I figured it was time to try reading a Clive Cussler novel. I knew the character of Dirk Pitt from watching the movie version of Sahara with Matthew Mcconaughey. Not the best movie, but a good enjoyable no brainer type movie. I wish I could say the same about this book.
I found myself skipping large parts of paragraphs because it was just too much pointless information that wasn't needed. Too much explaining about the surroundings for most every scene. Maybe this is what Cussler fans have come to enjoy, but it's not for me.
The other thing that just totally got to me was the amount of pure coincidence through this book. Dirk and his companion Al Giordino miraculously just happen to come across all of these random findings. They aren't looking for them, but of course, it turns out to be exactly what they needed to find in order to progress the story. And to make it worse, Dirk's children, who have absolutely no knowledge as to what Dirk is up to, just happen to come across a wreck off the coast of the big island of Hawaii that directly relates to the same things that Dirk and Giordino are investigating in Mongolia. Five and a half thousand miles away, no knowledge of what the other is doing and they both happen to accidentally investigate the same mystery at the same time. And there are quite a few other coincidences that happen throughout the book that just take away from the believability of the story.
All of the negativity aside, the main reason I still give it 2 stars is that I enjoyed the history behind it all. Cussler, if anything, does a great job at researching and thus teaching the reader what he has found out. I learned more about the times of Genghis and Kublai Khan by reading this book than what I was ever taught in school. And it was all interesting.
I doubt I'll be reading anymore Cussler after this one. If I do, it will be a long time until I even think of trying out any of his other works.
You own an iPhone or an iPad or even an iPod Touch. Which means you paid a lot of money already for one or both of these devices. Then there is a good chance you paid even more money for an accessory or 12 to go with your new device. So now it's time to get some cool and fun apps to play with. But for some reason, even though you've already spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on your new idevice, spending an additional 99 cents or even $1.99 just seems completely unreasonable.
From time to time some of these companies that create some of these amazing (or at least time wasting) apps decide they want to give out their app for free to get more people using it and then use that as advertising. This usually is only available for the weekend or sometimes only for a few hours.
What I will try to do is post here from now one whenever I hear about any of these new offers. Below are the ones that I know of that are currently available for the weekend. I'm not entirely sure when the deals end, so make sure and grab them as soon as you can. You don't even need to install them on your phone or iPad now. But by getting it now while it's free, it will always be free for download to you on the account you make the "purchase" on.
Slam Dunk King - Are you a good enough baller to become the Slam Dunk King?! Show your skills with trick dunks and smooth moves, harness unique mascot powerups, earn those coins and improve your rank! Master and chain together over a dozen tricks to prove you are the best and become the King.
Reflekt - The new addictive puzzle game that will keep you playing for hours.
Curvebot Evolved - A unique 3D cutting game inspired by Qix but so *SO* much more....
Dragon's Rage - Dragons Rage is an addictive medieval action-arcade game with simple controls, attractive graphics and intense game play. You’re the angry dragon and you must fight to defend yourself against a swarm of enemies coming at you from all sides! Defeat your enemies with a roaring wall of fire, pick up bonus items & weapons along the way and maximize your score as you tear through this fun action-arcade game!
EnsenaSoft actually has their entire collection of games up for free for the entire weekend. Here are some of the highlights (imo).
Ultimate Hangman - Ultimate Hangman is a must have hangman game with 4 awesome themes (Doodle Hangman, Chillin' Chalk, Christmas Snowman and Flower Power), 11 great songs and 73 word categories including 7 random modes.
Mahjong Deluxe - Mahjong Deluxe is a solitaire game based on the classic Chinese game where you are challenged to eliminate all the tiles from the board. It includes 12 lovely backgrounds and 84 different puzzle layouts along with relaxing background music. Relax and enjoy this beautiful game today!
Smooth Solitaire - If you like Solitaire then this is the game for you! Both Klondike 1 and Klondike 3 are included and you can move by tap and drag, tap and then tap or double tap to move up to top. Our natural movement system lets you play the way you like. Now with multiple backgrounds and card backs including special Christmas theme!
Sudoku Supremo - Sudoku is a fun number placement brain game that is sweeping the world. The objective is to fill a 9×9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 regions contains all of the digits from 1 to 9.
Ultimate Word Search - Ultimate Word Search has 63 English, Spanish, Portuguese, German and French word categories filled with fun word search puzzles. If you like Word Search puzzles, then this is the game for you! With great background music and 6 different themes including Newspaper, Christmas and Letter Soup to choose from, you can enjoy it the way you like.
Master Minesweeper - Master Minesweeper is an exciting new version of this classic game with 2 original themes (Desert Sands and Christmas Gifts), 3 levels of difficulty, great music and sound effects.
There are just way too many to list them all here. Including some educational and holiday titles.
If your iPhone or iPad are lost or stolen, either use the Find My iPhone app on another iPhone or iPad that are on the same Apple ID account, or go to http://me.com/find from any computer and put in your apple ID and password (the email and password you use for downloading any apps) and you'll be able to see where on a map any of your iPhones or iPads are that have the app installed using that ID.
At this point, you have 3 options.
- If you just lost it around the house or somewhere nearby, you can tell your phone to make a loud radar sound (even if you had the volume muted) so that you can easily find it and also send a message for anybody that finds it.
Hopefully someone nice finds it.
- Remotely lock your iPhone/iPad so that nobody can easily access your information.
- Wipe the contents of your phone in case you have any information on there that you don't want anybody else seeing. If you decide to do the wipe, hopefully you have been regularly syncing your info to your computer so that when you get your phone back or a new one, you can easily transfer all of your saved information back to your recovered/new iPhone.
Simple instructions on setting this up: http://www.apple.com/iphone/find-my-iphone-setup/
I use to think that the credits at the end of movies were completely pointless. Comparing them to the credits of black and white movies, they've become insane. It use to only list the production company, a few of the lead actors, the director and maybe the cinematographer and composer. That was it. And they were at the beginning of the movie. Nothing followed the last scene of the movie.
Now some credits of movies have reached the 10 minute mark. 10 minutes of credits!!! Don't get me wrong. I totally get it. Who wouldn't want credit for the work they've done and be able to show their kids, parents or significant other with proof?
I think it's a great way to pay respect to those that hopefully made a great movie for us to enjoy. Though sometimes after certain movies I understand if you feel these people don't deserve any of your respect. Of course, some movies you probably walked out of before you got even close to the credits (Battlefield: Earth). Or maybe you just feel the exorbitant price you pay for admittance is enough to leave without watching the credits.
But maybe there is a reason to stay. In fact, there may be a couple reasons to stay. Though it usually depends on the type of movie. I would never expect a serious drama to have anything other than the basic credits following the movie. Maybe the studios wanted to reward their viewers for staying to watch the credits. One of the earlier and most famous reasons for staying for the credits is Ferris Bueller's Day Off. It's been done before where there are extra scenes right when the credits start and Ferris uses the credits entirety to show the audience a further look at Principal Rooney's demise. But just when you think it's over and it fades to black, Matthew Broderick comes back out wondering why we're still here and telling us to go home.
Sometimes there is nothing to see throughout the whole credits until the last minute and then out of nowhere, a small short scene that simply says "thank you for staying". Sometimes it can be almost nothing, like the extra explosion at the end of Chain Reaction. Or it could be like most of the Marvel Comics' films that give the viewer a nice glimpse of things to come in another movie.
Sometimes, instead of a big reward at the very end, they will just give you comical credits. Credits that make no sense, but are hopefully really funny. Check out Monty Python and the Holy Grail for a great example of this. Though the credits are at the beginning to screw with us even more. "We apologise for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked."
I thought it might be nice to have a great big old list of movies that reward us in some way for watching the credits. I'll try to keep this updated, but who knows. Maybe I'll just completely forget about this when I wake up. Please feel free to respond with any movies that should be added.
There are no new stories to be told. Anything new that comes out is just a retelling of something we've seen or read before.
I've heard this many times before and in some ways it is true. But it's still possible to "wow" people with a very original idea from time to time. The first thing that comes to mind - The Sixth Sense. Nobody expected that. Look at pretty much anything Terry Gilliam has done. 12 Monkeys blew my mind when I first saw it.
Sure, with any of these movies, you can scrutinize every single detail and you're going to find similarities to other movies and stories. But it's how all of these little details are told throughout the story that can make a truly original movie.
Hollywood (is anything even technically made in Hollywood anymore?) seems to have given up. And it seems they have gone back 2 or 3 decades to get all of their ideas - at least a very large portion of them. Sometimes it makes a lot of sense to follow this practice though. There have been quite a few remakes that have been created because the original had so much potential but just basically failed or couldn't live up to what it should have been. It took 6 tries (only including American film) until the great Michael Mann finally came along and was able to make Last of the Mohicans into the film that it should be.
Is Hollywood assuming that those of us that are products of the 80s are willing and have the money to spend on terrible realizations of our (hopefully) fond childhood memories?
Transformers is coming out in 3 days and though the movies are just amazing for eye candy, I'm pretty sure I'll be much happier just watching the insane trailer 3 or 4 more times instead of paying to watch the overrated Shia and his horribly unfunny comic relief family screw up what could have a chance of being a decent action flick.
The other giant toy product of the 80s was GI Joe. (I'm not including Star Wars as we all know what happened with those sequels...) I couldn't even get myself to watch the entirety of this one when it came out. But guess what...the sequel is in the works!!! Woohoo!!!
Oh yeah, Hot Wheels is being made into a movie. How is that even done? Hot Wheels are just miniature scale versions of real cars. So basically, they're making a movie with cars in it and branding it Hot Wheels so people will go see it because of the familiar name. Ok, technically these have been around since 1968.
At least I know what I'm doing on my birthday. What am I doing? Well, The Smurfs comes out on July 29th, so of course I'll be watching that. Ok, in all honesty, I don't think this one is all too bad. It's actually being targeted for the kids that are the same age we were when we originally watched the cartoons. And the cast looks pretty good too and Katy Perry is in it too.
TMNT, that's right, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are on their way back. The movies have pretty much always been bad, so maybe this one has a decent chance of being something good finally, but I'd rather they just leave us with our fond memories of the comics, cartoons and toys.
But the products and toys from the 80s that are coming back as movies really isn't the big problem. It's the remakes of movies that we grew up on that just shouldn't be touched. I've known for quite sometime that they were working on a remake of Red Dawn that will be coming out later this year. This is the first of many upcoming remakes that saddened me. The worst part is that it looks like it actually has a pretty decent cast. But the original is such a classic and shouldn't be touched. Yes, it was cheesy and quite unrealistic at times, but that's part of the appeal. I'd much rather they made something maybe somewhat similar and called it something completely different.
Then there is Footloose. Seriously? An excellent movies that still, to this day, has a great lesson behind it. Just like Red Dawn, it still possesses the 80s' cheese, but believe it or not, that's a good thing. And well, in case you aren't aware yet, the trailer for the new version is out. It actually hurt to watch it. Some of it looked like it was a shot for shot copy of the original while the rest was filled in with shots from Step Up 3D. I hate you, MTV. And Dennis Quaid, I'm very disappointed in you.
Let's see, War Games. Yep, lets see how we can screw this one up too. It's just not gonna be nearly as cool as when you don't have to connect to internet without having to take the headset of a non-cordless phone and set it into the accoustic coupler. Especially since there wasn't even an internet back then. Well, not one that was publicly available. It's going to end up just being a "tech" movie where they show a bunch of hacking in a way that it doesn't actually happen. Here's a video and image to contemplate:
Conan isn't looking all that exciting. The time has passed to make a movie like that. And once again, there was nothing wrong with the original, so why screw with it?
And then there is my favorite. But this one isn't a movie that has already been made. It's not a cartoon. It's not a comic book. It's not a toy. Ok, well, it sort of is a toy. It's a video game. Well, tons of video games have been made into movies and very few have been successful. Street Fighter, Super Mario Bros., Double Dragon, Wing Commander (how can you go wrong with FPj and Matthew Lillard?), Doom, well, not the greatest. But there have been some successful movies and some that are actually well made. The first Mortal Kombat movie wasn't the greatest, but was quite successful. Same goes with the Lara Croft: Tomb Raider movies. The Resident Evil movies have been very successful and though I've only seen the first two movies, I think they were actually well made too. Zombies and monsters may not be your thing, but that doesn't mean they aren't good movies.
So what is this video game that is such a ridiculous idea? Well, it's definitely a classic game. The problem is that it's probably too classic. Classic to the point where it has no story line at all. Dig Dug and Frogger have more of a story line than this. Imagine a game without a joystick, but instead it has buttons to turn, move forward (thrust) and shoot. The main enemies are single pixel wide outlines of the games title. Yes, it's Asteroids. Yep, this is going to be completely plot driven and no special effects at all.
Next up, Pong: The Movie.....ok, just kidding on that one. Please don't prove me wrong.
Since I'm on a roll... Battleship. Just like Hot Wheels. Take any movie that has, well, battleships in it and call it Battleship. Then say it's based on the popular Milton Bradley game and we'll make hundreds of millions!!!
The final script for Battleship
Ok, there are quite a few more that I've come across that have temporarily slipped out of my tired brain. Let's just hope that there are a few people with money in "Hollywood" that remember/understand that there are still people out here with brains that enjoy new things and aren't swayed to see movies just because of what they are supposedly based on.
Treasure Of Khan by Clive Cussler
