Review: Black Hawk Down

Interesting facts I learned from the book:

1.) The Saudis had a UN presence in Somali and even the day after the fire-fight they weren't shot at as they drove through Mogadishu

2.)The UN Italian forces would sometimes used their car headlights to send signals to the Somalis in the city about what the Americans were doing.

3.)Most educated Somalis speak Italian.

REVIEW

Black Hawk Down was written by Mark Bowden and published in 1999. It's a non-fiction account of that time that Somalis shot down two of our helicopters in one day.

It's an amazing book. You should read it if you have the stomach for it, but becuase it isn't worth eating but becuase not everyone can digest writing like this.

The book's prose sometimes feels stale. It essentially is a large newspaper article dashed with more color than the average paper would allow.

At times the writing talks about what certain soldiers were thinking, which must have come from hours and hours of interviews and the prose sometimes breaks into out of place flavor:

Steele and his Rangers needed to pick up their wounded and move fifty fucking yards down the slpe to consoldidate the perimiter and join the fucking fight!

The book sometimes tells things from the Somali side. Getting those interview must have been hard and I would have been very interested to know more about what the Somalis were doing during the whole firefight.

Review: Silent Hill (The Movie)

Watch the preview of the movie:



Some reviewer somewhere called the Silent Hill movie, the best looking bad movie ever. Basically the movie loses the viewer with the plot but the special effects, costumes and cinematography keep you watching.

Silent Hill is an excellent video game series. The main character has to face trials and tribulations in a surreal world as ridiculous looking monsters attack him or her.

Now, of course, to move the game along, strange keys would turn up in strange places to open strange (seemingly out of place) doors. Also maps would appear places and no one would tell you why they were there or who put them there. You don't question these things in a video game. You just move the character along to the next door or the next destination on the map.

Can this translate to a movie? The director thought so and the critics thought not. It just doesn't work. There are holes in the plot big enough to stick a fire poker through, and the end of the film leaves a gigantic question (not the type that inspires sequels).

Regardless, the monsters are amazing looking and the camera shots are excellent. Someone deserves praise for the cinematography. The acting--given what the people were told to say--isn't bad at all.

Basically Silent Hill is a Ferrari with a bum engine. You'll look at the car for a long time, but when you try to drive? No dice.

Is it worth watching? Yes.

It's worth watching twice just to wrap your eyes around the incredible visuals which, thankfully, let you to forget the plot.