Rebecca and I have returned from a few days of solitude in the Hocking Hills region. We hiked by day and enjoyed campfires and some old movies by night. I brought the MacBook as our portable theater and we then watched two movies from the Cold War era that I hadn’t seen in ages. They both held up well.
Night One: WarGames – This movie I remembered loving as a kid when my dad took me to see it in the theater. Even to my young mind, most of the technology seemed too far fetched at the time. I was actually surprised to find that the movie held up quite well and had a much better story-line than I recalled. While some of the portrayal of technology was off base, much of the underlying tech was actually pretty much accurate. Beyond that, I was reminded of a time when dial-up access was really quite cool.
I was surprised to have seen that a young Michael Madsen was in the film in the opening scene.
Night Two: The Hunt for Red October – No surprises here. I loved this movie the first time I saw it and knew it would be enjoyable again. Interesting observations were as follows:
- Virtually everyone is in this movie.
- Fred Thompson looks more distinguished now than he did in the film
- Alec Baldwin, well, he doesn’t even look like the same person at all. I wasn’t sure I had the right Baldwin Brother for a moment.
- Ramius is a great name. If we get another Russian Blue someday, his name will be Ramius.