Selling My Books on the Streets of Brooklyn 2/9 - Snow Day

In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a figure who represents human striving, particularly the quest for scientific knowledge, and the risk of overreaching or unintended consequences. He created mankind from clay and gave it the gift of fire to insure its survival. This angered Zeus, who had Prometheus chained to a rock, where an eagle picked at his liver, which grew back each day. He was eventually rescued by Hercules. (Wiki).

I’ve been a member of Netflix for about ten years. At one time my list of DVDs to watch had 300+ titles. These days it’s about 20, mostly foreign and independent films from which I do not know what to expect. It’s been a while since I really looked forward to a movie. Ridley Scott has given us a lot of great grand scale entertainment: Alien (1979), Blade Runner (‘82), Gladiator (2000), Black Hawk Down (‘02), so it was with great anticipation that I popped Prometheus (2012) into my player. I really enjoyed it, although it borrowed elements from various sci-fi classics, including Alien. But its main story is completely original, and that is what makes it worthwhile and better than most films of the genre. The stunning cinematography (Dariusz Walski) is its main strength, and the gadgetry, sets and effects are terrific. The story is not easy to follow, but in the end I think I got it. The main body of the plot is set in 2093. There are several references to modern pop culture, which seem out of place, unlikely, but that is a quibble. Noomi Rapace, so brilliant as Lisabeth Salander in Stieg Larrsen’s Millenium trilogy, stars as an intrepid scientist searching for the origin and meaning of life. The beautiful and talented Charlize Theron is billed fourth in the opening credits! I was puzzled by her character's coldness until the latter stages. The film does not come to a satisfying conclusion, which probably hurt it at the box office, where it has yet to break even on its $130,000,000 budget, which must have been very disappointing to the film-makers, given that dreck like Transformers earned gazillions. Surprisingly, a sequel is planned. On a scale of five, I rate Prometheus three-and-a-half. It is rated 7.2 of ten at IMDb. I saw headlines of articles that blast the film as completely unoriginal and a rip-off. I disagree that it is completely unoriginal and I think it’s worth seeing. Intelligent sci-fi requires patience. Action scenes don’t come every few minutes. Rapace, 33, half Swedish, half Spanish, perfected her English by watching BBC series and CNN. Here are pictures of her, in character as Lisabeth, and glammed up for a night on the town:

In terms of snowfall, we were lucky in our end of Brooklyn. It was perhaps ten inches. The morning drive to my sister's was a little tough, but by the afternoon the sun was out and the streets were no longer icy. A meteorologist said on the radio that he'd never seen such disparity in accumulation. Some areas had two inches, and I just heard that a town in Connecticut had 40! It looks like the floating book shop will be out of business until Tuesday. My thanks to whomever purchased Killing on Kindle, my first web sale in at least a month.
Visit Vic's sites:
Vic's Third Novel (Print or Kindle): http://tinyurl.com/7e9jty3
Vic's Website: http://members.tripod.com/vic_fortezza/Literature/
Vic's Short Story Collection (Print or Kindle): http://www.tiny.cc/Oycgb
Vic's 2nd Novel: http://tinyurl.com/6b86st6
Vic's 1st Novel: http://tiny.cc/94t5h
Vic's Screenplay on Kindle: http://tinyurl.com/cyckn3