fine whine

Well, I'm off to check out my co-worker John's band, Soul Satyr, at some blues club a couple miles away. This will give me time to practice my new non-chugging beer-drinking technique.

Jessica and I tried to watch the movie Thirteen tonight. Only about twenty minutes in, however, we really started to wane and lost interest almost entirely in a movie that had failed to grip up even the slightest bit. I'm not sure if it was the subject matter, the Sundance prize logo on the cover, or what, but somehow it just didn't do anything for us.

I've generally had a harder time watching movies taking place on the west coast. It seems so culturally jarring for me, of humble, humdrum Ohio childhood. Teenagers in these movies go to these schools that seem like parks or malls, and live wild lifestyles I didn't dream of until at least college. It's not just the school movies (Thirteen, Crazy/beautiful, Encino man) but also other genres as well, though the only film that comes to mind at this late hour is Training day. Somehow there's just a whole different approach to things and I just can't get my head around it.

That said, New York movies aren't really much better (Cadillac man). Nor those of Boston, Miami and so on. Maybe I just have trouble with movies set everywhere.

Oh, and as for what we did in lieu of watching Thirteen? I threw in Falling down. Setting aside, it's just a great movie. Not one of my favorites, but one that I'm far more willing to watch than one about a drug-addled teenager and her friends. So sue me.

Atkinson, Rowan Atkinson. He's well-known as the star of both Mr. Bean and Black Adder, but lesser known as British secret agent English, Johnny English. The DVD's back cover claims it to be a spy spoof, but I'd call it more of a spy farce. The last quote-unquote spoof I watched was the brutally unwatchable 2001: a space travesty, which is truly a horrible movie. For them to mention travesty in the title is by far an understatement (two thousand and one: / a space travesty so bad / you'll gouge out your eyes). Anymore Leslie Nielsen's name on anything anywhere near a comedy should be a red flag to run away, fast. I know this full well and yet have subjected myself to the likes of Men with brooms, Spy hard, Camouflage and now this, but I fear, that I may someday need to check out Dracula: dead and loving it to see what a real master of comedy and spoofs can do with the white-haired buffoon. The knowledge that he appears in Scary movie 3 in no way sways my desire to see that movie, however.

Anyway, I've got other foolishness to discuss. Case in point is the aforementioned Johnny English. Sticking to playing it relatively straight instead of pandering to laff-a-minute buffoonery, the movie ends up pretty decent. They did manage to shoehorn in some Beanish shenanigans, and only so with the most flimsy of pretense, but the movie's no Citizen Kane and they breezily keep the pace going well enough to smooth over most missteps. I do think that Rowan's a really funny guy, and this sort of material only shows all of the weapons he has in his comedic arsenal. Natalie Imbruglia's passable, and Malkovich is at his fake-accent best. With a little restraint, he wouldn't stand out too much in a real Bond flick, though he'd likely never accept a role in that franchise.

Thinking about the 007 formula and my appreciation for subjective films (i.e. those in which the audience sees only what the protagonist could), I had to wonder if the two could ever work together. The answer, I suspect, is no. Bond movies have at their foundation the need to show what the nefarious villain is secretly doing. To show only what 007 is doing and to ignore Blofeld, Goldfinger and so on just doesn't seem like it would work. Johnny English too shows both sides of the good/evil divide, though balanced well enough (once a few scenes with an alternate Atkinson role were excised, rightly so) and in note-perfect fashion.

Speaking of note-perfect, the composer and 'Bond' quartet were brilliant, weaving into their original music snippets (and maybe just recognizable intervals) from just about every theme 007's ever had. The movie wraps up with a rather unexpected conclusion (well, the means, not the end) and overall is rather quite decent.

'Twas a warm day here.
We ate lunch at Panera
and thought about names.

As I was doping my (freshly-brewed) iced tea today with my secret blend of sugar and Equal, a thought struck me. What would be the most foolproof name to give the counter-people to call when the food is ready, I wondered. For some reason "Truman" came to my head, and upon giving it more thought now, I conclude that's it a pretty good one, both for clarity of spelling and pronunciation as well as potential for uniqueness. Moreover it is suitable for both first and last name, and it strikes me as something Jack Reacher would do in the books by Lee Childs (if he hasn't already).

Not one to leave such questions answered so quickly or easily, and looking to steer the dining conversation away from heightened cholesterol and other maladies, I posed it to my wife and parents, and we had a decent discussion about which name would in fact be best, if any.

We were, after all, a table full of Lietzes, not an easy tame to spell nor read. I've relegated myself to giving the name "Mike" instead of my last at restaurants and the like, and I had overheard my dad doing the same for this one. He suggested the use of more esoteric names like Alfred and then moved on to hip-hop nicknames ("P. Diddy, party of 1, your table is ready"). My mom chimed in with some more nicknames, and Jessica took the ball and ran with the whole idea of using stereotypically ethnic names for us WASP types.

A further suggestion, one that merits some further consideration, was the use of common object names, such as "houseboat" and "stick" and so on. This may well have been the sort of thinking that lead to the naming of heavies in Neil Gaiman's fantastic American gods, but one can never be too sure.

But "houseboat" has a nice ring to it. A lot better one than "Long feet", which could well be my Native American name, would have.

Well we inspected a house, today. The electrical's a little wonky, but everything else seems pretty decent, save for some patio windows. I'm not getting my hopes up too high until we close. So that's all I gotta say about that.

So this whole haiku
thing is getting kind of old
should I do lim'ricks?

Bah. That was horrible. I want to do limericks, but they're considerably more difficult. I know there are people out there who can rattle them off with little more than a moment's thought, but not me.

I was stuck on "So my boss went on vacation..." and meant to rhyme it with "consternation" or "frustration" but just couldn't get it to work.