November 2007
Great balls of Beowulf Batman! Okay, okay I’m no super hero sidekick, but thanks to the great folks over at moviehole.net (they hooked me up with free tickets) I have witnessed the future of motion picture entertainment: Beowulf in Imax 3D!
I can’t lie, and I can’t deny, there’s no going back. I’ll never be able to watch traditional projection films again.
Robert Zemeckis has bought us all some great films in the past, Back to The Future and Forest Gump come to mind, but much praise and heaps of thanks to Bob for going with the 3D on Beowulf. I admit that I never watched Beowulf’s predecessor The Polar Express, for whatever reason that film did not appeal to me, but Beowulf
did appeal to me, and I’ll be forever grateful that it was this film that busted my 3D cherry!
Beowulf just sucked me in and filled me with the wild giddy excitement of a 10-year-old boy. It is by far the best film I have seen in over ten years. The 3D was not so much about stuff coming out off of the screen as it was about literally drawing you into the world the filmmakers created. For 1 hour and 54 minutes I was there! Right @#$% there!
Killer kudos to Neil Gaiman and Roger Avery for writing something with an adult audience in mind. Beowulf has some blood and guts amid some of the best action sequences since the original Star Wars trilogy.
No big spoilers here but a quick plot outline. There is a creepy monster haunting a small kingdom and Beowulf is called upon to rid the world of Grendel, the monster. Grendel scared the crap out of me. I was terrified when Grendel first appeared. Thankfully Grendel’s mom just happens to be played by Angelina Jolie! I swear I am not making that up. Angelina Jolie. Naked. In 3D! Why I’d pay to see that! And so should you!
Beowulf is pure cinema magic, total entertainment from start to finish!
The future of cinema has arrived!
KGD
11-17-2007
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Like A Concentration Camp
October 2007
My name is Kenneth G. Donnelly and I was born July 3, 1967. Do you know what they called that summer? They called it the summer of love.
Turning 40 was easy. Thinking about turning 40 was the hard part! I dreaded it for years.
You know what I wanted for my 40th birthday? I wanted to weigh 145 lbs. I wanted to be physically fit. I almost made it. My 40th birthday came and went with no notice by anyone at all, and I was a little sad about that, but mostly I was just relieved. Thank god I didn’t have to look at those black balloons you see around offices sometimes when someone turns 40. Over the hill!
Over the hill my ass!
I can’t tell you if I made my goal weight because I no longer have a bathroom scale and the reason I no longer have a bathroom scale is because I no longer have a bathroom. In July of 2006 I became a homeless man. Two days shy of my 39th birthday I lost everything. Hell I’m sitting here writing this in a public library, and I’m wearing some other guy’s clothes. The only things I have that are truly mine now are my thoughts.
I wrote the above on July 24th of 2007. It’s October 11, 2007 now, and I have been living on the street since August. It turns out I got my birthday wish after all. I have been walking from Largo to Clearwater and from Clearwater back to Largo each day since September 18th, that’s the day my bus pas expired, and since I haven’t been working I haven’t been able to get a new one. I’m only eating one meal a day at the St. Vincent De Paul soup kitchen. I’m hungry all the time now, really hungry. On the bright side I am now so thin my pants no longer fit. They literally fall down if I let them. I have never been this thin in my adult life. I have the whole concentration camp Jew thing going on.
I always wanted to be thin, and I always wanted to die thin, but man I sure would love a slice of Pizza or a Dunkin Donut. Strange how it gets a hold of you, it’s a feeling you can’t shake. You have to eat.
I haven’t shaved in so long I have a beard now. It’s a bit too salt and pepper, I got the look of a hot Hollywood director, Spielberg or Lucas or Francis Ford Coppola. The gray used to drive me insane, but for some reason I’m okay with it now. Maybe cause I’m so far into my own world.
KGD
October 11, 2007
My name is Kenneth G. Donnelly and I was born July 3, 1967. Do you know what they called that summer? They called it the summer of love.
Turning 40 was easy. Thinking about turning 40 was the hard part! I dreaded it for years.
You know what I wanted for my 40th birthday? I wanted to weigh 145 lbs. I wanted to be physically fit. I almost made it. My 40th birthday came and went with no notice by anyone at all, and I was a little sad about that, but mostly I was just relieved. Thank god I didn’t have to look at those black balloons you see around offices sometimes when someone turns 40. Over the hill!
Over the hill my ass!
I can’t tell you if I made my goal weight because I no longer have a bathroom scale and the reason I no longer have a bathroom scale is because I no longer have a bathroom. In July of 2006 I became a homeless man. Two days shy of my 39th birthday I lost everything. Hell I’m sitting here writing this in a public library, and I’m wearing some other guy’s clothes. The only things I have that are truly mine now are my thoughts.
I wrote the above on July 24th of 2007. It’s October 11, 2007 now, and I have been living on the street since August. It turns out I got my birthday wish after all. I have been walking from Largo to Clearwater and from Clearwater back to Largo each day since September 18th, that’s the day my bus pas expired, and since I haven’t been working I haven’t been able to get a new one. I’m only eating one meal a day at the St. Vincent De Paul soup kitchen. I’m hungry all the time now, really hungry. On the bright side I am now so thin my pants no longer fit. They literally fall down if I let them. I have never been this thin in my adult life. I have the whole concentration camp Jew thing going on.
I always wanted to be thin, and I always wanted to die thin, but man I sure would love a slice of Pizza or a Dunkin Donut. Strange how it gets a hold of you, it’s a feeling you can’t shake. You have to eat.
I haven’t shaved in so long I have a beard now. It’s a bit too salt and pepper, I got the look of a hot Hollywood director, Spielberg or Lucas or Francis Ford Coppola. The gray used to drive me insane, but for some reason I’m okay with it now. Maybe cause I’m so far into my own world.
KGD
October 11, 2007
Monday, December 3, 2007
Kiss My Abacus,on iwoz and computers
October 2007
On Computers
So I read iwoz by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith this week. It was nothing special as far as books go. It didn’t stink and it wasn’t great. But I felt compelled to read it any way. Like many people my first experience with a personal computer was with an Apple II back in the year 1977, or maybe, just maybe 1978 at the very latest. I was only ten years old at the time. The computer belonged to a friend of mine, his family; he his brother and his mother and father shared it. His parents were extremely generous and would let us kids sit at the damn thing for hours. Let us play games. The Apple II my friend’s family had was not hooked up to a T.V., they had it hooked up to a green screen.
Does anyone remember them? It was a monitor that was not even black and white. All of the characters on screen appeared “green”, against a black background. I distinctly remember playing a game that was text based. You didn’t have graphics at all. You just read paragraphs, made choices or decisions about what your character would do next, which way they would go, what room they would enter, and then you would read more paragraphs. It was a text-based game. It was fun. The one I like best was called Kidnapped. We played it on an Apple II. There were other games that did have graphics. I remember a pretty fun little Star Trek game. You would chase Klingons to different sectors and report to different star bases. Battle the Klingons and watch how much shield power your Enterprise had. How many photon torpedoes you had, and so on. It was fun.
I don’t recall ever doing anything productive on the Apple II. It was just fun. As I said we were only 10, 11 years old at the time.
It was through this friend of mine that I got to witness a steady parade of different computers through the years. At some point in the late 80’s they abandoned Apple and moved to the readily available and infinitely cheaper IBM clones. I think they had computers that predated Windows. It was not an easy or fun time to be strictly a user of computers. You really needed to have some technical knowledge to make the damn things do what you wanted. An example would be I can remember trying to get some programs to run; more often than not some game we wanted to play, and in order to make it happen, in order to even load the damn program you had to make a batch file. You had to edit the config sys batch file and create a boot disk. It was not for the faint of heart.
Then you would often sit and wait a very long time and watch a little meter fill up as the program loaded. It could take a very long time sometimes. Computers were slow!
At the same time, my friend and his family including his mother and father became extremely proficient at using a computer. They probably still know more than many people who come to use computers today. I witnessed my first Network at this friend’s house. By this time they had moved through so many machines they had more than one lying around. They created a very crude Network by plugging a cable into the back of each computer. The thrill of it is was we got to play a cool NASCAR racing game head to head. It was a first on hour block.
The first computer to enter my house, belonged to my father. This could have been about 10 or 15 years after Apple II. Remember he had six children, a wife and a mortgage. He bought himself a Macintosh when he felt that the technology was something he could handle. They had a reputation back then of being more user friendly. My father never let anyone use his Mac. He bought it and it was his. This is something I never held against him. To him it was more of a tool than a toy. At least that’s how I always looked at it.
Me I didn’t get my own personal computer until February of 1998. I paid over two grand for a Pentium II. It came with Windows 95 and I had to go through a painful upgrade to Windows 98 when it became available.
Now about the book, iwoz by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith; I wanted to read it mostly because it was the first time there seemed to be a first hand account of events that I had read about in the past. Most people have heard the story about how Apple started out in the garage at Steve Jobs’ parent’s house. It’s such a cool story. About how they eventually got invited to the Palo Alto Research Center and learned all there was to learn about great things to come like graphical user interface computers and peripherals such as the mouse. All of these cool things we take for granted today could have belonged to a company called Xerox. But the fools running that company gave it all away to a couple of smart guys from Cupertino. I love that story, but I’ve heard it a number of times before.
Most of this book came out sounding a little to dull.
Wozniak couldn’t seem to make the telling exciting. Maybe because to him it was a little like you or I talking about our first humdrum job, just another day in the life. You know?
I thought he was a little callous when talking about Steve Jobs some times. He mentioned that when naming Apple Computer he actually spoke with Jobs about the recording company Apple Records and a possible conflict. I’ve always felt that Apple Records is Apple Records and Apple Computers is Apple Computers, even when considering the ipod and itunes. Why mention a sore point like that? He did that at least one other time, and I just felt it was unnecessary.
Any way it was fun to remember a time before computers, and the time after. I was 10 when I first got to play with a computer. I was almost 30 before I could afford one of my own. It was that one that I really fell in love with. I remember thinking almost 30 minutes after I had the thing sitting on my desk, “How did I live with out one of these for so long!” I went to school. Learned about Networking. Bought a second computer. Had some fun. Any way that’s my blurb on computers. For now.
KGD
October 28, 2007
On Computers
So I read iwoz by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith this week. It was nothing special as far as books go. It didn’t stink and it wasn’t great. But I felt compelled to read it any way. Like many people my first experience with a personal computer was with an Apple II back in the year 1977, or maybe, just maybe 1978 at the very latest. I was only ten years old at the time. The computer belonged to a friend of mine, his family; he his brother and his mother and father shared it. His parents were extremely generous and would let us kids sit at the damn thing for hours. Let us play games. The Apple II my friend’s family had was not hooked up to a T.V., they had it hooked up to a green screen.
Does anyone remember them? It was a monitor that was not even black and white. All of the characters on screen appeared “green”, against a black background. I distinctly remember playing a game that was text based. You didn’t have graphics at all. You just read paragraphs, made choices or decisions about what your character would do next, which way they would go, what room they would enter, and then you would read more paragraphs. It was a text-based game. It was fun. The one I like best was called Kidnapped. We played it on an Apple II. There were other games that did have graphics. I remember a pretty fun little Star Trek game. You would chase Klingons to different sectors and report to different star bases. Battle the Klingons and watch how much shield power your Enterprise had. How many photon torpedoes you had, and so on. It was fun.
I don’t recall ever doing anything productive on the Apple II. It was just fun. As I said we were only 10, 11 years old at the time.
It was through this friend of mine that I got to witness a steady parade of different computers through the years. At some point in the late 80’s they abandoned Apple and moved to the readily available and infinitely cheaper IBM clones. I think they had computers that predated Windows. It was not an easy or fun time to be strictly a user of computers. You really needed to have some technical knowledge to make the damn things do what you wanted. An example would be I can remember trying to get some programs to run; more often than not some game we wanted to play, and in order to make it happen, in order to even load the damn program you had to make a batch file. You had to edit the config sys batch file and create a boot disk. It was not for the faint of heart.
Then you would often sit and wait a very long time and watch a little meter fill up as the program loaded. It could take a very long time sometimes. Computers were slow!
At the same time, my friend and his family including his mother and father became extremely proficient at using a computer. They probably still know more than many people who come to use computers today. I witnessed my first Network at this friend’s house. By this time they had moved through so many machines they had more than one lying around. They created a very crude Network by plugging a cable into the back of each computer. The thrill of it is was we got to play a cool NASCAR racing game head to head. It was a first on hour block.
The first computer to enter my house, belonged to my father. This could have been about 10 or 15 years after Apple II. Remember he had six children, a wife and a mortgage. He bought himself a Macintosh when he felt that the technology was something he could handle. They had a reputation back then of being more user friendly. My father never let anyone use his Mac. He bought it and it was his. This is something I never held against him. To him it was more of a tool than a toy. At least that’s how I always looked at it.
Me I didn’t get my own personal computer until February of 1998. I paid over two grand for a Pentium II. It came with Windows 95 and I had to go through a painful upgrade to Windows 98 when it became available.
Now about the book, iwoz by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith; I wanted to read it mostly because it was the first time there seemed to be a first hand account of events that I had read about in the past. Most people have heard the story about how Apple started out in the garage at Steve Jobs’ parent’s house. It’s such a cool story. About how they eventually got invited to the Palo Alto Research Center and learned all there was to learn about great things to come like graphical user interface computers and peripherals such as the mouse. All of these cool things we take for granted today could have belonged to a company called Xerox. But the fools running that company gave it all away to a couple of smart guys from Cupertino. I love that story, but I’ve heard it a number of times before.
Most of this book came out sounding a little to dull.
Wozniak couldn’t seem to make the telling exciting. Maybe because to him it was a little like you or I talking about our first humdrum job, just another day in the life. You know?
I thought he was a little callous when talking about Steve Jobs some times. He mentioned that when naming Apple Computer he actually spoke with Jobs about the recording company Apple Records and a possible conflict. I’ve always felt that Apple Records is Apple Records and Apple Computers is Apple Computers, even when considering the ipod and itunes. Why mention a sore point like that? He did that at least one other time, and I just felt it was unnecessary.
Any way it was fun to remember a time before computers, and the time after. I was 10 when I first got to play with a computer. I was almost 30 before I could afford one of my own. It was that one that I really fell in love with. I remember thinking almost 30 minutes after I had the thing sitting on my desk, “How did I live with out one of these for so long!” I went to school. Learned about Networking. Bought a second computer. Had some fun. Any way that’s my blurb on computers. For now.
KGD
October 28, 2007
Sunday, December 2, 2007
The Road, A Book Review
September 2007
It’s September 25, 2007, and I would like to tell you how I spent my day with the Xbox 360, as Master Chief, playing Halo 3 and kicking ass, and that’s exactly what I would have done if I were still living my old life. But my old life is as dead as the dinosaurs. So instead I passed the entire day; that is the time I wasn’t walking from Largo to Clearwater and then from Clearwater back to Largo, reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. So that’s what I’m going to talk about.
I heard so much about this book, many rave reviews, and I have to admit until I did, I had never before heard the name Cormac McCarthy. I don’t watch Oprah, and I could care less what book she is pushing, though I love books so much I’m glad that she pushes them. So I picked it up.
I found myself wondering, just every so often exactly what happened to the punctuation in this book. There are no quotation marks in The Road. But it works. There are so few characters, manly just a man and a boy and the post apocalyptic world that they live in, and such limited dialogue that maybe Mr. McCarthy just figured, hey I don’t need no stinking quotation marks. Does he use them in his other books?
I can’t be sure if this book totally blew my away, or just left me empty. I think it may be both. And if you consider that, it’s actually a huge complement to Cormac McCarthy. I think the book was all about leaving you empty. The man and the boy in his story are lurching through a world devoid of color, devoid of birds, almost but not quite devoid of life, struggling to find food, to make it through the day, to survive.
I’ve never read anything so bleak. Two hundred eighty pages of grim strife, and the love between a man and his son.
KGD
09-25-2007
It’s September 25, 2007, and I would like to tell you how I spent my day with the Xbox 360, as Master Chief, playing Halo 3 and kicking ass, and that’s exactly what I would have done if I were still living my old life. But my old life is as dead as the dinosaurs. So instead I passed the entire day; that is the time I wasn’t walking from Largo to Clearwater and then from Clearwater back to Largo, reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. So that’s what I’m going to talk about.
I heard so much about this book, many rave reviews, and I have to admit until I did, I had never before heard the name Cormac McCarthy. I don’t watch Oprah, and I could care less what book she is pushing, though I love books so much I’m glad that she pushes them. So I picked it up.
I found myself wondering, just every so often exactly what happened to the punctuation in this book. There are no quotation marks in The Road. But it works. There are so few characters, manly just a man and a boy and the post apocalyptic world that they live in, and such limited dialogue that maybe Mr. McCarthy just figured, hey I don’t need no stinking quotation marks. Does he use them in his other books?
I can’t be sure if this book totally blew my away, or just left me empty. I think it may be both. And if you consider that, it’s actually a huge complement to Cormac McCarthy. I think the book was all about leaving you empty. The man and the boy in his story are lurching through a world devoid of color, devoid of birds, almost but not quite devoid of life, struggling to find food, to make it through the day, to survive.
I’ve never read anything so bleak. Two hundred eighty pages of grim strife, and the love between a man and his son.
KGD
09-25-2007
3-D's Second Coming
September 2007
3-D’s Second Coming
Or is it 3-D’s 3rd Coming?
Tell me I don’t have way too much time on my hands! I’m worried about summer 2009. I’m worried about the assault of 3-D! With Jim Cameron’s Avatar and Dreamwork’s Monsters vs. Aliens slated to hit theaters Memorial Day 2009, the final iteration of 3-D may become a reality in the very near future, some time in my lifetime.
I’ve been keeping up with the ins and outs of it. I have read at least one article that said using this new technology it may be possible to present an old film in a whole new format. The film mentioned was Star Wars. I’m such a geek. I would kill to see Star Wars in 3-D. I’m such a geek, I would camp out to be first in line to see Star Wars in 3-D. But there’s a lot I would not care to see in 3-D. And that’s the problem. Do we need to watch every film in the future in 3-D? What is this new format, what is this new 3-D really going to be able to do for a film like Superbad, or L.A. Confidential? Do you get where I’m going with this? There are plenty of great movies that are all about dialogue and not much else. Great stories to be sure, but not a lot of action, not a lot of stuff blowing up, not a lot of chases. Not much action! So what kind of dimension would 3-D add to a film like that?
My biggest fear is 3-D porn. Do I really need a 3-D money shot? How long before or after 2009 till it’s not even an option. How long before you’ll have to duck for fear of um…getting some on you? I guess with those 3-D glasses on at least you won’t have to worry about getting any in your eye.
I’ve seen 3-D done well, but only once. And I’ve seen 3-D done the same way everyone else has with those silly red and blue glasses. The 3-D that I watched that was done well was somewhere in Orlando. It would have been a film called Captain Eo, but
Walt Disney pulled it after the star Michael Jackson was accused of being naughty. So what I saw was a really generic flick with no plot but stunning 3-D effects. I remember a brief scene with kites flying shot from up above the kites looking down at the people flying them. I actually put my hands up to reach out and touch the kites.
What’s to be said about the cheesy red blue 3-D? Not much.
…until summer 2009?
KGD
09-21-2007
3-D’s Second Coming
Or is it 3-D’s 3rd Coming?
Tell me I don’t have way too much time on my hands! I’m worried about summer 2009. I’m worried about the assault of 3-D! With Jim Cameron’s Avatar and Dreamwork’s Monsters vs. Aliens slated to hit theaters Memorial Day 2009, the final iteration of 3-D may become a reality in the very near future, some time in my lifetime.
I’ve been keeping up with the ins and outs of it. I have read at least one article that said using this new technology it may be possible to present an old film in a whole new format. The film mentioned was Star Wars. I’m such a geek. I would kill to see Star Wars in 3-D. I’m such a geek, I would camp out to be first in line to see Star Wars in 3-D. But there’s a lot I would not care to see in 3-D. And that’s the problem. Do we need to watch every film in the future in 3-D? What is this new format, what is this new 3-D really going to be able to do for a film like Superbad, or L.A. Confidential? Do you get where I’m going with this? There are plenty of great movies that are all about dialogue and not much else. Great stories to be sure, but not a lot of action, not a lot of stuff blowing up, not a lot of chases. Not much action! So what kind of dimension would 3-D add to a film like that?
My biggest fear is 3-D porn. Do I really need a 3-D money shot? How long before or after 2009 till it’s not even an option. How long before you’ll have to duck for fear of um…getting some on you? I guess with those 3-D glasses on at least you won’t have to worry about getting any in your eye.
I’ve seen 3-D done well, but only once. And I’ve seen 3-D done the same way everyone else has with those silly red and blue glasses. The 3-D that I watched that was done well was somewhere in Orlando. It would have been a film called Captain Eo, but
Walt Disney pulled it after the star Michael Jackson was accused of being naughty. So what I saw was a really generic flick with no plot but stunning 3-D effects. I remember a brief scene with kites flying shot from up above the kites looking down at the people flying them. I actually put my hands up to reach out and touch the kites.
What’s to be said about the cheesy red blue 3-D? Not much.
…until summer 2009?
KGD
09-21-2007
Saturday, December 1, 2007
Like A Rainbow, A Book Review
September 2007
Rainbow Six Review
Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy is to long by at least 300 pages, and maybe more.The book is about an elite group of guys from different nationalities (thus the Rainbow) that are organized to fight global terrorism. The group is lead by John Clark who I believe was introduced in the Tom Clancy book Without Remorse. Rainbow Six started off great, terrorists attacked a rich guy at his mansion, terrorists took over an amusement park, terrorist tried to hijack the plane that the Rainbow team just happened to be on, and of course each time the Rainbow team kicked ass and stopped the terrorists plot, but after that Tom Clancy just rambles on and on. I mean there must have been over 200 hundred pages of: Guy goes into bar, meets another guy, they talk about secret stuff, one guy leaves the bar gets on a plane, the flight is long and boring…not unlike this book. Two hundred pages of this. Occasionally Clancy would follow the actions of an organization working on a “Project” that involves a plot to kill most of the entire population of the planet Earth, and even these scenes got really boring. It seemed to me Clancy kept repeating himself. You don’t have to hit us over the head with the notion that these are real bad people we are dealing with here Tom. We get it when you tell us that they are going to unleash a deadly virus that will kill all the people on Earth.
I can’t lie. I loved about the first 333 pages. Terrorists do something. Rainbow stops them. Just like the game. I mean how can I even compare a book to a video game? I played the game and I read the book so that’s what I’m going to do. In the game it got pretty repetitious, even monotonous, but it was still fun. Terrorist would do something, and you would take your Rainbow team in and take out the terrorists, rescue the hostages, disarm the bomb, or whatever. It was fun, but after a while kinda dull at the same time, but not nearly as dull as Rainbow Six the book. At least with the video game you had the whole Xbox Live Online play action that made the game so damn cool. That shit never got old if you ask me.
The book jumped the fucking shark when terrorist go after John Clark’s family. Yawn. How come they use this plot in every freaking book or movie? How come? I hate to tell you this Tom Clancy, but some people would Pay to see their family rubbed out!
Clancy is known as some kind of techno geek, but even this techno crap was just a case of to much information. It’s cool to have detail, it’s cool to have facts, but there is a point where too much of a good thing is not a good thing. This book ran 897 pages and could easily been about 500 or less and been a much tighter action packed book. I hear they are working on the movie. The movie should be great if they just use the first 333 pages and the last 50 or so.
The ending was great and for me a bit of a surprise. I just didn’t see it coming. But did we really need all that crap that was in between. I mean how many times are you going to tell me about a guy who gets on a plane and the flight is really long and boring. I get it already. This is not Tom Clancy’s best by a long shot. Try The Hunt for Red October or Without Remorse if you are just getting into Tom Clancy.
KGD
09-16-2007
Rainbow Six Review
Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy is to long by at least 300 pages, and maybe more.The book is about an elite group of guys from different nationalities (thus the Rainbow) that are organized to fight global terrorism. The group is lead by John Clark who I believe was introduced in the Tom Clancy book Without Remorse. Rainbow Six started off great, terrorists attacked a rich guy at his mansion, terrorists took over an amusement park, terrorist tried to hijack the plane that the Rainbow team just happened to be on, and of course each time the Rainbow team kicked ass and stopped the terrorists plot, but after that Tom Clancy just rambles on and on. I mean there must have been over 200 hundred pages of: Guy goes into bar, meets another guy, they talk about secret stuff, one guy leaves the bar gets on a plane, the flight is long and boring…not unlike this book. Two hundred pages of this. Occasionally Clancy would follow the actions of an organization working on a “Project” that involves a plot to kill most of the entire population of the planet Earth, and even these scenes got really boring. It seemed to me Clancy kept repeating himself. You don’t have to hit us over the head with the notion that these are real bad people we are dealing with here Tom. We get it when you tell us that they are going to unleash a deadly virus that will kill all the people on Earth.
I can’t lie. I loved about the first 333 pages. Terrorists do something. Rainbow stops them. Just like the game. I mean how can I even compare a book to a video game? I played the game and I read the book so that’s what I’m going to do. In the game it got pretty repetitious, even monotonous, but it was still fun. Terrorist would do something, and you would take your Rainbow team in and take out the terrorists, rescue the hostages, disarm the bomb, or whatever. It was fun, but after a while kinda dull at the same time, but not nearly as dull as Rainbow Six the book. At least with the video game you had the whole Xbox Live Online play action that made the game so damn cool. That shit never got old if you ask me.
The book jumped the fucking shark when terrorist go after John Clark’s family. Yawn. How come they use this plot in every freaking book or movie? How come? I hate to tell you this Tom Clancy, but some people would Pay to see their family rubbed out!
Clancy is known as some kind of techno geek, but even this techno crap was just a case of to much information. It’s cool to have detail, it’s cool to have facts, but there is a point where too much of a good thing is not a good thing. This book ran 897 pages and could easily been about 500 or less and been a much tighter action packed book. I hear they are working on the movie. The movie should be great if they just use the first 333 pages and the last 50 or so.
The ending was great and for me a bit of a surprise. I just didn’t see it coming. But did we really need all that crap that was in between. I mean how many times are you going to tell me about a guy who gets on a plane and the flight is really long and boring. I get it already. This is not Tom Clancy’s best by a long shot. Try The Hunt for Red October or Without Remorse if you are just getting into Tom Clancy.
KGD
09-16-2007
Blast From The Past
September 2007
On Remakes
How long before Hollywood starts to remake remakes? I’m just wondering because I watched Halloween recently and the original has only been around since 1978.
Am I really going to have to live through yet another Night He Came Home, if I should
live that long? I’m starting to think that I might. That’s like someone deciding to go ahead and remake Star Wars.
My next huge beef with remakes is how come they are always remaking films that were great to begin with? Don’t get me wrong I realize that from a business standpoint it’s a no-brainer, you do a remake of something good because it at least has a built in audience. I get it. But I don’t get it!
Why don’t they freaking remake movies that could have been good, should have been good, but were not any good. Want a list:
Battlefield Earth
Water World
The League of Extraordinary Gentleman
Van Helsing
Deep Blue Sea
Scooby Doo
I could go on forever of course. And I know that you can easily add a few of your own. Go ahead, think about it. There’s a movie you almost like, it just needed a little more work to make it work, to make it great. That’s it! That’s the remake I want to see.
I want Hollywood to fix their damn abominations! Break out the shovels, dust off the money men, I wan to see a risky remake of something that should have been box office gold in the first fucking place!
That’s it. That’s my pitch on remakes.
Kenneth G. Donnelly
09-09-2007
On Remakes
How long before Hollywood starts to remake remakes? I’m just wondering because I watched Halloween recently and the original has only been around since 1978.
Am I really going to have to live through yet another Night He Came Home, if I should
live that long? I’m starting to think that I might. That’s like someone deciding to go ahead and remake Star Wars.
My next huge beef with remakes is how come they are always remaking films that were great to begin with? Don’t get me wrong I realize that from a business standpoint it’s a no-brainer, you do a remake of something good because it at least has a built in audience. I get it. But I don’t get it!
Why don’t they freaking remake movies that could have been good, should have been good, but were not any good. Want a list:
Battlefield Earth
Water World
The League of Extraordinary Gentleman
Van Helsing
Deep Blue Sea
Scooby Doo
I could go on forever of course. And I know that you can easily add a few of your own. Go ahead, think about it. There’s a movie you almost like, it just needed a little more work to make it work, to make it great. That’s it! That’s the remake I want to see.
I want Hollywood to fix their damn abominations! Break out the shovels, dust off the money men, I wan to see a risky remake of something that should have been box office gold in the first fucking place!
That’s it. That’s my pitch on remakes.
Kenneth G. Donnelly
09-09-2007
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