

Anyway, I started complaining about good books and stories that became rotten movies. I understand the reasoning behind the changes script writers make when converting a book/story to a movie. Some things flow better in words, than they do on screen. Somethings needed for a good movie are missing from the book. Two different media, so it makes sense that some changes would be made.

The first on my list is a story by one of my favorite authors, Isaac Asimov. The story was “Nightfall”. A classic science fiction tale about a planet that never had night. With many suns in its skies, true darkness came on very rare occasions. The story was how the people reacted to the up coming event, and the effect it had on them. It was a very gripping story, that I thought would make a good movie. I didn’t get to see it when it was in the theaters, and only saw it many years later on video. Let’s put it this way I wasted money renting it from a library.

They forgot to change the names to protect the innocent. I can understand why it took years before another Asimov story became a movie.

Now it has been years since I’ve seen that movie, and I’m not sure if anything could cause me to see it again, but here are a few things I remember.

1) Terrible acting. David Birney was the lead character, and he as stiff and boring. The rest of the cast made no impression on me at all. I remember the lead because he was sooo.. bad.
2) Constant looking at the Suns/Sky with freaky music and video effects. Once would have done enough, but over and over again???
3)They advertised this as “Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall” I think he gave permission, and the used the character names and book title. Everything else had nothing to do with the original story.
4)The sets and locations for the movie just bit dust.
5) It was 83 minutes too long.
6) I kept thinking it would get better, it never did….

If you want some real fun, read the reviews on IMDB. I’ve spent too much time on this already.