DVDS
The Spiderwick Chronicles (2 spuds)
Vantage Point (1.5 Spuds)
No Reservations (1.5 Spuds)
TV
Saxondale (2 Spuds)
The Kumars At # 42 (2 Spuds)
Wire In The Blood (2 Spuds)
Graham Norton Show (2 Spuds)
SPUDITORIAL
Wimbledon Really Tuckered Me Out
KNOW YOUR SPUDS
TWO XL SPUDS — Absolute Must See
TWO SPUDS — Definitely Worth Checking Out
1.5 SPUDS—Worth Checking Out,
But Don’t Expect A Ton
ONE SPUD – Not Worth It, Except
For The Hardcore Fan
NO SPUD 4U – Just Plain Sucks
A BELATED HAPPY CANADA DAY
This is the last day of an extra long weekend. We should all try to take 4-day weekend whenever we can get away with it. Mainly because we’re all so freaking stressed out from the 5 day work week grind that two days just doesn’t seem like enough somehow. Especially for those of you who are heading to the cottage every weekend. What the hell do you get? Traffic misery and woe on Friday night. Traffic misery and woe redux on Sunday afternoon. And what do you get in between… well there’s shopping, cooking, eating, fix this, install that and a couple of hours on Saturday evening to play cards with your kids, who get bored after the first few hands and end up playing video games, leaving you with the incessant clamour of Super Mario music ringing in your ears. Well don’t feel bad. It’s the same in the city, at least here at Spud Central, where the Wife sees the long weekend as a chance to tear down and rebuild some part of Spud Central. This weekend it’s the triangular shaped walls that line the stairs down to the basement. It’s always a bigger job than she thinks it will be and in order to complete the job she needs a whole bunch of stuff that she can’t get because it’s one of those holidays that retailers actually take seriously…Canada Day.
Oh Canada, In spite of the useless politicians and the overinflated costs of just about everything. In spite of the nasty ass winter storms that blow all season, and the muggy humid days that we seem to have been having a more lot of. In spite of our tendency to be lumped in with the crippled giant to the south. And in spite of the fact that my bit of Canada, Toronto, has pretty much turned into Valhalla for gangs and tongs of all shapes and sizes, I can still look out the window on a morning like this where the sun is shining and the sky is azure blue and filled with harmless looking clouds and say to myself, in all honesty, I’m living in the best country around.
Tonight we’re going to The Boy’s for a barbecue and fireworks, because the The Boy has pretty much the best view in the city of the city, which means we won’t be just watching the fireworks down at Ashbridges Bay, but just about everywhere in the city that someone shooting them off.
So Happy Canada day to everyone. Hope yours was as good as mine. Now I have to go and clean out the eaves troughs, because reality may suck sometimes, but it still has to be dealt with.
THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES (2 SPUDS)
This was a request from the Wife, and not normally the kind of movie I would glom onto on my own. As it turns out, the Wife had pretty good instincts. This is a pure fantasy movie about a mom and her three kids who re-locate (post divorce) from New York to an old family home, somewhere in the boondocks. The house, originally owned by their great great uncle is quite a weird place, but that’s all part of the plot, so I won’t give you any details, other than that the family has walked into the middle of a centuries long battle between the forces of good and evil.
That sounds kind of ominous, and it is. This film really and truly takes you to another world in much the same way as the Harry Potter movies do (but without the trillion dollar budget), and it’s really well put together on just about every level.
The Spiderwick Chronicles was obviously intended for kids, but it worked just fine for the Wife and me, here in the kid-challenged paradise that is Spud Central.
VANTAGE POINT (Almost 2 XL SPUDS)
This is one of those movies that tells its story by playing the same basic scene over and over again from the different points of view of each of the main characters. The scene is a political assassination in Spain. Now if what I just told you makes the movie sound a bit dull and repetitive, trust me, it’s anything but. It does a fantastic job of revealing the whole story bit by bit and each bit has a twist of one kind or another. The screenplay was written by a guy named Barry Levy and it’s his first produced work. Pretty impressive debut.
This movie was obviously inspired by the great Kurosawa film, Rashomon, which was structured in the same sort of way. I kind of wish people would take more chances on movies with a unique structure like Run Lola Run, Insomnia and Memento.
The movie stars a lot of good people like Dennis Quaid as a secret service legend, William Hurt as the President, Matthew Fox as Dennis’ partner, and the great Forrest Whittaker as a tourist who gets caught up in the goings on.
Vantage Point is great action thriller that had me on the edge of my seat. I know that sounds corny, but I just got a new easy chair for Spud Central and it’s a glider, so I’m kind of always on the edge of my seat anyway.
NO RESERVATIONS (2 SPUDS)
This is a vehicle movie for Catharine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart, a couple of Hollywood’s prettiest people. It was kind of billed as a comedy, but it’s really more of a drama with Aaron Eckhart’s character providing a bit of lightness.
It’s essentially the story of a work obsessed chef in a hoity toity Bleeker Street restaurant (you can tell by the black market truffles that cost $2200 a pound), who, through a tragic accident, inherits custody of her very young niece, played by Abagail Breslin, and at the same time has to cope with the dog eat medium rare dog world of her profession as the restaurant owner brings in a sous-chef (Aaron). So there’s a lot of stuff on her plate.
In addition to being a pretty decent drama, this movie gives you an inside look at the kitchen of a busy upscale eatery and that’s kind of interesting. Zeta-Jones character is kind of a work obsessed, joyless honcho, who’s feared without bearing fearful, a quality I assume a lot of successful chefs need to have. Eckhart’s character is a great looking, easy going opera loving northern (blonde) Italian.
This movie was nice, poignant, well-constructed and even came with the requisite cornball happy ending. I liked all the characters, especially Aaron, who seems to just get better and better as he goes along.
BRIT TV – A REFRESHING CHANGE FROM THE TV WE ALL GREW UP WITH
Now that I have BBC Canada in my cable package, I have become a rather large fan of several of the shows they broadcast. These shows don’t really have any equivalent in North America and I guess that’s why I like them so much. What I find with British shows is that they kind of grow on you. I think that’s because the quality of the writing that powers these shows tend to be more sophisticated than the writing on all but a few North American shows, and it just takes that much longer for our little entertainment brains to realize and process that. Nonetheless, once you’ve watched a couple of episodes you find that the entertainment value of these shows ranges from moderately to vastly superior to the stuff we tend to usually watch.
SAXONDALE (2 SPUDS)
This is a very dry comedy starring Steve Coogan who plays a kind of know it all ex eighties power rock band roadie with anger issues, named Tommy Saxondale, who has retired into some small part of England and gotten himself a bug and rodent killing franchise. Steve’s character is absolutely fascinating, with a brain full of useless and pointless knowledge that he picked up from voracious reading on the endless rock tour road. He’s a slave to all things seventies and eighties, drives a not quite Shelby Mustang and tends to push everything a bit too far but is smart enough to always regret it. This is easily one of the most complex comic characters ever created for television and Coogan is an absolute hoot to watch, because he’s really smart and really dumb at the same time and that’s hard to pull off for just about anybody but the best.
THE KUMARS AT #42 (2 SPUDS)
This show is a broader sitcom than Saxondale about an Indian family living in Wembley, a suburb of London, who host a live TV talk show in a studio they have built in their back garden. It’s pretty weird premise, but the actors are all amazing and every episode features two real celebrities who get interviewed on the show. Each of the characters in the family is a living caricature of some sort of stereotypical, Indian immigrant. Sanjiv the son is a hip English guy wannabe. The father is an insurance salesman and probably sleeps with his suit on. The mother is doting and always cooking, and the grandmother is a wisecracking oversexed elder. This is a deadly combination and these actors all work extremely well together.
WIRE IN THE BLOOD (2 SPUDS)
This is a very successful series that has been running since 2003. What’s unique about it is that each episode, at the least the ones we see over here, are two hours long. This is a crime series whose major protagonist is a police psychologist named Tony Hill. The stories are complex to start with, but made even more so by the fact that they are filtered through the psychologist’s eye. The Tony Hill character is also a profiler, but one with credibility among the cops he works with.
This stuff is pretty dark and explicit for the most part. The Wife, for example finds it all a bit heavy for her taste, and, sometimes I have to admit, so do I. But generally speaking it’s pretty solid and entertaining, like most high-end British shows.
THE GRAHAM NORTON SHOW (2 SPUDS)
This is a talk show unlike anything we will ever see over here. The host is a flamboyant and outwardly gay Irish comedian with a razor sharp wit and a real rapport with his audience. The guests are all famous and infamous people who are encouraged to tell their raunchiest stories and use whatever four letter words they like. It’s a hell of a lot of fun for the guests, the audience and the viewers.
They do skits from time to time, but these are things like using an audience member to make a 1980’s style German porn film. The guests come on in pairs and are usually connected to each other in some way or other. But Graham, in addition to being very funny and self-deprecating, is also a great interviewer and manages to pull a lot of good stuff out of his guests.
Although it’s an acquired taste, The Graham Norton Show still a hell of a lot more entertaining than any North American talk show you can think of.
THE SPORT SPUD SPEAKETH
WIMBLEDON (10 LB BAG ‘O SPUDS)
The final match between Raphael Nadal and Roger Federer. Federer is defending five straight wins. Nadal is out to prove he’s a great all round tennis player ( ie hard court, clay and grass). I start watching at 9:37 AM. I stop watching at 4:39 PM. I can’t believe I spent a whole day of my life watching tennis. Of course there were two long rain delays, in which the Wife and I went out and did some shopping, but I never missed a single shot.
There are, quite simply, not enough Spuds to give this match. For the quality of play. For the fierceness of the competition. For the sheer human drama of two human beings doing the most important thing in their respective lives and absolutely needing to win. This was as close a match as you will ever see. The final set went 16 games and was decided (in Nadal’s favour), by a return shot about three inches below the net.
I was completely fried at the end of this one. And that’s about as high a compliment as anyone can pay any sporting event. Sports just keeps getting better and better. I’m looking forward to a post-Olympics coma.
Post match quote from Waldin, who is the biggest tennis fan I know.
“Jim, That really was incredible. Maybe the best tennis I ever saw. John McEnroe thought so. A sad day for Roger, but he fought like a champion right to the end. What an athlete Nadal is. He did unbelievable things on court today. That tennis match shows you exactly why I love that game.”
