Patrick's Rants

Will Ferrell fans, rejoice. Blades of Glory is a well written comedy that brings back the air of Old School. In this ice skating movie – full of cameos from real ice skating stars – Will Ferrel and Jon Heder play banned ice skaters who find a loophole in the ice skating rules that allow them to skate as pairs. Seeing two men skate pairs together should be funny enough. Add a thin, but cohesive, story line and this becomes a movie to watch and stick into your Will Ferrell library.

Mid life crisis leads to some pretty interesting and funny story lines. Wild Hogs is the story of four guys whose biggest adventure is to ride their motorcycles to the local diner for Sunday breakfast. What happens when they decide to hit the open road and ride to the West coast is hilarious. It all starts when Woody Stevens, played by John Travolta, tries to run away from his imploding life and drags his bumbling friends with him.

On the way the raise the ire of a real biker gang, and catch the attention of highway patrolman, John C. McGinley’s lustful eye. McGinley’s skin tight uniform in his first scene portrays his leanings as he ends up being as queer as the entire Village People line up. He ends up tailing the guys (no pun intended) through the movie, but is mysteriously missing when they could use his help in the show down with the Del Fuego biker gang.

Some of the story line might strike you as cliché and slightly predictable but that shouldn’t keep you from popping it in and laughing for most of the 100 minute playing time.

I (hopefully still) have a regular reader whose story mimics part of the preface,

“Chapter 9 quotes the comedian Julia Sweeney’s tragi-comic story of her parents’ discovery, through reading a newspaper, that she had become an atheist. Not believing in God they could just about take, but an atheist!”

He goes on to describe why we don’t hear so much about atheist groups,

“organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority”.

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Robin Williams is part Bill Maher, part Bev Harris, as a talk show host who runs for president in a movie that is part funny, part scary as hell. “Man of The Year” is a comedy to be sure, but a sick comedy that looks at how a single company (think Diebold) controls voting for the entire country and the consequences of unaudited source code and the complete lack of a paper receipt. Unfortunately for the American people there is a “bug” in the software that would have benefited the incumbent had a political comedian not entered the race. Attempts to bring the bug to the attention of management by a lone programmer are futile.

It’s a movie to make you laugh and to make you think. But you have to watch it to find out how the bug works and whether Williams will become an unwilling “Dubya” or whether he really is one of the good guys, who like Maher, best serves his country by being a straight shooter and asking the hard, if funny, questions.

After seeing Iacocca on a TV interview I decided to get this latest book for my library. Mr. Iacocca is bold and to the point.

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff… But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”
Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

And with that Iacocca starts his 263 page look at our so-called leaders. At 82 years old Lee is trying to inspire outrage at the status quo. He falls short of calling Bush a moron or imbecile but it is blindingly obvious that he has no love lost for the president. This is a no-holds barred call for sensibility, intelligence and a demand that we hold our leaders accountable. In the process he gives us a simple check list with which to judge our next leaders. Unless you are dead, this book will cause your blood to boil. If you are the least bit upset about where the country is headed you will be absolutely outraged once you reach the end. It is a call to arms, a challenge to apathy, a road map to righting the “ship of state” as he so eloquently puts it.
Buy it.

The story is simple. A single man helps to shelter over 1200 fellow citizens; sparing their lives. The effect is gut-wrenching and hard to watch. In scene after scene, Paul Rusesabagina – played by Don Cheadle – does everything he can to prevent the death of his Tutsi family members, his neighbors, and even strangers at the hands of the Hutu militia. “Hotel Rwanda” is at once an uplifting story of one man’s courage and a picture of genocidal atrocities. I found myself appalled at the apparent inability of the UN “peace keepers” to prevent these killings, outrage that any government in the world could allow these actions to go unanswered, and a sickening realization that whatever I wanted the outside soldiers to do also applies to our own troops in Iraq today. We didn’t create the civil war in Rwanda – but if our sensibilities begged us to have something done about it those same sensibilities now must tug at us – at least a little – to do something about the civil war in Iraq. This is an incredibly powerful movie that surely will leave a mark on anyone who has seen it.

Will Smith plays Chris Gardner, a man at a turning point in his life. As he struggles with his family while trying to sell medical equipment, Smith has to make decisions about the path he is to follow.

I watched this movie with a little trepidation. It has received many great reviews, but a single personal view caused me to watch it just a little more critically. Gardner was criticized for not, “doing everything he had to do for his son”. This was the viewpoint of an idealistic twenty-something. Age has a way of changing your perspective. During the Great Depression, some people would not do work that was beneath them, while others would do anything and everything to put food on the table. The young view of this movie is that Smith’s character should have gotten whatever job that he could – no matter what the pay. (more…)

It is not everyday that an ordinary person such as myself discovers himself in the presence of a published author. Scott Douglas, who drives a school bus here in Flagstaff, is an unassuming character with tired, life beaten eyes. He is as public as a bus driver naturally is and yet there is a certain seclusion about the man as well. His book, Moby and Ahab on a Plutonium Sea: The Novel Which Ended the Cold War is a fictitious account of what might have happened leading up to or following a purported event in 1979.
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Jenny White brings us The Sultan’s Seal: A Novel. This is a book that must not be put down until finished – otherwise you lose track of what the heck is happening. The novel is not written from the classic “one style” approach. Jenny White jumps from first to third to omniscient viewpoints at the flip of the chapter. I found myself wanting to keep a score card of sorts to keep track of whose perspective I was reading and at which point in time. Ms. White jumps backward in time – writing in the present tense is a slightly jarring experience as dead characters are alive for a page before snapping back into the “current” state.

Set in the late Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 19th Century, it begins with the death of a young European woman. While the magistrate in charge, Kamil Pasha, works to solve the crime, he determines that the death of another European woman some years past might be related. The inability to solve the prior crime forced Kamil’s father out of the same position making this all the more important for Kamil to solve. Many of the characters turn out not to be who they first appear to be.

Ms. White writes about the countryside and scenery in a manner that expects them to become more than the two bit characters they really are. I’m not sure that she’s found her niche, she writes in whispers where whole stories could erupt. Her talent seems to be hiding as demurely as a woman’s face behind the veils of the harems she describes.

As I turned the final pages, I found that I was looking forward to the sequel. In proper literary license Jenny White leaves me thinking that I might know some of the answers, but I am less sure of myself than Kamil Pasha is.

Is there anything more boring that watching a movie showing someone giving a slide show presentation – even if that person is Al Gore? A slide show on film? The thing is, it turns out to not be as boring as it originally sounds. Gore has a sense of humor as he presents his evidence that the world is getter warmer and that we are responsible. Gore gives us a picture of a future that looks pretty bleak if we don’t do something about it and gives hope that things aren’t so far gone that we can’t fix them if we (earth’s inhabitants) all work together.

Global warming is going to be a serious issue, it’s been on the lips of politicians running for president and even the current president. Unfortunately we are also finding out that somewhere around 50% of all scientists recently testifying to congress have removed global warming language from their research due to political pressure and threats to remove funding.

An Inconvenient Truth
UN Science Panel
calls global warming real.