Yay! Went to the gym this morning. I was feeling somewhat on the flabby side, even after only one week off.

This last weekend I did 2 skydives this weekend; one a fun jump and one AFF level 3 dive. This 2 dives a weekend is pretty pathetic; I want to hit the 1,000 jump mark by my birthday so let's see: I need 68 jumps and there's 13 weekends between here and then. I should be doing about 5 jumps a weekend. I just wish it would hurry up and get warmer.

So what did I do with the rest of my weekend? I watched a few movies. They all had one thing in common: mediocrity.

I finished Battle of Britain. For an English movie it reminded me heavily of american war movies like Midway or even Titanic: Take a historical moment for a backdrop and create some fictional characters to help 'personalize' the story. In this case I wasn't really interested in the characters - too bad, because the cast included Christopher Plummer, Amanda York, Michael Caine, Robert Shaw, and Edward Fox. (Seeing Shaw and Fox together reminded me of Force 10 from Navarone, a movie I haven't thought of in years, for the second time in a few weeks. I know it ain't great but I had to put it on my Netflix queue). Anyway: spiffy flight sequences featuring mainly Spitfires and Stukkas.

Then my day got even more mediocre - Raid on Rommel. Can a British commando train a rag tag group of P.O.W's mainly consisting of hospital personnel to blow up some guns in Tobruk? I guess if they are led by Richard Burton.

A quick aside: someone once complained about Laurence Olivier that the trouble with his acting is that you can tell he knows he's acting. Or to put it in another way, he reminds me of Jon Lovitz's character, Master Thespian. Not so exaggerated, but really: watch Olivier any time he acts. His acting is self-conciously stylized. I mention Olivier because he was in Battle of Britain. And I mention his acting style to bring up Richard Burton - he's another Master Thespian.

Anyway back to Raid on Rommel. Actually, no - I have nothing further to add. It was boring.

Now for something completely different, I saw Metroland, with Christain Bale and Emily Watson. This movie had considerable Bale nudity (including a brief flash of frontal naughty bits), mostly from sex scenes. So what - this movie was mediocre, too. Far more interesting than Raid on Rommell but still I was unaffected.

Bale plays a man in his 30's who lives with his wife and baby daughter in the suburbs of late 70's London (nicknamed 'Metroland'). An old friend of his who is still living la vida loca comes by for a visit and tries to entice him into leaving his middle-class existence. A lot of the movie is Bale's flashbacks to when he was a young man living in Paris and the love affair he had with a french woman and how he met his English wife (Watson). I adore Bale, Watson is a terrific actress, but I still just can't recommend this movie. Maybe it was because suburbia is just plain boring, maybe it was the copious 70's hair. Eh.

And to cap off a mediocre weekend, last night Jon and I sat down to eat and I searched TiVo for something to watch. I was delighted to see that it had recorded The Taking of Pelham 123, a crime movie with Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau from the mid-70's. It is about a gang of robbers who take a New York subway train hostage. I bet I haven't seen that movie since it was in the theaters, but I remember I really enjoyed it.

Well dammit I hit play and something looks wrong. WTF - Vincent D'onofrio is in it. Excuse me, was he even alive in 1974? (I checked - he was 15.) Then Donnie Wahlberg sporting an amusing blond 'do shows up! (As Mr. Gray. Damn that was funny in an obscure way). Even though TiVo listed the original movie date and actor roster, I was watching a frickin made-for-TV remake!

D'onofrio had the unfortunate task of playing Robert Shaw's character, Mr. Blue. He just ain't Robert Shaw. Well, nobody can fill Shaw's shoes; boy do I miss him. Nobody could play overbearing, aggressive, and loud like he could. Shaw was his own definition of machismo. Vincent D'onofrio - well, he plays wierdos real well. And he does a wicked Orson Welles impersonation.

Walter Matthau's character was played by Edward James Olmos and Lorraine Braccho. I have *no* idea why they felt the need to cast his character as 2 separate people but they did.If I have strong memories of a movie I saw as an 11 year old kid, it must have had something going for it. This remake was just eh. Blah. I was not happy. So I have slipped the original on my Netflix queue to see if my memories have merit.

This is a long entry - here's my top 7 favorite woman characters. I couldn't think of 10! I'm trying to decide if it is because there just aren't that many movies with women I like (I compared my list of favorite men to favorite women- they tend to share the same qualities I admire) or if there just aren't many movies with interesting women in them period. It is true, however, that the movies I like simply don't have many women in them.


7) Lindsey Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, The Abyss

Yes, I find it interesting that two characters from James Cameron movies made it to this list. I would have included Sarah Connor but I decided two was enough. For a while there Cameron was The God of Action movies.

Lindsey Brigman was remarkably different from Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley because she was not instantly likeable. She refers to herself as a 'cast-iron bitch' and indeed that a fairly accurate description. But the biggest bitchy quality seems to be vindictiveness. She is merely abrasive. She is an engineer, dammit, and she dislikes anything getting in the way of her projects. She and Bud (ex-listee Ed Harris) are on the verge of divorce, and the wonder is why did he get married to her in the first place?

In one sequence they are trapped in a submersible with only one usable scuba unit. They are a good distance away from safety (at a depth of 2000 ft+) and their submersible is filling with water. In desperation, Bud asks her to think of a way to get them both back safely. She suggests to let her drown and he can haul her back to the rig and revive her. Of course he protests vehemently, but she convinces him it's the only rational choice. You see then one of his biggest attractions to her: her intelligence. It's also the scene that made me like her. I find this movie severely flawed but I really like both of these characters.

6) Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell, His Girl Friday)

This movie was made when Romantic Comedies were romantic AND funny. His Girl Friday was directed by Howard Hawks, a filmmaker whose work always strikes me as hardheaded and practical. That's what I loved about Hildy Johnson - she is a hardheaded, practical journalist in a very male-dominated business. Russell's and Cary Grant's smart dialog in this movie is rightly regarded as classic.

5) Eowyn (Miranda Otto, The Lord of the Rings)

One of the few female characters in this famous trilogy. When the movies were being made I remember my
one real hope was that they would give this character justice. For the most part they did; the scene where Eowyn and Merry put a hurting on the Nazgul is truly a joy to watch. I was sorry they gave her (and Faramir) such short shrift at the end of the series, but the movie was long enough as it was. Here's hoping some of that is restored in the DVD edition.

4) Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand, Fargo)

Marge is the super-competent and seven-months pregnant Chief of police for Brainerd, Minnesota. She (and her relationship with her husband) is the warm center of this super-cold and super-funny movie about a kidnapping gone horribly awry. And holy cow, what an appetite.

3) Wing Chun (Michelle Yeoh, Wing Chun)

If I recall the legend correctly, Wing Chun developed the classic Wing Chun style of kung fu to get out of an arranged marriage with a horrible man. None of that is shown in this movie; this must happen after those events where she takes on some bandits that are threatening her village. This movie is light-hearted and many asses are kicked.

2) Dana Scully ( Gillian Anderson The X-Files)

Yeah, it's a TV character but a movie did make it to the big screen so I get to claim her. Ultra-smart, level headed, the calm foil and anchor to Mulder's manic-depressive wild speculations.

1) Ellen Ripley ( Sigourney Weaver, Aliens)

The Ripley character has been in 4 movies, but the only one where she mattered to me was this one. Alienwas good but the characters, all of them, were distant. She got to live because it was pro forma for one woman to live in a 'pick them off one by one' horror movie. That's right, Alien is the stylized cousin to Friday the 13th and Halloween.

In Aliens, however, Ripley is humanized. I'd like to recommend tracking down the extended edition which has two scenes that add to the character. In one scene we learn that Ripley had a young daughter who grew up and died of old age while she was in hibernation drifting along in outer space. This makes her bonding to Newt, the sole surviving colonist more understandable. The second scene is just before she leaves the ship to go rescue Newt. She checks on the one surviving Marine if he's okay, calling him by his last name, Hicks. He tells her his name is Dwayne. She replies "Ellen". A nice humanizing touch before she proceeds to kick alien ass.

That's pathetic. If anyone out there has some recommendations to add to this list, I'm all ears.