Monday, October 12, 2015

Post on The Martian, otherwise known as MATT DAMON!



So, I finally saw Matt Damon trapped on Mars and I must say that the above meme really got my excitement flowing to see it and was a thorough warm up to the main event.

If you don't understand the above meme, watch the movie Team America World Police, or watch this clip from the movie https://youtu.be/gnPWJOJYVKc

I went with some good friends to an Issaquah theater and there planted my butt and waited for the sciency stuff to get going.

And boy did the sciency stuff really science up the story. Filled with science, a true science buff will love this movie as there are lots of references to math and astrophysics that I didn't understand but must accept as truth for this story to make sense. You can't base a movie upon being hard Science Fiction and have half-assed science right? Right? This isn't Star Trek where you can say a futuristic sciency sounding word and fill a plot hole with it. NO! This is hard core science here, real life stuff, stuff that can and will happen at any moment and you must be ready. AT. ALL. TIMES. Thus extending the recent trend of movies trying to be realistic, yes that is a real trend my friends.

Okay, so I get what they were trying to accomplish here and I come out up front and admit that I didn't read the book not even the first chapter. But I did hold a copy of someone's in the Home Depot lunch room and pretended to read the last sentence on the last page and told everyone the famous last sentence was "And then he pooped his pants." And here is where the book and the movie began to not live up to my expectations.

First off it is super hard to have satisfying character development when the main character has almost no other human interaction. He is always by himself, talking to himself, or recording cool video blogs of his progress in trying to make stuff he needs to survive, food, energy, water. There is humor in the movie, boy did they ever try to put humor here and in many places it is sciency humor that only super sciency people will get, which I am not so that is why I found the humor to be really lacking in places. I don't know, just not my type of jokes I guess. Science guys that work in science labs will probably love it or anyone who is really literal and left brained. Is left brained the literal sciency one? I am so the other type of brained that I can't even remember what the sciency one is, but whatever it is, it's the opposite of me. The most relate-able humor was Matt Damon swearing or falling down.

If this movie were to be remade I would request lots more explosions and stuff going wrong for Matt Damon and maybe an evil alien or bad guy astronaut on Mars trying to kill him or steal his freeze dried teriyaki chicken and them having space fights and making space weapons out of the scant materials they have left and then Matt Damon finishing him off and laying down the final scene stealing one liner, something like "This planet is mine." or "Get off my planet." or "Your epidermis is showing."

But overall, Ridley Scott did a good job considering it is super hard to make something with this type of tone and with basically the main character being all alone the entire movie and trying to adapt it from a book which makes it even more super hard. So, 2.5 stars out of 4 for the Martian even considering the theater broke down at the climax and we had to wait 30 minutes for them to fix the projector which they did.

I leave you with an interesting fact that I found from another meme I saw on imgur.com that states; "Between Saving Private Ryan, Interstellar, and now The Martian, America has spent a lot of time and money trying to save Matt Damon." Thank you, thank you very much.

Alright, Sayonara. I'm out.
jake

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Mini post of just maybe a little significance, okay we'll see how it ends up ;)

Just an update wonderful people out there who maybe didn't want to read this blog but then thought well maybe since he hasn't posted in a while and then were like, well I don't have that much time, but sometimes his posts are funny and interesting in weird ways, so okay what the hay I'll read it and now here you are!

Great, now what I've been up to: 1. Going to school to finish the prerequisites for the Ultrasound program at Bellevue College. Now this isn't really complicated, it just involves about 80 million little steps that have to be done in perfect order so its mainly a test of patience, planning, and organization than anything. Just getting to the point where I could begin volunteering at the UW hospital to satisfy the volunteering requirement took about two months. Good thing I started early! My final quarter is this quarter and after that I send in my application, the application period is between Jan 1 2016 and Feb something 2016 so throw salt or something else over your shoulder for me. Thanks!

Anywho on to #2 the ongoing, unending, ever inspiring and sometimes maddening saga of trying to finish my book The Song of Jonas part 1 and publish it in some form that people can read dog gone it. So, 1 was finished and I started sending out submissions to Agents and in the mean time started part 2. So part 2 was going really good and am now about 90% done on first draft of it and since all agents I sent part 1 to were like "ummmmm we don't know, this sounds kind of weird and since its not accompanied by a perfect platform like a website, blog, or youtube account with already 1 million hits then we aren't interested, sorry," I decided to go back and make part 1 shorter. And I'm in the process of doing that or in other words "making it more like part 2, but also different."

In the mean time since traditional publishing is shying away from weird Young Adult novels that are too long, just like mine I have been thinking about self publishing on Smashwords and Amazon which is pretty cool in some ways and kind of a pain in more obvious ways such as no physical book being available in a real life bookstore. But oh, well maybe e-publishing will be easy and fun, or hard work and a little fun, or who knows.

So, that's my short update, nothing earth shattering here. Stay updated this fall for reviews from yours truly on the new Bond or as I like to say Borne in a Tux, and the Martian, or Saving Astronaut Matt Damon, and Star Wars part who the heck cares, which will have lots of lense flare galore and the usual J.J. Abrams staples that mean it will be pretty predictable, but hopefully good, fingers are crossing at least four times and it hurts.

Okay, Sayonara, later.
Jake