To all.....

HAPPY HALLOWEEN to all my readers out there!
I hope it's the best one ever!
I'm taking the day off to prepare for my 3 weeks away from home starting tomorrow.
Unfortunately, that also means I spent today taking down the last of my Halloween decorations, but I also shopped for a few more at the stores.
Be safe and have fun!

How to order at an Italian Restaurant without saying dishes wrong

Ok, so at first I thought this was a stupid article, but I read through it and noticed I say some stuff wrong, so I thought I'd repost it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bruschetta: brews-keh-tah

Not "brewshhetta." The "ch" sound in Italian is a hard "k." Also, this is usually served as an appetizer, which will probably be listed in your menu as "Antipasto" (appetizer, singular) or under "Antipasti" (appetizer, plural), or, erroneously, as "Antipasta" (this is not a word).

Gnocchi: nyoh-kee

Ah, dumplings! Every culture has 'em. In Italy, these consist of little potato morsels, often served in a tomato sauce. If you're lucky, they'll be "fatti in casa" (homemade.) The "g" in gnocchi just modifies the "n" sound (sort of like the Spanish ñ).

Minestrone (Don't Bother with the "E")

Italian is tricky because unlike in English, vowels at the end of a word are never silent. English speakers tend to overcompensate for this by exaggerating the vowel sound at the end of a word, for instance, saying "Minestron-EE." But in Italian, this last sound has a much lighter touch, and an "e" is pronounced much more like our soft "i." The Italian pronunciation of minestrone is therefore "Mean-ehs-tron-ih." If you order this at an Italian restaurant, you should definitely feel free to use the truncated, Americanized version of the word (with the silent "e"): Just don't add any extra vowels.

Espresso: There's No "X"

The Italian "espresso" means "pressed out," like, the coffee was pressed out of the bean. It does not mean "express" as in, fast. (Also, this totally doesn't matter when dining in America, but if you ever find yourself on a date in Italy, don't order a cappuccino after dinner — that's only a breakfast drink.)

Biscotti/Panini

Just as an FYI: Both biscotti and panini are plural words, for cookies and sandwiches, respectively. If you want just one cookie, or one sandwich, then you'd order a "biscotto" or "panino". Either way, you wouldn't say "a biscotti." However, the plural form has become so widespread in America that it's completely acceptable to get "a panini" and if you're ever on a date with someone who judges you or corrects you on this, you should probably end your date right there. (Interestingly, the inverse is true of "lasagna," which is merely the term for a flat sheet of pasta. Garfield's favorite dish is comprised of lasagna, but is actually called "lasagne" in Italian.)

Parmesan/Parmigiano (aka The Cheese)

Okay, that white grated cheese that they grate onto your pasta? That's called Parmigiano (unless you're at the Olive Garden, which, mystifyingly, chooses to use Pecorino, a sheep's milk cheese, instead). Parmigiano is from the Italian city Parma (Prosciutto is also from Parma! You can tell your date that. They will pretend to find it interesting.) and is a cow's cheese that has been aged for a year. It is delicious. Parmesan is the informal American word for this cheese, which is why the Kraft cheese in the green bottle says Parmesan, and not Parmigiano. You can use whichever term you'd like: the English or the Italian. But what you shouldn't do is use a weird hybrid of the two: Parmesiano, while often asked for at restaurants, is neither a cheese nor a word.

Pizza Margherita Is Not Made with Tequila

Pizza Margherita is the Italian answer to cheese pizza: a tricolor pie made with tomato, basil, and mozzarella. But (and this is nitpicky), note that Margherita is spelled with an "e" and not an "a" — this is what distinguishes it from the Mexican drink made with tequila. Marg-EH-rita.

When in Doubt, Pronounce Every Syllable

If you're unsure of how to attack a word — say, "carpaccio," "amatriciana" or "pepperoncino," just remember that there are no silent vowels in Italian, and usually the words are spelled phonetically (unlike English!). Their "c" is our "ch," while their "ch" is a "k" — but beyond that, word pronunciation is pretty straight forward. But also remember that few mistakes are so egregious as to actually be a turn-off to your date. Try to pronounce things correctly when possible, but no one expects you to actually be fluent. You're not an Italian, merely an American who knows his or her way around an Italian menu.

World Population at 7 Billion

Anyone who knows me, knows I have strong opinions on just about everything.  World population is no different.  I found an article on BBC News that talks about this very subject and has some interesting things to say.  I included it below.  In red are the side notes, and in gray is the main text of the article.  Make sure you watch the video because it is a very educational but short 2 minutes+.  At the bottom of the post I included a fascinating website that the BBC put together to see how your country's population is growing, how long you can expect to live (based on your gender and country), and what numbered person you were born in the Earth's history.  I was in the 43 billion range.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The world at seven billion

As the world population reaches seven billion people, the BBC's Mike Gallagher asks whether efforts to control population have been, as some critics claim, a form of authoritarian control over the world's poorest citizens.

The temperature is some 30C. The humidity stifling, the noise unbearable. In a yard between two enormous tea-drying sheds, a number of dark-skinned women patiently sit, each accompanied by an unwieldy looking cloth sack. They are clad in colourful saris, but look tired and shabby. This is hardly surprising - they have spent most of the day in nearby plantation fields, picking tea that will net them around two cents a kilo - barely enough to feed their large families.

Vivek Baid thinks he knows how to help them. He runs the Mission for Population Control, a project in eastern India which aims to bring down high birth rates by encouraging local women to get sterilised after their second child.

As the world reaches an estimated seven billion people, people like Vivek say efforts to bring down the world's population must continue if life on Earth is to be sustainable, and if poverty and even mass starvation are to be avoided.
There is no doubting their good intentions. Vivek, for instance, has spent his own money on the project, and is passionate about creating a brighter future for India.
But critics allege that campaigners like Vivek - a successful and wealthy male businessman - have tended to live very different lives from those they seek to help, who are mainly poor women.
These critics argue that rich people have imposed population control on the poor for decades. And, they say, such coercive attempts to control the world's population often backfired and were sometimes harmful.
Population scare
Most historians of modern population control trace its roots back to the Reverend Thomas Malthus, an English clergyman born in the 18th Century who believed that humans would always reproduce faster than Earth's capacity to feed them.
Giving succour to the resulting desperate masses would only imperil everyone else, he said. So the brutal reality was that it was better to let them starve.

'Plenty is changed into scarcity'

From Thomas Malthus' Essay on Population, 1803 edition:
A man who is born into a world already possessed - if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food.
At nature's mighty feast there is no vacant cover for him. She tells him to be gone, and will quickly execute her own orders, if he does not work upon the compassion of some of her guests. If these guests get up and make room for him, other intruders immediately appear demanding the same favour. The plenty that before reigned is changed into scarcity; and the happiness of the guests is destroyed by the spectacle of misery and dependence in every part of the hall.

Rapid agricultural advances in the 19th Century proved his main premise wrong, because food production generally more than kept pace with the growing population.

But the idea that the rich are threatened by the desperately poor has cast a long shadow into the 20th Century.
From the 1960s, the World Bank, the UN and a host of independent American philanthropic foundations, such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, began to focus on what they saw as the problem of burgeoning Third World numbers.
The believed that overpopulation was the primary cause of environmental degradation, economic underdevelopment and political instability.
Massive populations in the Third World were seen as presenting a threat to Western capitalism and access to resources, says Professor Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College, Massachusetts, in the US.
"The view of the south is very much put in this Malthusian framework. It becomes just this powerful ideology," she says.
In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson warned that the US might be overwhelmed by desperate masses, and he made US foreign aid dependent on countries adopting family planning programmes.
Other wealthy countries such as Japan, Sweden and the UK also began to devote large amounts of money to reducing Third World birth rates.
'Unmet need'
What virtually everyone agreed was that there was a massive demand for birth control among the world's poorest people, and that if they could get their hands on reliable contraceptives, runaway population growth might be stopped.
But with the benefit of hindsight, some argue that this so-called unmet need theory put disproportionate emphasis on birth control and ignored other serious needs.

 

"It was a top-down solution," says Mohan Rao, a doctor and public health expert at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University.
"There was an unmet need for contraceptive services, of course. But there was also an unmet need for health services and all kinds of other services which did not get attention. The focus became contraception."
Had the demographic experts worked at the grass-roots instead of imposing solutions from above, suggests Adrienne Germain, formerly of the Ford Foundation and then the International Women's Health Coalition, they might have achieved a better picture of the dilemmas facing women in poor, rural communities.
"Not to have a full set of health services meant women were either unable to use family planning, or unwilling to - because they could still expect half their kids to die by the age of five," she says.

India's sterilisation 'madness'

Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay (above) presided over a mass sterilisation campaign. From the mid-1970s, Indian officials were set sterilisation quotas, and sought to ingratiate themselves with superiors by exceeding them. Stories abounded of men being accosted in the street and taken away for the operation. The head of the World Bank, Robert McNamara, congratulated the Indian government on "moving effectively" to deal with high birth rates. Funding was increased, and the sterilising went on.
In Delhi, some 700,000 slum dwellers were forcibly evicted, and given replacement housing plots far from the city centre, frequently on condition that they were either sterilised or produced someone else for the operation. In poorer agricultural areas, whole villages were rounded up for sterilisation. When residents of one village protested, an official is said to have threatened air strikes in retaliation.
"There was a certain madness," recalls Nina Puri of the Family Planning Association of India. "All rationality was lost."

Us and Them

In 1968, the American biologist Paul Ehrlich caused a stir with his bestselling book, The Population Bomb, which suggested that it was already too late to save some countries from the dire effects of overpopulation, which would result in ecological disaster and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in the 1970s.

Instead, governments should concentrate on drastically reducing population growth. He said financial assistance should be given only to those nations with a realistic chance of bringing birth rates down. Compulsory measures were not to be ruled out.
Western experts and local elites in the developing world soon imposed targets for reductions in family size, and used military analogies to drive home the urgency, says Matthew Connelly, a historian of population control at Columbia University in New York.
"They spoke of a war on population growth, fought with contraceptive weapons," he says. "The war would entail sacrifices, and collateral damage."
Such language betrayed a lack of empathy with their subjects, says Ms Germain: "People didn't talk about people. They talked of acceptors and users of family planning."
Emergency measures
Critics of population control had their say at the first ever UN population conference in 1974.
Karan Singh, India's health minister at the time, declared that "development is the best contraceptive".
But just a year later, Mr Singh's government presided over one of the most notorious episodes in the history of population control.
In June 1975, the Indian premier, Indira Gandhi, declared a state of emergency after accusations of corruption threatened her government. Her son Sanjay used the measure to introduce radical population control measures targeted at the poor.
The Indian emergency lasted less than two years, but in 1975 alone, some eight million Indians - mainly poor men - were sterilised.
Yet, for all the official programmes and coercion, many poor women kept on having babies.

The BBC's Fergus Walsh finds out whether the numbers will rise or fall in the future

And where they did not, it arguably had less to do with coercive population control than with development, just as Karan Singh had argued in 1974, says historian Matt Connelly.
For example, in India, a disparity in birth rates could already be observed between the impoverished northern states and more developed southern regions like Kerala, where women were more likely to be literate and educated, and their offspring more likely to be healthy.
Women there realised that they could have fewer births and still expect to see their children survive into adulthood.
Total control
By now, this phenomenon could be observed in another country too - one that would nevertheless go on to impose the most draconian population control of all.

 

China: 'We will not allow your baby to live'

Steven Mosher was a Stanford University anthropologist working in rural China who witnessed some of the early, disturbing moments of Beijing's One Child Policy.
"I remember very well the evening of 8 March, 1980. The local Communist Party official in charge of my village came over waving a government document. He said: 'The Party has decided to impose a cap of 1% on population growth this year.' He said: 'We're going to decide who's going to be allowed to continue their pregnancy and who's going to be forced to terminate their pregnancy.' And that's exactly what they did."
"These were women in the late second and third trimester of pregnancy. There were several women just days away from giving birth. And in my hearing, a party official said: 'Do not think that you can simply wait until you go into labour and give birth, because we will not allow your baby to live. You will go home alone'."

The One Child Policy is credited with preventing some 400 million births in China, and remains in place to this day. In 1983 alone, more than 16 million women and four million men were sterilised, and 14 million women received abortions.

Assessed by numbers alone, it is said to be by far the most successful population control initiative. Yet it remains deeply controversial, not only because of the human suffering it has caused.
A few years after its inception, the policy was relaxed slightly to allow rural couples two children if their first was not a boy. Boy children are prized, especially in the countryside where they provide labour and care for parents in old age.
But modern technology allows parents to discover the sex of the foetus, and many choose to abort if they are carrying a girl. In some regions, there is now a serious imbalance between men and women.
Moreover, since Chinese fertility was already in decline at the time the policy was implemented, some argue that it bears less responsibility for China's falling birth rate than its supporters claim.
"I don't think they needed to bring it down further," says Indian demographer AR Nanda. "It would have happened at its own slow pace in another 10 years."
Backlash
In the early 1980s, objections to the population control movement began to grow, especially in the United States.
In Washington, the new Reagan administration removed financial support for any programmes that involved abortion or sterilisation.

The broad alliance to stem birth rates was beginning to dissolve and the debate become more polarised along political lines.

While some on the political right had moral objections to population control, some on the left saw it as neo-colonialism.
Faith groups condemned it as a Western attack on religious values, but women's groups feared changes would mean poor women would be even less well-served.
By the time of a major UN conference on population and development in Cairo in 1994, women's groups were ready to strike a blow for women's rights, and they won.
The conference adopted a 20-year plan of action, known as the Cairo consensus, which called on countries to recognise that ordinary women's needs - rather than demographers' plans - should be at the heart of population strategies.
After Cairo
Today's record-breaking global population hides a marked long-term trend towards lower birth rates, as urbanisation, better health care, education and access to family planning all affect women's choices.
With the exception of sub-Saharan Africa and some of the poorest parts of India, we are now having fewer children than we once did - in some cases, failing even to replace ourselves in the next generation. And although total numbers are set to rise still further, the peak is now in sight.

Assuming that this trend continues, total numbers will one day level off, and even fall. As a result, some believe the sense of urgency that once surrounded population control has subsided.
The term population control itself has fallen out of fashion, as it was deemed to have authoritarian connotations. Post-Cairo, the talk is of women's rights and reproductive rights, meaning the right to a free choice over whether or not to have children.
According to Adrienne Germain, that is the main lesson we should learn from the past 50 years.
"I have a profound conviction that if you give women the tools they need - education, employment, contraception, safe abortion - then they will make the choices that benefit society," she says.
"If you don't, then you'll just be in an endless cycle of trying to exert control over fertility - to bring it up, to bring it down, to keep it stable. And it never comes out well. Never."
Nevertheless, there remain to this day schemes to sterilise the less well-off, often in return for financial incentives. In effect, say critics, this amounts to coercion, since the very poor find it hard to reject cash.
"The people proposing this argue 'Don't worry, everything' s fine now we have voluntary programmes on the Cairo model'," says Betsy Hartmann.
"But what they don't understand is the profound difference in power between rich and poor. The people who provide many services in poor areas are already prejudiced against the people they serve."
Work in progress
For Mohan Rao, it is an example of how even the Cairo consensus fails to take account of the developing world.
"Cairo had some good things," he says. "However Cairo was driven largely by First World feminist agendas. Reproductive rights are all very well, but [there needs to be] a whole lot of other kinds of enabling rights before women can access reproductive rights. You need rights to food, employment, water, justice and fair wages. Without all these you cannot have reproductive rights."
Perhaps, then, the humanitarian ideals of Cairo are still a work in progress.
Meanwhile, Paul Ehrlich has also amended his view of the issue.
If he were to write his book today, "I wouldn't focus on the poverty-stricken masses", he told the BBC.
"I would focus on there being too many rich people. It's crystal clear that we can't support seven billion people in the style of the wealthier Americans."
Mike Gallager is the producer of the radio programme Controlling People on BBC World Service
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As promised here is the website to go to for some fascinating statistics.
What is your number?
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515

Mulholland Dr.

Released: 2001
Drama, Mystery (yeah, it's a mystery all right!)
Starring: Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux
Director: David Lynch (I use the term director loosely here)
Running Time: a very long and confusing 147 minutes
Rated R for sex, violence, and language

The breakdown:
Where do I start with this one?
A woman who was nearly murdered, is now suffering from amnesia and is trying to figure out what happened to her and who's trying to kill her.


Overall, this movie is a piece of crap...well, maybe I shouldn't say that all of it is a piece of crap.  The first hour is ok.  You can follow it and it all makes sense, it's after this little blue box is opened that everything goes to hell and you get mad and confused like me.  Now, I just finished reviewing a movie (Donnie Darko) that could be confusing to some in the main meaning and details, BUT I think the story is incredible and it's worth it to try and figure out the meaning and discuss it with your friends.  THIS movie after the first hour, completely goes haywire.  And by haywire I mean, characters start acting completely different than they did a few minutes earlier and they are calling each other by strange names and things just go in ways that I totally did not understand.  I really had no idea what was going on, not the slightest inkling.  I indeed was so confused and mad that I had to go to the internet to be told what it was all about after it was over.
The things that I did like?  The acting was fine, and I cared enough about the main female characters to actually enjoy the sex scenes between them (a first since I'm straight.)  The first hour of the film was fine, but once you hit that mark I really changed my opinion of this movie.
I don't even know how to tell you about the movie it's that weird.
I'll try anyway:
A dark haired woman at the beginning of the film is thrown out of a limo in the hills of the street Mulholland Drive.  The driver is about to shoot her when the limo is hit by some teenagers that are racing on the road side by side.  She escapes but she can't remember who she is.  She ends up sneaking into an open door of an apartment down in Los Angeles that belongs to a woman who is leaving town for a while.  It turns out Naomi Watts is the apartment owners niece and she's coming there to try to be a movie star and watch over the apartment.  The amnesiac tells Watts that she's a friend of the woman who left and Watts believes her until she talks with her aunt over the phone the next day.  Even after Watts tells the amnesiac my aunt doesn't know you, the amnesiac tells her the truth and Watts feels bad for her and lets her stay anyway.  Together they start working out what could've happened to her and who she really is.  The amnesiac does have a purse with her and in it is a strange blue key and a large amount of cash.  Watts goes for an audition for a movie and nails the part.  She couldn't be more excited and happy.  The amnesiac makes a few strides in her search of who she is and the two get very close.  Strangely (for me), there is a tenderness between them during the love scene that I think a lot of people will react positively to. 
Anyway, the two end up at a mysterious night club called Silencio.  There a little blue box changes everything.  Watts just finds it in her purse all of a sudden and it's a match for the amnesiac's blue key.  They take it home and open the blue box and then they both disappear.
The next morning, Watts is not the same character and neither is the woman who was playing the amnesiac.  In this this world, the amnesiac has never forgotten who she was.  They are now former lovers who broke up as a couple, and Watts wants to get back together, but the amnesiac is about to get married to a man and she hates Watts.  Watts is now a struggling actress, but she's really terrible.  The amnesiac was helping Watts to get bit parts in her movies.  In this world, the amnesiac is a big star.  And that's just the story of two characters.  There are a lot of others in this movie that don't seem to fit in anywhere and their mere existence in this film baffles me.  They have no point and they don't add anything so why are they there?  I guess David Lynch likes to try to have a great meaning beyond what mere human beings can understand or maybe he just likes to confuse people and tells them it means something, but they have to figure it out for themselves.  You honestly would not BELIEVE how many characters I am not telling you about!  Strange cowboys, producers, men in a restaurant just talking about dreams, etc.
I would liken it to Lynch giving you a 1,000 piece puzzle to put together without showing you the picture of what it's supposed to be and withholding about 100 pieces from you in the first place.  The only thing of his I ever liked was the show "Twin Peaks" and that was bizarre as well.
Any way you look at this film I can tell you for sure it's not a linear story, it's not an easy story to understand, and I think the director is being cryptic for the sake of being cryptic, not because it makes for a fantastic story, which it does not.  I don't care that he was nominated for an Oscar for directing this film, I don't care that some critics LOVE this film.  I hated it.  My ultimate recommendation is to only see this movie if you love to be confused.
My main problem with this movie is that the director has a reputation for making bizarre movies and that seems to be all he can make.  I think in this movie, he's trying to be confusing just because.  I don't think that's an effective way to tell a story.  I don't mind stories where you don't have everything spoon fed to the audience, but I do like enough clues to figure out the story on my own. 

I give it 2 out of 5 ticket stubs ONLY because of the first hour that made sense and the love scenes.

Why do we call them berries?

I read this interesting article from the dictionary.com website while I was double checking my spelling.
Thought I would pass it along, since I had no idea.  There is no author credited with writing it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The berry family is a linguistic invention particular to Germanic languages, like English. Other languages, like Spanish and French, do not combine the wide, diverse berry family into one group, but rather have very different words for blackberries, raspberries, blueberries and strawberries. The word berry comes from the Old English berie, which originally meant “grape.” As the English language spread to the Americas with colonization, many native grape-shaped fruits that grew in bunches took on the berry suffix: blueberry, cranberry, elderberry, etc. Though the many small, delicious fruits known as berries were grouped together in a linguistic accident, they are in fact many biologically distinct plants and fruits.
A botanist would probably tell you that grouping berries together is about as accurate as calling dolphins, tadpoles and squid “water creatures.” True berries are simply fruits in which each fruit comes from one flower, like blueberries. Even cucumbers and tomatoes are technically berries! Botanically speaking, blueberries (Latin family: Ericaceae) are more closely related to rhododendrons than they are to raspberries. Strawberries (Latin family: Fragaria) are called accessory fruits by botanists because they grow from parts of the plant other than the flowers. Raspberries and blackberries (Latin family: Rubus) are another example altogether. They are called aggregate fruits because their flowers form drupelets instead of one whole fruit. Drupelet is the technical word for the individual morsels of blackberries and raspberries. Fruits in the Rubus family are also called bramble fruits because they grow on spiky bushes.
Grapes, by the way, are technically berries. But where did the word grape come from? In Old English grapes were called winberige, literally “wine berry.” The word grape comes from the Old French word graper, which came from the word krappon, the hook used to pick grapes. In English, the tool became synonymous with the fruit in 1300s.

Luckily, the erroneous linguistic grouping of “berries” gave us great treats like mixed berry ice cream, which may confuse botanists and non-Germanic language speakers.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
So interesting!

The Omega Man

Released: 1971
Sci-fi, Horror
Starring: Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash
Director: Boris Sagal
Rated: PG for some nudity and violence
Running Time: 98 minutes

The breakdown:  The last man on Earth is battling against a group of infected "vampires" calling themselves "The Family" who want to kill him.


I have already posted a review of "I Am Legend" the book and the movie.  This is another version of the book, though it deviates greatly.
Here Robert Neville is an L.A. Army doctor who is one of the last people on Earth not infected by an apocalyptic war that raged with biological weapons.  China and the Soviet Union started a war and ending up killing most of humanity.  Robert injected himself with an experimental vaccine that saved him from becoming a vampire.  Now he's immune and looking for a cure for everyone else. 
There are a group of nocturnal people who have albino skin calling themselves "The Family" that have survived though.  They are sensitive to light and want to kill Neville.  They think science and technology to be the reason for the war and for their own deformities.  Neville is just a convenient scapegoat to blame as they think he is one of the last symbols of science, military, and the old world.  He is a "user of the wheel" and must be killed.  They want to destroy all of technology and also burn certain books.
Neville uses anything and everything to protect his stronghold, atop a tall apartment building, he has guns, explosives, and any other technology he can use against them.  He hunts during the day trying to kill members of "The Family" and looks for things to help him survive. 
Soon "The Family" captures Robert in a wine cellar and put him on trial.  The lead "Family" member is named Matthias who used to be a television anchor man in his normal pre-mutated life.  Robert is found guilty and about to be burned at the stake when Lisa and Dutch rescue him.  Lisa he had seen earlier on a hunt, but she ran away from him.  Lisa and Dutch are part of a small group of non-mutated survivors, but they are infected.  They have young children with them that somehow slow down the changing process, but if left without a cure, they will eventually become "Family" members.
Robert digs Lisa and they have a little romance briefly in the movie.  Lisa's brother is about to succumb to the virus, but Robert makes a serum with his immune blood and saves him before it's too late.  Lisa's stupid brother is convinced that "The Family" can also be saved and goes to them to explain.  Matthias does not believe that Robert would want to help them now and accuses the boy of being sent by Robert to hurt "The Family".  He orders the boy be executed and they do.  Robert discovers the boys body hanging out in the night to draw him out as bait.  Neville is outraged and fights off the horde after they push his car off the road.
Lisa changes quickly into one of "The Family" members and betrays Robert by leading "The Family" to his home.  When Neville comes home, he is met by Matthias and made to watch as they set his house on fire.  Robert gets free of his captors and runs outside with Lisa.  He takes a gun and aims it at Matthias looking down on them out the window.  Just as he's about to shoot, the gun jams and it gives Matthias enough time to throw a spear into Robert, mortally wounding him.  He dramatically falls into the fountain in the square and blood flows with the water.  Lisa stays with him until dawn, even though she says she's a "Family" member.  The others I guess stayed inside the burning apartment, maybe too tired to fight anymore, or just wanted it all to end.
The rest of the human survivors come up on the fountain and a dying Robert Neville.  He hands them a flask of his blood serum, so humanity can be restored and saved through his immunity.  After handing over the serum, Robert dies in the pose of the crucified Jesus Christ.  The survivors take Lisa and leave town and leave "The Family" to die like Robert wanted.

I give this version 3 out of 5 ticket stubs.  I think it deviates too much from the original story especially when the main character is supposed to be the last normal man on Earth, but finds other survivors.  Also at times, this version is just too cheesy.

I am Legend

Released: 2007
Horror Sci-Fi
Starring: Will Smith, Alice Braga, Salli Richardson
Director: Francis Lawrence
Running Time: 101 minutes
Rated PG 13 for some scary images

The breakdown:
Yet another version of the novel by Richard Matheson.  This one is a bit different from the book of course.  In this version the main character played by Smith is a smart scientist trying to find a cure for the virus that has either killed most of humanity or turned them into a zombie/vampire.  (They look dead, not super smart, they can't speak, they try to suck your blood or eat you, and they can't stand the daylight.  It's really a mix of both to me.)

WARNING!  Talk about the ending in this movie as well as the novel that inspired it, so if you don't want to ruin it for yourself don't read this one.......

In this version, Emma Thompson plays a scientist/researcher who's come up with a "cure" for cancer with a vaccine.  Of course, everyone gets the shot, but something goes terribly wrong.  Almost everyone turns into a vampire/zombie from the injection.  For some reason either by a natural immunity to it, or by luck and they haven't gotten bit or killed, a few survivors are left in the country.  Will Smith plays a military scientist whose family didn't make it to safety in time.  He's the only one, or seems to be, in New York City.  He plays a radio broadcast every day from the top of a building to see if he can get any one left to come to him, and for years he has no response.  He's working in his lab for a cure and sometimes gets live specimens to test on.  He travels for food by day with his dog and hides in his home at night to survive.  It's been years since the plague hit and eventually he finds an uninfected woman and child for company.  He has to take care of them as well, but at first he likes the company.  He loses his dog to a zombie bite and eventually captures the wrong live zombie (possibly the girlfriend/wife of a ferocious male zombie).  He has some close calls and sooner or later the zombies find out his hiding spot and get past all his protections. 
He's just found a cure when the zombies break in, and sends the woman and child off into the country to find a safe zone where most survivors seem to be gathering.  He hopes with the serum he gives them, humanity can be restored.  He stays behind as bait to a ton of zombies that have a big beef with him.  He pulls the pin on his trusty grenade and kills himself along with a ton of zombies. 

Ah now, with this movie version, since I know the original book and have seen other film versions of the story, this one doesn't rate so high with me.  I give it only 3 out of 5 ticket stubs because it did have some scary scenes, and the special effects were good, but it dumbed down the zombies a bit too much from the original book.  It could've been more dynamic had they made the zombies smarter.

This movie version, like all of them, of course, completely differs from the short novel.
Let me say how important this story was to pop culture and movies first.
It was written in 1954 and has had 3 different versions released in movie form.  None of them stay true to the original story though.  The Last Man on Earth in 1964 (even had the screenplay written by Matheson but by the end it differed so much he didn't want his real name on the project), The Omega Man in 1971, and I am Legend in 2007.  It was the inspiration for the Night of the Living Dead movies by George Romero.  It influenced Stephen King, and is a fantastic story to read if you've never had the chance.  Though Richard Matheson refers to the beings in his story as vampires, they had a very strong effect for the idea of zombies to get popular.  For the book review anytime I say vampire or zombie alone I really mean both because they resemble both.  I will try to keep references limited to vampire/zombie though.

In the novel, the main character, Robert Neville is just an office worker with a wife.  He lives a normal life in L.A. but pretty soon changes come across the country and people start to get sick with some new illness.  You either get sick and become a zombie without dying first, or the dead (unburied bodies) get infected and become zombies. The man loses his wife and all of his friends and co-workers through death or him having to kill them himself, except for one.  His co-worker becomes the lead zombie in town and is hellbent on killing the main character.  He's been able to evade Neville and is a strong nemesis.  Neville is depressed and turns to alcohol for a while to help him deal.  Neville goes out during the day, when it's safe, carrying garlic with him as repellent and collects what he can to survive.  He also kills as many enemies as possible.  At night, he hears them wandering the streets and they know where to find him, but they can't enter his well protected home.  They are not dumb like a lot of zombie characters we know of today.  They speak and travel together.  It's interesting how his co-worker was his friend in life and they used to carpool together for work, but since his co-worker got infected, he's really hated Robert and just wants him dead.
He begins getting books from the library and researching medicine/research/science to learn what might have caused this illness to happen.  He discovers through his own long and slow medical research that the illness started with a bacteria that could infect living and dead tissue.  He is immune, but would like to cure what is making what's left of humanity sick. 
He meets a woman named Ruth in a field and thinks she is a zombie/vampire at first, but she's out during the day so she must be human.  These things usually hide during the day.  He captures her and enjoys her company slowly trusting her.  He has been alone for three years before meeting Ruth.  He becomes suspicious of her when she flinches at talk of killing zombie/vampires, but if she was a true survivor she wouldn't mind killing them as you have to survive yourself, especially travelling alone like she was.  He has taken Ruth home but is upset when he wakes one night finding her getting ready to leave.  He questions her as to why she's leaving, but since he's been alone so long and he starts telling her about his past they console one another and she stays.  He wants a blood sample from her, and she gives it to him, but just when he sees the results (she is indeed infected) she hits him over the head and knocks him unconscious.  When he wakes up he sees a note Ruth left for him.  Seems that the infected are getting to the point where they can tolerate small amounts of sunlight (like she could) and want to rebuild a society.  She's part of the group that wants to restart the world the way that they are without being "cured".  Most of them hate and fear Neville because he has killed so many of them (including the true vampire/zombies that were infected only after they died) and they hate him because of his desire to eradicate them for his former way of humanity (non-infected).  Kind of like a strange genocide or racism if you ask me.  Anyway, Ruth warns Robert that her people are coming to get him and kill him.  She doesn't hate or fear him, but she's not trying to stop her people either.  She tells him to get out of his house and escape somewhere, but he doesn't believe they will be able to capture him.
They are better than he thought they were, they capture him and he wakes up in prison.  Ruth visits him and tells him she is a high ranking member of the new society.  She says she's been working with these new society members from before the time she met him and was basically trying to get to know him to learn best how to capture him.  She believes that he needs to be executed like all the other members, but she gives him pills (I believe are strong enough to kill him before the painful execution) saying that it will make things easier for him.  Neville has been badly injured and accepts that he is indeed going to die, there is no escape at this point.  He asks Ruth not to let this new society become terrible and heartless.  She kisses him goodbye and leaves his cell.
He goes to the window overlooking all the infected waiting for him to be publicly executed.  Their reaction to seeing him is strong and they are excited to see him die, some of them probably didn't believe he was real or really captured.  Somehow he understands what the new society believes and how they feel.  He recognizes that vampires used to be legend in his society, just a story with no proof.  He realizes that a new form of human or "race" has been created due to this illness and that people are just adapting to it.  He is a threat to what they believe since he is trying to kill all of them so that more "normal" pre-infection society can survive and continue to dominate the country/world.  He says to himself out loud after he swallows the pills, "[I am] a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever.  I am legend." 

I give the book (though it's really short) a 5 out of 5 for it being incredibly original at the time it was written.  It's influence continues to permeate today and it's really interesting to read.  The main character never found another living human being the whole time of the story that wasn't infected.  He was truly (possibly) the last human being on Earth.  Robert Neville was a very intriguing character.     

The Shining

Released: 1980
Horror
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Running Time: 142 intensely scary minutes
Rated: R for nudity, language, violence

The breakdown:  A family moves into an old hotel isolated in the snowy mountains.  The father was offered the job of watching over the hotel while all the guests and employees leave over the winter season as it is impossible to reach by any means.  He figures it would be good for him to write a novel there, but the hotel has other plans for him.


One of the most scary films I have ever seen!  I saw this version first and then read the Stephen King novel afterwards.  The two definitely are very different stories, but I like both.  If you like Stephen King or this movie, you've probably heard how much Stephen did NOT like this movie.  So much so that in 1997 he did his own miniseries on television.  We can talk more about this at the end.  On to the movie!
So Nicholson made this role iconic and I don't know if he's more known for any other role than this (maybe the joker in the Michael Keaton Batman movies or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), but I think this is the best he's ever been. 

WARNING!  I'm talking about plot in great detail and if you've never seen this movie, you should!  And if you want to see it in the future, do NOT read any further as I will probably ruin it for you.

So, Nicholson plays this father (named Jack, easy to remember) who's trying to take care of his family best he can and is struggling to make a good living, he used to be a school teacher, but he has a problem with alcohol (book and film differ a lot here).  He gets what he thinks is a great opportunity to be an off-season hotel caretaker for the Overlook Hotel.  Of course, it's over the cold snowy winter (6 months!) and the hotel shuts down since the roads are impassable during that time of year, but the father decides to bring along his family and wants the quiet and solitude to focus on his new career of writing a book.  It just so happens this hotel was built on top of an old Indian burial ground.  The Overlook Hotel has a name that's significant and meaningful here.  One could say that the hotel overlooked (in the worst possible way) the people that it was built upon; during construction in the early 1900's they had to fight off some Native American attacks.  Jack is warned that a previous caretaker got cabin fever and killed himself and his whole family during his time there.  Jack is not deterred at all.  His son Danny (character name and real name) has ESP and has a bad vision about the upcoming stay at the hotel.  He has an imaginary friend named Tony that "speaks" through Danny's finger.  Danny sees the hotel lobby.  The elevator doors open and a flood of bright red blood cascades out all over the floor.  He usually goes into a trance like state when these visions occur. 
Jack's wife, Wendy is (I think) splendidly played by Shelley Duvall (depends on how you look at it, we'll discuss more later).  Anyways, Wendy tells Danny's doctor (who's checking over Danny for his "weird episodes and imaginary friend") that her husband has recently given up drinking after hurting their son on a night of binge drinking.  The doctor says Danny is probably just under emotional stress, nothing is really wrong with him.  So things are looking up for the family, so it seems.

They arrive at the hotel on it's closing day when the sun is still shining and the blue sky is cloudless.  The hotel is HUGE and looks amazing to stay at.  (I love the old 70's style interior design of the place with touches of Native American here and there.)  The family gets a tour and is introduced to the chef (played by Scatman Crothers, I love him!) Dick Hallorann.  Hallorann shows he has the gift of ESP too by calling Danny the nickname his family uses, Doc.  The chef offers Danny some ice cream without speaking, i.e. telepathically, but the chef calls it "shining".  Danny and the chef have a private conversation over ice cream about the hotel.  Danny is aware of room 237 through his "shining" and asks if there is anything to be afraid of in the hotel, but particularly about room 237.  The chef tells him the hotel has many memories in it, but some are bad ones.  He also says the whole hotel has a "shine" to it, but make sure Danny stays out of room 237.  I love Scatman Crothers, he's so like a warm grandpa type in this film, it's hard not to like him.
So a month passes, things are fine.  Jack's book is not coming along though, he's a bit frustrated.  Danny and his mom explore the hedge maze that is out in the front of the hotel grounds.  It's huge and looks easy to get lost in.  Days pass.  Wendy's concerned that she can't get through on the phone lines (because of heavy snow fall recently) but she does have a two-way radio with the U.S. Fire Service to check in with.  They confirm the lines are down, but that that's normal during this time of year.  Danny has more frightening visions of the hotel.  His curiosity gets the best of him as he's wheeling down the hallway on his bigwheel toy near room 237.  He looks at the door and tries to decide whether to go in or not.  He tries the doorknob, but it is locked.  He rides his bigwheel around the hotel often and on another go around later of the same floor, he stops where twin little girls are blocking his way.  They ask him to play with them, but he has a vision of their bloody death and covers his eyes with his hands.  He remembers what Hallorann told him, if he sees things here, they are just like pictures in a book.  They are not real.  Meanwhile, Jack is getting more and more frustrated and begins to have emotional outbursts that lean towards the violent side. 
Danny is lured by a tennis ball that rolls towards him in the hallway where room 237 is.  This time, the door is standing open and Danny goes in. 
Later when Wendy sees Danny again, he's visibly shaken and upset and she accuses her husband of abusing their son.  Jack needs to get away.  He goes into the Gold Room which is a ballroom and sees no one at first.  He sits at the empty bar and says out loud, he'd give his soul for a glass of beer.  Just then he slips back in time (maybe), many decades into the hotel's history and deeper into his own madness.  All of a sudden a bartender is there in front of him....a ghostly bartender named Lloyd.  Lloyd serves Jack a drink and Jack tells the bartender all about the problems he's having with his family.  At this point Jack thinks nothing is wrong with him having a drink and conversation with a person who either really isn't there or is a ghost.  Jack is starting to lose it (though one can argue that the character at the beginning of the movie was a bit crazy already).  It could also be argued that Jack raised the bartender if he has a "shining" gift like his son also has.  Danny might have inherited his father's gift.
Wendy is running towards Jack at the bar all of a sudden and the bartender and all the alcohol disappear.  She says Danny said a woman in room 237 was responsible for his injuries.  She believes someone else is in the hotel with them.  Jack still seems drunk when he speaks, telling his wife he will go look, but he thinks she's out of her mind (a bit ironic). 
In Florida, the chef has a terribly bad feeling (possibly a telepathic message from Danny) that something is going wrong in the hotel in Colorado and immediately calls the hotel with no response.  He then calls the fire service and cannot reach them.  Then he catches a flight to Colorado and borrows a Sno-cat to get to the hotel.  These scenes are cut into the movie bit by bit over time showing his frantic pace to try to help the family, but it does take him a while to reach the hotel.  At this point in the movie he has not arrived yet.  We will see him later when he does get there.
Meanwhile back at the hotel, Jack investigates room 237.  He opens the bathroom door inside the room and sees a pretty naked woman in the tub.  He's intrigued as she gets up and moves towards him.   She stops in front of him and begins seducing him and he's happy to be seduced.  He lets her run her hands over his chest and neck and then he kisses her.  But as he looks at the reflection of them in the mirror over her shoulder, he sees something much different.  She's a partially decomposed corpse and wrinkled old hag.  He's shocked and revolted.  She begins laughing at his willingness to cheat on his wife with a dead lover, or the hotel is just messing with him to see if it can.  He's now back peddling out of the room and we see what Danny saw earlier.  A floating bloated cadaver in the tub rises and starts walking towards Jack with her arms held out in front of her.  He flees from the room, the heart of the evil spirits of the Overlook, and locks the door behind him. 

Jack tells Wendy he didn't see anything in the room.  They argue about whether they should stay or not to get their son to a better place.  Danny's ESP kicks in while he is sleeping in another room.  He goes into a trance and hears his parents conversation.  He sees the word REdrUM scrawled across a door in red.  Jack is raging and storms out of the little apartment to get away from his wife who he thinks is trying to screw his job up.

Jack returns to the Gold Room, but now there's a big party going on with many people in the 1920's.  Jack forgets his anger and moves deeper into the room.  Jack sees Lloyd again and gets a drink.  Jack walks around but bumps into a waiter and has alcohol spilled all over his shirt.  Then he is in the bathroom with the same waiter whose name is Grady.  Jack remembers this to be the name of the previous caretaker that killed his whole family.  Jack asks some questions of Grady, but he denies that anyone but Jack has ever been the caretaker.  Though Grady does fit the description to a tee with a wife and two daughters and Jack saw a picture of him in the hotel, so the denial is a bit confusing.  Grady insists that Jack has always been at the Overlook (meaning forever in one way or another) just as Grady himself has always been there.  Grady also warns Jack (in a very overtly racist way) that Danny is trying to bring an outsider into the hotel (Hallorann).  Grady tells Jack he needs to protect the hotel and correct his family.  It's possible through this conversation that Grady is indeed who Jack believes him to be.  A murdering former caretaker who "corrected his family" when they stood in the way of his duty to the hotel.  If Jack really does have the ESP gift like his son, or maybe just a demented crazy mind, he might project another facet of his personality upon this Grady image, and be talking to himself, or it could just be a ghost that senses Jack losing his mind and gives him a little extra nudge over the edge.

Danny has an episode where he keeps saying redrum and refers to himself as Tony.  Wendy is very concerned and starts looking for Jack though she brings a baseball bat.  Only because she's not sure what he will say if she tells him she's taking Danny away in the Sno-cat alone if he won't come with them.  Jack a long time ago, forbid her from coming into his work area saying that she was disturbing his work.  She slowly approaches this area afraid she will find him and upset him again.  She can't see him, but comes upon his typewriter and sees something very disturbing.  He's only written "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over again on what must be hundreds of pages.  She is terrified of what her husband has become. 

Jack sneaks up behind her and asks her how she likes it?  She's terrified but tells him what's going on with Danny.  She wants to take him to a doctor, but Jack says she wants him to leave his responsibility to the hotel behind.   He talks at her backing her up onto the stairs and she starts swinging the bat.  He tells her he's not going to hurt her, just bash her brains in.  Before he can hurt her, she knocks him out with a good solid connection from the baseball bat and drags him into the kitchen.  She locks him in the pantry, and he tries several different ways to convince her to open the door.  She refuses and tells him what she's going to do.  She wants to get the Sno-cat and drive her and her son to the closest city, Sidewinder.  Jack tells her she's in for a nasty surprise, that she should go look at the Sno-cat and the radio.
She runs to the radio and sees it's been destroyed and checks the Sno-cat in the shed and sees wires pulled out and running everywhere.  She realizes, she's stuck there with her now insane husband.  Jack asleep in the pantry is awoken by Grady's voice outside the door.  He's telling Jack the others and Grady do not think his heart is in protecting the hotel.  Grady says Jack will have to take care of the threat to the hotel in the "harshest possible way".  Jack promises if he's given one more chance he will take care of his family for the hotel.
The evil spirits at the hotel open the pantry door for Jack and he's out and he's very angry and incredibly dangerous.

Danny back in the apartment (what you could call the quarters where an employee lives at the hotel I guess) has taken red lipstick and written "redrum" on the bathroom door.  Wendy wakes up (she was sleeping somehow?) and sees this reflection in the mirror.  It reads murder.  At that moment, Jack takes an axe to the front door of their apartment looking to murder his wife and child.  Danny and Wendy go into the bathroom and Danny is small enough to slip out the window into the snow, but Wendy won't fit.  Jack bursts through the closed front door and is on his way to the bathroom now.  Wendy watches terrified as Jack's axe blade comes pounding through the door one chop at a time.  She has a butcher knife in her hands unsure of what's going to happen.  In the most famous scene of the movie, Jack pushes his face through the hole his axe has made in the door and he says, "Hereeeee's Johnny!"
She hits his hand with the blade of her knife when Jack tries to reach the door handle.  All of a sudden there's Hallorann outside with his Sno-cat arriving to save the day, or at least try.  Danny meanwhile, has run into a large metal storage cabinet inside the hotel.  Jack runs towards the front lobby to take care of the outsider that has finally arrived due to his son's meddling.  Hallorann is asking if anyone's there and Jack jumps out from his hiding spot and puts his axe blade into Hallorann's chest, leaving him on the lobby floor to die.  Danny screams out, but now Jack knows where to find his son.  Danny runs out of the cabinet with his father following behind still with the axe.
Wendy meanwhile is upstairs frantically looking for Danny.  She hears chanting and opens a random hotel room door and sees a man in a dog costume hovering over another fully formally dressed man on his bed.  Their sex act is interrupted as they look up at Wendy.  This might mean that the ghosts are getting stronger and could appear to anyone, or Wendy even might have a slight gift of "shining" as well.  She runs down into the lobby and sees Hallorann's body and also sees the same vision her son saw at first of the lobby elevator doors opening and a wave of blood rush into the lobby.
Outside, Jack is following his son's footprints left in the snow out into the hedge maze.  Danny has used an old trick though and double backed on his footprints escaping the maze and leaving his father behind.  He finds his mother and falls into her embrace.  He is now Danny again and not Tony.  They find Hallorann's Sno-cat and escape the hotel and Jack.  The next morning Jack is shown dead and frozen in the snow still lost in the maze.
The last shot of the movie is focusing in on a picture of a large party at the hotel in 1921.  At the center bottom of the picture you see Jack dressed in a tuxedo smiling devilishly.

I give the movie 5 out of 5 standing alone without comparing it to the novel.  It's a great intense, scary movie that is a horror classic without using old tried and true tricks like cobwebs, and darkness.  It's not easy to make a terrifying movie using extra bright light bulbs and full sun if you think about it.  One of few scary movies I can think of that isn't darkness or night all the time.



There is a pretty long list of things to talk about in this film.  All sorts of differences between the novel and the film (or even if you can compare the 2 considering they are so different from each other.)
Stephen King's dislike over the film.
Whether there are ghosts in the hotel or whether it's just a man going mad.  Is it reincarnation or just different personalities?
I've read that people say Stanley Kubrick always wanted to make a holocaust film, but it never quite worked out and that a thread of the holocaust works its way into all of his projects.  With this movie, some say that the Native American furnishings, patterns, the hotel being built on top of a Native American burial ground and other little touches throughout the movie reference Kubrick's belief that the Native American went through something similar to the holocaust.
I feel bad for the actors during the filming process though.  Sounds like from the behind the scenes documentary for the film on the DVD has Kubrick being pretty brutal on them.  He made them do take after take after take to get them to a tired, frustrated place to film the scene the way he wanted.  Poor Shelley Duvall took the worst of it though.  He apparently, had more lines for her character, but didn't like the way she did them so they were cut.  This makes her character quiet, and a lot more meek to the observer.  I thought she did a great job of being terrified though I don't know if that's due to Kubrick's picking on her, or her natural acting ability.
So the differences between the book and the movie.  These are very big differences and I suppose a lot of die hard King fans do not like this movie version.  You could argue they are two different stories.  In King's book the man is completely stable and sane, but a terrible alcoholic (King himself was a self-proclaimed alcoholic at the time of writing the book) who broke his son's arm and then quit drinking.  In the book, Jack had a terrible problem with authority and rebelled against it as much as possible.  In the movie, Jack's alcoholism is only barely mentioned and the authority thing is mostly dropped.  As well, in the movie, Jack's character is a bit loopy to begin with so him going crazy isn't as unlikely as it is in the book.  Also in the book, Jack's character doesn't die in a snowy hedge maze, he blows up with the hotel due to the boiler reaching a critical uncorrected pressure and he lets his family get away in a moment of total sanity.  Jack's character redeems himself a little at the end of the book, while in the movie, he goes off the deep end and stays there.  In fact, they only briefly mention the boiler in the movie, but in the book it's a huge part of the story.  Like I said, at the end of the book, the boiler gets too much pressure built up and it causes a huge explosion that destroys the hotel.  That was part of Jack's job at the hotel, to watch this boiler that needed fixing, but it wasn't due to get done until after the winter season.  It was down in the basement and Jack would go down there and have some alone time.  He also didn't have writer's block in the book, when he went down to the basement once, he found a hotel scrapbook of all the good and bad events that had centered around the hotel.  This gave Jack a ton of ideas for his book, so that was very different from the movie. 
In fact, I don't think you could say the movie was based on the novel really, it's more like a movie inspired by the book.  In addition one of the really scary moments in the book was never in the movie.  Due to special effects not being sufficient in 1980 they didn't even attempt it.  Out front of the hotel, they had a hedge menagerie of animals that were pretty big.  Danny was out playing by himself one day and a tiger began stalking him, but the boy never saw it move, he just kept looking and it would be in a different place.  When reading the book, this was a great scene, but replaced with the hedge maze in the movie.
The biggest difference is what makes the stories so very different.  In the book, it was clear the hotel had a supernatural power over Jack.  Things, bad things, happened there and the hotel kept all the bad energy and spirits there.  This bad energy made Jack go crazy in the book.  It really got a hold of him and there was no chance it was cabin fever or a mental instability that had already existed in him.
In the movie, it's more psychological and motivations are more debatable.  In the film, the hotel is built on a burial ground (bad idea if you want good energy at your hotel) but this isn't the case with the novel.  The movie version of Jack seems a bit weak minded and unstable from the beginning so being in an isolated place in the dead of winter with only a couple people around makes his path to insanity seem a bit easier.  He does almost exclusively only talk to ghosts when he's facing a mirror or a highly polished surface so you could say he's really just talking to himself.  These "ghosts" are just a manifestation of a highly unstable part of him that's always been within him pushing him to do bad things.  The only time that this logic fails is when he's stuck in the pantry and he cannot open the door himself.  It's bolted from the outside and there is no other explanation then the spirits, real ghosts of the hotel, let him out.  Some say Kubrick didn't want all the puzzle pieces to fit together in this movie, which they don't, and that he wanted some stuff to be fuzzy or not entirely make sense.  This would be one of those instances, because I think the movie really pushes you to believe Jack has always been a bit unstable and the environment and stress kinda' just push him over, not really a power the hotel has over him supernaturally.  I read that someone said the movie shows us that any human is capable of insanity and murder.  The book is supernatural, the movie is human psyche. 
There's also the debate of how Jack could "always be the caretaker" according to Grady in the bathroom.  Reincarnation?  A different version of himself only later?  The picture at the end is the most compelling evidence of this.  A picture taken of someone who looks like him in 1921 and the year this movie is supposed to take place in 1980.  I vote for reincarnation though I don't have a lot to back up that belief.  It is interesting to think about how the hotel seems to want caretakers to kill their children.  This would be the next generation in their own family trees.  Perhaps the hotel doesn't like children?  Maybe it's selfish and only wants the caretakers to be there for itself and no one else?

So personally, myself, I think the movie is excellent for a man's decent into madness, though his path to get there is not exactly clear, no matter how many times you see the movie.  It's a fantastic scary trip into the human mind and it stays with you.  Everyone who's seen the movie remembers it. 
The book is a great ghost story, showing how a spooky place can get into your soul and make you do whatever it wants you to do for it.  Even the most stable, sane person can be possessed by evil spirits.  Even the most rational loving man (or woman) can change into a murderer.  I'll have to reread the book now, but I will make a separate post for it somewhere along the way. 
In a separate note:
I have to say the "remade" King miniseries version of his book is of course, true to the book, but unintentionally funny sometimes.  Certainly not good if you're looking to scare an audience.  Although, I'm usually on Stephen King's side for a lot of things, I really love the 1980 movie version and the book version on their own.  The miniseries was a good way to visualize his book, but if you want to know the story, you should always read the book.  The miniseries I can't really recommend.

Donnie Darko

Originally Released: 2001
Re-released (Director's Cut): 2004
Drama, Sci-fi
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Mary McDonnell, Maggie Gyllenhaal
Director: Richard Kelly
Running Time: 113 minutes (2001 version - 2004 re-release has additional 20 minutes)
Rated R for scary images and adult situations, language

The breakdown:
A very troubled teenager has an imaginary "friend" named Frank, who happens to be a very tall demonic-looking rabbit.  Of course, no one else can see Frank.  Frank saves Donnie's life one night and asks Donnie to commit a lot of crimes.  Frank has also let Donnie in on a little secret, the world is going to end in 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds.


I had no idea what this movie was about when I watched it.  All I had was the Directv description, which was pretty cryptic.  I knew I'd heard of it, but I'd never seen a preview.
So having no preconceived ideas, I loved it and recommend it to anyone and everyone.  I really really enjoyed this movie!

The film is set in 1988 (I can only suppose this is to have a great 80's soundtrack and to possibly avoid having to deal with a few inventions like the internet and cell phones in the plot.)  I truly don't mind an 80's setting. 
Donnie Darko is a teenager who has been talking with a psychiatrist and is on medications for a condition that is never explicitly explained (it could be schizophrenia, but it's also possible that nothing is wrong with him mentally).  He doesn't get along with his family, his peers, his teachers, or really anyone.  He makes a new friend at school through Malone, since she's new to town.  One night while he's sleeping a voice draws him out of his room, and out of his house.  He sees Frank for the first time who tells him the world is coming to an end soon.  While Donnie is out, a huge jet engine falls onto his house and into his room where he would have been sleeping.  So Frank has just saved his life.
Donnie sees Frank often and Frank tells him to do things - stuff like flood the school and set people's houses on fire.  Frank also tells him about time travel. 
Donnie begins researching time travel through a fictitious book called
"The Philosophy of Time Travel" written by a local resident called Grandma Death; the idea of parallel universes is introduced.
There's a lot of things I could tell you about this movie, but if you're interested in seeing it, it's better I not.  I can tell you the reasons why I liked this movie so much though.....I've never seen anything else like it, so it's very creative and original.  The plot is engaging and the viewer definitely has to pay attention to try and understand the whole movie.  The acting is good, the characters are interesting, and Frank is very creepy.  Most of the time I think movies are a place to escape to and zone out from the rest of the world, but don't take any brain power to understand them because everything is laid out in front of you.  With this movie, no one tells you what it all means and what really happened.  You need critical thinking skills and you have to figure out what happened for yourself.  Sometimes, this is the easy way out for directors when they don't know how to finish a story, they leave it open ended and call it an ending.  This open-ended stuff or enigmatic ending either really annoys me because it's not done right, or sometimes it brilliant, and I love it.  In this movie's case, it's brilliant and the story is strong enough to end the way that it did.  Christopher Nolan's "Inception" was strong enough to end the way it did, but you take a movie like David Lynch's "Mulholland Dr." and forget it!  That movie confused me so bad at the end I hated it.  Don't even get me started, in fact, I think I'll review that one in a separate post. 

Just know with this movie, there is a pretty good soundtrack with one of the most sad (but pretty) songs I've ever heard, there's a very original story that's interesting to watch, and Drew Barrymore proves that she still cannot act (sooooooooooo painful to watch her try!)  The ending might confuse some as well, but a lot of people will probably interpret it differently.  I cannot discuss my understanding of the end without ruining the movie, so I will refrain.  Perhaps later in a separate post we'll talk about the end.

Some interesting tidbits:
This movie was supposed to premiere around September of 2011, but since 9-11 happened (and the airplane accident is a big part of the movie) they postponed it to October of the same year and only released it in about 58 theaters.  Of course, no one got to see it.  When it was released on DVD, the movie got a very good reception and cult status.  After the director saw the big fan base he re-released it in theaters in 2004 as a director's cut with an additional 20 minutes of never before seen footage.
I have only seen the original theatrical release, but plan on watching the director's cut soon.

I give the original theatrical release 4 out of 5 stars (and not 5) only because Drew Barrymore totally takes you out of the movie simply because she cannot act, and some of the dialogue (language) I feel was a bit unnecessary in some parts.  That's my only complaint.

Pandorum

Released: 2009
Horror, Sci-fi
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster, Cam Gigandet
Director: Christian Alvart
Running Time: 108 minutes
Rated R for violence and language

The breakdown:
Aboard a gigantic space ship, two men wake up to find they have no idea what's happened to the rest of their crew or the thousands of civilians on board.



I was really expecting this movie to suck.  I just watched it to kill a couple of hours, but I was pleasantly surprised, I really ended up liking it.
Quaid plays the commanding officer in charge of a huge ship.  So big that they have about 4 independent crews that work in year shifts.  One crew is supposed to be up and working at all times.  The other crews rest in hyper sleep until their shift comes due.  Foster plays a subordinate that wakes up first.  He discovers that no one is running the ship and none of the crew is around but Quaid and he's still in hyper sleep.  After waking Quaid they discuss what's going on.  Quaid was the Lieutenant of another shift other than Foster's so they don't know or remember each other at all.  Both of them seem to remember nothing and have no idea what's happened.  They really don't even remember who they themselves are.  They do know that the ship is not able to travel so they are essentially stranded out in the middle of space and they soon discover they are not the only living entities on the ship.  While Quaid stays on the commanding deck, he navigates Foster via radio transmitter through the ship to see if he can find out what's happened.  The longer he's gone the more they discover and the harder it is to survive.  Basically, well......I don't even want to get into because it will ruin it for you.  If you haven't seen it yet, I think it's worth catching.  There's a good amount of scares as well as thought-provoking ideas that tap into humanity's worst fears.

I give it 4 out of 5 ticket stubs for originality and creativity, as well as a surprising and satisfying ending.

Don't you just love Hugh Jackman?! I know I do!

Hugh Jackman was devastated by fertility problems

Hugh Jackman was left heartbroken by his and his wife's inability to have a baby.

The actor and his spouse Debra were both devastated when they were told they had fertility problems and he admits it was hard to have to go through IVF treatment and for Debra to suffer two miscarriages.

But he admits the love they have for their adopted children, son Oscar, 11, and daughter Ava, six, has eased the pain they experienced.

Hugh revealed: "It was painful. We thought we'd have a kid or two biologically and then adopt.

"Obviously, biologically wasn't the way we were meant to have children. I don't think of them as adopted - they are our children."

Hugh admits parenthood is not always easy but he has learned a lot about himself from his kids. 

The 43-year-old actor told the Daily Record newspaper: "With kids you have this wonderful ability to carry on for months without any sleep. And you learn patience. Kids have a way of pushing every button. They find the trigger points - those things that make you frustrated and angry and they use them."

Hugh's children even help him pick his film roles, as it was Oscar who encouraged him to star in robot boxing movie 'Real Steel' after he read the script to him as a bedtime story.

Hugh said: "I got to the end of the scene and Oscar was still awake. He told me to keep going and when we got through it, he said, 'Dad you have to do this.' "

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have a huge problem with this article. 

Why is he letting his 11 year old kid tell him what movie to do?!

Have you seen the previews for Real Steel?  It looks absolutely terrible.

I'm embarrassed for him just being associated with the project.

He (and no other adult for that matter) shouldn't let his kid dictate what his job is,

or what movie to make.  Real Steel of course is going to appeal to an 11 year old

boy, but it looks like a flop already to me.  It's a dumb idea for robots to be

fighting in a ring in the future.  I could be wrong, it might be a brilliant heart warming

movie, but I don't think so.  Please Hugh, don't listen to kids for advice!

My oh my Christina!

Christina Aguilera's weight gain draws criticism

Oct. 13, 2011 08:20 AM
USA TODAY

Unfortunately for Christina Aguilera, her performance at last weekend's Michael Jackson tribute concert is still causing buzz. But not for the right reasons.

"The Voice" coach belted out songs including 'Dirty Diana' and 'Smile' - and she earned raves for that - but the singer has taken a beating on blogs, Twitter and elsewhere for her "weight gain," her "considerable curves," her "thick thighs" and her "unflattering" outfit. Joan Rivers even called her "a pig."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lord knows I love me some Xtina!  She has a fantastic voice and blows all those other young blond singers away, but I have to say, I haven't seen a more unflattering photo of her as of late.  I know that a baby changes a woman's body.  I know it may be hard to get rid of the baby weight.  I'm sure she's not really that heavy, just average woman size.  With that said, she can afford a personal trainer, and a nutritionist, and a chef to get her healthy and back to a good weight for public appearances.  Didn't her personal stylist tell her this was not the most flattering outfit for her to wear?  If you're not quite at the weight you want to be but you have to do a really high profile appearance like the Michael Jackson Tribute Concert, shouldn't you wear something a bit more covered up?!  A nice pant suit perhaps?  Or at least pants?  And who did her hair?! 
She looks like she's having a difficult bowel movement for God's sakes!

I knew it.....

I really knew that there was a good chance that my favorite and only reason for watching Dancing with the Stars would go home last night.  Watching Carson dance on Monday I only really had one thought go through my head.....He is so in trouble this week.  He didn't really dance, he did a cheer leading routine.  That didn't surprise me since he really had little rhythm and was self-proclaimed as not co-ordinated.  Every week though, I looked forward to seeing him and getting a few belly laughs at his perky spirit and cute routines.  I really did enjoy his sense of humor and he will be missed from the show.
As for me, I don't care who wins now.  I won't be watching.
BUT, there are a couple people who certainly deserved to go home because of their overall performance more than Carson this week.  People who are boring to watch and bring no laughs, and no passion to the dance floor.
Nancy Grace I can't stand.  I don't care what happened to her in her past.  I don't care about her kids or her husband, she's really annoying and boring to watch.
Rob Kardashian, what a joke.  He has no talent whatsoever, just like all the other Kardashians.  The only reason he's famous is because Ryan Seacrest can't get enough of producing shows for them.  The whole family lacks any talent (except for Bruce Jenner, but he doesn't count here).  He gets out there and looks like a total dork and fondles his dance partner in really immature ways.  He's so gross.

Adopt a special dog into your home

I had no idea that this program existed.  I always assumed that the handlers or the soldiers that worked with the dogs would want them.  October is adopt a shelter dog month, but I think all homeless dogs should be adopted no matter where they come from.  This is a repost of a local article I read in Arizona.

 

Dog Heroes in Need of Homes

By Deborah Kandoll

Military working dogs (MWDs) are the unsung four-legged heroes of our armed services. Every day, these amazing dog heroes put their lives on the line, on patrol and on specialized drug and explosive detection missions around the world. Wherever there are American security forces, MWDs are there serving right beside them.

When these dogs grow too old or cannot physically continue on with the rigorous standards required of military working dogs, they can be retired from the military and offered for adoption to qualified civilians and law-enforcement handlers.

Finding a Dog Hero

Because there is a long waiting list, it can take a year to 18 months to adopt from the 341st MWD Training Squadron at Lackland Air Force Base (LAFB) in San Antonio. LAFB also adopts out dogs that “wash out” of the training program. Although they might not have been suited for military life, they’re still wonderful dogs.
Many military working dog facilities exist throughout the country. To shorten the lengthy waiting time for your companion, you can also actively call any of these groups to inquire if veteran dogs will be retired soon. My website offers more information at MilitaryWorkingDogAdoptions.com.

These Dogs Are Indeed Special

I established my group’s website in 2008 as a result of my own personal MWD adoption experience. I made 50 calls before I discovered my first MWD, Benny B163, a beautiful black and tan German Shepherd. I thought I knew all about the breed after owning seven German Shepherds. But my Benny made me see what military dog handlers speak of in reverent terms. The relationship they have with their working dogs is unique from any other. The depth of its closeness, loyalty and trust cannot be quantified in words. My special 12-year-old Benny passed away from a heart attack on January 3, 2010.
My husband and I are now overjoyed to have 12-year-old Bino C152 (USA, Ret.) and 9- year-old Alex H116 (USAF, Ret.) as our new and much-beloved family members. Bino C152, a narcotics detection/patrol dog, had paws on the ground in Iraq for 14 months. Alex H116 served two six-month stints in Iraq as a patrol dog. Their time to enjoy a well-earned rest at “Ft. Couch” has come!

How You Can Learn More

I founded Military Working Dog Adoptions to help make sure that all of these dog heroes find happy homes. MWD Adoptions accepts donations, which it uses to transport adopted MWDs in need of a ride to their new homes. We also help out with military working dogs’ medical costs from time to time. Our paperwork as a nonprofit is pending. However, every dime we receive goes directly to help these veteran canines and the families who adopt them.

Visit our website for more information on how to adopt or otherwise help one of these amazing creatures.