Posts by Berck

B-1

F-15

Taken from our balcony. Saturdays in the fall are fun. They got a lot closer on their final pass, but I wasn’t taking pictures then.

We just watched Winter Passing and really enjoyed it. Part of its appeal for me is Zooey Deschanel, my latest movie star crush. If I were to give you a plot outline, it would sound horribly boring since it’s a character movie. And the characters are, perhaps, a bit overplayed, except for Deschanel’s, since all of her characters tend to be quiet and understated, with the exception of the disgruntled store clerk in The Good Girl. B+.

Though I’m sure the film makers would argue the point, Eulogy was a better family-oriented, indie version of The Big Chill (which Jonah really liked, and I more or less liked. B.). Eulogy too stars Deschanel who is probably the best thing about it. Jonah like this one better than I did as well, but I certainly enjoyed it. I’ve never been to a funeral, but I like watching movies about them. B.

I’ve also realized that even writing blurbs this short about everything in our Netflix history is unlikely to happen.

Election wasn’t bad, but wasn’t worth recommending. Average Hollywood fare. C.

I keep renting foreign films that annoy me. Aside from the steamy sex scenes, Lower City wasn’t very interesting. A plot about a weird love triangle that wasn’t weird enough to be intriguing. C.

SLC Punk is one of those movies I rented just so Netflix would stop recommending it. Since I expected it would probably be awful, I was pleasantly surprised. It was, from time to time, very entertaining. It was at least different and vaguely thought-provoking. Also very indie. B-.

Joanna and I both thought Secretary was brilliantly done. It’s a movie about two people who engage in sexually abnormal behavior, but the point, I think, is that they’re perhaps not as abnormal as we pretend they are. B+/A-.

If The Celebration wasn’t Dogma 95, it certainly looked and felt like it. I don’t like watching movies that were filmed on a camcorder. I realize that a lot of people probably disagree with me, but I think movies should be shot on film. At the very least. Production values aside, the plot was awful, the subject matter was unappealing and the subtitles hopefully didn’t do the Danish justice. D. (That said, Ben might like it.)

Under the Tuscan Sun is a typical hollywood woman-power story. Based on the memoirs of a loud feminist. C+.

Beautiful Girls is a decent indie film. Good characters, some excellent moments. And it’s got Natalie Portman in mittens. Always a plus. And now I’ve seen it twice, because I didn’t realize when I rented it that I’d seen it on IFC. B+.

So, no student of mine has failed a checkride.

Or had until yesterday afternoon. And boy did he fail it good. He managed to put the aircraft in a spin during slow flight. Twice.

I guess I was due.

So, last week I had a bit of an incident on landing… Everything was looking fine, and the student decided at the last minute to just jerk back on the stick, for unexplained reasons. This put us in a nose-high stall attitude about 10 feet over the grass on the right side of the runway in a left bank. I took control of the aircraft and added full power, hoping to keep the nose up so that we wouldn’t hit the prop. What I didn’t consider was the possibility of dragging the left wingtip. Until I heard a scraping noise. This isn’t such a common occurence on most aircraft, but the DA20 supposedly only needs something like 13 degrees of bank for a wingtip strike because it sits so low to the ground. I wasn’t the first, and I probably won’t be the last either.