December 2, 2010
Dear Everyone:
A few weeks ago “Jeannie” and I went to a movie.
This hasn’t happened in quite a while.
In fact, according to my calculation, the last movie we saw
together was
Sherlock Holmes
in February. There is a
reason why we haven’t been to a movie since then, but it’s “Jeannie’s”
reason, so I’ll let her explain when she’s ready.
In the meantime…
The movie was
RED, starring
Bruce Willis, in the role he’s patented:
The slightly-grizzled, wisecracking veteran of a thousand
skirmishes who still has something up his sleeve.
This time he plays a retired
CIA agent named Frank.
Frank likes to call his customer service rep at the
pension
office, Sarah, played by Mary-Louise Parker, simply because he’s bored
with retirement and wants someone to talk to.
Sarah, bored with working in a windowless cubicle, dreams of
“adventure”.
One night a group from out of nowhere tries to kill Frank, who outfoxes
them with appalling ease, then dashes off to rescue Sarah as she is
undoubtedly next on their “list”.
Soon it’s apparent that
Morgan Freeman,
John Malkovich and
Helen
Mirren are also on the “list”.
They decide to find out whose “list” it is.
Meanwhile, back at the “office” there’s young up-and-coming agent
Cooper, played by Karl Urban.
Never heard of him?
You will. I’ve seen him play
Julius Caesar, conqueror of the known world one week and
Cupid, god of
love the next. Most
recently, he played a
young Dr. McCoy in the last year’s version of
Star Trek.
He was also in the
Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
Think range and versatility.
I’d love to see his
Hamlet.
Cooper soon finds himself looking into Frank’s background, which earns
him a trip to the “records keeper”, played by
Ernest Borgnine.
Yes, he’s still alive.
He’s also the person who stamped “RED” on Frank’s file.
It stands for “Retired, Extremely Dangerous.”
By this time, Sarah is beginning to think that “adventure” is not what
she wants after all. But she
warms to the idea when Mirren’s character, Victoria, takes her under her
wing. The “old folks” enlist
the aid of a former Soviet adversary, played by
Brian Cox who is equally
at home playing upper-crust British servants or down-and-dirty Southern
Senators, and a dangerous bad guy in
X-Men 2.
I’d love to see his
Malvolio.
All in all, great fun.
The other movie I saw last week by myself, while I was on vacation was
Inside Job.
This is a documentary about the
economic crisis that “began” in
2007 and continues today. It
does a very effective job of explaining how the various elements came
together into a “perfect storm” of financial “oopsy-daisy” that made
millions for a privileged few and wiped out many more millions of
ordinary people.
It uses interviews with “experts” who explain how “so-and-so” did
“this-and-that” that lead to the fall.
Then you see some text that “so-and-so” declined the opportunity
of an interview. (The
audience chuckles.) Except
for one “so-and-so” who wasn’t as smart as he thought he was and
denounced the filmmakers with “this is not a deposition and I don’t have
to answer your questions!”
(The audience laughs out loud.)
No doubt he knows what a deposition is.
Be prepared to see this one at next year’s
Academy Awards
presentation.
In other news…
I swear I was only out of the office for three days last week.
But when I came in Monday morning, there were so many cries for
help coming out of the IM Academy (mostly questions about taking
SharePoint training, or running reports about SharePoint training) that
I have not been able to devote as much time as I’d like to my
Computer
Based Training (CBT) for the electronic
document management system.
I have tomorrow (Fridays are always quiet) and the next two weeks to
wrap it up if I’m going to finish it “this year”.
Which I’m determined to do.
So there.
Pete
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