Jack wrote this in August, 2006:
Morning to you.
Jeanne loaned me a few movies to watch, so I viewed one and parts of another last night.
Weird stuff going on out there in the movie world. One of them was named, Willow, one of those flicks. I’d call it a sort of kids movie, and adventure/romance/fantasy of sorts.
It qualifies as unusual enough to keep a person watching. It’s a fairly stock plot moving around in the background with heroes, bad queens, sorcerers, monsters, baby-royalty having to be hidden and those protecting her going through all manner of dangers and whatnot.
But the thing that kept me watching was the characters. This movie has a main character and a lot of secondary characters who are shorter in physical stature than the average human being. Secondly, the dogs used for hunting and killing weren’t dogs at all, but appeared to be wart-hogs.
Otherwise, I’d rate it fairly weak, with a strong plus for imaginative in setting.
The other I partly watched was The Big Sleep, with Bogie and Lauren Bacall. No point in me saying much about it, except watching it completely through’s on my priority list of things to do. I haven’t seen it in a number of years and I’d forgotten how fine it is.
She also loaned me 12 Oclock High, which I also haven’t seen in a few decades. I’m generally able to get a lot of enjoyment out of movies involving airplanes only big enough for a couple or four people to get inside, so I think it might be hokey, this one, but still worth a couple of hours watching.
Also been pondering what piece of written work on the bookshelves I’m gonna re-read next. I’ve about milked The Songlines dry for the time being, though I’m still thinking about various aspects of it and might make another blog entry or two about permutations and thoughts still coming out of it.
Poking and prodding around the bookcases my hand came on The Sibyl, by Par Lagerkvist, as a possibility, My Name is Aram, by William Soroyan, which was the first book that wasn’t mostly pictures that I ever read. Neither of them demanded I begin an immediate re-reading, so I kept looking after pulling them down from the shelf and stacking them near to hand.
I’m thinking Cyrano de Bergerac, by Rostand. The Confessions, by Rousseau, The Decameron, by Boccaccio, and The Big Sky, by A.B. Guthrie, are going to have to fight it out to see who gets the next re-reading.
They’re all stacked over there close at hand on top of My Name is Aram and The Sibyl. I think I’m leaning to Cyrano at the moment, but I’ll see how the mood strikes me when I’m feeling I need to think about something besides random numbers.
Jack
So Far From Heaven 