¿quien es mas macho: kevin spacey o starcraft?
No running.
Last night Darin and I went out to dinner with Paul, one of Darin's friends from a hundred years ago (or, rather, Chicago and the ICOM days, and then from Apple). We went to Lawry's Prime Rib, which as always is tasty but gives too much food.
During dinner we discussed Small Soldiers. Paul said that, while listening to Frank Langella's voice and noticing the reaction of the all the women around, he found himself saying, "Well, it's understandable, him getting that sort of reaction. Perfectly reasonable, given that voice."
Darin and I flew up to San Jose today. Why? Because I'm taking this running thing a mite too seriously, that's why.
Rob and I signed up to do the Wharf-to-Wharf run in Santa Cruz shortly after doing the Bay-to-Breakers in May. Rob uses this journal and the threat of impending races to keep him running.
(I don't know what I use--the joy of being a size 6, I guess.)
Rob collected us at the airport and drove us back to his house. During the ride Darin called Mitch and arranged to have him meet us at Rob's, and then the 5 of us would head over to the Original Pancake House for breakfast. We arrived, said hello to Nutmeg, collected Laura, and headed off to get us some fine pancakes.
Or, we tried. Whilst getting into the car, Laura closed the back door on Rob's finger, removing a wedge of said finger and getting blood all over the backseat. Rob and Laura took care of Rob's finger; I wiped up the blood. Mitch and Darin discussed Starcraft, a game brought to you by the guys who brought you Warcraft.
Once the shock wore off Rob and Laura had regained her composure (she was pretty upset about Rob's hand), we once again piled in the car and headed out.
The second we arrived at the restaurant, Mitch's engine seized up and dumped all his antifreeze. Darin pushed the car into a parking space and Mitch called AAA (which he just joined, 3 weeks ago--whoo hoo!). I decided that the blood on the backseat had raised some ancient demon, whose wrath was felt through engine seizure.
Since we were already there, we decided to have some pancakes and wait for the AAA guy.
Darin and I have yet to find any place in LA that even begins to approach The Original Pancake House in San Jose for sheer wonderfulness of breakfast food. We always go to the Pancake House when we're in San Jose. It's simply not to be missed: the pancakes are fluffy without being doughy, the flapjacks are a different creation entirely than the pancakes, the waffles are extraordinary. I think we would eat all meals there when visiting the Peninsula, except a)there are other restaurants we're missing and b)the Original Pancake House closes at 3pm.
Both Laura and I got chocolate chip pancakes. Rob got banana pancakes. Rob and Laura mixed and matched, which led to a tasty pancake combination and to Diane feeling pangs of envy.
The AAA guy showed up eventually--and it wasn't even the AAA guy assigned to find Mitch. That AAA guy had given up, because evidently he couldn't find the restaurant, despite the large sign that says ORIGINAL PANCAKE HOUSE outside the door. This second AAA guy just happened to be in the neighborhood when he called in and said, Hey, is there anything around? Mitch rode off with him, and Darin did the only sensible thing: he called Greg to come pick us up.
"Isn't Greg going to be upset that we didn't ask him out to breakfast?" I asked.
"I'm not giving him an opportunity to raise that question," Darin said.
Greg showed up and the 5 of us piled into his Camaro. I've driven Greg's Camaro: it's an excellent car for, say, cruising the boulevard and picking up chicks at the high school. (In case anyone wonders what Greg and I were out doing when I was driving his car.)
It's not a good car for piling 5 adults into.
LAURA squeezes between ROB and DIANE in the backseat.
GREG
It's really a two-seater, okay?
Rob leads a short prayer thanking his lucky stars
everyone in the backseat went on the liquid diet.
DIANE
This is reminding me of high school.
(beat)
Not, of course, that I ever did
anything like this in high school.
GREG
Oh sure.
DIANE
(morose)
No, I actually didn't.
Rob leads a short prayer atoning for Diane's lack
of adolescent high-jinks.
Diane's excellent plan for Saturday night involved going to see a sneak preview of The Negotiator. Since Greg had been Diane's enabler in her Kevin Spacey fixation and Rob and Laura had ripped those Wiseguy tapes out of Diane's hands just as soon as it was physically feasible to do so, seeing a Kevin Spacey movie seemed like it was a good idea.
Darin, however, realized something much, much more important: he was in an area where he could play Starcraft with a bunch of gamers. People who really enjoy playing large networked computer games. And since he was going to be in town for 36 hours, he wanted to take advantage of it. The only limiting factor was the number of computers that could be networked together--not that much of a limiting factor.
DIANE
So, do you want to hang out with
Darin and play Starcraft, or hang
out with Diane and see The Negotiator?
(beat)
Choose wisely.
Darin, Mitch, and Rob decided to stay home and play the game; Laura, Greg, Laura's friends Dean and Lee Ann, and I decided to go to the movie.
We headed out to Kikusushi, a good Japanese restaurant we have also missed. I had an unagi donburi, or a bowl of rice with grilled freshwater eel on top. Very, very tasty--except they didn't burn off all the alcohol from the sauce, and I got a buzz from it. Whee! I also pigged out on edamame, but I justified this (and most everything else) as "carbo-loading."
Sho came down from San Francisco to see Darin, but he showed up just as the moviegoers were leaving, so all I got to say was "Hi."
Greg, Laura, and I went to Dean and Lee Ann's house, where we all piled into Dean's Jimmy truck/SUV (a much better car for 5 adults) and headed to the new AMC Mercado 20 Theaters, over by Great America. This entire complex is After My Time--it just sprouted up between visits to the north.
Sigh. I won't recognize this area after a while. The landscape's changing so remarkably and I'm already forgetting the orders of streets.
The Mercado mall is an exercise in poor civil engineering: it's tough to get into and out of, the traffic flow doesn't, and the parking is a nightmare. I'm sure it's outrageously popular.
The Mercado also perpetrated one of the more, uh, unusual movie-showing experiences I've ever heard of: Rob and Laura and Dean and Lee Ann went to see The X-Files. Rob and Laura bought their tickets separately from Dean and Lee Ann--and as it turned out they got shunted into separate theaters that were showing the movie at the exact same time. (Rob is convinced that the theater is doing something fishy, like somehow using the same print to show the movie in two separate theaters simultaneously.) So they couldn't sit together at the movie.
Anyhow, back at the ranch: 4 of us got into one of the huge, sprawling lines for the tickets. Then I said, "I'd better to check to see if it's sold out." So I went up to the front and saw that The Negotiator wasn't even listed. I went up to a Not In Service window to ask the clerk if it was playing and was it sold out. Of course, the speaker that allow clerk to talk to patron and vice-versa wasn't working, so like a dork I had to lean down to the money-passing hole and speak through that. The clerk didn't return the favor, so I had to guess at what her answers were. She said yes and no, respectively.
I turned to go back to where my compatriots stood at the end of that line, when she opened the window.
Me, I'm all for kismet.
I bought the tickets and raced to find the others before they also bought tickets. We checked to make sure we all had the same theater number listed before splitting up so that Lee Ann could find Dean (who'd been out parking in Western Siberia).
We got into line outside the theater. When the ushers forced the milling patrons to get behind the velvet ropes, I kept our group right up there at the front. Well, not the exact front: some really die-hard Kevin Spacey fans made sure they were number one. No one was coming between them and the theater, believe you me.
Some other people decided that being behind the velvet ropes was keeping them too far from the theater, and they just "hung out" right by the doors. Real casual-like. Needless to say, we made fun of them.
On to the movie:
I think we all agreed that we liked it. It's uneven. There were no great surprises in it, but Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey are really good. There's always something happening, be it humor, tension, or action. (Note to makers of action movies: please stop making over-the-top action scenes where we in the audience have a hard time telling who's doing what to whom. That is all.)
There's one scene at the end that I thought was very cool, because it's unexpected. It's followed by a very hokey coda, however, that I didn't believe for a second, which damaged the impact of the scene.
|
|
|
|
The biggest flaw for me is in a movie that's a mystery--Samuel L. Jackson is being set up to take the fall for a crime he didn't commit--we should care about the solution to the mystery. And the possible bad guys are simply too faceless and formulaic for us to be seriously involved with which one of them is the bad guy. There needed to be more menace and personality in the three guys set up as the possible Head Bad Guy.
Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com