Was I supposed to laugh out loud at Independence Day?
There was no baseball on last night and nothing else worth watching, so my hubby had Mission Impossible on when I got home from work yesterday. I like James Bond better and the ending... So stupid. It's the one where Jon Voigt kills everybody, pretends he was a victim, too, shoots his wife or lover after making sure she knows how contemptuous he thinks she is. Then he runs away, trying to escape from the London to Paris express train by catching a passing helicopter. The helicopter ends up inside the Chunnel - after clipping its rotors on the edge of the tunnel entrance.
Sorry, folks - wrong! From everything I've read, and from my little experience in a cartoon video game that's supposed to emulate how a helicopter looks and feels - heck, the video screen even had the blades whirring around the top! - helicopters are like totally unstable. If you clip something like a concrete wall with your rotors, you will lose control and probably crash. Particularly if you're only twenty or so feet above the ground because there's no room to maneuver. There are no stabilizers in a helicopter. It was pure-d Dumb. Yet another movie at which I laughed out loud. Bad writing, bad acting, no real story that wasn't easily predicted. All about the special effects for fourteen year old boys. Whatever. Then we watched Independence Day, which I've never seen before.
The special effects were good but, oh my God! The acting and the writing? God awful! Contrived and awkward, silly to the point of head shakingly bad (there goes that whiplash again!).
How amazing that even though there's a concussive shock wave from the White House imploding, the presidential helicopter has no problem taking off. Same with the fire when Air Force One is taking off - missed by just tha-aaat much. Oh, and the dame in the tunnel with her kid and dog? Nope - that explosion didn't cook her and her kid, didn't suck all of the oxygen from the space she manages to get into and thank God Fido didn't even get singed when he leapt through the door with the fireball missing him by tha-aaat much! And then, the president's wife survives it all only to die from internal bleeding about twenty hours after being injured. That is one seriously slow bleed. Oh! But it did allow for a touching scene in which she and her hubby say good-bye over their little daughter's head. Or something like that. I went upstairs to pee when the doc said 'there's nothing we can do.' Yeah, I know. Life support ain't gonna help this thing so I came back down with my iPad, even though hubby disapproved, and I played games for the next couple of hours.
Okay, enough of that. Next time I want to watch something silly...
Sorry if those are on your hit parade. When I want comedy, I prefer that it be clearly labeled as such. If it's action thriller, like Casino Royale or any of the other, older James Bonds movies, at least make it believable. Make sure there's a story line and at least some acting. And even though I know the good guys will win at the end of it, give me enough doubt that I want confirmation.
Another decent series are the Bourne movies. I like those, and not just because of the eye candy actor (don't even know his name). Matt Damon, maybe? There's a fight scene in the first one that is really well done and even though it's contrived and silly, it's so well done I don't care. In the next, he's guiding this guy through a crowded mall someplace, directing him by cell phone, while the bad guys and a sniper are trying to take him (Damon's character) or the guy he's guiding out. It was a tense couple of minutes as you can just about feel the terror this mark feels. He knows these bad guys are out there and that there's a sniper looking for him. That's the kind of action I like. That not quite sure he's gonna make it action.
Did you ever see the movie Charlie Varrick? That's a good movie with action without much at all in the way of Hollywood special effects, and it has a good, solid twist at the end. So does The Woman in the Window with Edward G. Robinson. The end of that took me completely by surprise the first time I saw it.
Okay, let's get away from that and get back to the waltzing puppies. I'm actually quite pleased with myself after yesterday. My projects are at about the 40/80 stage. That's not bad.
I made myself start on the one I didn't want to do, the MS Project fix, and spent about three hours working on that one.
I made a good start. The new tables are set up and partially populated. I've decided on colors so that if someone opens any of them up, despite the file names being highly specific, it will clue them in to which table they're looking at. I even got started on manipulating the data.
As of yesterday noon, when I put it aside, the Immediate Needs table has data from the first two files, the Long-Term Needs table has the same for the longer term needs, and the 100% Complete table has it's data. I'll work on that exclusively this morning so that, hopefully, by the end of the day I'll have something I can turn over to the director who's requested it.
The other project, the training show, went pretty well. But have you ever tried standing a puppy on its head and making it waltz in a different direction? It's hard!
Because of the change of focus and how I need to present this, I couldn't just move things around. There was quite a lot of re-writing needed, too - to soften it and make more pablum than meat so folks won't get their backs up.
That one is about 80% done. I'll do a walk-through with the director who's directing this one, and then make any changes suggested. No matter what, this has got to be done by Monday afternoon. That's when I have my Guinea Pig session in front of the six early bird people. I also need to get my cheat sheets ready - to make sure I know what I want to cover in what order in case I get stage fright and get lost.
After that, there are four more sessions and, I think, I've got a total of about twenty-five people signed up for those. Naturally, there are still some laggards out there, but it's only about seven or eight, so I'll capture them later. I have time since the last session isn't until the 18th.
The good news is that the external microphone I ordered arrived yesterday. It wasn't supposed to get here until next Tuesday, so maybe I can get the voiceover done this weekend. Or not. It occurs to me that with the guinea pigs on Monday, I might want to wait, to see if there are any glaring changes that come out of that session.
We'll see. Then it's the weekend - thank goodness! And it's not going to be blisteringly hot which it has been this week.
Now, though, I need to get running - have a lovely day!
Best~
Philippa
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