Best Movie... Ever?

Could the upcoming live action adaptation of Underdog be the greatest movie ever?

We'll see...

The Era Resumes

Sometimes (when you're single) you meet a really nice girl. She's pretty, and she's funny, and she even agrees with you that Trompe Le Monde by The Pixies is a pretty good album, when everyone else in the world thinks it wasn't a great effort. You have a good first date, and you think "Wow, this is it!"

At he beginning she mentioned she liked mountain biking, and while you weren't that into mountain biking, you thought "That's fine! I can go mountain biking every once in a while. We love The Pixies!" But then when you go out the next time, all she talks about is how you're going to go mountain biking. She talks about tire types, changing tires, handle grips and certain kinds of dirt on certain kinds of paths.

So, you bring up The Pixies, and you realize the only Pixies album she actually owns is Trompe Le Monde.

Figuring it's a fluke, you try again and she insists on actually going mountain biking. So you figure, "Ah, that's okay. I can try this."

So you go mountain biking. And while you've ridden a bike before, you aren't keeping up because, honestly, who takes a two-wheeled vehicle under your own power into rocky terrain?

You go out again, and it's more mountain biking. More talk of mountain biking. More trails and rocks. Anyway, she's being sort of encouraging.

But you realize, "She doesn't just like her mountain biking, she NEEDS to go mountain biking." So as pretty and funny as she is, and even though she also likes Trompe Le Monde (in her own way) you realize that maybe this isn't such a good idea.

And so, anyway, you call it off sort of abruptly. No doubt she's pissed. After all, you liked biking, didn't you?

So you're single again, and you sort of talked her up to everyone, so what does that make you?

Tired

The new job continues apace. I'm still trying to adapt to a new environment, names, people, ideas, alphabet soup and cube life.

Mostly I spent the first two days completely exhausted and jittery on caffeine. I also feel completely out of touch with the world as personal e-mail is still something I'm not sure is okay, no "web surfing" in the office (even during lunch, I guess...), and I'm not really picking up the phone. Still the new guy. Gotta look crazy busy, and I am.

Poor Jamie. I took her out to dinner last night, and I know I was a million miles away the entire time. We went to Austin-fave-spot Castle Hill in our attempt to do something nice for a change. I just didn't think i was very good company.

Today, at least, I am not totally exhausted. I remember this from starting the job in PHX. I was tired for most of the first month, and then one day my body adjusted to the lack of sleep, I settled in, and got used to things in general. It'll happen again. It's just going to take time.

Poor Lucy is very upset by my return to work. Mel is, too, but he seems to understand what is going on, while Lucy has spent 1/5th of her life with me at home for her amusement. Her clock is off as she's waking up when I get up. And today Mel actually came and got me out of bed as I tried to squeeze in five more minutes of sleep. Apparently he wanted to be fed and would not be denied.


I saw an article that mentioned a ton of bands are going back out on tour, including Van Halen and The Police. There's an odd generational thing that happens every decade where the folks who were kids or teenagers during a certain decade is able to somehow relive their past, now that they've got an income and will pay out the nose to see their bands. In the 70's, 50's music was big. In the 80's, the Summer of Love generations pilt no small amount of ink telling us how great it had been and making sure the "oldies" and classic rock stations played 60's faves. In teh 90's we all uffered through a revival of the Village People and Disco nostaglia. And now we're getting the Police and Van halen (I'm sorry you Hagar fans, Van Halen is an 80's band).

There was some commentary about the "sad" state of music that we have to pull from a catalog that's 20 years old to build concensus, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Those bands didn't just pay their dues, they're still selling records twenty years after they broke up. Where's the NKOTB reunion tour? Weren't we once told they were bigger tan the Beatles?


Hop everyone is having a good Valentine's Day.

Weekend/ First Day of Work

Friday Night Jamie and I headed North by Northwest to sup with JAL and his lovely wife, Tania. JAL and I go back almost as far as The League and Peabo. Curiously, JAL lives in N. Austin, but works very close to League HQ, in fact between The Hopalong Lounge and the House of Peabo. I shall begin working to convince him to join us in the 78745/04 area with all due speed.

The JAL's are a fun couple, and we had a lovely evening, even if we got a little droopy early in the evening and had to call the night just prior to JAL's knife tricks.

Saturday was relatively uneventful, but Cassidy joined us for some fun. I had planned to organize my comics for sale to Austin Books (no, not all of them), but then I realized I had to make a list of the stuff I was getting rid of so my database would be accurate, so I did that instead of anything productive. Plus, FedEx delivered a box of meat to our house, but the meat was for some other guy. Jamie called FedEx and explained to them our meat situation. So now we have this random box of meat sitting in the fridge as FedEx is tasked with tracking down the true owner of the meat.

Hit Threadgill's for catfish and okra. Then to Jason's where we watched Ghost Ship, a fairly awful haunted house movie with a terribly misused Julianna Marguiles and Gabriel Byrne. What fascinated me (and JackBart should take note) was that you could almost see the half-way decent movie that might have existed had Joel Silver not been attached to the project. Instead, you sort of get "movie in a can". Five characters explain their two-dimensional motivations in pointless explosition, enter haunted house, pretty girl survives. Just as in the 90's remake of "The Haunting", nobody on this picture understood the concept of "less is more".

Sunday I bought a cowboy hat. It's true. I bought a straw Stetson at Cavender's Boot City. Jason does not like my hat. But I do. I think it looks sharp. He also decried my plan to buy silver-toed cowboy boots with fancy bluebonnets stitched into the leather.

Dinner at Hunan, where I am becoming BFF with the waitress, Sue. Me and Sue are becoming big pals, and to prove it, Sue hooked Jamie up with some extra rice last night. It's nice that I like their food, but when I feel like a regular somewhere, I'm ten times likelier to hit that place up when we go out. I expected to be a regular by now at Casa G's, but I think the place is so full of frequent flyers that everyone is a regular.

I could not sleep last night, and so I stayed up far too late finishing my weekly comic reviews and working on my HR paperwork for the new job. Then, I just lay awake. After keeping a nocturnal schedule for the past few months, getting up at 6:15 for work hit me like a sledgehammer. I have some apologizing to do tomorrow. I was so @#$%ing tired, I was ready to fall asleep all day.

So far so good. It's my first job where my office isn't sort of in the thick of town, so I will have to get used to being out on 360. I may also have a window in my cube (sort of like some of the cubes at my office in AZ, OH). I will miss having an office, and apparently there's a strict "no surfing" policy which is fairly well policed, which is kind of creepy. I found myself wondering today if my Google searches were being monitored as I looked up some information on some B2B systems.

All in all, the job looks very promising, and the folks in the surrounding cubes seem like some decent joes and janes. Plus, forty minutes in to work today in fog and rain, and 30+ minutes home in sunshine. I used to have an hour home for my five mile drive from Briar Street to UT. This is a commute I can handle.

I'm off to bed.

You kids be good.

Previous to Hollywoodland

The feature film "Hollywoodland" was originally entitled "Truth, Justice and the American Way". Warner Bros. money was tied up in the film, and with Superman Returns expected to become a cultural phenomenon (along the lines of "Spider-Man" or "Pirates of the Carribbean"), the Super-Friendly title was changed. That said, "Hollywoodland" rolls off the tongue a bit better, anyway, unless you're making goo-goo eyes at spunky reporters.

In the next few days, Hollywoodland will be arriving in my mailbox via Netflix, and I'll watch the movie.

Here's the deal: In the past year or so, I've become quite a fan of George Reeves' Superman/ Clark Kent. As genuine as I continue to find Christopher Reeve's performance as a Man of Steel with a heart of glass, and as much as I think Brandon Routh was the right guy for the emotionally battered Superman of "Superman Returns"...

George Reeves Superman is the Superman that I watch and think "That's a Superman I can relate to!" Looking kind of paunchy in a fairly home-made looking suit, bemused by the guys shooting at me, making lots of comments regarding my dual identity at my co-worker's expense, and, of course, winking at the camera... I dare you to watch those episodes and NOT like Reeves (or, really, the whole cast).

The official story is that George Reeves killed himself, but ever since Reeves died, there have been suggestions that perhaps it wasn't Reeves who put the gun to his own head. And, I guess, that's more or less what the movie explores.

But I recently read an interview with Noel Neill in which she expresses her disappointment regarding the film. I highly recommend reading the interview here.

As infrequently as the newspapers or television seem to get a story right as it's breaking, what chance do filmmakers have of digging up much of the truth fifty years later?

So I'll watch the film. But I'll watch it with a certain eye of skepticism. Reeves' early death was tragic, no matter how it truly occured. I suppose it's somehow easier to think of the smiling Superman coming to an end not of his own doing than to think, as the movie posits, that the show and the character were what eventually led to his death.

Those are two very different stories, if there's a lesson to be garnered from all this. And it seems that there's not agreement even among those who knew Reeves during his final years, as to what may have happened.


More to follow when I've actually seen the movie...

Edward James Olmos Toy

Okay. It's actually a BSG toy. But that doesn't mean it's not totally awesome.



and for Randy and Reed...

what's up with the painted on boobs?

90210 Confession

In the Fall of 1993, Peabo and I shared a 10x10 cell in Jester West. My TV viewing habits were significantly different from Peabo's prior to college. Essentially, I never watched TV after 5:00pm. I was not someone who felt they grew up with the Huxtable Family, or who knew every beat of every episode of Cheers. In fact, the KareBear had pretty firm rules regarding TV consumption on week nights when I was a kid, and I consequently never got into the habit of watching "prime time" programming until Peabo introduced me to Seinfeld that same year.

That is not to say I didn't watch TV. In the summers I watched hours and hours of Beverly Hillbillies reruns on KBVO, The Price is Right, and Sale of the Century. I was 12, but I had the viewing habits of a man 7 times my age.

I still think Ellie May is kind of funny.

I remember being vaguely aware of 90210 coming to TV. At the time I remember looking upon the program with the same suspicion that I looked upon any show I felt had pigeonholed me as a demographic. Plus, who could relate to the characters and storylines of a bunch of kids doing very un-High School-like activities, rolling in cash, and for whom life was pretty much already set?

A few kids at KOHS started sporting sideburns in tribute to Luke Perry or Jason Priestly. Fashion dolls found their way to the shelves of the toy aisle at the grocery, and I found out my prom date was a closet 90210 fan.

Now, to be honest, I wasn't exactly free from being hit as a target demographic. I watched more than my fair share of "Saved by the Bell", thanks to my pre-Show Girls interest in Jessie Spano. But when I completed high school, it was my plan to put all of that behind me.

So when Peabo announced it was 90210 night in my first fall of college, and that he would be watching 90210 whether I liked it or not, I packed my bag and headed to the library for a few hours to study for an Oceanography quiz. I was a serious college student with no time for the bobble-heads of the 90210 universe. Where was their angst? Where was their genuine human drama? To my dismay, Peabo was joined by my pals Beno and Julio, who both confessed to knowing quite a bit about the show.

I did not yet understand the genius behind "Donna Martin graduates."

It was a few weeks later that I had studying that could be put off and not wanting to leave my own dorm room when my friends were hanging out that I watched my first episode.

What I had not understood was that 90210 was a soap opera. Whether you liked the characters or felt any sympathy towards a single one of them was incidental to putting the characters in the most abso-ludicrous positions possible and then react with a straight face while making decisions that were (a) absolutely repugnant, but (b) created the most room for TV-soap drama.

Soon the crowd grew to include a few other folks from our floor, and Peabo began to keep a stack of disposable plastic cups on hand. At some point someone (I think Julio) had become so disgusted with the characters, he threw a cup at the screen. And so it came to pass that we all were armed with plastic cups with which to voice our displeasure in a manner approximating physical violence toward the characters for their boneheaded decision making.

What I recall most from those episodes was that character Kelly Taylor was positioned as the heroine of the program, but either because actress Jennie Garth was a passive-aggressive jerk in real life or because Jennie Garth wasn't much of an actress and thusly defaulted to angry at every opportunity, Kelly spent her episodes pouting every time another character disagreed with her. And because the show invariably vindicated Kelly Taylor, it seemed the longtime viewers of the program could not see through her veil of lies, when to eyes unfamiliar with the show she whined until the whinee could not longer stand it and gave in. (Oh, how I hate Kelly Taylor...)

Recently, Jamie figured out that 90210 runs for two hours every day on Soapnet. So there's been a LOT of 90210 viewing going on at my house of late. We're about 2/3rds of the way through the first year of college (the last season any character was seen to crack a book or go to class). And what I've realized is that all of the characters of 90210 are complete sociopaths. These characters inflict untold harm upon each other, and coccasionally complete strangers. They're elitist, snobby bastards who all seem completely put-out when any work is written into the show for them, and they join and drop campus-causes on a bi-episode basis.

In order to create drama, items like the school newspaper are blown up to NY Times proportions, and second semester freshman are seen as a plausible and persuasive voice within the university infrastructure. The show is absolutely awful, and embarassing. And yet, I cannot look away.

Part of the allure of the game now is that I did follow the program for two or three seasons, plastic cup in hand, and I know what drama befalls the characters. So, when the characters (such as Kelly Taylor) get up on their moral pedestal and preach down to the lowlies, you can remind them "hey, you develop a horrible coke habit in two more seasons. How about a little compassion?"

The "teens" of the show are absurdly old, in absurd situations faced by no prior college freshman in the age of man, and are far less worried about academics than even the guys who didn't come back after Christmas freshman year in Jester.

Jim and Cindy Walsh are supposedly successful corporate something-or-others, but theire really there to salute the two Walsh-children characters and to appear bemused but concerned. A thankless role, the two departed towards the end of teh college years.

And, of course, there's always Nat, played by fourth-string central casting bench warmer, Joe E. Tata. I am sure Mr. Tata has lots of credits to his name, but that poor dude had more humiliating scenes bowing and scraping before the teens of 90210 than I am sure he likes to think about.

That, and it's fun to say "Joe E. Tata" every time he appears on screen.

Upon re-watching the episodes, it seems that the writers were alternately not really trying, or had a mountain of contempt for their own characters. And who can blame them? Why not send the whiney DJ/ wanna-be hip-hop Beverly Hills dork on a whacked out Crystal Meth spree? Why not let the eye-brow wiggling Kerouac-dork get ripped off by his former step-mom? It's a soap opera, and nobody stays happy for long on a soap.

So I say, huzzah for 90210. You set out to fulfill a certain vision, you set the bar incredibly low, and you still failed to in many regards. But you did bring the world Tori Spelling, and for that, we are all eternally grateful.