Lincoln Lecture and Ecolitan Finish

Date night last night was viewing of the latest Spielberg epic – Lincoln.  My wife was fighting tooth and nail against going as she hates movies that are nothing but talk, talk, talk.  Well this movie had a lot of that and she ended up loving it.  I think only Spielberg could take a movie involving congressional politics and make it fascinating.  This is a great movie because of the cast.  Every single role had an accomplished actor playing the part.  It was a constant stream of recognizing actors under their heavy period makeup.  There are a lot of photographs from this era and the amount of historical accuracy portrayed is astounding.  Tommy Lee Jones steals every scene he’s in, but you almost expect that.  Daniel Day-Lewis is his usual amazing but he doesn’t seem up to his usual lofty presence.  He portrays a Lincoln that is in keeping with the historical record of a shrewd but likable politician with an inner drive to do right.  Maybe my expectations for Lewis are so high that he will never be able to live up to them but I felt this was not his best effort.  Still a seventy five per cent effort by Lewis is still Oscar caliber when compared to mere human actors.  Everything else about this movie resonated – a great movie.

 

I finally received some heartening news yesterday.  My company lost out on the renewal of the contract (that’s not the heartening part), which expires here on December 31^st.  The replacement company had indicated they were going to hire me but I hadn’t heard anything yet.  Yesterday I received the written job offer with a nice little bump in pay (cue the heartening part) and reams of forms to fill out.  Once again I will be called upon to prove that I am in fact, an American citizen.

Yesterday I also finished reading Empire and Ecolitan by L.E. Modesitt.  This was a combination of two of his earliest sci fi novels into one, very large book.  Once again it was interesting to observe how he has evolved as a writer since these earlier novels but you can still get his typical crackling good story from protagonists you care about.  This one has a special operations operative from a future galactic empire that solves problem by nuking recalcitrant populations where needed.  He is sent on a recon mission to a planet devoted to ecology and this starts him on a long arc of finding love, redemption, and freedom from the empire.  There were passages that were almost incomprehensible but for the most part this was an extremely fun read.  I kind of liked the points he makes about the inherent weakness of democracies to confront evil.