February 19, 1998
Dear Everyone:
For the first time since I started writing these
weekly Letters, which was in September, 1988, I brought the wrong one
with me to the office last Thursday.
Instead of “980212.doc”, I’d copied “980122.doc”, which was the
Letter from January 22, 1998.
Same numbers, different text.
I might have gotten away with sending a rerun, except that it was
only a few weeks old and people might have noticed that it looked
familiar. So I had to go
home and get the right file and send it out the next day.
Of course, the people who get this via email never
noticed the delay since I’d sent it out the night before.
On the other hand, they don’t get to enjoy the cute graphics,
either.
Working a 9/80 schedule really paid off last
weekend. My “every other
Monday off” landed on a holiday, so I got Tuesday off as well, making
for a four-day weekend. What
this meant is that I could spend all day Saturday at the office and
still get a long weekend. We
now know that it takes about 12 hours to run a complete Database
Integrity Check on
Versatile.
We know this because I hung around the office for most of that 12
hours.
Not that this was hard labor, you understand.
The computer was doing all the work.
I was in the conference room, watching rental movies, stopping
every 10-15 minutes to check on the system’s progress.
I concentrated on movies I hadn’t seen either
because the timing was bad or “Jeannie” just didn’t want to watch them.
In most cases, “Jeannie” was right.
The first one was
Kull,
the Conqueror. Not
to be confused with just plain
Krull, which was made in 1983.
Both are apparently based on a comic book character who has a
clause in his contract that a new movie has to be made about every 15
years or so. It’s your
standard hero quest story in a mystical land where literally everyone is
having a bad hair day. The
wigs are so bad, it takes your mind off the ludicrous costuming.
It’s also one of those mystical lands where the men all wear
leather and furs while the women wear chiffon.
I always wonder about the climate in these movies.
The next was
Conspiracy Theory.
Director Richard
Donner finally lets go of the reins this time and allows
Mel Gibson to
bounce off the walls any way he wants to.
And bounce Mel does.
He plays a crackpot named Jerry who thinks everything in the world is a
conspiracy. Except Alice (Julia
Roberts), whom he watches every night.
Jerry’s problem is that there actually
is a conspiracy; but, because
he’s cried wolf so many times, he can’t get anyone to believe him.
Except Alice, who just feels sorry for him.
In the end, they realize that Jerry gets his crazy
ideas because of the way someone scrambled his brain in the past.
And we find out why Jerry has been watching over Alice all those
years from his cab. It’s
definitely Mel Gibson at his manic best.
Finally, we have
Double
Team (I think that’s
the title),
Jean-Claude Van Damm and that
flamboyant
basketball player against
Mickey Rourke
and (I swear) those same nefarious government people who locked up
Patrick McGoohan
in
The
Prisoner. Lots of
opportunities for flexing muscles, kicking heads and expending more
bullets in five minutes than were used during the entire
Normandy
Landing. By this time, I
was so tired of checking on the computer every quarter hour that I
needed something loud enough to keep me awake.
All those videos didn’t stop me from going to the
movies on Sunday with “Jeannie”.
The last three films we’ve seen were
Wag the
Dog,
Zero
Effect, and Sphere.
As “Jeannie” says, “Two out of three isn’t bad.”
Sphere
starts out interestingly, with
Dustin Hoffman,
Sharon Stone,
Samuel L.
Jackson and
Peter Coyote investigating what appears to be a space ship that sank
to the bottom of the
Pacific Ocean
about 300 years ago. Soon
they enter the ship. Soon
they encounter a strange, glowing sphere inside the ship.
Soon they start acting funny.
At this point, the picture turns into a
Twilight Zone
study in the nature of fear and how do you tell reality from illusion if
you are (or aren’t) totally paranoid?
The only thing missing is a voice-over by
Rod Serling.
The movie still holds your interest, but chokes in the final
quarter-hour. If you decide
to watch it, take notes and plan on at least an hour for the postmortem.
(But why did
Norman...?)
In other news...
El
Niño has given us a bit of a break in the weather this past week.
The hills are a lovely shade of green, the
wild mustard
and
California golden poppies are springing up wherever they feel like
it, and half the trees around here are blossoming.
I guess it’s
Spring.
Love, as always,
Pete
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