The Endurance, Movie

Mercury Rising is a 1998 thriller directed by Harold Becker and starring Bruce Willis, Alex Baldwin and Mike Hughes. The government creates an unbreakable super code, they think. As a totally irresponsible and implausible decision some idiot in the government publishes the code in a magazine as a test. They never though the code could be broken, but a 9 year old boy with autism somehow breaks the code. Some people in the government then sees the boy as a threat to national security and wants to eliminate him. FBI Agent Art Jeffries, played by Bruce Willis, takes on the task of protecting the boy. This was quite a decent movie I thought, even though I felt the whole premise was very unrealistic. The government people are so incredibly stupid and even a boy with autism can’t break an unbreakable code. Besides that, there’s some fun to be had and this was while Bruce Willis still had a name worth checking out. The score is composed by John Barry.

Talk about the human condition. When Melissa Etheridge released Lucky in early 2004, it was in celebration of a new romance and her status as a veteran singer/songwriter. Sadly, just a few months later, she announced she had breast cancer. But then, almost exactly a year after Lucky's release, Etheridge was on-stage at the Grammys singing a powerful version of Janis Joplin's "Piece of My Heart." Her bold, and bald, performance proved that cancer wasn't Melissa Etheridge's goodbye. But it also gave hope to anyone experiencing the same ordeal. Etheridge celebrates her career again with 2005's Greatest Hits: The Road Less Traveled, which joins highlights and singles from her albums to unreleased material and a rousing studio version of "Piece of My Heart."