Tag Archives: weird

Ground Zero, In Passing

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I finally pass by an area I’d been avoiding.

We passed by Ground Zero in New York City the other day while going to the movies. I’d been avoiding lower Manhattan — something that’s pretty easy to do when you live 2,400 miles away and visit New York infrequently — since the World Trade Center’s twin towers disappeared from the skyline.

Ground ZeroBut Sunday I was there.

It’s amazing how much you can see of the area with the buildings gone. I could see Trinity Church and the old Woolworth Building (the tallest building in the world for 13 years, topped by the Chrysler Building and later the Empire State Building in 1934). We were on the west side of Ground Zero; evidently, the tourist stuff is on the east side. From our view, it just looked like a big construction site. Very big — four city blocks. Of course, I didn’t get a picture of it from the theater’s windows; the shot here is from the car.

I feel kind of weird about the way Ground Zero is being treated as a tourist attraction. I hope most people are very respectful to the site in remembrance of the thousands who died there. I don’t think that people who don’t know New York can understand the significance of the attack and buildings’ collapse. Lower Manhattan is occupied by literally hundreds of thousands of people on a typical workday morning. Those buildings were each 1/4 mile tall. If they had fallen any way but straight down, the body count and damage to New York would have been far, far worse. Any New Yorker can tell you how lucky the city is that the buildings came almost straight down. And any New Yorker who was in lower Manhattan that day can tell you, without exaggeration, how lucky they are to be alive.

The DaVinci Code — The Movie

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Worse than the book?

That’s what the review on Slate said: the movie was worse than the book. I didn’t believe it.

Silly me.

I also poo-pooed Mike’s cousin Ricky, who didn’t want to see the movie because it had only gotten 1-1/2 stars. (I don’t know where he saw that rating.) It couldn’t be that bad, I argued. I’d seen a positive review just that morning on a network news show in our hotel room.

Ricky was stuck with us — he missed his flight on Sunday morning and called us to rescue him from the airport. We dragged him to dim sum in Fort Lee and around New York’s SoHo and south Village — which he seemed to enjoy — and then to the Battery Park Regency 11 Theater for the movie.

A few weird things about this particular theater. First of all, it’s on the 5th (or so) floor of the building. You buy your ticket at street level, then proceed up a series of escalators, one of which takes you at least two floors up. The escalators run along the east side of the building where windows look out — right at Ground Zero. (More on that in another post.)

The movie was boring. It seemed to follow the book pretty closely — I read the book about two years ago, so I don’t remember it perfectly well. What’s weird about the movie is that the book is so widely read that you’d expect everyone in the theater to know the punchline — that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, who bore his child after the crucifixion. Yet that punchline wasn’t delivered until more than halfway through the movie. I guess it makes sense because it was probably delivered halfway through the book, too. But when the information was presented in the movie, I felt like saying, “Yeah, and…?” As if there should be more. But there wasn’t.

I think Tom Hanks’s acting capabilities were completely wasted on this movie. There wasn’t much real acting to do. Just deliver the same lines that were in the book — poor dialog to begin with. There was an awful lot of tell rather than show. In the scenes in Teabing’s house, it appeared that Hanks’s character already knew much of what Teabing told Sophie — if that was the case, why didn’t he just tell her before? Of course, this is a book complaint — not a movie complaint — because the movie followed the book. I guess if you make a movie that closely follows a bad book, you’ll end up with a bad movie.

The guy who played Teabing — who also played the bad guy in at least one X-Men movie — did a much better acting job. But I think that’s because his character wasn’t flat and lifeless like the other characters in the book.

Flashbacks were distracting and overused, especially the historic ones. It was like watching a History Channel documentary. You know the kind. Where they get actors to re-enact scenes from history?

I left the movie feeling as if I’d gained nothing from the experience of seeing it.

Ricky said the movie’s music was overpowering. He said that was a sign of a bad movie. I liked the soundtrack, but agree that it sometimes did more work than it should have.

But I wasn’t impressed with the movie at all. It was just a visual representation of what was in the book. And since what was in the book wasn’t anything that needed to be visualized, the movie wasn’t anything special.

Did you see The DaVinci Code? What did you think? Use the Comments link to share your thoughts. I’d be interested in reading what other people who read the book and saw the movie have to say.

Sedona Update

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Good news for pilots flying into Sedona.

I did a Sedona charter today. It was a birthday gift for one of my passengers. His girlfriend had me fly the two of them up to Sedona where they went on a Jeep tour with the Pink Jeep Tour company there. Then I flew them back to Wickenburg.

Both flights were great — smooth and uneventful. I flew the helicopter from Wickenburg to downtown Prescott, then skirted around the south end of Prescott’s airspace over Prescott Valley, crossed over Mingus Mountain at the 89A pass, flew past Jerome, then toured the red rocks north of there all the way into Sedona. Although I expected the flight back to be hot and bumpy, I was very pleased to be wrong. Bumpier and hotter than the trip out — yes. But not too bumpy or hot to enjoy. We flew from Sedona past the south end of Cottonwood, over the tail end of Mingus Mountain, over the weird mountain town of Crown King, and straight into Wickenburg. Total flight time: 1.7 hours.

The good news for pilots flying into Sedona is this:

First, the restaurant, which was supposed to close for good in May (this month) is remaining open. So you can still get breakfast or lunch or dinner on that wonderful shady patio or indoors — with red rock views either way. I had lunch there today while waiting for my passengers and really enjoyed a nice, leisurely meal in the shade, with a cool, comfortably breeze keeping me feeling refreshed.

Second, the terminal now has wireless Internet access. So if you show up with a laptop or other computing device that uses wireless networking, you can hop on the net, do your e-mail, or surf to your heart’s content. That’s a nice thing when you find yourself waiting a few hours for your passengers.

It was a nice day out — the first flight since my surgery — and it felt good to be in the sky again. I had great passengers and I think they really enjoyed themselves.

Sedona is still my favorite charter.