Stem cell therapy was always the stuff of science fiction and fantasy for me. That was until my cardiologist encouraged me to contact the Heart Center at Cleveland, Ohio. It took me several weeks to make contact with someone, but I finally did and now I’m slated to pay them a visit in December. My cardiologist explained they probably couldn’t fix me, “but I’ve seen them do some amazing things,” he says. I guess we’ll see. In the interim, I’m putting in almost sixty-hour weeks at work which leaves little time for much of anything. I did however, manage to get a star on The Cure’s “Lovesong” and despite my free time, I was able to dabble in a few things.
Lords of the Fallen on PC: I’ve talked about this delightful Dark Souls copycat before. Having killed off four bosses now, I’m beginning to see how everything comes full circle. I can look out on a vista and view some mystical looking spot in the distance. Eventually I’ll find a way to get to that spot. I’ll enter a door that was once incapable of being opened, and going through it, find that I’m in a room I’ve already been in several times, just from a different entrance. Seems I’ve just discovered a shortcut that shortens half the map! One thing I will say that this game has over Dark Souls is the color palette. Though it’s still a gloomy game, it’s so much brighter and shall I say. . . hopeful?
Fallout on PC: First starting this game in 1999, and after four attempts, I beat it. It is with great honor I’ll be able to venture into this world from this point on, being able to state I’ve beat Fallout. As I’ve said before, it’s worth the playthrough, if just to see the origins of Deadmeat, and the Brotherhood of Steel, of which I earned my very own power armor. I got to meet the mutants and put an end to them. Admittedly, the game hasn’t aged well. The controls are wonky and the game is difficult. I used a walkthrough, but at this point I didn’t care. I just wanted to finish the game. I’ve read Fallout 2 is even bigger and more expansive. I can’t wait to check it out.
The Birds on 4K Blu-Ray: Deemed, Alfred Hitchcock’s monster movie, this movie struck a chord of inspiration. Remember Richard Dreyfuss in the shark cage being rammed by the shark in Jaws? Well, you saw it first in The Birds when Tippi Hedren escapes the birds by sheltering herself in a phone booth, and the birds try to crash through to get at her. Slow pacing reigns supreme in this film, as alluded by the lack of a musical score. Bet you didn’t realize it, did you? However, you probably experienced the impending dread that prefaced each bird attack in the film because of the movie’s pace. Hitchcock does something else interesting in this movie, he shows a lot of closeups of a person’s face, particularly their eyes, and then we see what they are looking at. It has an intimate effect, creating anticipation and drawing the viewer closer to the character. But the main character in this film is the birds themselves. The birds were trained by Ray Berwick was the bird handler/trainer. It was discovered the crows were the most intelligent and the gulls were the meanest. Once trained to dive bomb humans, none of these birds could be released from captivity again.
The Reivers by William Faulkner: William Faulkner could be inferred as the 20th Century South’s GNP. His writing clearly has more verbiage than his scribbling peers, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. And he sends me to the dictionary. Steinbeck and Hemingway never do. This is probably the most comical of Faulkner’s books I’ve ever read. It involves three youths in the early 1900s who “borrow” a car from one of their wealthy grandfathers and head to Memphis, Tennessee where they spend the night in a brothel and lose the car in a foolish trade for a race horse. Then they must race the horse and gamble on the race to try to win the car back. Hilarity ensues, but there is a passage towards the end involving a boy’s corporal punishment (or lack of) however, that I found poignant and moved me to tears. As per any other Faulkner novel, this one has its share of “n-words” because it's the old South, and it was a different time back then. The novel won the 1963 Pulitzer Prize.
Simcity on PC: When this game came out in 2012 it caught an unnecessary amount of flak for it’s always online requirement and its limiting real estate space to build its bespoke cities. And then Colossal Order Ltd.’s Cities Skylines dealt the killing blow to EA’s venerable city building sim. I actually enjoyed SimCity and favored it over Cities Skylines. The poppy colors and vibrant art style, and not to mention the stellar sound design put it a cut above in my opinion. Clicking on a supermarket brought with it the sounds of grocery items being scanned, someone pushing a shopping cart with a squeaky wheel, and the plaintive cries of children being denied candy at the checkout lanes. There was such an ambience to the game. I recently reinstalled and tried to play the game again, however. It had been a minute and a half, but I just couldn’t get into it. Maybe the general consensus was right; the game just needed more real estate.
Death Race on Blu Ray: Take the idea of reality television and catapult it twenty years into the future. This is the concept of Death Race. Prisoners at a maximum security penal colony drive weapon clad vehicles in an all out race in which the winner is granted his freedom if he can survive five races. I’d never seen the 1975 David Carridine movie Death Race 2000 (but always wanted to.) Paul W. S. Anderson stated the movie was more a prequel than a clear-cut remake of the original film. With an all-star cast, the movie was filmed as a Hollywood A film and not a B film (despite Roger Corman opining treatments for the film) Also the an original idea for the film was helmed by Paramount Pictures and the Paula Wagner/Tom Cruise team. Tom Cruise did not like the first two screenplays of the film he read, so he passed on it. Jason Statham was cast as the lead, and I was not disappointed. The cars were the main stars, however, each having dedicated mechanics that worked 12-14 hour days 6 days a week to keep the cars running while filming. It’s a fun movie to watch, rough around the edges and graphic, but it will rivet your senses.
The Untouchables on 4K Blu-Ray: Could you imagine Bob Hoskins playing Al Capone in this epic gangster movie? Well, that’s how it almost happened. Brian De Palma much preferred Robert DeNiro in the role, and when DeNiro went to meet with De Palma, he thought Robert DeNiro was much too slight in his manner, softspoken and not rough enough. He was told he would be in for a big surprise when DeNiro showed up for filming. DeNiro used a heavy set body suit, and gained weight in his face and neck, and he had his hair shaved into a receding hairline, and he adopted the mannerisms and voice. He became Al Capone. Brian De Palma said DeNiro did subtle things in the film that you simply could not see behind the camera – a testament to DeNiro’s talent. The characterizations in the film were superbly done in the guise of four men (Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Andy Garcia, and Charles Martin Smith) who were totally disparate, coming together like a well-oiled machine and working to topple Al Capone and his chokehold on Prohibition era Chicago. The soundtrack created by Ennio Morricone (who won a Grammy for his work on the film, produced the theme song that Paramount still uses today to present preview trailers on their home media. Metacritic summed up the movie perfectly: Slick on the surface, but loaded with artful details. De Palma was going for a clean and pristine look like Nazi Germany. This really shows in the 4K transfer.
