Martin Geisler Online

I went to see Pearl Harbor the other day. It was a good film, but it was more about love than about war. There’s nothing wrong with than — I had just been expecting a little more about the war. Instead of being a movie primarily about the attack of the Japanese on Pearl Harbor, it was a film about a romance that happened to take place at that time, December 1941.

The scenes with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor are great. There’s some nice flying action in the film. It’s just a shame that they’ve made so many mistakes in the film. Take a look at this page to see a list of the embarrassing mistakes.

But despite the errors in the film, it’s still a good film. It was long — about three hours, and it covers a lot of ground, starting with the Battle of Britain, moving on to the Japanese attack, and ending with the Doolittle Raid. If you don’t like these American movies about their heroic soldiers, then don’t bother seeing this movie. And, by the way, all the girls in the theater was weeping at the end of the movie — I’ve never seen that before…

Another film I’ve seen recently is Thirteen Days. I bought in on DVD yesterday. The film describes the Cuban Missile Crises in 1962 where the world was on the brink of a nuclear war. This film is about the crisis, and is not a love-story. The film shows how the Kennedy brothers were under a great press from the military to issue the orders for an airstrike against the missiles in Cuba. In the film we follow Kenny O’Donnell (Kevin Costner) who was one of JFK’s most trusted advisors. That gives us an in-side view of the conflict.

As we’re only allowed to see what the Kennedy brothers saw, the crisis is gradually built up until we reach the climax where the Americans decide to trust the back-channel contact that have approached them.

I likes the film a lot, perhaps because we’ve been studying the crisis in our History class. By seeing it on film it suddenly comes alive in a new way. And it’s also a much more correct film than Pearl Harbor, just take a look here to see for yourself. As I’ve bought it on DVD I had a chance to hear the producers talk about the film. They said that many of the cars, the photographs, etc used in the film is in fact the original objects. That’s pretty impressive.

I’ve just posted some news I wrote on my trip to Hungary. But here’s a little more about the trip.

We we’re lucky that the weather was good. The first two days or so it rained a lot (in fact it was just like in Denmark :-) but then the sun started shining. So the temperature rose to above 30 °C (86 °F) and the water also got warmer. But the temperature also made it somewhat unpleasant to walk around in the cities in the middle of the day.

Perhaps it’s part of this kind of holiday, but I quickly got fed up with driving for two hours to see some sight and then drive back again two hours later. We spend a lot of time on the Hungarian roads — too much I think. I would rather that we had lived right in the middle of Budapest, so that we could have concentrated on that. There must be some sights there.

We lived in a small town called Sukoró by Lake Velence. We went into the nearest large city, Sz�kesfeh�rvár (it took us about three days before we could pronounce it :-) a couple of times. We also tried to drive into Budapest, but was lucky to escape a huge traffic jam. We tried again on a Sunday and looked at some of the sights along the Duna.

But now we’re home again — that’s the best part of every trip: the return to home :-)

I’ve home after having spend nearly 14 days in Hungary. It seams that the world has been busy while I’ve been away — I’ve just finished reading over 300 mails :-) I also need to download 163 MB from my local Debian-mirror, as the developers from around the world has been rather busy… But that’ll have to wait until later.