Pilot's Log

Finally saw the movie Rollover after almost thirty-five years of wanting to; it was on Escape Network overnight.  And it has officially become a part of the Hackett Continuum.

I'm sure you won't mind me spoiling it: at a World Trade Center investment bank, an heiress and her banker partner are eyewitnesses (and unwilling catalysts) to a diabolical scheme by a faction of the Saudi government, who (with help from inside men) engineer a massive panic on Wall Street, causing an existing recession to snowball into an all-out Great Depression.

So, this would go a long way to explaining the Hackett world--global economies often determine cycles of war and peace.  Wealth breeds corruption; poverty breeds brutality.

In some phases of your life, you have been a wanderer. You've had a fuzzy sense of where you belong. It has been a challenge to know which target you should aim your arrows at. During those times, you may have been forceful but not as productive as you'd like to be; you may have been energetic but a bit too inefficient to accomplish wonders and marvels. From what I can tell, one of those wandering seasons is now coming to a close. In the months ahead, you will have a growing clarity about where your future power spot is located -- and may even find the elusive sanctuary called "home." Here's a good way to prepare for this transition: Spend a few hours telling yourself the story of your origins. Remember all the major events of your life as if you were watching a movie.

Now that I have a copy of the "Save The Cat" model of storytelling perhaps I could apply it to my life history and see what appears.  Watch this space.

In Roald Dahl's kids' story James and the Giant Peach, 501 seagulls are needed to carry the giant peach from a spot near the Azores all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to New York City. But physics students at the U.K.'s University of Leicester have determined that such a modest contingent wouldn't be nearly enough to achieve a successful airlift. By their calculations, there'd have to be a minimum of 2,425,907 seagulls involved. I urge you to consider the possibility that you, too, will require more power than you have estimated to accomplish your own magic feat. Certainly not almost 5,000 times more, as in the case of the seagulls. Fifteen percent more should be enough. (P.S. I'm almost positive you can rustle up that extra 15 percent.)

Oddly enough I noticed that the film version of Jonathan Livingston Seagull was available on DVD from Oldies.com and I was rather curious about that.  Was it a sign?

Almost six whole years after I first posted about it here I finally got a copy of Sky Crawlers on DVD.

Yes, it's very much a Mamoru Oshii movie.  It's got characters walking around in existential hazes, realism that makes you wonder why it isn't live-action, and even a basset hound.  While there is action--in deadly earnest--it isn't an action movie.  The setting is both real and unreal, and the themes of his previous movies are taken in a different direction.

Basically, this is ONE scene from CATCH-22 transformed into an entire feature movie.  Where in the Heller work (and the movie that came from it) the scene was played for satirical effect, in this case the concept's tragic meaning is thrown to full relief.

FP (who is wrestling with the existential ramifications himself)