Mel at the Movies: Australia

The posters are up and the trailers are playing for the upcoming "event" of 2008: Jackman and Kidman, together again for the first time, in...



To be honest, I don't go to the cinema much; the last movies I saw on the big screen were IRON MAN and Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull ... both of which I enjoyed vastly. (I know some people are rubbishing Jones now, but I personally enjoyed the movie, so, what they hey? It had a great sense of both humor and the ridiculous; it knew when to laugh at itself; Harrison Ford has turned into a likable old codger who, in this incarnation, could go on for a long time. Okay, he's not young anymore. Where is it written that a person has to be young to be likable? Spielberg and Lucas cast an attractive young dude as Jones Jr., and Cate Blanchett gets to strut her stuff outrageously, so who's got a complaint? The movie was FUN, people.)

Having said that I don't go to the theater much, I shall certainly be sitting in the middle of one of the big ones at the Marion megaplex later this month ... Australia is a movie I gotta see.

In the last couple of days I've been watching numerous trailers. In case you've missed them, and are interested (!), here you go:


THE FULL TRAILER

and


A second, different trailer.

...There are about a half dozen trailers and sneak previews circulating right now, each giving a different perspective on the movie. One of them at least is "getting rotten reviews" as a trailer! Peanut gallery critics are not even waiting for the movie to come out -- they've got Australia labeled as a lousy movie because they found the trailer "baffling and incomprehensible."

It's true that if you don't know much about Australian history, you could be confused. It's equally true that Aussies and Kiwis might find the trailer for a movie about the American Civil War to be confusing ... doesn't mean it's going to be a lousy movie: just means that the parochial education -- necessary to understand the visual references used in the shorthand with which movie trailers are crafted -- is missing in folks from way downunder. High duh factor on that one. Same difference with the trailer for Australia. I watched the exact same 90 seconds that had rubbed this person the wrong way, and the footage made perfect sense to me.

What's going to take me to the movies to see this one on the big screen is sheer curiosity: my gods, it's a movie about Australia, with real Australians in it!!! Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Bryan Brown, Jack Thompson, Bruce Spence, David Wenham, Bill Hunter, John Jarratt, David Gulpilil, Ray Barrett, Arthur Dignam ... they're all Aussies!!

It's seldom that a movie about Australia is actually 1) about Australia, 2) done properly and not turned into a pastiche from foreign perspectives, 3) FILMED in Australia, 3) cast with real Aussie actors.

For example ... The Thorn Birds, filmed in Hawaii in 1983, starring Richard Chamberlaine, Barbara Stanwick, Rachel Ward, Christopher Plummer, Jean Simmonds, Piper Laurie, Earn Holliman ... the dramatisation of the crash-hot Australian monster novel of the early 1980s. Not one single Aussie actor in it. Not even filmed here.

The year before ,The Man From Snowy River premiered locally with the kind of pomp and fireworks that are usually reserved for things like Return of the King and Revenge of the Sith...


In its favor were the cast (all Aussies with the exception of Kirk Douglas who played two parts and was actually very good in both ... don't count Gus Mercurio as a Yank: he'd been here for so long, he was as Aussie as any of us by '82), and the cinematography, which was so vast, so sweeping, so color-saturated and amazing ... it looked like a Marlbro country commercial half the time. Sorry, guys, but it did. In the end, the massive cinematography (reminiscent of Brokeback Mountain) looked like the cigarette commercial, and ended up as a detraction.

The big problem with The Man From Snowy River was that, for most of the audience, the whole movie ... all 102 minutes of it ... hangs on about four and a half minutes of action which, admittedly, knocks your eyeballs right out of their sockets. The thing is, you have to wade through 95 minutes of Nineteenth Century Soap Opera to get to this. Now, if you fell instantly in lust with Tom Burlinson or Sigrid Thornton, you sat there drooling for an hour and a half. If you didn't, you kinda toughed it out and waited for this:



There you go: there's The Man From Snowy River in a thimble -- at least, the bit that counts, the bit the greater percentage of the audience remembers. The rest is soap and teen romance, and glorious backdrops. This highspot is well worth the rental price of the DVD, if you have a big-screen TV. Trust me on this: you will get goosebumps.

Not quite what some of us had in mind when we imagined a movie about Australia. Sure, Snowy was as Aussie as the dog on the tucker box -- which, in a big way, was a relief. But ... a movie about Australia?

A couple of years earlier, we came close

"From a place you've never heard of comes a story you'll never forget." Whoever wrote that slogan got it right. Gallipoli is less a movie than an experience ... and it's an experience it'll take you a week to get over. Not that it's graphically violent by today's standards: if you're thinking along the lines of Private Ryan and We Were Soldiers -- wrong. To many people (myself included) too much too-graphic violence causes compassion fatigue well inside the 120 minute running length of a movie. What shocked me in Reel One doesn't rouse much of an emotional reaction in Reel Six. Gallipoli is the exact opposite. It's like an exercise in virtual reality. You are there ... you live and work with these guys (Mel Gibson in the days when he was an Aussie, and drop-dead gorgeous, and Mark Lee, who has always been an Aussie, and equally drop-dead gorgeous). And you die with them. The movie stands out in my memory as the most amazing Australian movie done to date ... but I can't watch it more often than about once in three years, because it's almost unbearable, especially in the last ten minutes or so.

Here's the sneak-preview:



YouTube has a couple of uploads of the end, but the good one of them is dubbed from a copy with what looks like it might be Dutch or Danish subtitles. I find this distracting, but give it a shot:



(Yes, of course I have a copy, and I know it line for line. I wasn't at the premier, but I saw it the first week it played here (parts of it were shot in South Australia, so it was a big event here; believe it or not, Mel Gibson used to live in this city a loooooong time ago, before he went well and truly bonkers. I can tell you, the audience was full of very elderly veterans of the actual campaign ... and you had to swim out of the theater. It was that good. That real.)

Australia opens here on November 26th, and I just have to be there. A real Aussie movie, with real Aussie actors and ... everything. From the trailers, it looks like it's going to be tremendous, and certainly Hugh Jackman will be a sight for sore eyes:


I'll talk more about the movie when I've seen it. For now, my recommendations regarding Aussie movies? Gallipoli (keep the kleenex handy), Quigley Downunder (there, now I've astonished you, right?), Man From Snowy River (learn where the fast forward button on your remote is), The Chain Reaction (if you're lucky enough to find a copy) ... and here's hoping that I'll be able to add Australia to this list very soon.

The Great Halloween Chocolate-athon

It happens twice per year ... there's no way to avoid it ... it's heaven for kids and natural born skinnies; it's hell for diabetics, dieters and health food store proprietors.

It's the Biennial Chocolate Olympics.

Now, in March or April these Olympics seem to be obsessed with rabbits, hatchling chickens and eggs ... which is perfectly understandable, when you remember that the festival of Easter started life as (!) Eostar, one of the high points of the (!!) pagan calendar, and the year's biggest, brightest, bestest (!!!) bonking tournament.

Yes: Eostar was a fertility festival ... hence the chocolate bunnies and eggs and chicks. Comparatively late in the scale of human evolution was Eostar was morphed into Easter by the early Church, which slightly renamed it. (They just weren't trying ... they could have called it Holy Hoppazoozitztide, and sworn to people it was a word that came straight from heaven, via the Ark of the Covenant, which had been stumbled over just the week before by the emperor's special operative in Judeah, Indianus Jonos, who was actually looking for the wreck of this really big, fat boat, and got a bum steer from a secondhand camel dealer who sold him the wrong map.)

In fact, Easter remained a bonking bonanza; only its name changed ... the church even allowed its very date to be set by the phases of the moon ... still true today, which is why Easter floats around like a cork in a bathtub.

And even now, 1683 years (calculators come in handy) after the Council of Nicea, where the new church's sacred days were fixed (hey, you've seen The Da Vinci Code, right?) Western Civilization is still bunny-happy, and egg-centric, and chick-obsessed, when the floating date of Holy Hoppazoozitztide -- whoops, Easter -- comes around again.

Only, we've translated the whole fertility cult into CHOCOLATE. Fertility ... sex ... procreation (if you're not bloody careful; if you're not contentedly gay; if you're not a person happily blessed with the DINK or MINK mindset) ... means the start of new life.

For the record: rabbits + eggs + chicks = sex = procreation = new life = chocolate.

Now, this explains one of the Biennial Chocolate Olympics ... or at least it explains the symbology, though I'm damned if I personally see the connection between a Mars Bar or a packet of Maltesers, and standing in the checkout line at Big W (Walmart in the US), behind an unfortunate young woman paying huge bucks for a 132-pack of Huggies ... though, I admit, the connection has been firmly established during the last several generations. It all looks a little bit weird to me, but then, what the hey, we're all human. Well, most of us are, anyway.

However, our civilization has more of this Big Fun in store. The second of the Biennial Chocolate Olympics takes place almost exactly six months later, at another renamed pagan festival: the whole place goes ballistic at Halloween, and -- whether or not you're diabetic, a dieter, or the proprietor of a health store -- you're wading up to your navel in chocolate. Again.

Halloween was last night (Here's my post: http://mel-keegan.blogspot.com/2008/10/halloween-memories.html), and this morning we still have a pile of chocolate left over after the trick-or-treaters finished. Now, the whole Halloween celebration has become a matter of costume parties and scary movies on DVD, while a few of the adults are out "trick of beering."

As I mentioned yesterday, for those folks of the pagan persuasion, it's Samhaine ... a time where no one minds if you have a big party (pagans really know how to party), but the festival is really about communicating with your deceased loved ones -- and dodging those people whom you really got barking-mad in this life, and they're dead now, and probably just as mad with you.

In other words: dead people + Samhaine = death = chocolate.

Right. Start of life = chocolate. End of life = chocolate. A pattern emerges.

Well, so long as the equations balance, I suppose. They're probably reciprocal anyway, so it could also be shown that

L=D/C+x

Where L is the number of years you've Lived to date, D = the number of your relatives who have passed away (Died), C = the average volume of Chocolate consumed by yourself without the assistance of family members or trick-or-treaters, and "x" is the amount, expressed in eith pounds or kilos, of weight you personally gain at each of these Biennial Chocolate Olympics.

There, now the whole thing makes a great deal more sense, doesn't it?

Chocolate is life, so "just do it," and if you do it often enough, the words "Death by Chocolate" will assume a whole new gravity.

Speaking of our Halloween -- we did not watch either Chocolat or Charlie & The Chocolate Factory. We watched Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Sleepy Hollow. Anyone notice how Halloween seems to be a kind of Johnny Depp Fest? Or is it a Tim Burton Fest? Well, either one. Those two seem to go together like caramel and fudge...



These are two good Halloween movies, if you're looking for blood by the bucket-fulls and heads getting whacked off in every direction. If you're looking for the best haunted house story, I recommend THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE; and if you're just looking for something to really creep you out, well, you could do worse than tune into any political broadcast issuing from the general vicinity of the USA. Shivers.

The US "goes to the polls" in about 100 hours, and like many people around this planet, I shall be holding my breath.

To folks on the other side of the dateline: Happy Halloween!

Cheers,
MK

Writers, inspiration, and recycled ideas

I was asked a few days ago, "Do writers recycle their ideas?" And the answer is yes, they do. Do they do it at the professional level? Yup. Do they recycle the ideas of other writers? Yup! And why in the world do we do it?

Well, partly because there's no such thing as a unique idea, and when you've typed your byline on upwards of fifty or sixty novels, novellas, and short stories -- well, you're going to be very hard pressed to find a topic or treatment that's absolutely new.

And partly because some writer, somewhere, has absolutely, positively, written the same story you're about to write ... but you, your publisher and your readers just don't know it.

Take THE LION KING. Everyone's favorite family movie, right? You think it was an original idea or story? Wrong. It was lifted wholesale from a 1960s Japanimation TV series produced for young kids, KIMBA THE WHITE LION.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimba_the_White_Lion

Obviously, Disney did it better (duh), but the question was not about who executed the idea better, it was about who got the idea first! I'd hope some money changed hands, and the original Japanese studio that produced Kimba was paid a fair price for having their idea redeveloped -- because THE LION KING is a clone of KIMBA in every important respect.

The same writer can also recycle an idea. For example, British TV writer Brian Clemens wrote two scripts, about 17 years apart, one for The Secret Agent, one for The Professionals ... based on the same idea -- but developed very differently, with a completely different resolution.

The reader might also suspect recycled ideas when s/he can spot various elements in a new book which reflect elements from one or twenty old books. Take STAR TREK as an example. You think it was absolutely original, in every way shape and form? You haven't seen FORBIDDEN PLANET, which was the leading SF movie about ten years before ST made its debut. Don't believe me? You'll have to watch it yourself and see the uncanny similarities! http://www.amazon.com/Forbidden-Planet-Walter-Pidgeon/dp/B00004RF9B

(Incidentally, the rights to FP changed hands a year or so ago ... a remake could be in the offing.

Old ideas can be recycled to great effect. George Lucas was heavily criticized, when STAR WARS came out, for lifting imagery from all parts of the spectrum. Luke Sywalker was recognized as D'Artagnon, Han Solo was recognized as the Clint Eastwood archetype ... sexual symbolism was spied in the attack on the Death Star by the X-wing fighters (think sperms and ovum, and you have it), Tatooine was instantly recognized as Dune, Darth Vader was a skull in a German "coal scuttle" helmet from World War II ... the Imperial officers are all wearing "nasty" uniforms reminiscent of Maoist China ... and as the ultimate slap on the wrist, in 1977 someone was old enough to recall having seen a Nazi propaganda flick called Triumph of the will, which was clearly the inspiration for the film's closing sequence:

	Screenshots from Triumph of the Will ... don't have a copy, but have been hearing about it since SW came out!

So, writers' ideas can be recycled over and over ... the same is true in music, too, where composers of current film scores routinely borrow theme, cadence and orchestration from the classics ... but who's going to know, since classical music is almost a taboo in today's world. Admit that you listen to Beethoven or Richard Strauss or Vaughan Williams, and you might as well wear a tattoo on your forehead saying, "Look at me, I'm a nerd."

And recycling ideas is no actually a bad thing, so long as writers don't do it ad nauseam, in place of genuine creativity.

Now, pulp fiction has grooves it gets into ... you can tell from a mile out when someone is rewriting Lord of the Rings with minor changes (heroines instead of heroes, witches instead of wizards, come right out and call the fell beasts dragons, fight goblins and 'svart alfa' instead of orks and urukhai). You can tell from a mile out when someone is "doing" TREK ... it's the United States Navy In Space, with "yessir," "nossir," and a command hierarchy that'd drive a non-military mind bonkers in one afternoon...

But when recycling is done right, it has much to recommend it. Take for instance the classic Italian cinema. For decades they made, and probably still make, more movies than Hollywood. They have their own incredible national history to drawn on, and generations of writers and directors fed swashbucklers through the cameras. A lot of them are twaddle ... some of them aren't. Some of them are little gems, founded on fantastic ideas.

Now, a fantastic idea from a classic Italian historical, made in 1962 and lost in time. Where's the harm in recycling its idea? The movie has been lost in antiquity. Few people these days even want to watch the massive Hollywood blockbusters from the 1950s, let alone overdubbed Italian movies of the same era! (And it's a great loss, because there are some outstanding movies from the time. Try Stewart Granger in Scaramouche, which boats the longest motion picture swordfight in the history of film ... not to mention that in 1952 Granger was only 39 and tasty ... very tasty ... six foot three, dark as a gysy and, uh, stacked. Or try The World in his Arms, with Gregory Peck at age 37, a schooner race to the Aleutian islands, and punch-ups galore.)

Some of the best ideas are buried in 50-year-old "foreign" cinema (I use quotation marks there because they're not foreign if you happen to be a native to Rome or Beijing, Mumbai or Tokyo!) and I see nothing wrong with resurrecting an idea.

Like ... do you know that Indiana Jones was lifted right out of a 1954 Charlton Heston movie? Heston was Jones, fedora, revolver and all. I've seen it a couple of times: Secret of the Incas. I wish I had a copy, but it hasn't been aired down here in Aus since before the age of video recorders, never mind DVD recorders!

Don't believe me? Got 90 seconds to spare? Watch the clip on YouTube ... when "Jones" enters the shot, walking away from the camera, you might just not believe your eyes!



So, yes, all writers borrow ideas. Good writers redevelop the material so thoroughly, however, that it's barely recognizable, and only people (like Keegan) who have looooong memories, will know what's been done. Like, the way Clive Cussler took a 1941 B&W British comedy called The Ghost Train ... and turned it into a bestselling Dirk Pitt novel, Night Probe.

And before anybody says anything smart -- no, I'm not that bloody old!! Well, not yet, anyway. My mother was a movie buff. I was weaned on classic movies that were already ancient before I was born ... and I have a very, very long memory, almost a "trick" memory, but not quite ... which is to say, I'm supposed to get four things from the store this afternoon, and ... darned if I can remember more than three of them...

Ciao for now,
MK

Unsung Heroes of the Event-Free Zone

Thank gods the Tour de France only has a week to go. I don't think I could stand much more of this ... it's unmittigated sadism. They used to call this torture -- forcing a person so stay awake, force-feeding them chemicals, such as caffeine, in a desperate attempt to keep the eyes open, because they keep the best part till last ... and it's invariably about two o'clock in the morning when the leaders zip across the line. By that time, these guys have been in the bike saddle for maybe six hours, and have slogged up mountainsides in the heat, the cold or the rain; they've fallen off and picked themselves up, ridden through hundred-degree afternoons, left their skin on the bitumen --

And they look a hell of a lot better than the poor buggers at home, we unsung heroes who make up the Viewing Public without whom the whole bloody event would be cancelled, because there'd be no one to watch the damned commercials!!!

(I debated about putting half of the above paragraph in captitals and then decided against it. Caps would make it look like I'm yelling. I'm not. I'm whimpering pitifully while trying to find the scotch tape. I'm going to need it if I intend to get any work done this afternoon, because my eyes are not going to stay open by themselves. Whimper.)

Today is a rest day for the likes of Cadel and Robbie and Simon and George and Fabian and about another 160 just like them.

Tomorrow is a rest day for Keegan: first day off I've scored in two weeks. I'm going to a movie. Last time I blogged about going to a movie, I didn't actually get the chance -- stuff happened, as it usually does, and my moviegoing activities were postponed. (I'd seen IRON MAN and the new Indiana Jones in the previous month, so I can't complain too much. I defiitely want to see the third MUMMY picture. And tomorrow, THE DARK KNIGHT.)

Incidentally, the new Indiana Jones is very good. If you read critiques to the contrary, don't believe a word of it. Some idiot said he wished the movie had not been made ... presumably because he can't stand to watch Harrison Ford getting older. That's fair enough. Ford is about 66 now, I think, and sure, he looks like Han Solo's father. Thirty years have gone by! What, a person should look the same after three decades of rough living? Ford hasn't exactly coddled himself through those years, and the truth is, he was showing the mileage a loooooong time ago.

(Interestingly, though, Brad Pitt doesn't seem to be showing the mileage at all. How the hell does he do it? He has to be mid-40s now, and there are photos where he looks younger than the missus, who's only 33. Damn.)

Anyway, it's THE DARK KNIGHT for me tomorrow, and I'll let you know what I think. I expect to like it a lot. (Then again, I also liked IRON MAN a lot, and subsequently read some genuinely stinking reviews of the movie, which sorta-kinda surprised me. Some critics can't seem to get one salient point through through skulls: it's a FANTASY! It was never going to be structured like MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD, scripted like OUTBREAK, with acting performances like Russell Crowe in GLADIATOR. Movies like IRON MAN are strictly for fun. It'd be like tuning in to THE SIMPSONS and breaking your heart over the deeply-moving human drama that unfolded in the next 25 minutes, between the Coke, Pizza Hutt and Bigpond commercials. I would often love to tell some of these critics to 'get real,' but ... what do I know? I'm just a viewer, the poor nong who puts the money down to actually BUY the ticket.)

As you can probably surmise from the diatribe on movie critics, Indiana Jones and ... so on, this neck of the woods continues to be an Event-Free Zone. So I'll fall back on Plan A and put up some pictures. Australian pictures this time, since I did the Alaskan shots yesterday.

Same story: they're parked on Jade's Flickr account for sheer convenience (meaning, Keegan hasn't bothered to get an account yet, and might not be bothering, since it's so much easier to shoot the pictures to the existing account, and Jade doesn't seem to mind, so ... what the hey?) If you'd like to use a photo, just drop me (or Jade) a line either here, or at Flickr, or on the website.

Pictures, now...


Laden vines stretch away to the Barossa hills. Some of the best wines in the world are made in this part of the world ... not all of them. I'm admittedly biased because I'm from the southern wine-growing zone, but I actually prefer the McLaren Vale wines over the Barossa vintages...


Morialta is a deep river gorge a few minutes' drive from the city of Adelaide. It's a sort hike through to the waterfall (which actually flows in winter), and you think you've stepped back in time a million years. You wouldn't be surprised to be stalked by raptors. This shot was taken from the Giant's Cave, high in the cliff...


There you are, you see: we DO have fall colors in Australia ... just not many! Seriously, the native trees don't shed their leaves, so the foliage never 'turns,' but early settlers planted European trees wherever they went, and obviously these do change. (The only northern trees that don't do well down here are birches. They call them 'weeping birches' downunder, because they droop like weeping willows -- and you can't get anyone to listen when you say they're not supposed to.


Speaking of early settlers, this is the kind of structure they built. Of course, they originally built them with roofs and windows and everything. (!) This colonial ruin is probably Heritage listed. I think it's somewhere in the Scott Creek area, but the truth is, that's only a guess.


Yeah, yeah, okay, you were waiting for pictures of the beach. This is Australia, after all, and we're one BIG beach, we admit it. This one is south of Adelaide, at Silver Sands.


Also the sea shore, but not quite what you were expecting: the horse tram at Victor Harbor, which carries passengers over the causeway to Granite Island. This shot was taken (plus about 1000 others) on a winter's day. It's very cold ... which would suit the Little Penguins which are native to the area. Doesn't seem to bother the clydesdales, either.

Now, I gotta find that scotch tape ... or maybe duct tape...

Breaker, breaker

As you read this, Keegan is gearing down for a couple of days' break: 48 hours of trying not to think about work, and getting out of here and maybe looking at some hills and trees rather than screens and cables. It's time for a break, because when I get back there's about a year's worth of work stacked up in front of me, and maybe four months to do it in! So ... lunch somewhere; and a movie; and a couple of Subway constructions and a hike through the national park, weather permitting.

I saw weather permitting, because it's winter, and even though most northerners would vigorously contest the fact that it gets cold down here, it's also true that you aclimate pretty fast, and 50 degrees F. feels just as cold as 30 F. feels. I'm one of the few folks who can really attest to this, because I spent 15 months in the Frozen North, and although I never 'wintered over' in Fairbanks, I was there until the Christmas trees went up in the stores, and I returned the next year before breakup. I was there for the world ice carving championships, and the dog races. (I'd show you the pictures, but in those days you shot your best stuff on (yep) slide film, and I'd have to scan them. Now, that's not a problem in and of itself ... but the slides are packed along with the rest of my library.) The coldest temperature I ever experienced was around -30 F., but to fully appreciate what this felt like to ME, personally, you have to factor in the information that it was 98 F. here in South Aus, on the day before I flew out.

I judge it from the day before because, as anyone who's ever made an international trip knows only too well, overseas journeys begin in the middle of the night. My alarm would be set for 3:45am, I'd have a taxi booked for 4:30, and the airline demands that you get there 60-90mins early for the checkin ... even though the metal detector people don't get to work till about two hours AFTER you arrive at the airport!

Mind you, it was a good thing I arrived early one time, because the delightful young life form behind the checkin counter had me booked on Japan Air Lines out of Sydney at 9:30am, with no booking whatsoever on the connecting flight from Adelaide, which should be due to tuck up its wheels at 6:00am. Sorting out that problem took a while -- so I guess it's not a completely ridiculous notion to turn up early.

I just wish the people who staff the metal detectors and the coffee kiosk had to turn up at the same time as the passengers. Put another way, wouldn't it be nice to have someplace to get a cup of coffee and sit down, since you're already suffering from a major case of sleep deprivation??

Fortunately, these are not problems I have to wrestle with in the next couple of days. A short break in this neck of the woods probably means sleeping late, walking about 150 yards down the street to the local restaurant for lunch, dawdling down to the megapelx to watch Indiana Jones, or Brendan Fraser, or someblody. Not even sure what's playing right now.

The last movie I saw was the Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, which I quite enjoyed (though Dave didn't seem to like it so much, becaise it defied the laws of reality fairly routinely). As I recall, the Jones movies never did score highly on the 'common sense' quotient, and the'reasonable adherence to the laws of physics' register. Then again, neither does IRON MAN, and I have but two words to add to this: who cares?

These movies are FANTASIES. The whole point of them is to leave your common sense in the foyer, turn off the part of your brain that figures out whether physics will allow for this or that, along with your cell phone, and ... enjoy. Let's be honest: Spiderman, Batman, Daredevil, Iron Man, the X-Men, the whole lot of them, would be relegated to the too-hard basket, if they were required to adhere to the laws set down by Newton, let alone Einstein, and (perish the thought) Planke and Bell.

But who cares? Movies are about forgetting who you are for a while, and what your problems might be. Indiana Jones is almost as improbable as Rick what's-his-face in the Mummy movies; and I really can't say it bothers me. (Rick O'Connell, is it? Brandan, at any rate. You know the hunk in question. He has a couple of movies in the works right now; one of them is in 3D, and although it otherwise seems to be populated by juveniles, the 3D aspect of it might seduce me into a seat at the cinema. It also doesn't hurt that Brendan Fraser looks very good in this one, if the poseter's anything to go by. There's also another Mummy movie in the offing, with Jet Lee topping the bill with Mr. Fraser ... and since Rick's kid should have grown up by this movie, we shouldn't have to contend with juvie content.)

We spent a fascinating day installing software, getting the computer up and running ... freaking when various disks couldn't be found, then finding them three hour later behind something else in the software box. We have too many disks, I'm sure, though not all of them are software. I spent the last 12 months dowbloading quite a lot of music --

I have a URL for you: emusic.com. I got some excellent music, and would highly recommend them, especially if your taste is somewhat eclectic and inclined toward the international. Mine is. It was a lot of fun.

The downside to which is, you're probably going to end up with a lot of disks. Plus movies, plus software, plus backup files. And when you have upwards of a couple of thousand disks, it's easy to lose one. And we did. For about two wonderful, fun-filled hours, before the house gremlin decided to play nice and give it back.

So we're all installed, up and running, ready to go ... and I'm utterly exhausted. 48hours off sounds about right to me. The major newsletter announcing the new site goes out in the morning, our time, and then, for me, it's on to the next project.

I need the break. I'm starting to 'zone,' with that 'rabbit in the headlights' look, glassy-eyed and semi-comatose, while my deeper brain functions sing a siren-song of a lullaby, "Sleeeeeeep, why don't you sleeeeeeep, why don't you cloooooose your eyes and let the world slide byyyyyy, while you sleeeeeep..."

Your eyelids are getting heavy (mine sure are).

On the count of three you will fall into a deep, deep sleep.

One...

Two.............

.............................................

[sounds of snorring issue from terminal in corner of room]