Author Archives: Bob Evans

Movie Review: Battle Los Angeles

Despite the horror that is daylight savings time and the foolishness of of staying up late on the night that the time skipped ahead by an hour I got up this morning and with a pal went to catch the first screening for today of Battle Los Angeles, and latest Alien invasion movie.

I was pleasantly surprised and thoroughly enjoyed myself at the screening this morning. The plot is simple and mostly what you could have expected if you had seen the trailers. Aliens, apparently in a bad mood, making water landings around the world, just of the coasts of major cities, and then without any fanfare proceed to the shoot and smash portion of their package tour. While the entire world is at war and we get flashes of news and information about what is happening elsewhere, this movie like the title suggests, is about the battle in Los Angeles.

Aaron Eckhart plays Staff Sergeant Nantz, a career Marine who is now haunted by the ghosts of soldiers under his command that fell in the middle east. Tired, worn out and beginning to fail physically Nantz wants to retire. Eckhart plays the role wonderfully understated. This is a US Marine, he doesn’t cry and moan about his troubles, but you can see them in his eyes. Of course his plans for retirement are suspended when the aliens attack and he is assigned to a new platoon and green lieutenant for action.

I have heard people compare this to an alien version of Black Hawk Down, and I can understand where they are coming from with that idea. This is a gritty style of filmmaking with an focus on making the scene look, sound, and feel realistic. To my limited knowledge that got the military aspects of the story dead on. With an unsteady handheld camera and lots of fast editing the film conveys the chaos, confusion, and calamity that is combat.

One of the aspects of this film that I really applaud the writers, producers, and director for is that this is a very personal point of view. We follow the story by way of these Marines and never do we see Generals, Secretaries, or Presidents in the story. The story is about these characters in this fairly limited time frame.

That is not to say that this film is not without flaws. The science at one point becomes more than ludicrous abd worse yet it did not need to go that far.

Some years back, 1990 in fact, a small genre film named Tremors burst upon the scene. One scenes in Tremors has the main characters trapped on a rock speculating where the monsters came from. Each characters proposes a classic SF trick that has been used to explain monstrous beasts in other films, mutated animals, aliens, government projects, etc. What Tremors never did was as a film tell you where the monsters came from because it was unimportant to the story. Battle Los Angeles should have learned from that trick, instead they try to explain why the aliens are invading. Why is unimportant to our plot, that’s for people of a much high pay-grade than Staff Sergeant and it should have been left on the editing room floor. I personally rationalized away the ‘explanation’ as merely the blathering of network talking heads and not anything based on the films ‘reality.’

Aside from that there is nothing to cause even a moments pause in recommending the people see this film.

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A new software suite coming soon

So, in order to get my sweetie-wife the speed she needs for her own internet needs I have purchased a second computer. (A used iMac a little faster than my current system.) I’ll take this second computer as my own and this system I am now using will becomes hers in the bedroom. (Or vice versa I will really leave it up to her.)

Anyway along with this change I will be transition most of my writing from the software I use now, Pages, to MS Word. Le Sigh. Word, and MS in general are not things I an enamored with, however there are a number of really good reasons to make the switch.

Foremost, Word is very much an industry standard and it will make my life easier once I started selling. (yes, I am still expecting rather than hoping to sell consistently someday.)

Also Word has a number of features that Pages either lacks or has in a less well-defined version, such as the ability to merge files and Track Changes. I write my novels in chapter files, each and every chapter gets its own file and them I have to cut and paste together into a final assembly. Word would allow me to do it just by merging files.

rack Changes is something I am just learning how to utilize and I can see the real advantages to it for copy edits, particularly when someone else — such as the wonderful Sweetie-wife — has done those edits. With both os us using Word she can make the changes, I can use track Changes to see and approve or reject and so get a clean copy with less paper used.

Buut I will use more MS product. Oh well.

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Not the best of days

I awoke with a headache and it has been with me all day long. It’s skimmed the edge of migraine several times, but always stayed on the just painful side of it. I stayed at work the whole day and I will finish my edits on chapter 1 tonight but I will not get much more done.

I did find a movie that I added to my Nextflix instant queue, A genre film from 1965 starring John Saxon, and with Basil Rathbone and Dennis Hopper. Gods, with a cast like that how can I NOT check it out.

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Sunday Night Movie:The Return Of The LIving Dead

I selected last night’s film based on a couple of different criteria, firstly that it was a shorter film, just over 90 minutes, second that it was not too serious nor too funny but something that struck just the right balance for my mood, and thirdly  I had not watched this film is quite some time so it was due for a screening.

The Return Of The Living Dead is a small low budget zombie movie that has had one clear and lasting impact on the Zombie genre and that is the incorporation of Brain Eating. Not generally known is that this film is a direct sequel to 1968’s Night of The Living Dead, subject of an earlier Sunday Night Movie here. Romero’s partner and co-screenwriter for that classic and far influencing movie, John Russo, had rights to make a sequel just as George A. Romero. Romero famously went off and created in 1979 Dawn of The Dead the archetypal zombie apocalypse movie, a film copies and referenced today more than 30 years later. Russo first crafted a serious script for his sequel but when Dan O’Bannon was tapped to directed O’Bannon thought it better to avoid directly ‘stepping on romero’s toes’ and to instead make a comedic sequel. Of course, being Dan O’Bannon one of the principle forces responsible for Alien, this was not going to be a friendly feel good comedy. O’Bannon rewrote Russo’s script and crafted a unique movie thought one yet unmistakably stamped with’s its period.

Continue reading →

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Money comes in, Money goes out, never a miscommunication

So this week I got my yearly bonus from my Day job and that certainly felt good. My sweetie-wife has been laboring under a very slow desktop computer so it was time to do something about that.
Here computer needs are much simpler than my won, so I purchased a used iMac for myself and she will now use this machine. Luckily, the bonus covers it nicely.

I finished creating 3×5 cards for each chapter in Love and Loyalty and now I can start playing with the order of the chapters. I’ve read about writers use do this with card and I have never been one who has, but this is a novel situation for me. (Yes, that was an intended pun. I do not do that accidentally.)

The whole novel is now going to turn and be driven by the main character’s choices — so much stronger as a story that way — but that means I have to move something around and some cause and effect is changing. I am really quite excited by the re-write process.

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