The Triumphant Return of the Solitaire Update

After briefly pausing at our new base camp, our climb up Mount Everest has resumed.  Despite suffering through the setback of a 1 for 27 stretch, we ended up advancing our overall win percentage to 17.2%.  Winning at a 20% clip now seems like it is an obtainable goal.  To win 1 out of 5 hands of solitaire seems above average mean to me.  But then again, soon it will be quite average for me.  That is the greatness that is my solitaire mastery.

At the beginning of this exercise, I said I was going to start giving some names to the various aspects of the game so that I could more efficiently communicate my grand strategies.  I already introduced the term "gutter ball" to mean finishing a hand of solitaire with out being able to make a single card play.  Today we add another vocabulary word - "codon".  From hence forth, this word will be used to refer to the set of three cards you turn over from the deck (see picture below).  My word is law.

Day 48 – 2 of 8 (199.5, 4.01, 49.56)
Day 49 – 4 of 8 (201)

Day 50 – 0 of 6 (201, 4, 49.38)

Day 51 – 2 of 9 (201)

Day 52 – 1 of 1 (202, 4, 48.56)

Day 53 – 0 of 5 (200.5, 4, 48.33)

Day 54 – 0 of 10 (200.5, 4.04, 49.36)

Day 55 – 1 of 12 (200.5)

Day 56 – 3 of 7 (201)

Day 57 – 1 of 6 (201)

Day 58 – 1 of 4 (201)

Day 59 – 2 of 8 (201.5)

Total - 89 of 516 (17.2%)

The Sure to be Wrong Prediction of the Week

This week I am going to take a shot at predicting the first movie this year to break the $100 million mark.  Since none of the movies released so far this year stand a chance of reaching the century mark (Sorry wolf-punching Liam Neeson) this is truly a forward looking exercise.  In 4 out of the last 5 years, a movie released in January or February reached 100 mil.  So I am going to play the odds and say we are going to have our first century club member in hand before Rare Disease Day has passed.  By making that declaration, we dramatically limited the field.  So let's take a quick look at the remaining candidate.

There is no clear cut blockbuster in the February slate.  There are several recognizable names releasing films but none of them really are the type that carry big money makers.  The Rock, Ryan Reynolds, Denzel Washington, Drew Barrymore, Nic Cage, and Harry Potter all stand a good chance of getting a movie a $50 million gross but not much more.  We also have a couple of sequels on our hands but the original Journey and Ghost Rider movies barely made it to $100 million last time and no one seems to really be clamoring for another go around with these stories.  So what does that leave us with?

The three movies that I think have the best chance to go big time are Chronicle, This Means War, and Wanderlust.  Chronicle feels like a really interesting, decidedly dark take on the superhero trope and the found footage angle clearly still has legs.  It is hard to get a real feel for how interested people are for this because it is such a genre movie and the it features unknowns in an understated advertising campaign. There is a chance this could be another Cloverfield but in the end I just don't think there is enough critical mass behind this movie.

Next I will tackle Wanderlust.  This one actually does have a star that has shown she can deliver a $100 million dollar movie.  Jennifer Aniston has scored two $100 million comedies in a row.  But this movie seems fairly generic.  Another movie about harried professionals slowing down and learning to enjoy life.  Haven't seen that story in the theaters....since last month 6 months in a row.  Also, it is released the last week of February so all the other movie in front of it have to fall down in order for it to be first to the finish line.

That leaves us with This Means War.  Bane (an English national working for the CIA?) and Captain Kirk fight over Reese Witherspoon who every seems to have stopped caring about 10 years ago.  But it is a big budget action/comedy coming out around Valentine's Day.  That "holiday" has helped other movies break through to the rarefied air.  And has alot of the look and feel of Mr. and Mrs. Smith (the folks that made that movie made this one too), which was quite successful and really enjoyable.  So, I am going to put all my Monopoly money down on This Means War as the year's first $100 million movie.  (my hedge - I would not be surprised if this movie topped out at $75 million).

Bonus Prediction - This one isn't mine but I agree with the person who said it - Reese Witherspoon turns out to be a spy too.

This blog post is sponsored by Weinerlicious.

The Worst Thing in the World Ever (or Maybe Just Right Now)

Speaking of the movie that I would give my Razzie vote to as worst movie of the year – Twilight : What To Expect When You Are Expecting Vampire Spawn Part 1…. What an awful, awful viewing experience.  I don’t think words can express how truly bad this movie was.  And really, I won’t try.  It is pointless at this point.  One thing the internet is not short on is Twilight take downs (One thing the internet is short on – more little kids getting hit in the head with oversized balls please).  It would be like staking Edward after Buffy and Abram Lincoln were already done with him.  So, instead of piling on with yet one more overwrought dissection of this cult phenomenon’s sexism, disturbing messages to teen-age girls, or undercover Mormon evangelism, let me instead just highlight the most memorable moment for me from this most recent episode of “As the Pampered Teen-Ager Pouts”.  And can there really be any argument about this.  Clearly the best part of this movie, ney, the whole series, is when the spurned werewolf of the central love triangle falls instantly in love with the less than 1 day old vampire progeny of the story’s protagonist upon locking eyes with it (By the way, the resolution of the love triangle in Stephanie Meyer’s other book “The Host” was equally creepy and off-putting).  Then, in the translating of bad book writing by poor screenwriting into dreadful cinema, the vampire boy narrates this perverse bond of man and child wife for the benefit of the audience (It is their most sacred law).   So, you don’t misunderstand there cosmic bond.  For more Twilight bashing, enjoy the below video. 

By the way, the remake of Arthur is actually pretty good.



Solitaire Update

So much for that upward climb I was crowing about last time.  I seem to have plateaued in my rapid ascension to solitaire royalty.  Of course, their might have been another reason for my continued improvement overtime besides the one I gave the last time.  And that is my addled, aged mind and its inability to keep track of how many games I have actually played at any given time.  I give it the old college try but many times I find myself asking, was that game four or five.  To my benefit, when I do question myself, I go with the higher number.  Darn you natural aging process.

There is one other variable in the ebbs and flows of my success and failure - the device and version of solitaire I play my games on.  I tend to play my games with either the default Microsoft Solitaire on my laptop or the game that is found on my Blackberry.  Originally, I had assumed these to versions of the game both simulated the randomness of a deck of cards.  But I am not so sure anymore.  It may just be me (and I am not willing to do the game tracking to figure this one out.  At least not yet.) but it seems like the Blackberry pays out fewer winners than the laptop one.  I don't think I ever came across a gutter ball (a hand that you can't make a single card play with) on the laptop but I know I have with the Blackberry.  It seems to me that the laptop always gives you a chance to win, you just have to make all of the right moves.  But the Blackberry simulates the truth of the cold, hard world.  Or it could just be my senior brain playing tricks on me again.

Day 35 – 0 of 9

Day 36 – 3 of 18 (3.75, 48.52)

Day 37 – 3 of 9 (200.5, 3.88, 50.51)

Day 38 – 1 of 9 (202.5, 3.75, 48.58)

Day 39 – 0 of 9 (203)

Day 40 – 2 of 5 (203, 3.5)

Day 41 – 2 of 8 (200.5)

Day 42 – 4 of 10 (200.5, 4, 52.16)

Day 43 – 1 of 5 (201.5, 4, 51.54)

Day 44 – 0 of 11 (201.5, 4, 51.34)

Day 45 – 1 of 5 (200.5)

Day 46 – 0 of 6 (201, 4.01, 50.41)

Day 47 – 2 of 10 (200.5, 4, 50.11)

Total - 72 of 432 (16.7%)

 

This blog post is sponsored by Knight Industries.

Battle of the Snow Whites

Mirror, Mirror


Snow White and the Huntsman

I have already stated my clear and strong support for the repurposing of Disney Princesses.  Therefore, it is likely not surprising that I have no problem what so ever with two, that's right two, live-action reimaginings of the Snow White fairy tale.  At least in principle.  But now that the trailers for both of these endeavors have surfaced, I can resoundly say two additional takes on the costs of extreme female vanity is one too many.  

The two Snow White  movies could not have taken more different approaches to the source material.  Snow White and the Huntsman did the en vogue thing and took the whole thing to a dark place while transforming the heroine into a fully empowered warrior princess.  The whole thing looks like a high concept actioner where the princess stops wishing for the one to love and becomes the latest iteration of Buffy, the wicked witch slayer.  The only glaring negative with this version is the actress charged with bringing Snow White into the flesh.  Somehow, someone in Hollywood decided it was a good idea to give our nation's worst living actress a career outside of the Twilight series.  Just superficially, Kristen Stewart fails to live up to the standards of a beauty greater than all others in the kingdom.  A beauty worth killing for.  And that is before she opens her mouth and makes everyone in the audience wish you can have a Snow White movie without Snow White.

But the other option, Mirror, Mirror, is trying exceeding hard with its trailer to guarantee there is no audience even in the theater to question why they spent good money to see it.  This thing looks absolutely awful.  It is fine that they decided to go light hearted in this one.  It differentiates it nicely from the Batman Begins-version of Snow White the competition is selling.  But maybe if it is going to be a comedic version of the story, maybe some of it should be actually funny.  This Grantland piece does a nice job of pointing out many of the ways this trailer went horribly wrong.  Let me just add a couple more nails to the glass coffin.  The production value of this looks low rent by the standards of high school musicals.  The casting is down-right dreadful.  This Snow White not only makes Kristen Stewart look like the fairest in the land, she makes miss Stewart seem like someone two super-powered, immortal beings would fight over.  And Prince Charming is just as bad.  The Winklevoss smarm still oozes off of old Arm and Hammer.  He was born to play bad guy from the rich, snooty frat house in a college set comedy.  Not the man of virginal girls dream.  Julia Roberts, you are better than this.

Solitaire Update - Things picked up a bit after my involuntary shut out a couple of days past, included a personal best of 3 wins in a day.  I still have resisted applying any real strategy yet.  That is still to come.  But in the meantime I was also think that there needs to be some cool lingo to go along with certain events in solitaire.  This will be a critical step in setting it up the mainstream competitive sport it was always meant to be.  Just like in bowling, three consecutive strikes is called a turkey and four strikes is a hambone.  Solitaire needs its own hambone.  What do you call it when you lay out a hand and you can't make a single move.  No cards can be brought down from the stack and none of the cards below can be flipped.  This phenomenon seems like it should have a name.  For that matter, the different areas of the solitaire playing field need names. How is any one going to be able to follow all of my great insights into the practice of solitaire if they don't know if I am referring to the stacks or the triplets (my first attempt at some names)?  So, top of my list of things to do in my solitaire sojourn - develop some cool jargon.

Day 4 - 2 out of 13
Day 5 - 3 out of 12
Overall Success Rate - 7 out of 56 (12.5%)

This blog poster is sponsored by Gen Sys Research Laboratories.

In memorium

An incredibly important date past the world by last month with surprisingly little fanfare or ceremony  Despite it being the 30th anniversary of an event that singularly provided for the ultimate triumph of good over evil.  It was on October 31st, 1981 that a young mother and father were faced with the ultimate nightmare of many a new parent. As most of the world slept, a malevolent intruder entered their home with the sole intention of taking the life of their dear infant son.  Despite the fact that this notorious mass murderer had already left a pile of bodies in his wake, the dedicated parents did not flee the premises.  Instead their declared their homestead the Alamo, digging in to make a final stand against the reptilian sociopath that sought to claim the life of the child.  After a fierce battle that culminated at the very edge of the crib that held the young boy, the invader was successfully repelled but not before leaving the mother and father dead and the child with a disfiguring scar on his forehead that would torment him with memories of what he lost that night for the rest of his life.  Of course it would be other 17 years before the force of pure evil responsible for the systematic execution of hundreds to thousands of individuals (accurate counts are still not clear) not deemed "pure" enough to be part of his new world order was finally defeated for good.  But that defeat happened at the hands of that same boy who lived that night (after a short stop over in Heaven's Train Station and Mutant Day Care Facility).  Without the sacrifice of these two brave souls, millions of more might have died.  So, next year, when Halloween rolls around, remember these two individuals and what they did to help secure the freedom and safety we enjoy today.  Well, maybe just eulogize the mother.  The father was a bully, an entitled prat, and all around horrible individual that probably deserved to die.

The Death of James and Lily Potter - October 31, 1981 (the actual date)

This blog poster is sponsored by the Umbrella Corporation.

My Hindsight is Impeccable

The problem with taking months off between writing blog entries, is that all those absolutely brilliant predictions you make never get recorded so that when you are inevitably proven correct there is a lack of a record to prove your brilliance.  Luckily, I included my feelings about the Green Lantern movie in my last blog posting spree well before Ryan Reynolds proved me one hundred percent right.  I was able to successfully call both the miscasting and awful look and feel of the movie from the trailer.  I particularly enjoyed the io9 review of the movie that referred to GL as the floating of head of Ryan Reynolds.  The movie looked silly and amateurish by direct-to-DVD standards and only succeeded in killing off a franchise that the studio was willing to keep alive even in the face of losing over 100 million dollars on the original.  My childhood installed in me a deep fandom for Green Lantern and G.I. Joe and I was thrilled when it was announced that both of those properties would be turned into movies.  And then Hollywood went and destroyed both of them (we won’t even get into Transformers 2 because at least the original Transformers is a pretty entertaining movie if you edit out all the parts with John Turturro and Sam Witwicky’s parents).  At least G.I. Joe is getting the Rock.  And the Rock does not disappoint.

But one prediction that I didn’t get down on silicon in time was my the strong feeling from the trailer that Cars 2 was going to be the big letdown that breaks Pixar’s streak of instant classics (Personally I consider Ratatouille to be the first blemish on their reputation but I will go with the critics here and pretend that it was a classic).  It didn’t play like a Pixar movie.  It felt like a Dreamsworks’ movie.  A shameless grab for the easy money that comes with a quicky sequel and a built-in merchandising franchise.  And the full length thing just proved all of those concerns to be on target.  The wafer thin plot and a nonsensical twist ending (it made absolutely no sense in retrospect or in immediate inspection) had the stench of Disney’s fine tradition of sequels like Aladdin: The Return of Jafar or Cinderella II - Dreams Come True.  This movie clearly existed only to get their branded toys back on the shelves and drilled into kids’ cerebrum’s.  The Toy Story sequels had made us think Pixar was different.  They weren’t wearing the Katzenberg albatross that gave us Lilo and Stitch 2: Stitch as a Glitch.  But it is clear now.  The only 2 Pixar movies to get sequels to date (Monsters Inc. 2 will soon make this statement out dated) were the ones that spawned successful toy lines.  The announcement of a fourth Toy Story movie, despite the artistic crescendo of Toy Story 3 (should have won the best picture Oscar last year but an animated movie will never win) that provided one of the best trilogy conclusions ever only, only underlines, bolds, and italicizes the swallowing up of the Pixar vision by the Disney marketing monster.  Oh well, we will always have WALL-E.  

Oh and here is one more of my outdated predictions for the road.  3D movies are an overpriced fad that tries to convince people to pay premium pricing for a diminished movie going experience.  It will soon pass.  Also, we will one day fly like the birds, walk on the moon, ride around in horseless carriages, and tame the mighty power of the open flame.  Man, my ability to predict the past is amazing.

This blog poster is sponsored by the Four-Five-Six Laundry.

The Big Bad

It is a well known rule of cinema that villains are much more interesting than the heroes. The actors like to play them and the audience loves to see them get their come uppence while secretly rooting for them.  Keyser Söze, Anton Chigurh, and the Joker won Oscars, Batman wasn't even considered and most people wouldn't recognize the names Llewelyn Moss and Dave Kujan even if they were tacked up on the bulletin board directly behind them.  The bad guys are just cooler.  For me, my favorite all-time (off the top of my head) bad dude is Agent Smith from the Matrix.  Sure he got a little less awesome as the trilogy progress but then so did the entire trilogy.  But the steely menace he exuded as he pursued the whiny/nancy Neo really drove the action of the movie.  In fact while I am at it, here are my top ten movie and television bad guys.  Again, this is completely off the top of my head so I expect to revisit this topic once I stop and expend a neuron or two on it.  There are no criteria or metrics for the order and make up of this list other than my own personal whim.

1. Agent Smith
2. Keyser Soze/Verbal Kent
3. The Thin Man
4. Hans Gruber
5. The Joker
6. Q
7. Ivan Drago
8. Ben Linus
9. Thomas Gabriel
10. Russell Edgington (Russell earned his spot on the list with this exceptional scene)

 With this said, is it really any surprise that this little girl bows down to one of the most iconic baddies in movie history (he didn't make my list because I am a Star Trek guy, not Star Wars - Yoda wants to bring balance to "the Force" when "the Force" was out of balance in his favor.  Yeah that makes a lot of sense).  I mean Darth Vader once slaughtered a whole school of little Jedi's in training.  Is it really smart for an untrained tyke to stand up to him? I think Mace Windu is the real villain in the video below.  Sending a child to certain death and then rudely escorting her off the stage when she won't be his willing sacrifice.  The girl was just being prudent in joining up with the dark side.

This blog poster is sponsored by the Drunken Clam Tavern.

Collateral Damage

I was watching Knight and Day, Tom Cruise's failed attempt to regain his standing at the top of the summer blockbuster hill, the other night and in between the wacky hi-jinks and intricately choreographed gun-play, a thought occurred to me. Even though Tom Cruise is our movie's hero (he's TOM CRUISE, could he be anything than our wise-cracking hero), the people he is killing, maiming, and generally laying waste to with a broad Tom Cruise smile on his face are actually good guys.  The plot of the movie hinges on a betrayal by Tom Cruise's CIA partner.  The always theatrically evil Peter Sarsgaard decides to go rogue and frame our good man Tom Cruise for his crime.  This sends Tom Cruise on the lamb as a gaggle of law enforcement and federal agents attempt to bring him to justice.  The problem is the evil conspiracy does not seem to extend beyond the always evil Sarsgaard.  So when Cruise takes out several agents, he is taking out good men just doing their job in defense of God and country.  Essentially, the subtext of this movie is that it is OK to be a mass murderer of our nation's law enforcers and espionage agents if you believe you have been treated unfairly by "the system".  Can't imagine that is what the film makers where going for but it is there none the less.  Not that this a completely novel element to the modern action movie.  James Bond commonly lays waste to random security guards and soldiers that just happen to have the bad luck of being assigned to work the night shift when Bond breaks in to steal the secret science project from the penthouse office of an evil mastermind.  A secret science project that no minimum wage security guard just trying to get a few bucks into his 401K would have any knowledge of.  They are just trying to see why the alarm is going off on the 16th floor and a man with a license to kill puts a bullet in their head.  Again, not much different from The Matrix that shed no tears for the mindless drones put out of their misery because they couldn't accept "the reality" that select few unplugged knew.  The heroes are not so heroic if thought of from another angle.

This whole diatribe does bring to mind one of my favorite scenes from Clerks (embedded below) where they discuss the morality of killing the contractors that were likely hard at work on the Death Star when the rebels blew it up for the second time.  I still argue that the Knight and Day federal agent isn't in the same category plumber on the Death Star or the roofer working for the mobster.  But it probably does work for the employees of the Rupert Murdock-analog in Tomorrow Never Dies and his Fox News-like organization.

This blog post is sponsored by Cybus Industries.

Chance of Brightest Day, Most Likely Blackest Night

The trailer for the first live-action Green Lantern movie came out last weekend. Unfortunately though, when I call it live-action, I am using the term loosely. And this greatly disappoints me.

I am, of course a bit of sci-fi, comic book dork and in the realm of the superhero universe, Green Lantern was my childhood favorite. Superman was an incredibly boring and unimaginative character and Batman was just too mainstream for my taste. I wanted a B-level star to call my own and Green Lantern fit the bill (my choice of Green Lantern over Batman was for the same nonconformist reason that I chose to root for the New Orleans Saints and Houston Astros despite growing up around Pittsburgh and the greatest sport franchises of all time) . I was sold on the galactic policeman. Of course the cartoons that my fandom was built on didn't contain any of that confusing Book of Oa backstory. Just a man and his ring. But by the time I found out that Green Lantern wasn't that special in the comic book world, one of thousands that include a dog, a squirrel, and a cucumber, he had been imprinted on my amygdala. With the kind of brainwashing that only childhood cartoons can provide, I was very excited to hear that a Green Lantern movie was on the way. Of course, at this point my hopes should have been as high as a Democrat on election day but the lessons of G.I. Joe:Rise of Cobra and Transformers 2 didn't seem to fully set in.

The casting of Ryan Reynolds should have been the first warning sign. Yes, Hal Jordan is a cocky test pilot but the Green Lantern of Hal Jordan and John Stewart are definitely serious stalwart fellows. There is no such authority exuded by the Sexiest Man Alive (or Dead for that matter - I can't imagine a dead body being very sexy). He is the jokey, snarky, ironic guy. Just because Iron Man was such a hit, doesn't mean every superhero from here on out has to be Sherlock Holmes as Tony Stark. But I always like Reynolds going back to his days as a guy in a pizza place so I was willing to overlook Hal Jordan as a poorman's Stark minus the alcoholism. Then I saw the preview.....If they were going to use so much cheap CG, why not just make it an animated feature and call it a day. They couldn't even be bothered to fashion a real suit for GL out of real materials. They had to paint him up like on of the girls in the Sports Illustrated Swim Suit issue. It looked horrible. When the next step after the three new Star Wars movies was the Cartoon Network's Clone Wars. I made complete sense. Nothing looked real in those movies. You might as well forget the expensive actors and just make it all computerized. And that is what we have with the Green Lantern movie. A whole lot of really fake looking CG done at the discount rate compared to the cost of Star Wars. If you were going to do this, why not just make another cartoon movie. At least Green Lantern has several options for his Jar Jar.

This blog post is sponsored by Ferris Aircraft.

And the Oscar for Pretentiousness Goes to....

Way back in the early days of the internet, I used to maintain an unvisited outpost of self-indulgence. A lot like...no...exactly like this blog (hence the reason the original site and the blog share the same name). One game I used to play purely for my own enjoyment was selection of personally sanctioned movie awards. The only qualification for consideration for my prestigious awards was that the film had to make a minimum of 100 million dollars. My motivation in doing this was that I found the Oscars to be less and less representative of reality. I also found them less and less watchable but that is another story. It seemed that as the movie industry began to loss that aura of exclusivity and superiority, the individuals responsible for the Oscars felt they needed to try harder and harder to separate themselves from the rabble. To distinguish themselves. To justify their existence. To establish that they maintain some singular skill and knowledge that the proletariat do not possess. The only way to do this of course is to summarily dismiss any movie that garners popular acclaim in favor of monotonous, ponderous, navel-gazing art house fare that rarely plays outside of L.A. multiplexes. Where once the Oscars honored true classics that are still beloved and watched today, the present day Oscars select movies that were never actually viewed by people who weren't paid to do so and are forgotten to time immortal as soon as the poorly watched telecast ends. Pollack, Atonement, Babel. These aren't good movies. Under any circumstance. They're not even watchable. And the grand tradition continues this year. Despite incredibly popular pieces of art like WALL-E and Dark Knight, we get nominations for Milk and The Reader. Sure, popularity does not equal quality - Twilight and Harry Potter any one - but if a piece of celluloid is really supposed to represent the best work from a period of 365 days, shouldn't someone actually be willing to watch it? As a final proof of how bad this year's nominees are, I give you the following video. The largest moneymaker of all the nominees isn't even original. It is a puffed up, padded, and pompous rip off of a much better movie. The Raspberry Awards have more relevance now a days than the Oscars.

On a side note, given the lobbying, pandering, and slandering that goes into a successful Oscar campaign, you almost have to wonder if this video is the product of the makers of Gran Torino or something.

This blog post is sponsored by Binford Tools.

Order of the Pheonix - A Potter that isn't Horrible

Just saw the most recent Harry Potter movie. I was surprised by the watchability of the thing. The special effects weren't distractingly awful and the movie lacked many of the gaping plot holes that the novels are well known for. The last scene did not consist of long exposition that if shared with Harry at the beginning of the movie would have prevented all of the events of the movie from happening. For a change, I didn't have the feeling that this was a children's movie written by a child. Anyway, I only mention this to give a reason for archiving these Potter-related amusements.

Brothers by Other Mothers

Militant actor George Clooney and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal. Separated at birth or really the same person? Ask yourself this - have you ever seen them in the same place at the same time?

Good Question

Youtube and CNN had the brilliant idea of allowing the voting public to ask the questions at the next Democratic presidential debate. Of course, the questions will be vetted by CNN so I imagine the questions will sound alot like all the other questions asked at all the other debates. Lots of gay marriage, abortion, war, and the evils of George Bush. And a lot of empty answers from spineless Democrats afraid to stand up to the Republican minority. But the thought was nice.

There was one video submission that really struck home with me. It of course focused on the media fixation de jour but the central conceit was right on. It dealt with the out of whack funding priorities in this country. How much money is going into destroying and then rebuilding another country and how little is going into the scientific research that could save lives here in this country for decades to come. Time to put some of that juice into other cups.

By the way, the central plot line of Flight Plan is so ridiculously implausible it ruins the entire movie. No one sees the little girl? No one? And the bad guys entire, elaborate plan rides on this implausibility. How could they possibly even imagine this to be a viable idea for a crime or a movie?