From My Eight-Year-Old To Yours

"That is just so wrong!" sez she. But she can't stop giggling.



Get your copy here.

It's an über-geek's world -- the rest of us are just cluttering it up like so much botched code

Scott linked me up with this interview with Kristen Bell. The quote that caught my (and his) eye is near the end: "The New Beverly in Los Angeles had a double feature the other night of Tron and the Last Starfighter. So I was like I kind of needed to see that at least just once in my life because that seemed like an awesome double feature, you know?"

My immediate response to that statement was contemptuous disbelief. "I miss playing Veronica Mars, but I went to Comic-Con to fish for a role on Heroes because it's just, like, SO KEWL!" You're just telling the fans what they want to hear, you shameless hussy!!

Then I thought back to this photo (SFW, link via Yahmdallah) of "The Slave Leia Appreciation Society" that showed up at a Star Wars con ... and the penny dropped.

I was a young man back in the days when a Tron and Last Starfighter double bill was a "males without wheels" feature. In those days, the women that mustered up the courage to attend a Sci-Fi con tended to look more like Doris Lessing than Carrie Fisher on a stay-trim-with-cocaine regimen. Back then "Asperger's" was just a clever name for what the REAL Alpha-Males made out of the geeks among us.

Brother, but the ground has shifted below our feet....

Who Is To Blame For The Leafs?

Damien Cox says we should stop booing the players (or GM John Ferguson) and start booing these guys for the Leafs' abysmal hockey. I can picture it now: Ivan Fecan wheels his Escalade into the CTV parking lot, is stopped briefly at the gate for the mandatory security clearance. The security guy gives Fecan the once-over, nods him through, then adds, "Hey, Fecan -- you suck! Where'd you learn to own a team anyway, you moron?"

Yeah, go on and boo the owners. They're just doing what any owner of the most financially successful hockey franchise in the world would do: stay the course and rake in the mega-bucks. If I lived a little to the west, or to the south, I wouldn't care because I'd be out-of-range of Leafs-dominated network television. But since I am where I am, I'll just keep booing the fans who pay so willingly for this garbage hockey.

Shades of genius in Idiocracy?

"The Costco of the future has aisles numbering in the tens of thousands. There are rail stations to help shoppers get around. Racks soar overhead till they're lost in darkness, and a long shot reveals a field of neatly ranked red sofas stretching to the horizon. Joe's new friend Frito is nostalgic visiting Costco, because he went to law school there. And at the entrance stands a greeter, a young man the size of a sumo wrestler, who morosely tells each shopper, 'Welcome to Costco. I love you.'

Now, there are plenty of jokes circulating about Costco's vastness, but the greeter's 'I love you' is a bit of genius."

Even though I am a fan of King of the Hill and, to a lesser extent, Beavis & Butthead, I believe I'll take a pass on watching Mike Judge's Idiocracy. But I'm sure glad Frederica Mathewes-Green didn't.

"Fillsome" Foods

My wife returns from Milan in a couple of days. Yesterday at the grocery store I stopped by the ice cream freezer and considered purchasing a tub of Häagen-Dazs (Vanilla Swiss Almond being my comfort food of choice). Then I considered how crappy I'd feel after consuming the ice cream. Then I wondered how crappy I'd feel if I made, from scratch, and ate my childhood comfort food: tapioca pudding. I bought some tapioca beads from the local bulk foods store, went home and got to work.

Tapioca custard is ridiculously easy to make. The beads have to soak in water for two hours, but that's as fussy as it gets. After that, you scald two cups of milk, stir in 1/3 cup of sugar, a teaspoon of vanilla, two eggs and the drained tapioca. It gets thick pretty quickly, and smells wonderful. The girls were curious, so I let them dip a spoon into the mix. "I want extra much!" said the younger.

I gave each of them about a third of a cup, and myself about a half cup. They tucked in, but were unable to finish. "Sorry dad," said the one who'd asked for extra much. "It's really good, but it's also really fillsome."

It certainly is. I had no trouble finishing my portion, but I also had no desire for more. Contrast this with the ice cream. Man, when I get started on the HD, it's difficult to quit before I finish the little tub.

The more I think about that, the stranger it all seems. The basic ingredients, if the HD label is to be believed, are more or less identical: milk, sugar, eggs, flavoring. Tapioca is a glutinous thickening agent, but it doesn't add that much body to the custard. How is it that something I make on the stove is more filling than something made in a factory? What, exactly, is the "process" that makes processed foods more binge-able?

Artless Ensembles

Are there any star-studded ensemble movies that actually work as drama? The ones that come to my mind are typically comedies: It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the original Ocean's 11, Star Trek IV, The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen. You could argue that of the bunch, only Mad World set out to be an actual go-for-the-jocular-vein comedy, but the others all have a light touch and a shared sense of How can we possibly take this seriously? When it comes to epic dramas, though, the vehicle gets awfully creaky.

The question occurs to me after watching Serenity, the movie finale of Joss Whedon's Firefly. I'm under the impression that Whedon hoped the movie would pull in enough money to inspire a serial, a la Star Trek, but that clearly did not happen. And no wonder: Serenity is a mess.

There's plenty for hardcore Firefly fans to enjoy, mind you. The movie tidies up a few story lines the series had left open-ended, particularly regarding the origins of those ubiquitous baddies, The Reavers. Chiwetel Ejiofor does a terrific job at being a cultured killer -- the type that sips tea, then uses the cup and saucer to take out an entire room full of goons. Set his imperial swagger against Nathan Fillion's Oklahoma swagger, and you've got the kind of hero/villain chemistry that only Hollywood can generate.

But if you're not of the "Browncoat" persuasion, this movie will leave feeling very alienated. Since it is an extension of a television series, everyone in the carry-over cast is required to say something, so each character inserts the sort of catch-phrase that he or she has come to be known for. And since this is a movie, with a running time that's been set in stone, the catch-phrase is all they get. It's difficult for a viewer to work up emotional interest under such conditions, and Whedon seemed to think the best way to counter this impediment was to kill off a few secondary, but important, characters -- Wrath of Khan times two, basically. I couldn't quite buy into it, especially when the hero (Fillion) was kicked, pounded, stretched and squashed like so much silly putty, only to bounce back and conquer. When the secondary characters started dropping, so did my interest.

I'm guessing the chief difficulty with ensemble dramas is big name actors will only sign on to a project if they get to deliver a memorable moment. So long as the film is a comedy, the star will happily rise to the occasion and play the fool. But no-one can guarantee a memorable moment in a drama -- at least, not the way a star prefers to be memorable (I'll certainly never forget Gene Hackman's Pepé Le Pew accent in A Bridge Too Far).

It strikes me that Robert Altman figured out the best way to circumnavigate this difficulty by just letting the big names do what they were going to do. So long as the movie was an enormous pastiche (Short Cuts, Prêt-à-Porter, Kansas City, A Prairie Home Companion) he and his editors would find someplace to insert the moment. Narratively speaking, it might even make intuitive sense. In fact, now that I think of it, you wouldn't have to work too hard to define these pastiche films as being comedies of a peculiarly dark and cynical stripe. Hey -- what would Altman have done with Serenity, or, for that matter the up-and-coming Star Trek movie (which shows every indication of turning into the largest train wreck of the bunch -- and that's no small feat, given how Rick Berman reduced the series to flashy warp core breaches and Jean-Luc Picard in a fruity little muscle shirt).

What do you think? Could Altman have pulled another Popeye with Star Trek, or the X-Men? What does it take to make a successful comic book ensemble action flick? Or is Brad Bird the only one who knows the answer to these questions?

Graphite vs. Wood

Ringette season has returned. It's a popular sport around here, but not nearly so popular as hockey, so I had to do some driving to get my daughter a new stick. The gent who sold it to me tried to persuade me of the virtues of graphite, but all I could see was the $75 price tag. I said, "When my daughter can play a $75 game, I'll buy her the $75 stick."

I relayed this exchange to the local sporting goods guy. He shook his head. "I can't get over the kids who say they won't play hockey with anything less than graphite. So far all the hockey records were established by guys who used wood. What's graphite got that's going to beat wood?"

He was just warming up. "And golf clubs! You can pay $1000 for a driver that hits the ball farther, straighter, higher. But if all this research and technology and money has gone into the science of the club, why are the pars still the same? The course just up the road here has been a par 3 course for the last 50 years. The clubs some guys use, you could buy a car with that money. But they still play a par 3 game.

"Of course," he added, "if you want to spend the money, I'm not going to stop you." And he was talking to a guy who clearly was not going to spend the money.