It’s been a while since I watched Westworld. I had forgotten that it was written and directed by Michael Crichton. I was suprised by the many similarities to Jurrasic Park. It starts with oohing and aahing and ends with running and screaming. Westworld was made in 1973 and the big name stars were Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, and James Brolin. It’s a baffling film to watch now. The effects are bad to really bad. The writing is clunky and awkward. The acting is wooden and embarrassed. And it’s a pretty short film, only an hour and a half long. The…
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Talk Like TED
Carmine Gallo has found nine things successful TED Talks have in common and he shares his insights on how to use these nine secrets in your own presentations. TED, for those who have been living under a rock, is a conference where famous and not so famous people give short presentations. One of TED’s rules is that a talk can’t be longer than 18 minutes. This is one of the Nine Secrets Carmine shares, keep it short. He also says to have a Tweetable Headline. Keep your title under 140 characters. He goes on to mention several titles that are…
Hulu’s 11.22.63
Spoilers. It’s always a bittersweet experience when a beloved book is translated into a film, or in this case, a miniseries. Stephen King’s 11.22.63 was a very long book with a lot of small details. So it is not really surprising that whole swaths of the book are left out. Right off the bat there is the odd casting choice of James Franco as Jake Epping, a man from Maine who travels back in time to 1958. This is odd, because while everyone remember black racism in the good old days, they don’t always remember the racism against Hispanics. The…
Room
Room was a good movie. Lots of moving moments. Great acting and a gripping story. It drifted slightly from the book, but it has been a few years since I read it. Much like the book, the first half of Room the movie is amazing. The tale of a little boy whose whole life has been lived in a storage unit. We have a modern take on Plato’s The Cave, if you only know the world of Room, is there really any more to the world? Jack is the hero of the story and his Ma is a bit mad.…
Mockingjay Part 2
The Hungery Games was a brilliant book. Catching Fire was sort of OK. Mockingjay was an abomination. Suzanne Collins last book in the Hunger Games Trilogy was a tough read, to say the least. Which I think might explain why the opening numbers for Mockingjay Part 2, a mere 101 Million dollars, were not as high as they could have been. Everyone that knew where the story was going didn’t want to see is acted out on the big screen. Spoilers. Mockingjay Part 2 was not nearly as soul crushing an experience as reading the book was. For one thing,…
Mr Robot and the New World Order
A couple of years ago the Stock Market crashed. The Big Boys of the banking world, Citibank, Chase, Bank of America, etc were all trading for around a quarter a share. The reason for this was they were, and mostly still are, run by greedy, selfish, cheating bastards. Our fine Government stepped forward and said these Institutions were [easyazon_link identifier=”0143118242″ locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Too Big Too Fail[/easyazon_link]. Everyone who owed them money was more than happy to see them fail. No more bank, no more debt. Which brings us to [easyazon_link identifier=”B00YCVCBRS” locale=”US” tag=”londonthoug-20″]Mr Robot[/easyazon_link], an often brilliant show from the USA…
Ebook Publishing Fundamentals
Over the years I’ve watched one or two tutorials from Lynda.com, Tutsplus, and more recently Udemy. These are tutorials that are designed to be easy to watch and understand. As opposed to say, CreativeLIVE where the normal workshop is three days long and each day is around 8 hours of video. Ebook Publishing Fundamentals is a great course from lynda.com. Jason Matthews covers how to format your book in Microsoft Word, how to upload to Amazon and other booksellers, and suggestions on how to promote your book once it’s up and running. Like all such courses the videos are short…
Tomorrowland
Spoilers and such. Yeah, but, John, if The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists. -Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park . . . Ok, I did like Tomorrowland, for the most part, but it has a few serious problems. I’ve seen a number of headlines that mention this film’s optimism, so I was a bit surprised to find George Clooney playing a Prepper waiting for the end of the world. I was also a bit surprised to see several cops murdered by smiling happy killer robots. But that pales when compared to Huge Laurie’s character, who…
Dreaming Spies
A few books back Laurie R. King sent Mary and Sherlock on a World Tour, so that Holmes and his wife, Miss Russell, got to see all kinds of exotic places and have all kinds of adventures. This time round we find the happy couple back home in England with an extended flashback of their last great destination, Imperial Japan. As with most Historical Authors, Laurie can’t resist dropping famous people into her tale. This time round the famous person is Hirohito, the sad little Emperor of Japan. Also mentioned in passing are Frank Lloyd Wright, the poet Basho, and…
Wayward Pines
The first episode of Wayward Pines hits a lot of familiar notes. A man wakes up in a strange hospital. He meets a mysterious person who offers him help. The people he meets all seem normal, in a Stepford Wives’ kind of way. When he tries to leave the town, he finds himself back in the middle of town. Our hero is a Special Agent and I kept waiting for them to call him Number 6. M Night Shyamalan made one really good movie, two so-so movies, and several really bad movies. Much like The Wachowski Brothers, instant success was…