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The Breakfast Club gang

Sad news today with reports that John Hughes, legendary 1980s writer/director of such movies as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (among others), has died age 59 of a heart attack.

ABC Online

While I was almost too young to get most of those movies in their original release, as they filtered to me on video through the late 80s, I was a real fan, at least of his topline stuff. Movies like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller (likely his two best) really did speak to kids in the 80s, as good as any filmmaker ever has.

Sure they’re kind of dated now, but they’re still universal at their core at the same time, and that’s what matters. They really worked with character, humour and honesty in dealing with young characters and their lives, and that’s all anyone could ask for.

Not to mention the music — again, kind of dated, but some outstanding work for its time went into his movies, from the likes of Simple Minds and Psychadelic Furs, not to mention the Beatles reworking in Ferris Bueller.

His most successful project, Home Alone, gave me a chuckle at the time, but in retrospect seems pretty pathetic, and his few projects after that were even worse. No matter… by then Hughes seemed to have turned his back on Hollywood. He’d been a recluse for 15+ years, so his loss seems almost anti-climactic in a “cinematic impact” way. He’d left the industry a long time ago.

But his best works will always be remembered, and are worth a re-watching if you get a chance.

Actually in more ways than one…

It’s Sallie and I’s third wedding anniversary. Which is big, and good… but also to be mostly ignored.

Because it will be our third son’s birthday… Sallie is off to hospital in the morning to have our child delivered, and I will be there of course. It’s all been so routine and organised, and we knew the delivery (by caesarian, as necessitated from our previous two children) date from weeks ago would be the same as our anniversary. It’s just how it worked out, and there wasn’t much we could do to change it.

So I need to go and get some sleep soon, likely to prepare for a lack of sleep coming up. Not that I can’t sleep through anything of course… even when I try not to!

But I’ll be there to help, with another week and a half off work, and I’ll mostly be there for Will and Alex, who should make the whole experience quite memorable in their own unique ways. Sallie will be in hospital until at least the weekend, and I’ll be running the show at home and keeping the two boys in line.

It should be another boy that comes home next week, despite Sallie’s still existing wish to the contrary (ha!), and I don’t actually think life will change that much. There will be a new face to love, but otherwise we’re all good already. We appear to have the parenting thing going okay now

Pics and news right here tomorrow as soon as I get a chance!

Just realised, that, give or take a few days, it’s been 10 years since I moved out of home and moved in with my girlfriend, who eventually became my wife.

Ten years. Doesn’t seem like a long time, but it’s nearly a third of my life, and a hell of a good time

In that time, I’ve lived in seven different houses, in … Carlingford, Newtown, Wanniassa (Canberra), Newtown again, Westmead, Wentworthville and now Blacktown. Didn’t always move because I wanted to, haven’t always been that happy with the house. All rentals, though maybe that will change soon.

But it’s not the house you live in of course, it’s who you live with. We had roommates a couple of times, real poorly the first time, not too bad the second. But it’s been Sallie and I for all that time, and then Will, and Alex, and soon another little guy (didn’t know that? Will elaborate here soon…) And various pets of course, mostly cats. It’s all about family, and it’s worked for me.

Wow… ten years…

I actually reviewed a lot of things here this year. Some of my best:

Best music: The Hold Steady, Stay Positive. Reviews

Best movie: Wall-E. Review

Best US TV: Burn Notice. Review. Best local: Underbelly. The guide

Best news: Obama wins. Posts

Here I sit, at our family place in Nelson Bay, thankfully feeling better (but hardly perfect), and planning our night’s activities, and thinking about the year that was. Only about five hours left in the year, and it’s certainly been a varied one.

Really don’t go for all that “year that was” stuff, so there’s really only two things I want to mentioned here. I wrote a bit over 450 blog posts this year — at least one for every single calendar day this year. That’s more than twice as many as I’d written in the entire 6 and a half years of the blog prior to that, and I’m really pleased with my efforts. Obviously they’re not all gold entries, but I’m more interested in the regular effort and the regular committment to keeping this going, something I haven’t been on top of enough in previous years. So top marks there, and here’s to another year of full-on blogging!

Until November, I thought it was going to be another dud year for my fiction writing. Then a couple of things happened. We finally sorted some finances out enough to get ourselves new laptops — I got an eeePC 1000 — and I entered the NanoWriMo competition. Incidentally, I didn’t actually pass that, writing 26,000 words in November, but then I wrote another 20,000 words in December. I’m at 46,000 words as of now, this month’s effort slightly curtailed by Christmas activities and the illness of the last few days. But still — 46000 words of fiction written in two months. I expect to finish this novel draft in January, and even if this one doesn’ t work, I’ll go straight on to a new one. This sort of word count seems amazing, and it’s more fiction than I’ve written in the previous 2-3 years. It should be mentioned that the laptop brought new productivity, via reclaiming my time spent of the train every day. I get upwards of two hours every week day on the train, which with my laptop means at least 1000 words every week day. Of course, it seems harder to write anywhere else, but I’ll take what I can get.

So those are my two great activity triumphs this year. Regular day job stuff has been way more mixed, to the point that I hardly even want to mention it. And for 2009, that’s either going to get much better or much worse very quickly. But that’s the way of the world I gues, especially as is being forcast for 2009. Would rather not concentrate on that!

So, if I don’t post here again until the new year, Happy New Year to all, be safe, have fun, treat those close to you well, and enjoy yourself. First up for the year will be blog highlights, New Year’s Resolutions and a look at TV highlights for the coming year.

Went out to some local second-hand markets this morning, a first in our new local area. Nothing unusual about that, since we go to markets a lot. But these were a little different, as they’re held on Sunday morning at the Blacktown Twin Drive-in. And…

One, I didn’t know they existed still, and two, I’m fairly sure I’ve never been to a drive-in movie anyway.

I don’t know what happened or why it happened, but drive-ins just seemed to die out. Somewhere in the 80s I think, they just started to disappear. I guess it was business as much as anything else — the move to shopping mall megaplexes and super-sound — but it’s odd that in a time where everything else was going drive-in or through as at least an option, it just stopped for movies. It seemed like a romantic thing from the 50s and 60s, but apparently it just went right out of fashion.

Yet the Blacktown Twin Drive-in still appears to be functioning. It looked kind of rundown, with the sound units looking pretty crap, but the main building was active and clean, there were posters for things like Wall-E, so it was very current, and two screens must mean some kind of audience. I just didn’t know it was there.

And as for why I never went to one… opportunity as much as anything else explains that, I guess. I remember a drive-in at Dundas when I was a kid, and that was kind of near home (but it closed down just as long ago), but unless the parents took me to one at the time, I never went there.

So drive-ins have remained something I see in other movies really, mostly very American, and mostly quite foreign. But now I realise there’s one just down the road, still active, and pretty accessible. Interesting. We’ll go to the markets again (Will just adored the jumping castle/slide thing), but the dirve-in movies?… maybe!

Twenty-five years ago, something nearly happened that, if it didn’t kill us all, would have seriously ruined, well, everything.

Thank you Stanislav Petrov for defying yourr apparent standard orders, for using common sense, and for knowing better.

What kind of a world would we have had without this man, and others like him?

Seventh anniversary of the event, and while I don’t think we ever want to forget it, it’s still clear that some people really have to start remembering it in different ways. Yes, I’m looking at the Republicans who peppered their convention with 9/11 imagery, in an apparent attempt to show how tough they still are.

John Scalzi has a quiet little thread on the commemoration, where he simply says: “It brought us together.” I added the following comment:

I think everyone should remember that it brought the whole world together with you, for a while at least.

It’s hard to remember now, after all the bullshit the world’s been put through (from all sides), and all the downright xenophobic shit that the party in power has used to stay there, that the whole world was on America’s side on that day (recall the leading French newspaper — “We are all Americans today”).

All we seem to hear about is anti-Americanism around the world now, but there’s also a core appeal that most of us see in America as well. And we saw it on that day.

The tragedy is that for most people it didnt — couldn’t — last. And the world will change for the better if we can bring that back.

(From Australia… mostly, usually, a friend.)

In a US election year, this event has probably got more exploitation than usual, but at the same time, there’s enough smart people to balance out the crap I think. Hope that holds for other events this year.

An addendum: There’s no real conclusion I can draw from this little observation… but tonight, Letterman was meant to be on Channel Ten at 11.20pm, with the guest being Barack Obama. I was looking forward to this. Instead, we got the old 9/11 doco from the French brothers. It was a good piece of work, but not something I feel the need to relive religiously every year. Letterman isn’t on until 1am now. There’s some kind of irony here — wallowing in the tragic past and ignoring the (hopefully) brighter future…

Coming into this too late as usual, but on my Dashboard screen in WordPress, I believe I just worked out that this is my 200th post this year, which amounts to almost a doubling of the size of my overall blog this year alone Hooray for progress!

When this year started, I wanted to blog more and write more — the writing hasn’t gone too far sadly, and I’m still trying to fix that, but the blogging has gone magnificently. I’ve written endlessly reviewing movies and TV, talked about politics and current events, rambled on generally about my activities, ranted ocassionally about various things, and naturally written endlessly about my family, especially my kids, Will and Alex.

Top post of the year by a long shot is of course my Underbelly Character Guide. Not necessarily my personal favourite even though, but I did write it specifically to find an audience, and that worked grandly. Other posts I’m more personally happy about are really my family posts — they’re all there for anyone to take a look.

Bring on the next 200 posts. Four hundred for the year sounds good. But of course, to improve my writing …

My first thought about 1993 was that it was my first year after high school, but I don’t remember it being this influential … in fact, 1994, being my first year of exposure to the Internet (or probably more 1995), seems far more important to me.

But Wired, in a further effort to play up their 15th anniversary, has an interesting multimedia thing that highlights all the breakthroughs and quiet beginnings that occurred in 1993. It’s a little hard to follow, but they make some good points.

Was 1993 good for you?