DVDS
INDIANA JONES & THE CRYSTAL SKULL THINGIE (1 SPUD)
TV
MY OWN WORST ENEMY ( 1 SPUD)
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
THANKSGIVING, OR AT LEAST THE DAY BEFORE
Thanksgiving…I know that in the US, it commemorates the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock and just how happy they were to have made it to the new world without all dying of scurvy or dehydration. I guess that’s worth being thankful for. But in Canada, it’s evidently a holdover from the European tradition of celebrating the harvest. No pilgrims involved.
I always think of Thanksgiving in terms of what it means here at Spud Central. First of all, it means moving the summer clothes to the back of the closet and moving the winter duds up. It means putting the rubber floor mats in the car. It means moving the Spud Central lawnmower into the basement to make room for the snowblower. It means that basketball season is only a few weeks away, and that football season is starting to fall into a rhythm, so that I can see the winners and losers a little more clearly. It means my first cold of the season, which I haven’t yet had the pleasure of greeting. It means calling the weird skinny guy named Ken to clean the eaves troughs and a whole bunch of other stuff.
But mostly, it means that The Boy, Mel The Fiancee (formerly Mel The Girlfriend), The Princess of Pain, The Wife and I all get together and dive into a gargantuan turkey and all the fixings and the Wife’s inimitable pumpkin pie for dessert. Besides Christmas and the odd barbecue, it’s the only time the whole immediate family is together. In a way it makes me sad that we’re all so busy all the time, but in another way it makes me feel good, like we’re still all one unit and that nobody has decided to “move away”. All families have their issues. But families are also capable of, at least a few times a year, setting all that aside and just sitting down at the table together to celebrate…the harvest.
If you look around the world, you can see that living here in Canada may not always be paradise, but it’s a hell of a lot better than most places. I can’t really remember a time when I haven’t felt very fortunate to be living here. Nobody’s ever tried to impede my progress as a human being here. Nobody’s ever tried to stop me from chasing my dream. Nobody’s ever banged on my door in the middle of the night and invaded my house with guns in their hands and the law on their side. Nobody’s ever told me what I can or can’t believe, read, listen to or watch. Nobody’s ever tried to tear my family apart through conscription or terrorism. Nobody, besides Bobby Huard back in grade school, has ever even tried to pick a fight with me. And I don’t think I’m living in a bubble. I think I’m living in Canada.
I’d say that’s a lot to be thankful for. I hope that wherever you are, you feel the same way…Happy Thanksgiving.
MY OWN WORST ENEMY (1 SPUD)
IN A NUTSHELL: This dude named Edward, who is some sort of spy or assassin for the government, volunteers to have his brain messed with to create this alter ego named Henry. But something goes wrong and the two guys find out about each other. PEDIGREE: It stars Christian Slater, who is really just a character actor but he’s all gung ho and full of piss and vinegar. FEARLESS FORECAST: This show is a mess. Half the time you don’t know which side of his split personality Christian is playing and he doesn’t either. I just kept asking myself why the hell a guy who was already a master spy and assassin would even volunteer to have his head messed with in the first place. It’s a just a lot of high quality production value with very little thought behind it. If it becomes a hit, I’ll fall off the couch. Dead by Christmas.
THE SPORT SPUD SPEAKETH
A YEAR WITHOUT TIGER—LET’S HOPE IT NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN.
They say you never fully appreciate what you’ve got until you lose it. Well this summer, after one of the most heroic US Open victories in the history of golf, we lost El Tigre, Tiger Woods, who immediately thereafter shut it down for the season and underwent surgery to repair his badly messed up left knee.
Anyone who watched the US Open for all 5 days, couldn’t help but wince along with Tiger on every tee shot and every long iron out of the rough he took. But never once did he consider dropping out. The man is just obsessed with finishing what he starts. When asked that very question in interviews after the tournament, you could see the puzzlement in his eyes. Guys like Tiger are not built to wimp out, although playing with that level of injury would have made his decision to drop out extremely excusable. But things like that just aren’t part of the way he pays the game or manages his career.
Tiger’s disappearance from the circuit left a mighty big hole at the top and it was obvious that Lefty (Phil Mickelson) and Sergio Garcia would be the most popular choices to jump in and take the reins. What happened instead was that all they managed to show is how they could blow a tournament on Sunday with the best of them. This, of course, opened up opportunities for other golfers like the much hated (at least by the Wife),Vijay Singh, the ever popular Kenny Perry, the fighting Irishman Padrig Harrington, Argentinian Studly Do-Right Camilo Villegas and the big buckled Valley Boy, Anthony Kim.
And that’s just about how the rest of the season went, and as it went along in this unfocused way, with no Tiger to lead the pack, it just became wild and wooly, but mostly, at least to me, uninteresting. Now a lot of people might argue that the loss of a dominant player like Tiger would kind of level out the playing field, and in a way it does, but it also flattens the interest of the fans, the majority of whom are secretly there to watch Tiger kick everybody’s ass.
This is a real danger to the sport. Because it’s a well known fact that TV ratings and attendance for tournaments drop dramatically when Tiger’s not in the game. And that’s really too bad because in August and September Golf could really own the sports airways.
All this is by way of wishing Tiger a quick and thorough recovery. If a game ever needed one guy to make it work, it’s pro golf, and Tiger Woods is da man.
INDIANA JONES AND THE SECTRE OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL
OK, Harrison Ford is an old guy now. It’s been 20 years since he cracked his whip in what was arguably one of the best action adventure feature series of all time. But for some reason, the creators Steve Spielberg and George Lucas couldn’t leave well enough alone. This latest Indiana Jones adventure kinda reminded me of Michael Jordan coming back to play basketball after he had retired as a hall of fame legend.It was cool to see him for sure, but after a few minutes you realized that he was just too old to be capable of playing at his former level (absolutely great), and that was uncool.
In this movie, Indie is searching for this Crystal Skull and that’s supposed to lead him to the long lost city of el Dorado, and a bunch of other stuff along the way. All the while he’s being chased by a troop of Commie Russians (hey it’s 1957), led by Kate Blanchett, who are trying to kill him and follow him at the same time and that was confusing. Anyway, he gets re-united with Karen Allen, his old squeeze, and her son, a fifties greaseball, played by Shai LeBoeuf, (weird name) etc etc.
The action here is ultra large scale. The effects are amazing. The story is kind of cool. But this movie just doesn’t cut it because the characters are all so secondary to everything that’s going on that you hardly give a shit about them. So now you’re not so much watching a movie as you are watching the Industrial Light & Magic 2008 Demo reel. And that gets old pretty fast.
The thing about the original movies was that the characters were all so great.This was something that nobody of that generation had seen before. I guess they were, with this new effort, trying to introduce it to a new generation, but with the proliferation of the classic original series that’s a daunting task. You’d have to coax all the cave dwellers out of their caves and Mennonites out of their log cabins, cause these are probably the only groups that haven’t seen the Indiana Jones movies. In spite of that, it still did more than $700 million world wide, just in theatrical sales alone.
Just goes to show you the kind of income big names can generate, even for a film that was OK, but nowhere near great.
SPUDITORIAL – WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO HEROES?
The first season of Heroes, the NBC prime time sci-fi drama series, started with kinds of a whimper. But it was like a long fuse burning slowly, as bit by bit all the main players and the fascinating plot line was revealed. I loved the concept of an artist painting the future and a scientist trying to figure out where all these mutants with their special powers were coming from. I liked that it was a little hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys and it was definitely must see TV.
Then something happened. It may have had to do with the shows its ever increasing popularity, but at the end of the second season, it kind of exploded into a complete mish-mosh of stuff that just left you shaking your head and wondering if the monster that creator Tim Kring had created had actually gotten away from him, mutinied and taken over the ship shooting off subplots in all directions at the same time, making the show virtually impossible to follow. This, in the reviewing business, is called forsaking your audience, none of who are the intellectual equal to the strange goings on that are being displayed here.
And this season, if anything, the situation has gotten worse, even more chaotic. The Wife gave up on it right after episode 1. I hung in for a couple more but now it’s just so confusing that it’s all becoming boring as batshit. Everything that gave the show its appeal and a good deal of its focus is gone. And I’m thinking that there’s this bunch of stoned out writers in Hollywood, getting paid an obscene amount of money to write this stuff, and through the cocaine fog of pressure to perform they have all intellectually imploded.
I get the ‘order out of chaos’ principle on which this show motors along. But what good is all that if by the time you get through all the chaos, you have lost your audience? Sometimes, and many conversations with Caruso confirm this, the creators of TV shows and movies get so wrapped up in their ‘art”, that they completely forget that they are creating their art for human consumption, and the timeless adage,
“if there ain’t no audience, there ain’t no show’, always applies.
I hope, for the sake of Tim Kring’s career, that he gets this show back on track, because I don’t wish a ruined reputation on anyone. But the other side of that coin is that I new, officially, no longer care. Monday night is jammed with great TV entertainment, so for me it’s just on less thing to worry about PVRing.
