Well, it took me two takes of this movie to feel comfortable writing much about it.  The way I was thinking, watching it the first time, made me fail to see some of the better qualities of this movie.  Hint to self, if you are going to see a midnight show, take a nap first.  I didn’t fall asleep, but my mind was thinking of different things way too often (see here ).

Now on to the movie itself. The Dark Knight’s title says it all, this movie was dark. The character of Batman is dark, the character of the Joker is extremely dark. The City of Gotham and its police force is dark. The only light in the movie is the new District Attorney, Harvey Dent. The unmasked hero Gotham needs.

The show starts with a mid-day bank robbery, by guys in clown masks. One by one the clowns off themselves and others. A Joker run scheme to rob banks that hold mob money. This was a great introduction to the character of the Joker. Harking back to various stages in DC comic book history, this Joker is not just a raving lunatic, he is also a cold and calculating killer. Anything that will forward his plans is OK with him. This is the darkness that the Joker brings to the movie.

Batman and his past bring up his dark side. His actions may be making the criminal element of Gotham react with the likes of the Joker. Confronting these inner demons is the life of Bruce Wayne/Batman. This Batman has depth. The perfect counterpoint to the Joker. He says he has one rule, where the Joker has no rules. This one rule separates Good from Evil, and Order from Chaos.

In watching this movie it is easy to be taken in as to exactly what the Gotham Police, DA’s Office and Batman are fighting. The movie is about the confrontation between Batman and The Joker. Every other plot device, and character development drives home that point. Batman on one hand is trying to protect the people and City he cares about. The Joker is trying to destroy the same. A big game devised by The Joker to test the mettle of Batman. The Joker and Batman are polar opposites again, destined to battle for the control of the city of Gotham.

To get this across the acting need at a very high level. The main actors all portrayed there parts very well. I really think the ‘new’ Rachel Dawes was a much better fit. She seemed more like a hard nosed attorney to me. I don’t think I would have wanted to get in her way. Lt. Gordon (Gary Oldman again) again made this role his. Even the minor roles were good, I really liked the fake cop Rachel Dawes, he seemed like someone the Joker would hire.

Now my biggest concern of this movie is that it is 2 1/2 hours long. That is a very long movie. I saw this movie the first time at our little local theater for the Midnight show. At the prices that you pay for a movie, the $5 and $3 matinee prices usually make up for the fact that this is not the latest in movie theater seating or comfort. For this movie it was definitely a factor. The second time I saw this movie was at a newer theater with full stadium seating. The extra room and comfort of the chairs made the movie fly by. I no longer had the feeling that the movie should be ending soon, based on the number of times I shifted in my seat. I’m sure that seeing the movie once before helped to keep my attention up too, but I know the seating comfort helped a lot.

The sick and twisted plot of the Joker is to cause as much panic and chaos as possible in the City of Gotham. He is working to get control of all of the Mobs in place. He is working to cause panic in the streets. He is working to destroy Batman and the New DA. And for most of the movie it appears that he succeeds. Destruction, violence, murder and mayhem are his stock and trade. He robs a Mob bank and then breaks into their meeting saying he wants to be hired to kill the Batman. He then takes over one of the mobs.

Many people die until the Joker finally reveals most of his plan to Batman just after he is captured. The end of the show Batman is in a different place than he was at the beginning. At the beginning he is an overlooked vigilante, at the end a hunted vigilante, never to be overlooked again. Did the Joker win this battle?

The saddest part of the movie is this line from the Joker:

You just couldn’t let me go could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You truly are incorruptible aren’t you? You won’t kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness, and I won’t kill you, because you’re just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.

This looks like a lead in to a certain sequel, but with the death of actor Heath Ledger, if one comes about it, this quote will remain just that a quote. I can’t see them putting another actor in the place of this Joker. Played in a way never seen on the screen before, and probably never seen again.

LAKE VALLEY, New Mexico (AP) — The howling wind across a remote landscape, a creaky metal gate or a run-in with a rattlesnake or gun-toting local are the things that attract ghost towners. They are history buffs who take their outdoor adventures with a dash of mystery.

Monument Peak, which some old-timers call Lizard Mountain, rises over what’s left of Lake Valley in southern New Mexico.

 Just as traditional outdoors enthusiasts enjoy mountaineering or hiking, and tech-minded gadget lovers enjoy geocaching, ghost towners have their own agenda: seeking out, documenting and photographing towns that one day will cease to exist.

“We are a subset of the outdoors culture,” said Clint Thomsen of Stansbury Park, Utah, who writes newspaper columns about the ghost towns he visits. “If you’re willing to drive around 200 miles along dirt roads and find something that’s definitely crumbled, you’re definitely part of the breed.”

Ghost towns are prevalent in the West with 100 to more than 200 per state, but even states in the Midwest and several Eastern states have between 10 to 100 ghost towns apiece, said Todd Underwood of Prescott, Arizona, who hosts a Web site for ghost towners, https://www.ghosttowns.com.

Underwood, a chemistry professor turned pilot who estimates he has visited about a thousand ghost towns, said the site has helped coalesce ghost towners into a group that logs millions of Web site visits a month.

And for those who think ghost towning is only a Western phenomenon, ghost towners are quick to say that even New York has 14 ghost towns. Pennsylvania has what one ghost towner calls a ghost highway, a 13-mile stretch of Pennsylvania Turnpike complete with overpasses and tunnels near Breezewood that was bypassed in 1968.

Underwood said he began ghost towning in 1976 with his father.

“We were really fascinated as to how and why people would just up and leave towns. We were steeped in the mystery of that,” he said.

That mystery is palpable at the abandoned silver mining town of Lake Valley, New Mexico, which was founded in 1878. The Bureau of Land Management property has a renovated schoolhouse filled with wooden and wrought-iron children’s desks, an ornate wood stove and an old school bell. A nearby church holds wooden pews and ornate woodwork railings.

But along the dirt roads, the wind moans and whistles through the dilapidated wooden houses and around crumbling stone ruins. The town’s slow decline from a peak population of 4,000 people in the 1880s began with the devaluation of silver and was accelerated by a 1895 fire that destroyed its business district. Lake Valley’s last resident left in 1994 at the age of 92.

A typical ghost town visit usually begins with an offhand remark from an old-timer or a mention on a Web site, ghost towners say.

Before leaving home, they try to solve the mystery of why the town disappeared and, more importantly, how to get there by hitting the history books and topographical maps.

Ghost towners give only vague directions to newbies. They figure those who are willing to unravel their hints and work to find these places are more likely to respect them.

Then, a visit is attempted. Thomsen recalled arriving at what he thought would be the abandoned mining town of Gold Acres, Nevada, at 3 a.m., only to find from a surprised mining office worker that the old buildings had been bulldozed a few months before.

Other ghost towners described making a half-dozen trips before finding the town, but agreed the search is half the fun.

Though their motto is to “take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints,” there are gifts to be found — literally and figuratively — at ghost towns.

David Pike, who grew up in southern New Mexico and now lives in Washington, D.C., has rated nearly 20 New Mexico ghost towns on his Web site.

He says ghost towning has helped him understand how his environment affects him and taught him to live in the moment.

“It’s hard to ignore a metaphor when you’re standing right in the middle of it,” he said. “When you’re standing in a building that was once something and now is slowly fading into not being anything anymore, that’s a stark reminder about appreciating what you’ve got when you’ve got it.”

Pike said he visited a ghost town in southern New Mexico with his late father. He remembered his father had called out to him, but the howling wind blocked out the voice, which got Pike ruminating on the town’s name, High Lonesome.

“He’s been gone for a couple of years now and I still miss his voice,” Pike said.

Laura Aden, who explores old mining sites with her husband mainly in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest, says ghost towners are “the people who walk around with their heads down scratching the dirt, the crazy bunch of people who pick up nails and cans.”

If she finds abandoned objects in the deserted towns, she offers them to local historical societies, which don’t always want them. She’s taken home some old tools to decorate her cactus garden, she said.

Ghost towners also compare notes on the danger of their hobby. They have to contend with rattlesnakes and other critters, running out of water or fuel, vehicle breakdowns and the hazards of abandoned mine shafts.

Underwood said he once entered a ghost town and sitting on top of a dilapidated house was a man with a gun pointed right at him.

“I turned around and left in a hurry,” Underwood said.

Underwood encourages ghost towners to photograph the places they visit and post them on ghosttown.com as a way to document their historical significance and decline.

Often ghost towns are vandalized, they erode or are bulldozed over to make way for economic development.

“There is a time when this hobby will go away. You will not be able to go and appreciate these places anymore,” Pike said. They are “slowly fading into nonexistence.”

Certainly, every actor has movies or plays they would rather leave off of their resumes. Unfortunately for some of our well established and well-regarded performers, these cinematic achievements are often unearthed and put on display for the viewing public to watch and ridicule or just glance at and wonder what on earth they were thinking. For the rest of them, it is just another day at the office… making bad movies and making money (somehow) by doing it. Here are a few:

• Marlon Brando (he played Superman‘s Kryptonian father and was paid $14 million dollars for 13 days on the set. This breaks down to nearly $1.4 million dollars a minute for his total on screen time. An excellent movie, but a miserly performance).
• Elizabeth Taylor (her role as Wilma’s mother (did she have a name?) in the live-action Flintstone‘s movie was about as memorable as her laundry list of ex-husbands. Her payday must have been nearly as extravagant as Mr. Brando’s)
• Ben Affleck (should be named multiple times, but it can be summed up in one word… Gigli)
• Richard Pryor (ok… so maybe not one of our most celebrated actors… but I’m thinking the adult comic famous for his drug-addled standup of the 70s was attempting to change his image in the mid-80s when he decided to sign up for such movies as The Toy, Brewster’s Millions, both of which were relatively harmless comedies. However, he was at least in part to blame for the beginning of the end of a superhero movie franchise).
• Sir Michael Caine (thank goodness he has his role of Alfred the butler to make up for the travesty that was Jaws: The Revenge).

Although these are quite dated to be sure, there must be other memorable (memorable to mention perhaps not so memorable to watch) examples in which well-known and established actors were only looking for their next pay check. Feel free to include your favorite “paycheck” role/movie.

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The title of this post reflects someone’s actual given name at birth.  Shame on everyone who ever gave flak about my cute little Disney – it could have been worse; much, much worse!

(CNN) — A New Zealand judge has made a 9-year-old girl a ward of the court so that her name can be changed from Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii, the country’s national news agency reported Thursday.

Family Court Judge Rob Murfitt listed a series of unusual names that New Zealand parents had given their children, and said he was concerned that such strange monikers would create hurdles for them as they grew up.

“It makes a fool of the child and sets her up with a social disability and handicap,” the New Zealand Press Association quoted the judge as saying.

Among the names Murfitt cited: twins named Benson and Hedges — after a brand of cigarettes; Violence; and Number 16 Bus Shelter.

Some parents had named children after six-cylinder Ford cars, the news agency reported.

The Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages said in a statement that it had rejected names including Fish and Chips, Yeah Detroit, Stallion, Twisty Poi — a staple food in Polynesian cuisine — and Sex Fruit.

A lawyer for Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii said the girl is so embarrassed by her name that friends know her as “K.”

Last month, a judge in the U.S. state of Illinois allowed a school bus driver to legally change his first name to “In God” and his last name to “We Trust.”

But an appeals court in the state of New Mexico ruled against a man — named Variable — who wanted to change his name to a two-word phrase that contains a four-letter expletive and expresses opposition to censorship.

Ran across a news story about children jailed for an armed holdup.  At the time of the robbery, they were all 14 years old!!  My first question was, “where are the parents?”.   The article mentions that the three children were cousins, but makes no mention of parents or guardians.  Could it have happened in my family, sure.  My girls had plenty of time to plan this sort of thing.  I had hoped, and still hope that the lessons they were taught earlier in life were and still are with them when they aren’t in my sight.

So, I guess I do have another question.  Should the parents/guardians be held responsible for this?  My thoughts on this are mixed and still in the formative stages.  Many things point to, yes hold the parents responsible.  But another part of me wonders, when are the children old enough to take responsibility for there own actions.  Parents can be completely in the dark about some of the things their children do.  This does not have to be an indication that they don’t pay attention.  Some children are just really good at hiding things from Mom and Dad.   So, I guess I still don’t know…

While I’ve been recently listing my many recent medical procedures and complications, it seems I forgot to mention the blood transfusion.  When I found out I would need one after the surgery, my mom generously offered me some of hers, but the nurses politely refused her, saying our hospital gets its blood supply from Toledo.  So, there you have it – I guess you could say I’m now an official Ohioan with Toledo blood and everything!  Go Buckeyes!

We managed to fit in some movie watching this week while the kids are with Grandma, and I was attempting to put them all together in a clever blog post title, but it wasn’t to be.  Probably my lack of sleep with the new baby and my recovery process has inhibited my creativity.  I hope to be back in full swing soon, but it will probably take a few months, especially because once I’m feeling better, I have lots of stuff around the house I need to catch up on and as much as I would like blog posting to come first, it doesn’t.  As people keep reminding me oh so helpfully, a c-section is major surgery 🙂  Don’t I know it. 

So the 3 movies we saw this week are Hellboy 2, American Psycho, and Fortress.

I did not like Hellboy 2.  I actually would have left the theater, but I never got around to asking my husband if he wanted to and that was a good thing because he liked the movie.  It gave me a good laugh when we were walking out of the theater and he told me he liked it because we always have the same taste in movies and I really didn’t like this one.  That also means I don’t have much to say about it except that the Abe fish-like character reminds me of C3PO from Star Wars, and I can’t believe the actor who plays Hellboy, Ron Perlman, was also Vincent the Beast in the old Beauty and the Beast tv show from the 80’s with Linda Hamilton.  I thought he was going to be some Andre the Giant huge guy wrestler type, but it turns out, he is just a regular actor.  I suppose my impatience with this movie had to do with the fact that my infection flared up and I was raging with fever yet again in the movie theater.  So even though I felt crappy and wanted to leave, I could not pass up a night out with hubby while the kids were away.  Even if it was to see Hellboy 2…  I’m just glad one of us enjoyed the movie.

Next up is a movie from the early 90’s called Fortress.  It’s set in the future – and it’s always fun to see what people thought the future would be like when the movie was made over a decade ago – and revolves around a corporate owned underground prison (think Walmart does Alcatraz).  The main characters are sent there when they break the “one child per couple” rule.  They had lost their first child, and now they’ve been caught trying to have another, so they are both sent to prison, even though she is pregnant.  This is a fun action-packed movie.  When I looked it up on imdb.com after we watched it, I learned that it is actually a kind of cult classic movie and there are actually multiple endings.  Our version was the less happy of the endings, but I still liked the movie.  It’s kind of violent for early 90’s, and if you look it up on imdb.com, don’t let the keywords fool you.  Let’s put it this way, if I had seen the keywords first, I wouldn’t have watched this movie, but in retrospect, I don’t think there was really much adult stuff in it – just violence and gore, but they didn’t overdo it like they do in some movies nowadays, like the Saw movies for instance.  American Psycho on the other hand…

I will start by saying that Christian Bale was excellent in this movie.  I wasn’t so impressed by him when he was Batman in The Dark Knight, but he definitely shows versatility and depth in this movie.  He plays a Wall Street executive who is just about as big a jerk as one can be.  Also, he has blood lust and likes to kill people in his spare time.  The movie is very strange for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on.  For one, I was confused about what the movie was trying to be.  I guess it’s just a story about this man, an American Psycho.  But at times throughout the movie, the music was strange, and it just didn’t play like a normal movie.  And then there were the constant 80’s references.  I guess it was supposed to take place in the 1980’s, given the characters’ huge cordless phones and constant talk of musical artists such as Phil Collins, Huey Lewis, and Whitney Houston.  Why they would change the time period of the movie, I don’t know, but they did a good job because if Reese Witherspoon (who is about my age and would have been a kid in the ’80’s) wasn’t in it, I would have been convinced the movie was actually filmed in the ’80’s.  And I have to say the end confused me a lot.  I won’t say more because I don’t want to spoil anything, but if anyone who reads this has seen this movie, maybe you can answer a question I have.  I don’t think I’d recommend this movie since there are many disturbing scenes and it didn’t seem worth it to me to sit thru them for what you get from the rest of the movie.  I don’t think I’m going to put it on my list of baddies however, but then again, Hellboy 2 isn’t going on there either.  Just 2 movies I didn’t really like and wouldn’t see again, but I don’t feel like I wasted my time watching either of them, and that’s always a good thing.   

I am a reader.  I have been a reader since I was a child, especially of science fiction and fantasy.  I remember back when I was around ten, reading a book series about an alien called a “Martinean” who everyone called Martin E. Ann, assuming that was his name.  Except for the boy who knew he was an alien of course.  I don’t remember anything about that series aside from that, but it shows that I have been reading for awhile.  I have read some Isaac Asimov, Ben Bova, Piers Anthony, Terry Goodkind, Terry Brooks, Terry Pratchett, Alan Dean Foster, Robert Jordan, and more.  Currently I picked up a new book at the library from Timothy Zahn, called The Third Lynx.  Noting this was the second book in a series, I also picked up Night Train to Rigel from the non-recent stacks and read it first.  Now before I continue, I should say that there are a few types of books.  There are those that you take one look at and then leave on the shelf.  Then there are those that you read for a bit and then realize that reading that book is just a waste of time, so you either force your way through it just so you can say you finished it or you stop reading it.  I actually had a book of this type recently, a Star Trek Titan book part of a post-Nemesis movie about Captain Riker and his starship, Titan.  I read one by a homosexual author who put a scene in the book that served no purpose other than to say that he believes in homosexual relationships.  In fact, you could remove those pages entirely and no one would ever realize it was missing as it had no bearing on the plot.  Anyway, I digress.  After finishing that one, part of the third category I have yet to mention, I checked out another one where they found entire groups of the giant sentient “spaceships” Captain Picard and company encountered at Farpoint way, way back in the very first Next Generation episode.  After getting about halfway through I realized that the book was just not my type of book so I stopped reading it.

The third category included those books that you read and finish, but are just not memorable.  You finish the last page, close the book, and go, “meh- whatever.”  The last category is the book you just can’t put down.  Timothy Zahn is one author who writes books like these, at least in my view.  Star Wars fans might find his name familiar as he had the first books out in the newly approved-for-writing post-episode-VI universe.  This first trilogy consisted of the books Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command.  Leia and Han Solo are now married and give birth to twins Jacen and Jaina, and later Anakin (you know who he’s named after…).  Luke starts taking on students would would become new Jedi.  I read this series about ten or so years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.  When he wrote a couple more Star Wars books I was quick to read those as well.  He introduces a new enemy known as Grand Admiral Thrawn.  He was an extremely brilliant alien strategist bent on keeping the Empire alive after Palpatine was gone.

His new books star a character who bears some resemblance to Thrawn in that he is is quite brilliant in his own trade, as an investigator, or spy.  Once employed by a government agency, Frank Compton had a falling out and was fired, though not for lack of competence.  He has just taken on a job for someone when another one falls in his lap in the form of someone who dies just as he finds Frank.  Frank picks from his pocket a quadrail (futuristic train that travels interstellar distances) ticket in his name, and leaves immediately to discover an answer to this mystery and is led to the one who would hire him, leaving the first job on the backburner- or did he?  The employer for the first job is only revealed later in the book, and the job he was hired to do not until the very end.  There are some imperfections in the books, but overall they are also books that I can’t put down. I will definitely be adding Zahn to the list of authors I will be keeping an eye out for, and I will have to read the other books he’s written as well.

In the late 80s, one comedy kept senior citizens glued to their televisions on Saturday night. The Golden Girls featured 3 mature ladies living together under one roof. Dorothy, Rose, and Blanche were the three main characters. However, it was the wise-cracking Sophia (the mother of Dorothy) who stole every scene she was in. Ironically, Estelle Getty was actually 15.5 months younger than her on-screen daughter, Bea Arthur. Sophia’s acerbic wit and zingers (often directed to the promiscuous Blanche or the naive Rose) won Estelle 7 Emmy nominations and one statue for Best Supporting Actress (1988).

Estelle’s talents were not limited to the small screen. She also appeared in 80s and 90s big screen comedies. In Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, she appeared as Sylvester Stallone’s mother. She also was the head of a department store in Mannequin. Not the world’s most entertaining films but worth a mention (Mannequin was more entertaining than Sly’s mediocre attempt to be funny) .

Estelle’s career ended in early 2000. Unfortunately, she was diagnosed with a severe case of dementia which later took her life.

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How does a techie solve a Rubik’s Cube?  Simple, he builds a machine to do it!  Even geekier is the fact that the machine is made out of Legos.  Check it out:

Original site:  Tilted Twister