Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Negligent in My Blogging

I seriously doubt that many people follow my blogs, but if anyone does I apologize for the lack of posts over the past 4 or 5 months. As you might imagine, I've been a bit preoccupied with work and this summer with "daddy duties." Since my son, Brady, wont begin daycare until August and with my wife, Sheri, back to work, I've been playing Mr. Mom for the last several weeks. However, I hope to post several posts over the next week or so.

Upcoming posts will include my review of my self-built Media Center PC I've been using for the past year and a vacation review of Disney World. Other travel-related reviews I've written in the past can be found along the right-hand margin of this page.

Three Hours of Sleep I'll Never Get Back

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been taking advantage of the midnight showings of this summer's blockbuster movies as my son, Brady, and wife, Sheri, are asleep at that time; thus, my father- and husband-related responsibilities are not being neglected. Of course, there is additional loss of sleep, so the movie has to be quite good.

The movie I was most looking forward to this summer, in part due to the hype of the trailers, was Transformers. I'll admit that I grew up when Transformers appeared as toys, competing with GoBots, and was one of the dominant cartoons on television. I even had a number of the Transformer toys, including Optimus Prime and Starscream. And of course, my friends had various versions of them as well. And since the only movie to date was a cartoon version, I was quite excited that a live-action film was being made.

While the movie was fair and one that is enjoyable to anyone looking for a shoot-em-up flick, I must say that I was disappointed in the film overall. In my opinion, it failed to stay true to the cartoon storyline, the storyline I grew up on. Instead, the storyline was disjointed with all the Autobots and Decepticons going after one item, the Allspark. Rather than showing how the Transformers evolved, Optimus Prime spends five minutes providing a narrative.

Now, I must say that the midnight show drew a lot of fans. The theater was packed, and the audience cheered upon the lights dimming. The audience also cheered when Optimus Prime appeared for the first time, and applauded when the film was over, much like one would see at a Starwars screening.

Fortunately, I also saw Live Free or Die Hard, also known as Die Hard 4.0 in Europe, the week before at midnight. While the audience was much smaller, I must say that this 4th Die Hard movie was everything that I expected it to be and more. While I admit that I was not a fan of Die Hard 3, I really enjoyed the first two Die Hard movies. However, I think this is the best to date as you have a known character, the introduction of several new characters, and all the action and suspense that one would expect from a Die Hard film. Thus, I was completely satisfied when I left this movie, realizing that the 11 bucks and loss of 3 hours of sleep were worth it--not so for Transformers.

Of course, I could always go to Krikorian Theatres' "Mommy Movie Mondays," which I've taken advantage of several times, but I didn't want to wait to see the movie, nor did I want to be interrupted from the action by having to tend to Brady during the movie.

Pride of Aloha Review

I've had a couple of people asking me to post my January 2005 review of the Pride of Aloha, so here it is: http://members.cox.net/drlc/POA%20Review.pdf

While this review was posted on Cruise Critics, the posting on that website is incomplete.