Italy!

Italy. We are going to Italy!

I made brief mention last week about planning a trip to Italy and getting side-tracked planning our Thanksgiving holiday with family instead. Well, ultimately we got both trips planned last week. We're going to Italy at the end of May.

Italy!

Better yet, this trip is mostly free because it's my company's President's Club. "Club", as it's often referred to in sales, is part of the incentive/reward system in sales organizations. Top performers are nominated to Club each year and go on a trip, together, somewhere fun for a few days. Typically it's a beach resort. I won a club trip for the third year in a row at our annual sales kickoff in February.

Over the past several years this company's club trip has always been somewhere in Mexico or the Caribbean. While I hate to be the sort who looks a gift horse in the mouth, part of me each time has lamented, "Againnn?" I've been to those locales many times, and they're easy enough to get to from the US they don't feel that special. I've even suggested gently to our execs, "How about next year in Greece? Or Italy?"

Well, I don't know if they were listening to me or made the decision completely on their own, but this year it's in Italy. And that's awesome, because I've never been to Italy.

Italy!

Club this year is on the island of Sardinia. We'll have 3 nights at a nice hotel there. Hawk and I have chosen to extend it, at our own cost, for an extra night— as it seems such a shame to travel 7,000 miles away and stay just three nights. Oh, and we're also adding a pre-stay in Rome. Rome! We'll fly to Rome, stay there for 3 nights (at our own expense, but we've picked a really nice hotel— and gotten it on points!), then fly a short hop to Sardinia, stay there a total of 4 nights, then fly home.

Italy!

RIP, Val Kilmer

Today film actor Val Kilmer died. He was 65. He starred in dozens of movies; in many of them he made his characters memorable. Here are a few memories of Val Kilmer movies I've seen and enjoyed:

Kilmer's first film was Top Secret! (1984). He starred as Nick Rivers, an Elvis Presley-like rock star sent to a festival in East Germany to draw attention away from an American spy operation. I saw that movie not when it ran in theaters but probably not too many years after that on video. I think I saw it before the fall of the East German regime in 1990, when it was actually topically relevant rather than a quaint historical piece. And as a Zucker-Abrams-Zucker film it was hilarious, full of slapstick humor, sight gags, and Vaudeville-style straight-man lines.

The first Val Kilmer movie I saw was 1985's Real Genius. As a middle school/high school student really interested in STEM it was meaningful to me to see his slacker/genius portrayal because it showed me that smart guys can also be cool. Prior to that I'd only ever seen smart people in movies made fun of as stereotypical nerds.

For a lot of people Kilmer's co-starring role opposite Tom Cruise in Top Gun (1986) might be his most iconic. For me that movie was forgettable except as some big-budget special effects vehicle that involved a 110% predictable love triangle.

Willow (1988) was another movie where I remember Kilmer's portrayal as being special. His character of Mad Marnigan was not the star but he brought a special verve to it, frankly a bit of scenery-chewing— but in a good way— that made the character bigger than it was written.

Tombstone (1993) might be the movie in Kilmer's filmography I like best. It was an amazing movie. And Kilmer's portrayal of legendary gunslinger Doc Holliday was amazing. He took a character that in many other tellings of the story of Wyatt Earp is portrayed as two dimensional and made him actually more interesting than Wyatt Earp. Plus, even the way he committed to portraying Holliday as a person suffering from tuberculosis was special. He acted as if he had such trouble speaking that you really wanted to pay attention to every word he said; like a person who didn't have that many words left sure wasn't going to waste one.

As I peruse Kilmer's list of film credits on IMDb I realize there are many of his movies I haven't seen— and should see. Tops on that list is The Doors (1991). I'm a big fan of The Doors' music. And just today I learned that Kilmer actually sang all the parts as Doors' front man Jim Morrison in that movie.