This was a great Disney movie. Okay, so the director altered the original incident on which this story was based in order to give it a happier ending, but one doesn't go to movies for a starkly depressing reality; at least I don't. It's based on a 1983 Japanese movie, which was based on an actual incident which occurred in 1958.
In this story, set in 1993, a dogsled team of eight dogs is left alone in the Antarctic when the humans have to beat a hasty retreat. One person had a broken leg, another had severe frostbite, and there was a bad storm. They intend to go back for the dogs, but the weather is too severe, and since it is the start of winter down there, the weather would remain severe for months.
The guide, Jerry, (Paul Walker) is absolutely distraught but is unable to get back to Antarctica for nearly six months. I could identify with his angst. I know if I had to leave my cats somewhere where they probably wouldn't survive on their own, I would be inconsolable. Jerry clearly loved his dogs.
One of the best scenes in the movie occurs before they actually leave, when a scientist falls through the ice and Maya, the leader of the dogsled team, helps Jerry rescue him. It is the fact that the dogs saved his life that finally gets the scientist to help Jerry return to Antarctica.
There aren't really any surprises here. You know at the start of the movie that all or most of the dogs will survive, but the story is still good. It's a lot better than what really happened in 1958; then seven of the nine dogs died (though I was amazed that any could live through that). Much of the focus is on the dogs and how they help each other survive. I don't know how realistic that is, but of course I believe that animals care for and help each other.
We had our own little drama a week ago here, when one of my cats jumped down behind some plastic file boxes. She was pretty much trapped, because the sides of the boxes were too smooth for her to gain a foothold to climb out, and she had so little room back there that I don't think she would have been able to get into the right position to jump out. But the other cat caught my attention, because she was frantically pawing at the carpet on the other side, trying to rescue the first cat. It cracked me up, but I was glad I was home and she didn't have to be trapped there too long (and that the other cat didn't damage the carpet). I moved the boxes so that they are now flush against the wall and there is no room to get between them and the wall.
Anyway, not quite as dramatic as being in the Antarctic, but I feel safer knowing that I have a rescue kitty living with me.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Book Review--Murder One, by William Bernhardt
This is a book in a series featuring defense attorney Ben Kincaid and his partner, Christina McCall. Ben tends to take cases that are vastly unpopular in terms of public opinion. It's not like he takes them for the money either; most of his clients are poor. His belief is that everyone is entitled to a good defense. He's very dedicated and doesn't come across as a sleaze.
In this book, his client is a 19-year-old stripper named Keri Dalcanton. Keri has been accused of murdering a police detective and then chaining his nude body to a public fountain in downtown Tulsa, OK and scrawling the word "faithless" across his chest in blood. Police, media, and the general public have all convicted her in their minds and are out for blood.
The case doesn't look good for Keri. She was involved in a kinky affair with the married police detective. The prosection has a powerful circumstantial case against Keri, and conviction is all but guaranteed until Ben uncovers a major procedural violation on the part of the police. The case is overturned and Keri is set free, but things don't end there.
The police are furious about this turn of events and put the "Blue Squeeze" on Ben. A bloodstained knife that Ben has never seen is found in his office. It is a part of a blatant attempt to get to Keri by discrediting her lawyer. Ben is charged with conspiracy and murder and a new trial for Keri is launched as well.
This book was hard to put down. It is full of twists and turns that will keep the reader guessing until the last second. I am looking forward to reading more in this series.
In this book, his client is a 19-year-old stripper named Keri Dalcanton. Keri has been accused of murdering a police detective and then chaining his nude body to a public fountain in downtown Tulsa, OK and scrawling the word "faithless" across his chest in blood. Police, media, and the general public have all convicted her in their minds and are out for blood.
The case doesn't look good for Keri. She was involved in a kinky affair with the married police detective. The prosection has a powerful circumstantial case against Keri, and conviction is all but guaranteed until Ben uncovers a major procedural violation on the part of the police. The case is overturned and Keri is set free, but things don't end there.
The police are furious about this turn of events and put the "Blue Squeeze" on Ben. A bloodstained knife that Ben has never seen is found in his office. It is a part of a blatant attempt to get to Keri by discrediting her lawyer. Ben is charged with conspiracy and murder and a new trial for Keri is launched as well.
This book was hard to put down. It is full of twists and turns that will keep the reader guessing until the last second. I am looking forward to reading more in this series.
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Book Review--Blessings, by Anna Quindlen
I first listened to this book--or part of it--on audio. I checked it out of the library, and the librarian seemed momentarily puzzled; there were just four CDs and she thought maybe there wre supposed to be more. She must have decided there weren't, but it turned out that she was right the first time. I noticed this when the book seemed to end in an odd spot. It seemed that there were more loose ends than there usually are when a book ends. So I checked out the actual book, and of course there was more to it. The only thing is, I would have preferred that it had ended where it did in the incomplete audio version. The real ending was more realistic, but not as happy (not bad, just not as happy).
Skip Cuddy, caretaker of the Blessings estate, finds a newborn baby in the garage one day, left there by a teenage couple. He decides to keep her himself, at first managing to hide her presence from Lydia Blessings, the matriarch of the estate. When Lydia does learn about the baby, rather surprisingly, she decides to help Skip keep her.
Skip doesn't know anything about babies and never had to care for one before, but he learns and does a very good job taking care of the baby, whom he names Faith. Faith seemed to help him turn over a new leaf. Skip had been associated with some rather unsavory characters in the past. He was more of a follower with them than a leader, but Faith and his job at the Blessings estate, which he obtained right after getting out of prison, seem to give him the strength to leave all that behind. Not surprisingly, Lydia had not known about Skip's prision stint when she hired him, but by the time she found out, she had gotten to know him and decided that he was okay. Things go quite well at first, until Skip's past catches up with him.
Anyway, I thought the ending was rather sad, though not without hope. I do really enjoy Anna Quindlen, but sometimes her endings are more realistic than I need, as I tend to like happy endings, even if they aren't as likely to happen in real life.
Skip Cuddy, caretaker of the Blessings estate, finds a newborn baby in the garage one day, left there by a teenage couple. He decides to keep her himself, at first managing to hide her presence from Lydia Blessings, the matriarch of the estate. When Lydia does learn about the baby, rather surprisingly, she decides to help Skip keep her.
Skip doesn't know anything about babies and never had to care for one before, but he learns and does a very good job taking care of the baby, whom he names Faith. Faith seemed to help him turn over a new leaf. Skip had been associated with some rather unsavory characters in the past. He was more of a follower with them than a leader, but Faith and his job at the Blessings estate, which he obtained right after getting out of prison, seem to give him the strength to leave all that behind. Not surprisingly, Lydia had not known about Skip's prision stint when she hired him, but by the time she found out, she had gotten to know him and decided that he was okay. Things go quite well at first, until Skip's past catches up with him.
Anyway, I thought the ending was rather sad, though not without hope. I do really enjoy Anna Quindlen, but sometimes her endings are more realistic than I need, as I tend to like happy endings, even if they aren't as likely to happen in real life.
Monday, February 13, 2006
Book Review--The Midnight Before Christmas, by William Bernhardt
Okay, I am slightly out of season with this, but oh well. This is a holiday thriller, not all that festive, but good. With this book, the author has taken a break from his Ben Kincaid series, but this is also a legal thriller.
Lawyer Megan McGee doesn't have much of a Christmas planned for herself, so she agrees to see a client with an emergency on Christmas Eve. The client, Bonnie Cantrell, is seeking legal protection against her husband, an ex-cop who tends to drink too much and get violent. Bonnie reports that he has threatened to kill their 7-year-old son rather than be separated from him.
Megan asks where her son, Tommy is, and Bonnie tells her that he is at the daycare run through his school. Megan gets a bad feeling and asks Bonnie to call and check on him. When she does, she discovers the worst has happened; a substitute caregiver who didn't know the situation had allowed Tommy to go with his father.
Megan and Bonnie spend their Christmas Eve searching for Tommy, praying to find him before the unthinkable happens. And Megan discovers that there is quite a bit more to this case than Bonnie is telling her.
The book isn't long and it's easy reading, but there are some twists and turns that really make it interesting.
Lawyer Megan McGee doesn't have much of a Christmas planned for herself, so she agrees to see a client with an emergency on Christmas Eve. The client, Bonnie Cantrell, is seeking legal protection against her husband, an ex-cop who tends to drink too much and get violent. Bonnie reports that he has threatened to kill their 7-year-old son rather than be separated from him.
Megan asks where her son, Tommy is, and Bonnie tells her that he is at the daycare run through his school. Megan gets a bad feeling and asks Bonnie to call and check on him. When she does, she discovers the worst has happened; a substitute caregiver who didn't know the situation had allowed Tommy to go with his father.
Megan and Bonnie spend their Christmas Eve searching for Tommy, praying to find him before the unthinkable happens. And Megan discovers that there is quite a bit more to this case than Bonnie is telling her.
The book isn't long and it's easy reading, but there are some twists and turns that really make it interesting.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Book Review--The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom
I actually listened to this on audio, which I think I liked better than I would have liked reading it; the audio just really added something somehow (how's that for eloquent?). Anyway, this was really an amazing book, sad in a lot of places, but with an uplifting ending.
The story begins at the end of the life of an 83-year-man named Eddie. Eddie was the head of maintenance for an amusement park called Ruby Pier. His job was fixing things and making sure the rides were safe. He died trying to save a little girl when one of rides malfunctioned.
When Eddie gets to Heaven, he discovers that it is not as he expected. Instead of landing in some sort of paradise, he is to encounter five people who will explain his life to him. Some were people who were close to him, while some he barely knew or perhaps never knew at all, but they were people who knew who he was and had touched his life in some way. With each person he meets, Eddie learns about some part of his life and also takes away a specific lesson.
As I said, the book is sad in lots of places. Eddie had quite a lot of tragedy in his life. He was a war veteran, and the war really changed him, especially his experience of being a prisoner of war. It made him a more bitter person, especially since his leg had been injured and he walked with a limp afterwards. He had a very difficult relationship with his father, and he lost his wife at quite a young age. He had planned on studying engineering, but life circumstances and perhaps in own difficulty in adjusting after the war interfered with that. He ended up being head of maintenance at Ruby Pier just like his father, and he ended up feeling like he had done nothing with his life. I thought that, among other things, he was missing one very obvious point, which was that he was saving lives by making sure the rides were safe (that accident at the end wasn't something he could have forseen, from the sound of it).
Anyway, the book was very uplifting. Eddie comes to realize that his life did have meaning and that he touched more people than he ever knew. A simple message, but important and one that people often forget or never realize.
The story begins at the end of the life of an 83-year-man named Eddie. Eddie was the head of maintenance for an amusement park called Ruby Pier. His job was fixing things and making sure the rides were safe. He died trying to save a little girl when one of rides malfunctioned.
When Eddie gets to Heaven, he discovers that it is not as he expected. Instead of landing in some sort of paradise, he is to encounter five people who will explain his life to him. Some were people who were close to him, while some he barely knew or perhaps never knew at all, but they were people who knew who he was and had touched his life in some way. With each person he meets, Eddie learns about some part of his life and also takes away a specific lesson.
As I said, the book is sad in lots of places. Eddie had quite a lot of tragedy in his life. He was a war veteran, and the war really changed him, especially his experience of being a prisoner of war. It made him a more bitter person, especially since his leg had been injured and he walked with a limp afterwards. He had a very difficult relationship with his father, and he lost his wife at quite a young age. He had planned on studying engineering, but life circumstances and perhaps in own difficulty in adjusting after the war interfered with that. He ended up being head of maintenance at Ruby Pier just like his father, and he ended up feeling like he had done nothing with his life. I thought that, among other things, he was missing one very obvious point, which was that he was saving lives by making sure the rides were safe (that accident at the end wasn't something he could have forseen, from the sound of it).
Anyway, the book was very uplifting. Eddie comes to realize that his life did have meaning and that he touched more people than he ever knew. A simple message, but important and one that people often forget or never realize.
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Book Review--Predator, by Patricia Cornwell
This is the latest book in Cornwell's series featuring Kay Scarpetta, one of my favorite characters. Once the Chief Medical Examiner in Virginia, Kay is now freelancing with the National Forensic Academy in Florida. The academy is the brainchild of Lucy, Kay's genius niece (and also one of my favorite lesbian characters in literature, actually). Benton, Kay's boyfriend and a forensic psychologist, is doing a research study of violent, sociopathic males through Harvard University. One of the study participants tells Benton about a woman he supposedly killed (not one for whom he was convicted), at a Christmas shop in Florida. The team (Benton, Lucy, Kay, and Pete Marino, a former cop who worked with Kay in Virginia) investigate and tie this to a missing persons case. There seems to be a connection between this case and the disappearance of four people who were abducted from their Florida home.
Meanwhile, Lucy has a brief involvement in Provincetown with a woman named Stevie, who, oddly, has tattoos of red handprints on her breasts and upper inner thighs. Then Benton sits in on an autopsy (most forensic psychologists don't do this, by the way) of a Massachusetts woman with similar tattoos.
Lucy is not herself lately. She has gained weight, seems to have lost interest in the academy, and she made a careless security mistake with disastrous consequences.
This book is rather hard to summarize, because there are a lot of details and several different cases that connect in a strange way. It's gripping, though; the details don't seem tedious. Cornwell just keeps getting better and better.
Meanwhile, Lucy has a brief involvement in Provincetown with a woman named Stevie, who, oddly, has tattoos of red handprints on her breasts and upper inner thighs. Then Benton sits in on an autopsy (most forensic psychologists don't do this, by the way) of a Massachusetts woman with similar tattoos.
Lucy is not herself lately. She has gained weight, seems to have lost interest in the academy, and she made a careless security mistake with disastrous consequences.
This book is rather hard to summarize, because there are a lot of details and several different cases that connect in a strange way. It's gripping, though; the details don't seem tedious. Cornwell just keeps getting better and better.
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