Book Corner: Body Of Lies

I was watching a movie preview show a couple weeks back when the trailer came on for the new spy thriller, Body Of Lies. At the end of the preview the host of the show mentioned the book that this was taken from came out last year. Being the dead of the summer I thought I would pick it up and give it a read.

The story centers around a terrorist setting car bombs off across Europe with a C.I.A. agent and his boss trying to capture him before his wave of terror can make his way onto American soil. To add a bit of human drama to things, the agent finds his home life with his wife falling apart. I enjoyed the book a lot. With the book only 347 pages it was a fairly quick read, and the cast of characters was fairly small so it didn't take a scorecard to remember who everyone was. The story moves along pretty quickly. I'll admit that I thought I had figured out how things were going to go, but just as I was patting myself on the back thinking I figured it out the story takes an interesting twist that I didn't see coming. I'll also say I didn't quite know why they were spending the time they did with his home and personal life, but that also paid off through the story.

It looks like the movie is coming out in October and will have Leonardo DiCaprio playing the C.I.A. agent and Russell Crowe playing his boss. Those two don't usually end up in bad movies. I highly recommend the book, and it will be interesting to see how the story translates to the big screen.
-MJP

Zuma? Really?

A couple days ago Gwen Stefani and her sorta rock star husband Gavin Rossdale welcomed their new son into the world by naming him Zuma Nesta Rock.

What..........The..........Hell !!!

It seems more and more of these.......unconventional... names are popping up

Jason Lee (the guy from My Name is Earl) named his son Pilot Inspektor
Nicholas Cage named his son Kal-El. Wasn't that the same of Superman's dad?
Gweneth Paltrow and Chris Martin named their two kids Apple & Moses. Heck, compared to these recent ones those sound almost normal and makes Tom Cruise & Katie Holmes daughter name Suri sound almost pretty.

I guess there is earlier precedent for this sort of thing. Frank Zappa named his kids Dweezil, Ahmet, and Moon Unit. Eddie Van Halen named his son Wolfgang. I guess they all survived pretty well. Sure I guess these actors and musicians are all creative types and have some uniqueness me just being a regular working joe can't understand. It just seems like now these celebrities are trying to out-strange one another.

I hope with all the millions of dollars these people earn they invest some of it in teaching these kids how to defend themselves. These stars may forget that it's the kid that will actually have to live with that name, and those first days on the playground when they get into school may be kind of tough.
-MJP

Sometimes Chick-Lite Is Just Right!

I was channel surfing the other night and came across the end of a movie on the Starz channel that I had watched on DVD a few months ago - The Jane Austen Book Club. I truly enjoyed watching it at the time and viewing the end of it again really got me thinking about what I like and want in a movie and how sometimes it's great to go outside the box. I'm one of those people who would probably be considered somewhat of a movie snob. I want great acting, engrossing storylines (often with multiple storyarcs intersecting), if it's a drama, an ending that hits you right smack in the gut, and if it's a comedy, completely original, quirky, subtle, off-the-wall humor that you have to use your brain to get. Neat, tidy ending for the sake of making you happy don't do it for me. And most of all, NO CHICK FLICKS! I'm not into the poor damsel in distress, man comes to the rescue, they fall in love and all is right with the world plot in any form. But every once in a while a movie comes along that appears to the naked eye that it may be for the female gender only with mostly lighter fare, but has a little more lurking under the surface. For me, The Jane Austen Book Club fit this bill.

It is the story of 5 women at very different points in their lives who decide to start a book club where they only read all of the works of the great Jane Austen. Of course, each woman in her own way resembles a great Austen literary character. They add a lone male member to the club for one reason, but he has his own agenda. The great thing is, even if you haven't read Austen, or only some of her books, the discussions they have give you the jest of each plot and you can make the character connections and start rooting for the outcomes based on the plotlines of the books. This movie is at times hilarious, sad, touching, and just like all of Austen's books, all about the complexities of love and the human condition. By the end, all I could do was wonder what happened to all of my Jane Austen books from my high school years and wish I still had them to read again. Mmmmm, maybe I should just sign off now and surf on over to Amazon and put some books in my shopping cart! - SJP

Behold the "Ninja Warrior"

This summer ABC started airing Wipeout, a game show where contestants maneuver through 3 stages filled with crazy obstacles. My wife and I get a lot of laughs out of it and have enjoyed it over the summer. When I mentioned this show at work I was told the show was a cheap copy of a Japanese game show called Ninja Warrior, and if I wanted to see a real show like this I should check it out on the G4 cable channel.

I never heard of G4 before this, so the next weekend I found the channel and after watching only 1 episode of this I was hooked. The challenges on this show are crazy tough! The show is subtitled, and reading the subtitles combined with the Japanese announcers make this a riot! Each "season" of the show starts with 100 contestants trying to make it through the 4 stages of the contest. Typically after the end of the first stage only 4 to 6 of the 100 are left, and after 20 of these "seasons"only 2 people have made it all the way through and finished the final stage. This show is a pretty big deal over in Japan. Some of the more fanatic contestants build replicas of the obstacles so they can practice, and a number of well known Japanese actors, athletes, and celebrities compete as well. With the ego of some of our well known celebrities and athletes over here I don't know if many would set themselves up to possibly look as foolish as they typically do on this show. I'm putting a clip of the show below. More clips can be found on YouTube, but you should really check your listings and check it out on G4.
-MJP

What Is Up With Larry King?

SJP - For a while now I have been wondering why CNN keeps Larry King on the air, much less why anyone tunes into his show. He bungles more interviews than you can keep track of, does ridiculous stunts like trying to dance with Janet Jackson, interviews and plays drums with Motley Crue, and makes a mockery of what should have been a serious show the night Heath Ledger died by obviously having no idea who he was nor having seen any of his movies, including his Oscar nominated role in Brokeback Mountain. Then comes this bit of news from TVGuide.com:
http://community.tvguide.com/blog-entry/TVGuide-Editors-Blog/Cheers-38-Jeers/Larry-King-Jeered/800045408

A TV accident Larry? Seriously? Now I personally had a TV accident when I was a child. Long story short, I didn't do what I was told and pulled a portable TV over on my head, breaking and bloodying my nose. To this day I still have a crooked bend and scar from this random act of childhood stupidity, and two years ago had to have surgery to try to correct the collateral damage. And to be fair, I have heard of other children doing the same thing (thank goodness I am not the only silly one!), but a 46 year-old man (who he apparently reported as 66)? Does he do any research before he goes on the air, or just spend all of his time prepping his suspenders? And the real mind-blower is that a few months ago, CNN re-upped his contract through 2010! Larry, I realize you now have divorce number five, seven, or something to pay for, but please do us all a favor and put yourself and TV land out of your misery.

What Did The iPod Offer Up Today?

MJP - One of the decent things about where I work is that it's laid back enough to where I can keep my iPod & speaker dock on my desk and play music (at a reasonable volume) through the day. Today the iPod landed on the new live album by John Mayer, Where The Light Is: Live in Los Angeles.

Okay, before I'm asked to hand in my Man card, I'll say that I was not a fan of this guy. I thought his songs were fluff and I felt a minute drain from my life each time "Your Body Is A Wonderland" or "Daughters" came on the radio. What brought me around was seeing him play live on the PBS Series Soundstage. During the show, blues legend Buddy Guy came out and played part of the set with him, which was very, very good. I also came to find out that he has played with Eric Clapton many times. SJP got me his live album TRY! with the John Mayer Trio and lo and behold the guy has some pretty serious guitar chops. I gave his last album Continuum another listen after that, found it wasn't bad, and my opinion changed.

ANYWAY....back to today. Where The Light Is has almost three albums in one. It starts with an acousic set in which he does a nice job in covering Tom Petty's "Free Fallin" He then does a set with the John Mayer Trio, and wraps it up with his full band. Best of all, "Your Body Is A Wonderland" is nowhere to be found! This pretty much has something for everyone. If you like the softer stuff, some of that is included. If you enjoy fantastic guitar playing there is plenty of that as well. My two favorites right now are track 13 in which he covers Jimi Hendrix's "Bold As Love" and track 19 "Gravity" Both have extended guitar solos that will peel the paint from the wall.

SJP - I have enjoyed his music for a couple of years now and knew that he was no longer your daughter's John Mayer, but you know men - they have to discover and come around in their own time. So all you guys out there - Man up and give a listen! Oh, and in case you're wondering, my iPod offered up nothing today, as it never got off of the bedside table.

Our take on Vantage Point

Before the Olympics and Phelpsmania started we watched Vantage Point. This film had a number of big names. Dennis Quaid, William Hurt, Forest Whitaker, Sigourney Weaver (where the heck has she been all this time?) and Matthew Fox. So, with a cast like that one would have fairly high expectations.

In a nutshell, the President (William Hurt) is in Spain, giving a public speech in an open plaza and is shot in an assassination attempt....or was he? We see this play out in the first 10 minutes of the movie, the rest of the time we see bits and pieces of the plot revealed through the eyes of his secret service agents, observers in the crowd, the news reporters covering the speech, and a local police officer. Each time the perspective changes the movie does this rewinding thing taking you back to the next person who moves the plot along.

MJP thinks - it was okay. It would probably be good if you happened to catch it on cable. It was 90 minutes in length and even then felt a bit long. I also thought the plot was a bit unbelievable. Come on, with as unpopular as we are in the world, would the President be giving a public speech like this anywhere outside the country? The rewinding effect was clever....once...not the 6 or 7 times it happens through the movie, and I thought the actors in the movie were kind of wasted with the shaky plot.

SJP thinks - if you have 90 minutes that you don't mind wasting, knowing that you will never get it back again, then this is the movie for you! Besides a plot with timelines that didn't match from each respective "vantage point", to clichéd diaglogue, in my humble opinion, this was just a mess. Honestly, it sucked the life right out of me. By the time it was over I didn't know if I wanted to let out a primal scream or just curl up in the fetal position! Normally my husband and I are pretty much on the same page after we watch a movie, but he obviously looked more kindly on this one than I did.