The Patient

Upon opening up the patient's door, I saw the most remarkable face. His face could only be described as one of character. His face had the wisdom of the ages, it appeared as though he had been through a lot of tragedy. Mottled, wrinkled, a weathered, his face was a piece of aged parchment, a thousand years old. The potpourri a nurse had placed on the patient's table didn't really do much to combat the stench of cigarette smoke. Eyes veridian in colour stared at me without really seeing me, sending deep chills through my bones. Resting underneath a muddy brown pageboy cap was a white, tangled nest of candy-floss hair. He gestured me to take a seat, and I glanced down at his hands. They were easily the most aged part of his body. The withered and lined hands were similar to those of an ancient Egyptian mummy. Just looking at his hand, calloused and tabacco-stained, one would think that they were those of a dead man. Staring quizically at me for a moment, he poses the question, "Who are you, and why are you here?"
My eyes sparkling like a prism in the sun, welling up with tears, I answer him, "It's me Grandpa. Don't you remember?"

To be or not to be? No, I am!

I am a leader in my community. I can often be seen juggling chainsaws, saving kittens from vicious dogs and writing novels in Swahili. People see me as the girl reading the entire set of encyclopedias and planting trees. I recycle everything. Occasionally I swim the English Channel in 3 hours. I impress people with my doctoral skills (I was an emergency surgeon at the age of 10), and my astounding ability to make the bagpipes sound beautiful. My soufflés never collapse. Using only my voice, I single-handedly saved the entire Amazon rainforest. Oprah comes to me for advice. I speak Latin fluently, read daily, and have actually watched all of War and Peace, without falling asleep. In my spare time, I build replicas of World War II tanks using only macaroni and a glue stick. The FBI and the KGB trust me. I jump, I spin, I create, and I win. Writing haikus with only 14 syllables isn’t difficult.
I’m a big deal
You see me and are impressed
Math is fun
I breed prize-winning labradoodles. I know the time from the position of the sun, what direction I’m facing from the stars and why the Earth is round. I have spoken to Leonardo da Vinci. Years ago I invented a time machine, but forgot to get it patented. I only write in purple ink. I have won pumpkin-carving contents in Salem, writing contests in Spain, and geography bees in Somalia. On my eleventh birthday, I got a letter from Hogwarts, but couldn’t make it to Platform 9 3/4 on time. I have read Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Yes, I have done all of those things, with ease, but I have yet
To find a college who will believe me.

It Ain't Over Until the Fat Lady Sings....

If looks could kill, I would be dead. But I stood my ground. The wind whistled, the sun blared overhead and the tumbleweed blew. But I had nothing to fear but fear itself. We stared at each other, eye to eye, man to man.

"Where'd he go?" Curley growled, " I got a bone to pick with that two-faced murderer

I just played dumb as a post, "Well, I dunno, you sure played him for a fool, didn' ya?"

He didn't like that so much. His face turned redder than a tomato. He lunged at me quick as a fox, but I was faster than a speeding bullet, and his face met the cold, hard dirt. He got up, pride shaken and looked at me with a murderous gleam in his eye. I, clearly, was barking up the wrong tree, since Curley thought he was the best thing since sliced bread. Curley ran at me again, but this time I didn't get away fast enough. He knocked me out cold.

When I finally woke up, it was like waking up for the first time. My world seemed shiny like a new dime. Until I saw Curley's ugly as sin face, then it was a whole new ball game. My hands were tied, and Curley had a gun, and my life, in his hand.

"That Lennie's a bald-faced liar, bad to the bone, cold-blooded killer. And you can bet your bottom-dollar that I will blow his brains out!" he screamed at me. He mounted his noble steed, leaving me in the dust.

I escaped my prison, and ran like the wind. I knew I had to find Lennie before Curley did.

Yes,Dear

"Everyday all you do is read that silly paper! All you care about is all the tragedy in the world! Why don't you start paying some attention to me, your wife? Why don't you ask me how my day went, for once?" snarled Jane.
Hugo lowered his glasses and glanced at his furious wife. "Alright," he replied in soothing tones, "how did your day go today dear?"
Jane took a deep breath and released a torrent of words, "Just plain awful! My roses won't grow, my lilacs are drooping, the neighbours were giving me strange looks, and, and..."
"This, this is why I don't ask you how your day went," muttered Hugo.
"Are you even listening to me?"
"Of course, dear."
"No, of course you're not, only a husband who even remotely cares whould listen!" Jane screeched, getting more and more angry by the minute.
Hugo raised his hands in a gesture of innocence, and suggested, "Perhaps, if you did something more interesting, something worth noticing, I would pay more attention to you."
"Like everything you do is so interesting," Jane sneered, cackling with fury, "you're an accountant! You really think I like listening to all your supposedly witty stories about numbers that all your office drones laugh at? You could be the most boring person on the face of this planet!"
"Now Jane, just calm down..."
"I'm perfectly calm," Jane claimed. "I won't bring up the subject again, I promise." "But, by the way," Jane smiled sweetly, "we're getting a divorce."
Hugo's face went as gray as the newsprint he was still holding. "What?" he stammered. Jane continued smiling for a moment, then rolled over and went to sleep.

A year later, Hugo opened up the paper, like he did every evening, and gasped at what he saw on the second page. The headline of the London Tribunal read, "Jane Goodall Saves Chimps From Extinction", with a blown-up picture of a woman and the chimps she just saved. The woman? Hugo's ex-wife.

And so the Men Step on the Mice...

Beatrice Strait won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1976 for the movie Network . Her screen time? Just five minutes and 40 seconds. Is it really plausible for a person to completely develop an entire character in just 5 minutes? Furthermore, is it plausible to completely develop an entire theme of a movie in just 5 minutes? In the 1992 version of Of Mice and Men, Joe Morton, the actor who plays Crooks, has to do just that. While not a huge component of the novel of the same name, Crooks symbolizes the discriminated in John Steinbeck's microcosm of society. To boil down that entire symbol, the entire theme of what loneliness can do to a person, to just over five minutes of a two hour movie simply isn't good screen writing. What Morton did with those few lines is pure gold though. He combined the meanness George was supposed to have had, with the desperation of a man downtrodden, into a character Steinbeck himself would have been proud of. However, one thing that should have perhaps been included was Crooks asking George and Lennie if he could become a part of their ranch, that would further explore the power that dreams can hold on a person. The way Crooks was portrayed and written is arguably one of the best elements in the entire film, and certainly the best element transferred fro text to screen. Crooks' character is definitely as fantastic in the movie as he was under-looked by the ranch hands in the novel.

A Timely Visit

"Has the stress of the day ever made you feel insane? Made you feel as though it might just be easier to live in simpler times?" the overly cheery TV announcer practically shouts at me. Yeah, I think to myself, maybe it would be nice just to live in an era where there was no computers, no cell phones, no televisions. I picture myself in a small cottage with a roaring fire and not a trace of modern technology, me in a dated skirt and blouse. I force myself to return back to my own world. Oddly enough the same ad was playing.
"We here at FT Industries believe that no one should be forced to spend their days stuck in their own time! Just one payment of $29.95 could grant you this wonderful power, based on centuries' worth of knowledge!
"If I could control time," I mutter to myself, "I would pay FT Industries much more than $29.95."
"Really?" a snide voice from the corner of the room questioned. "How much would you be willing to pay?" The man was clearly ancient, wrinkled from head to Grecian- sandaled toe. He also had the most peculiar thing around his neck, an enormous hourglass.
"Well, I think that if I could control time, if you could give me that power, I would pay you 10 times that." I reply, trying my best to ignore his very eccentric appearance. "But you would have to explain yourself first."
"I am," he begins in the most pompous voice I have ever heard, "Father Time, master of all time, and I will give you a share of my abilities for $295.95!"
I contemplate this for a moment and decide if this guy was a fraud, then I would learn my lesson and never watch infomercials again. But if he was real? Then I would be able to control time for virtually nothing. He did appear out of nowhere, a fact that was still flummoxing me. I ask him if takes Visa, and he takes my card and returns me a slip to sign. Then he snaps his fingers and leaves me alone, powerless, and feeling like a complete fool. So I sit back down on my couch when the most strange feeling washes over me. It's a curious mixture of nostalgia and happiness, and it doesn't go away. Maybe it did work after all? I concentrate hard on willing all time to stop, visualize the hands of the clock coming to a standstill, and snap my fingers expectantly. All time stopped. It was so eerily silent the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I went outside and surveyed my surroundings-a gridlock of frozen cars, water from sprinklers halted in mid-air, and a man whom I had just saved from cutting his entire hand off with a saw. Quickly I walked over and unplugged the saw, saving the poor man from a lot of pain. I snapped my fingers and the world came alive again. Then I return back to the inside of my house, smiling slightly as I watch the man whose hand I saved, stare, perplexed, at the unplugged cord. I glance back at my TV, which is now showing some program on Michaelangelo, and I suddenly have the most intriguing idea. Could I teleport to other places when I go through time? I close my eyes and focus on Florence, Italy in 1501, and snap my fingers again. Before even open my eyes,I smell the most enchanting of smells- wonderful Italian food and finely made wine. I hear the bustle of people, the soft clip-clop of horses, but not a single car, or the doleful purr of those Vespa scooters the Italians are so fond of. Upon opening my eyes, I see the many famous buildings of Florence in their infancy. Then I fully take in my surroundings. I appear to be in a workshop of some kind, and the man staring intently at his work of art, has not seemed to notice me. With closer inspection, the work of art appears to be David, Michaelangelo's most famous statue.
"What to call it?" the small, dark man vexes in Italian, which I now seem to understand perfectly. Father Time certainly did a good job with giving me powers! But I'm confused, the statue is clearly David, why can't Michaelangelo realize such a simple name?
" I was under the impression it was David." I reply, causing the artist to jump, but then he forgets his fear and considers what I've said.
"David, David, David," he mutters, "so simple, so classic, just like his proportions. It's perfect! Thank you kind stranger for giving me the perfect name to the perfect piece of art!"
Well, I guess my work here is done, and I snap my fingers to go back to my own time, my own house. When I'm there I start to think. Sure these powers are fantastic, but if I have them, then I need to make sure that I do some good with them. As I trudge up the stairs to go to bed, it was a exceedingly long day, I realize that if I could have any superpowers, it would be time-travel, and maybe, just, maybe, Father Time already knew that.

These Bones May Be Lovely, But the Film Sure Isn’t

Imagine the world. Now imagine it without you into it. That's the sole basis for Director Peter Jackson’s, “The Lovely Bones”, based on a novel by Alice Sebold of the same name. One day, a girl named Susie, “like the fish”, Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) decides to wander into a mysterious cornfield and go with her decidedly creepy neighbor, Mr. Harvey, to his underground shelter. Who can guess what happens next? Well, she certainly doesn’t get away, and the rest of the film depicts her in heaven as well as her family in their grieving process.

Understandably, Susie’s death must have been hard to film, and hard to make it appropriate for the younger audiences watching it. However, the whole scene after Susie was killed was rather confusing to anyone who hasn’t read the book, where it is made clear to exactly what has happened. For just a moment it seemed as though Susie had made it out alive, and was really running away from Mr. Harvey, not just leaving Earth. It wasn’t until she was calling for her Mr. Jack Salmon, who was portrayed wonderfully by Mark Wahlberg, that anyone realized what was going on. The death was made harder to understand by the fact that there was no implied death at the underground shelter, just Susie running away, interchanged with picturesque views of the idyllic family life when the Salmons are eating their supper, unaware of what has happened.

When the Salmon family finally does realize what has happened, they are instantly devastated, and there are moving performances throughout the cast, especially Rachel Weisz’s atypical portrayal of the grieving mother. One thing that Jackson neglected to include was the memorial for Susie, where I would have like to see George Harvey, as included in the book. Upstairs, Susie has discovered the not-quite-heaven Inbetween, a place where you can have everything you want, or that’s how it as described in the novel anyways. In the film adaptation, Susie’s heaven was just an array of fantastic special effects, such as the glass bottle with ships in them, but with little relevance to what her heaven was supposedly like. It also appeared as though only Mr. Harvey’s, who was a long-running serial killer, victims were there. Jackson did away with people like Frannie, Susie’s guidance counselor and Bethel Untermeyer, Susie’s old neighbor. While Jackson did do a good job on the visuals of Susie’s heaven, it was a far cry from the humbler version that Sebold took her time to create.

While some of the less important plot details of the novel, such as Abigail (Rachel Weisz)'s affair with Detective Len Fenerman (Michael Imperiloi, who nailed the "good cop" routine) were scrapped from the film, which makes sense, the ending, however, was true to the book. Stanley Tucci's evil, sinister, and loathsome character of Mr. George Harvey dies in the most peculiar of manners-death by icicle. This happens in both the film and the novel, and then the Salmon family moves on completely, Abigail returning to her husband, and Susie's little sister Lindsey finding a seemingly happy life with one true love Sam. But what of Buckley, Susie's little brother? He doesn't seem to age at all, and just disappears part way through the movie. Poor, overlooked little Buckley. Now Susie, once she has finally fulfilled her life's desire- to kiss Ray Singh (Reece Ritchie), decides to let go of all life on Earth and move on to heaven-the real heaven, not the one Salvador Dali created. And yes, all of that happen in the book, a politically-correct Hollywood ending.

Overall I would give this movie a 3/10. Good cast, bad screenwriters. Shame on you Fran Walsh!