Night Train - pretty good for a B movie

I grabbed this flick at Blockbuster the other night on a whim. I knew little of it. It's a decided B-movie without, as I later found out, even a single review at Rottentomatoes.com. My biggest concern was the cover, which suggested it might be a gruesome, mindless slasher film. It isn't. It turned out to be a pretty good choice.

Night Train is a story of three strangers that meet aboard a train on one snowy night -- one with ridiculously few passengers and not much of a business model. Danny Glover is the train's conductor, Leelee Sobieski is the hot, but unhinged med student, and Steve Zahn is the scheming, eccentric salesman. When a nameless passenger dies shortly after boarding their car, Zahn and Sobieski discover he was carrying a box containing a fortune in diamonds. Together they plot to dispose of the man's body and keep the box's contents for themselves. All manner of paranoia, double-crosses and murder follows. There also may be something more sinister and mysterious to this box than any of them suspect.

The movie is a homage to movies of yore -- dumbed down Hitchcock. The scenery and setting is very appealing. The characters are beguiling. The ending, however, is absurd, and ruins what could almost have been a fantastic movie. Overall, it is still worth a watch.

Putting the band back together, sort of

I lost all interest in blogging for a while and wanted to take a break, but I'm thinking of getting back into it. I like the idea of keeping a journal.

Topics will be a hodge podge of whatever interests me at the moment. It will be niche oriented and in flux. I suspect I will probably be writing about things like Phoenix restaurants, film, comedians and professional sports. I've been gone from Saipan for a year now, so that won't be a topic.

The school year is over and I'm in the midst of doing a number of things like shopping for my first house, getting some health problems evaluated and I'm planning on taking a comedy course that concludes with a set at the Tempe Improv. I'm also hoping to really explore Arizona, and will probably drive out to Las Vegas, which will be my first time there. If fate should smile on me, I'm hoping to get out to either Belize or Roatan to do some diving and to try ziplining. I don't even have a passport right now, which shows how life has changed for me. I applied and that problem should be fixed. Travel to even the Caribbean is impossible without one now.

Alex just completed kindergarten and his growth amazes. He reads up a storm and is very inquisitive. He asked me the other day if God was real. I heard him use the word "addicted" in a sentence -- in his case a reference to his feelings about a videogame, which I thought a pretty impressive word choice for a six-year-old.

My Ashley is developing quite the personality. I can't get over how fast she is growing. I take her in the pool most every day. She walks around "supervising" the place constantly.