What is Best in Life

While most people can describe the general details of the Polish and French campaigns in broad strokes (Germany blitzkrieged through Poland…then they did it to France), the Balkan campaign is most often thought of as simply ”the blunder that critically delayed the Russian invasion” (which, as I have already written, did not actually delay the Russian invasion since the extended 1941 rainy season would have made a pre June 20th invasion impossible).  But, there is a lot more of interest in the Balkan campaign than its effect on the Russian invasion’s start date, so I thought I’d try to cover the main points today. (more…)

Everyone knows that I was a particularly vehement opponent of the Lord of the Rings movies.  My thoughts on adaptations are well publicized and they basically amount to the unyielding law that it is unconscionable to change even one line of the author’s text.  And when we are talking about a master on Tolkien’s level, well you can imagine my speechless rage to find out that they had decided (to name one of a countless number of grievances) to portray Gothmog, Lieutenant of Mordor as an orc even though his name is obviously Sindarin in origin and therefore he obviously could not be an orc!  And don’t even get me started on that winged Balrog…

Anyway, with the painful experience of watching my favorite book in the world getting “Hot Carled” for 12 straight hours fresh in my mind, it was with a great deal of trepidation that I greeted the news of a Hobbit movie.  And it appears that my initial fears were founded as more and more rumors have come in.  The rumors range from bad to awful, but some are so horrible that I fall asleep screaming each night wishing for the sweet release of my nightmares.  Of these I have selected ten of the most upsetting.  For those who think their constitution is doughty enough (we’re talking 17-18 range here), read on to hear how many orifices the first part of the Red Book of Westmarch should start preparing for violation. (more…)

Last time I discussed the basic problem of adaptations and the idea that “the book is always better than the movie”.  I came to the conclusion that each must be evaluated by different criteria and making blanket statements about the relative quality of one over the other (assuming, of course, that they were both created with some degree of mastery over their respective mediums) is a futile effort.  But there is still the question of how much importance you should put on fidelity to the source material once you have decided to make an adaptation.  Once the genius of a source work is decided upon should you change as little as possible to avoid destroying the soul of the work?  Or is it ok to plunder the source work, freely using, changing and leaving out whatever parts you want? (more…)

Hello dear readers, it’s MAILBAG MONDAY again!  On this special day I will search through my mountain of reader mail and answer the five most pressing questions!

What’s that you say?  Do I really get that much mail?  Well, I’ll admit…the contact section of this website doesn’t get used that often, but, one of the perks of wordpress stats is that I can see the google search terms that people use to find my site.  And I’m going to go ahead and pretend that these search terms will count as reader mail, since they are often entered in the form of a question.  So as you read these, remember that each “question” was something that someone actually typed into google that brought up my site as a hit which they then clicked on thus letting wordpress stats report to me the search they used to find my site.  I could make up the questions myself, but it turns out the actual google searches are far better than anything I could come up with!

This time I answer the questions:

• What can I make with just milk sugar flour syrup bread and peanut butter?
• I try to respond with that’s what she said as m uch as possible.
• Wolverine’s healing factor prevent him from becoming a zombie?
• What color are pancakes look like white?
• How to make extreme editz?

So, without further ado, it is time to dig into the old Mailbag to see what kind of things have been on my reader’s minds in the last month! (more…)

Here are some two sentence reviews of the movies I watched in July.

Stats

• Movies watched - 31
• Movies that were new to me - 26 
• Percent Romantic Comedies watched - 52%
• Monthly Masterpieces - Henry V, Shanghai Express, It Happened One Night, Paris Texas, Rebecca, The Wages of Fear

(more…)