And now the NBA Finals are over. What to watch, what to watch.
You must be kidding.
Well, Mike F. and his wife are now divorced--the first person from my circle of friends to have gotten divorced. Unfortunately, this being the last decade of the 20th Century, I'll add, "so far." He seemed to be doing okay about it, and we talked about where he's living now and how work's going and how he's really getting into Judaism and yadda yadda yadda.
I won't go into it because it was all sort of domesticated and boring, but it was great seeing him again. It really brought back a ton of memories about college.
Darin told me he couldn't watch Game 6 of the NBA Finals, which had gone back to Utah. "What if they lose?" he said. "Then they'll have Game 7. And when it's not life or death, Jordan isn't Jordan."
Well, I sat down to watch it.
The first thing I learned to yell while watching basketball, which I learned from my brother-in-law Scott, is, "Denied!" The sequence goes something like this:
- a player for the opposing team tries to make a basket,
- a player for your team stops him from making said basket,
- you yell, "DENIED!"
I've discovered my current favorite thing to yell while watching basketball is, "You SUCK!" Which goes the same route as "Denied!" but the players for the teams are reversed.
The Jazz stopped the Bulls from scoring a lot during the first half of Game 6. And they had a ton of flagrant fouls that the referees weren't calling--I know they were flagrant, because even I could catch them (and I can't call traveling, okay?).
So I would yell, "You suck!" and Darin would yell up from downstairs, "What happened?" and I'd say, "Jordan missed the free throw! They're behind by a point!"
Then Mike and Harry showed up and we missed the second half of the game, which evidently Chicago won.
It amazes me that basketball is such a violent game. I remember hearing that being given as one of the reasons that Magic Johnson had to retire when he was diagnosed as HIV+, because of the chances of transmission during a game, and I thought, Basketball? Football, maybe, but...
Then you watch one of these Finals games, where Rodman and Malone are doing everything but taking machetes to one another, and you think, Yeah, maybe they were right.
Mike and Harry came over and the 4 of us went out to see 6 Days, 7 Nights. If you've seen the trailer, you've seen the movie. It's pleasant enough, but it's fluff.
DARIN and DIANE walk out of the theatre.
DIANE
I won't remember a thing about
this movie tomorrow morning.
DARIN
Tomorrow morning? Try in 10
minutes.
And he was right.
The plot is very simple--boy and girl meet cute, boy and girl crash on island, boy and girl avoid getting involved, only to have girl find out her fiance cheated on her, girl runs back to boy--and there's no character depth. I mean no character depth: if Harrison Ford hasn't been your cup of tea up until this point in your life, here is not the place to start. Anne Heche was just fine. David Schwimmer was...well, I've never seen him on Friends, but boy that whiny New York Jew shtick gets old quick.
(Spoiler: while Harrison and Anne are on the island, David and Harrison's girlfriend sleep together to console one another. Then David agonizes over it in every scene he's in thereafter. He abases himself in front of Anne when she returns. I got so annoyed at his whinyness and wishy-washiness that I leaned over to Darin and said, "Should we ever find ourselves in this situation, just say, 'It happened,' and move on, okay? None of this groveling crap.")
The dialogue was atrocious in its blandness and its clichedness--Ivan Reitman, in the episode of Naked Hollywood on writers, talked about how he always uses a stable of writers on any movie he works on. Well, he forgot to get the funny guy this time around. Darin kept leaning over to me and saying, "You're not allowed to write that," after a particularly egregious line.
The movie has to end where it does, because there is no way to show these characters starting a life together. And, as Darin pointed out, she has the passel of kids, he stays home to raise them, and by the time they're ready to go to high school he's 70. But Harrison and Anne are just fine together and Harrison does look pretty good for 55 or whatever he is now.
Verdict: matinee.
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Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com