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The Big Boss
I recently watched ‘The Big Boss’ again with my son. This movie from 1971 start Bruce Lee in his first major film role as the leading star. It is vintage Bruce Lee, including extreme close ups of his face, grimacing, the tasting of blood before he really unleashes his devils, the howling sounds he makes and of course the lightning fast kicks and punches in fight sequences with Bruce Lee bare chested against dozens of adversaries. At the start we see Lee going into ‘hiding’ in Thailand to get away from the fights he keeps getting into at home. Although…
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Apollo 13
This movie with Tom Hanks playing Jim Lovell came out in 1995. It is about the disastrous Apollo 13 flight and based on the book ‘Lost Moon’ by Jim Lovell. Apollo 13 was the third flight scheduled to land on the moon and so got little prior attention from the press. That changed dramatically after an oxygen tank exploded on the spacecraft on the way to the moon. Instead of landing on the moon the three astronauts and ground control have only one objective left which is to bring the astronauts back safely to Earth. The movie largely depicts the…
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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling (ISBN 978-1408855676, Bloomsbury)
The third Harry Potter book. As you probably know each Potter book follows Harry during a year at Hogwarts school of Magic. So, in book 1 he was 11 years old and going to his first year. In The Prisoner of Azkaban we meet Harry during the summer at his uncle and aunt awaiting the third school year at Hogwarts. As Harry grows older the story evolves with him. Where the first 2 books were light and mainly humorous in tone, things start to turn dark in book number 3. Summers at his uncle and aunt are always a torment…
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File extensions
Ever wonder where these (mostly) 3 letter file extensions come from ? Here are 14 common ones : .bat : batch .bmp : bitmap .cfg : configuration .doc : document .exe : executable .flac : free lossless audio codec .gif : graphics interchange format .jpg : joint photographic experts group .nfo : information .png : portable network graphics .ppt : powerpoint .tmp : temporary .txt : text .wav : wave
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The Last Stand
This 2013 movie was directed by South Korean Keen-woo Kim and stars Arnold Schwarzenegger in his first lead role 10 years after Terminator 3. Arnold plays Ray Owens, a former LAPD policeman who has retreated to being sheriff of the quiet bordertown Summerton Junction, far away from the violence of LA. Unfortunately the quiet life is soon about to end as a Mexican drug lord manages to escape and heads for Summerton Junction at high speed in souped up Corvette. His men are already on site secretly building a bridge across the canyon so that the drug lord can make…
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Safe
This is a movie from 2012 starring Jason Statham. It could also have been called Save as Statham plays Luke Wright, ex cop, now living as a tramp because the Russian maffia threaten to kill everyone he talks with for more than 5 minutes. Finally ready to give up and throw himself in front of a subway train his path crosses with that of Mei, a little girl working for the Chinese maffia and on the run for the same Russian maffia. She saves Luke from suicide, he saves her from the mob. After this intro the movie becomes the…
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Star Trek 10. Nemesis
The last movie with the TNG crew and the end of a 10 movie series that began with ‘Star Trek. The Motion Picture’ in 1979 and ends with ‘Star Trek. Nemesis’ in 2002. The first 5 movies suffered from varying quality and seemed to struggle to translate the themes central to TOS episodes into stories worthy of a full length movie picture stories but from ‘Star Trek. The Undiscovered Country’ onwards this was no longer an issue. From that moment the movies expanded thematically and stylistically bringing something different every time. The transition from TOS to TNG crew was nicely…
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Star Trek 9. Insurrection
Movie number 9, the third TNG based one. And another good one if you ask me. It has drama, suspense and mystery, betrayal and even a love story with Picard as one of the lovers. Of course it stays all very dignified, Picard never losing control. The movie starts with Data malfunctioning and being out of control on an undercover mission on the planet of the Ba’ku. The Enterprise goes to pick him up and to investigate the reason his malfunctioning. While doing so they uncover a plot against the Ba’ku in violation of the Prime Directive. The crew of…
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Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character, Richard Feynman, Ralph Leighton (ISBN 978-0393061321, W. W. Norton & Company)
This 500+ pages book contains all the stories from Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman and What do you care what other people think. If you have already read these 2 books and maybe own them then there is not much new. Unless you are a true fan. There is a foreword by Freeman Dyson and an afterword by actor Alan Alda. From these I learned a few new things like that there has been a play about Feynman by Alan Alda called QED. The stories also have been reordered a bit compared to how they appeared in the 2 separate…
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Star Trek 8. First Contact
This is the first completely TNG movie without any TOS characters involved anymore. In it 2 stories are cleverly intertwined. The first one is the one about how humankind developed the warp drive and made contact with the Vulcans, the First Contact with extra terrestrials. The second one is about the Borg attack on Earth to assimilate humanity. Before being destroyed by the Enterprise the Borg launch a sphere that travels back in time in order to prevent the first warp flight and ET contact resulting from it and by doing so avoid the Federation ever being formed. The opening…
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