Ridley Scott must have seen Pearl Harbor and said, “That’s what I want to do!”  And William Monahan, who had split a jumbo carton of Raisinets with Scott, said, “I’ll get you a script by Monday.”  What other explanation is there?  Since Pearl Harbor, no one can claim ignorance of the historical epic’s cinematic follies; Scott & Co. must have meant to employ them.  Judged by those standards, Kingdom of Heaven acquits itself admirably.  It nails the trifecta of overblown-period-piece suck.

1. Writing.  William Monahan won an Oscar for writing the departed.  He sure didn’t earn it here; Kingdom of Heaven has one of those rare scripts that dares to show and tell.  Like when Balian (Orlando Bloom), accused of killing a priest, helpfully informs his just-found father (Liam Neeson) that the charges are true.  We know, Balian.  We saw you set him on fire.  And how about the clichés?  Surrendering Jerusalem to Saladin—after lots of period battle scenes, after lots of speeches that are stirring only in that they sound like other speeches that actually are stirring—Balian asks his erstwhile opponent what the city is worth.  “Nothing,” says Saladin.  He paces away, then turns back.  Guess his next line.  There’s also the fact that the screenplay grants its characters as much depth and humanity as a crime blotter, and probably ended every line of dialogue with “[Significant pause].”  Hell, that’s probably why this thing runs 150 bloated minutes.

2. Directing.  Kingdom of Heaven had a budget of $130 million.  Ridley Scott puts every dollar on screen in the least efficient way.  Okay, he couldn’t really film character development, since the script gave him nothing to work with, but instead of trying to tell a story Scott loads up every frame with stuff.  During the siege, Saladin’s forces storm the walls of Jerusalem with wheeled assault towers.  Balian’s defenders attach ropes to spears, skewer the towers, and topple them.  We get it the first time, but apparently Scott had some CGI budget to spend, because he shows another tower falling, then another, then another, and then pans across the wall to show them toppling in sequence.  The movie is so rich in visual detail that it ends up being as redundant as the script.

3. Acting.  Why is Orlando Bloom here?  His biggest hits were CGI-heavy series where thespianism got bumped from the marketing strategy in favor of Burger King cups.  Don’t make him do the heavy lifting in a “philosophical” historical epic, because the result is 150 minutes of his must-not-fart face.  The script gives Balian one note—grim but noble determination—so it’s hard to blame Orlando for milking it dry, but no one else gets more than one note and they somehow work around it.  David Thewlis owns the movie in the filler role of the priest, Liam Neeson manages to enliven Balian’s Crusader father, Kevin McKidd does the work as a doomed exposition mouthpiece—fuck, Martin Csokas shifts himself to enliven a villain whose main task is to wind up naked and dunce-capped on the back of an ass.  It’s Balian’s story, so it’s Bloom’s movie, and in it Bloom reveals that his only talent is making teen girls squeal.  If he starred in a romantic comedy with his fellow grooming-salon graduate Jennifer Aniston, the charisma vacuum they’d generate would turn the universe inside out.

Somewhere in Kingdom of Heaven, there’s a point about Christianity and Islam, West and (Middle) East, coexisting in piece—about the value of religious belief when weighed against human life.  Someone else can talk about that.  I’m more interested in the movie’s point about Hollywood.  The witless script, the clueless direction, the somnambulant acting—these were all mistakes that Pearl Harbor made.  That movie still stands as a cinematic nadir.  Not for nothing did the puppet in Team America sing, “I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark when he made Pearl Harbor—and that’s an awful lot, girl.”  But since PH made $450 million worldwide on a $140-million budget, the crappiness of the thing was forgotten and the parasitic lifeform flourished.  Here it is again, and the only good thing I can say about it is that this incarnation is (slightly) better than King Arthur.

Sunday at almost exactly 2 a.m., I was in the middle of a particularly bad dream when the phone rang. Everyone hates phone calls in the middle of the night, and ever since I moved to the States, I’ve been convinced that if the phone rings late at night, it can only mean that my parents are calling to let me know my grandmother has died. (She’s fine, in case you’re wondering where this is going.)

I stayed under the covers and waited to hear the answering machine pick up. I don’t know if it was the relative quiet in the middle of the night or something else, but the machine filled the apartment. It wasn’t my parents, as I said, but this instead:

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I understand that it’s not exactly heavy breathing, or someone asking me what my favorite scary movie is. But when the loud, random beeping started sounding like Mary Had a Little Lamb (it’s about 35 seconds in), I admit I was scared shitless. By then, I had woken up Kris, who had slept right through the ringing phone.

“Hon,” he asked softly, “Where is that noise coming from?”

I realized, of course, that as scary as it had been for me, it must be even more nerve wracking for Kris to wake up to a strange, computerized version of a nursery rhyme booming through the house. The message ended and Kris got up to check the caller ID (there was a name and a local number) and make sure all the doors were locked. I thought about calling the number back, but I realized that either drunk kids were fooling around and were hardly likely to sound apologetic, or (what seemed more likely) the evil monsters that were calling me in a horror movie-like way might be less likely to kill me during the day.

We both slept fitfully. At dawn this morning, Kris (who usually can sleep through anything) woke up, rattled that the phone was ringing again. I told him he was just hearing birds chirp, because I had been awake for a while and knew what woke him.

The number turned out to belong to a residential address just a few blocks from us, and after work today, we tried calling it back. Ironically, the machine always picked up– it had voice of an old man cheerfully announcing his name. There’s no chance that the old man died, and his ghost was trying to call us, is there?

My latest craze is Conquer Club, an online turns-based game improving on the Risk board game. I understand all the theoretical problems with taking a subject like war and trivializing it with game play. But to me, with all the various boards in this new game that aren’t even map based (the chinese checkers board, the crossword board, the university campus), the game takes on more a game of strategy like Chess or Backgammon and less a trivialization of war.

And how can something this fun (and free) be intellectually dishonest to play? Not to mention the sideline banter: I was in a game recently where conversation between players turned from comic books to quoting King Lear to debt relief roadblocks as a result of the Iraq war to jockstraps. And these weren’t even the players I knew. 

Maybe Kris will share his drawing for a game board that he and I thought up. But for that to make sense, I guess you have to give this game a try first at: www.conquerclub.com. If you see yammers1 out there, beware, he is a keen strategist, held back only by a vague twinge of enjoying himself too much.

I guess at this point I have to start justifying my Netflix queue, so here goes. I liked Ben Kingsley in Dave and thought he was impressive in Sexy Beast (although I couldn’t get through the movie as a whole), plus HBO Films has a reputation for quality. That’s how I came to see Mrs. Harris. Based on a true story, it stars Annette Bening as the title character, a headmistress who attaches herself to Kingsley’s self-professed “country doctor” Herman Tarnower. Tarnower is less rural sawbones and more egocentric, womanizing publicity hound, and Harris soon finds herself taking a backseat to Tarnower’s pursuit of younger women and his rise to fame with the Scarsdale Diet. As he neglects her (except to write her dubious prescriptions), Harris goes into an emotional tailspin that ultimately drives her, one rainy night, to go to his house with a gun. Before night’s end, Tarnower is dead and Harris is facing murder charges.

I hate Annette Bening. Part of me thinks she keeps choosing to play brittle, needy types who snap in hopes of capturing the Oscar that Hilary Swank denied her the first time; another part of me remembers her staticky, Lifetime-movie “complexity” way back in The American President; neither part of me likes to see her on screen. Mrs. Harris has to accomplish a lot of heavy lifting to get me past that. That it does is due to some strong direction and an interesting script, both by Phyllis Nagy. Was it murder? The movie presents two scenarios: in the opening, the gun goes off as Tarnower tries to wrest it from Harris (the real-life Harris’s story); at the end, Harris arrives at Tarnower’s in a near-fugue state and shoots him in the back out of anger. (In both scenes, after the shooting Bening puts an acquiescent Tarnower to bed. I’d want a ride to the hospital, but the good doctor and I differ on many points.) Thus the movie manages to avoid passing judgment (in real life, she was convicted) without glossing over the details of the case.

The fact is, the Jean Harris of the movie—borderline under a façade of patrician competence—is exactly the kind of role that suits Bening, and the fact that I don’t like that role doesn’t mean she inhabits it poorly. She captures the way emptiness can erode the foundations of a personality until the whole edifice collapses. The sequence where Harris, having been dumped, sends Tarnower a letter by registered mail and then calls him, near tears, to request that he destroy it is exemplary. She knows he’ll have to sign for the letter and, thus, still have some marginal contact with her; by the time she realizes how pathetic and desperate this plan is, it’s too late for her to extricate herself without another flaky gesture. She sees what she is but can’t change it. As Tarnower, Kingsley is both sane and plausibly blind to Harris’s precarious emotional state, and manages to infuriate me even though Harris generally deserves his callous treatment. The movie is packed with familiar faces (Michael Gross has a basically silent role as a society husband; there are also Mary McDonnell, Brett Butler, Lee Garlington, Cloris Leachman, Frances Fisher, Chloe Sevigny, and Philip Baker Hall), but Nagy has the sense to clear the dance floor and let Kingsley and Bening destroy each other unimpeded.

It’s a true story, but I find Mrs. Harris odd in that Tarnower never seems to like Harris all that much. Maybe it’s just that Kingsley applies his smarmy charm equally to Bening and to any other woman Tarnower wants to get naked with. When Tarnower proposes to Harris, it’s like he couldn’t find anything else to do that week; when he backpedals, swearing he loves her but doesn’t want to be married, why doesn’t he back out all the way? My best interpretation is that he liked having a long string of ladies on his line too much to let her go completely. If that’s the case, then frankly, they both got what they deserved.

I’ve been hearing for a while that the latest in party-game crazes is Apples to Apples, and I’m happy to report that after a single night’s shennanigans, I can declare myself a big fan.

See, my two favorite games so far have been Taboo and Drinking Jenga and Apples to Apples provides a combination of both those games. (I feel legally obligated to tell you that drinking apparently isn’t really a requirement– but, like I’ve been telling my writing students for years, there are just some things you shouldn’t try without being drunk.)

The premise of the game is fairly simple. There are two kinds of cards: green and red. Green cards have adjectives on them, and the red ones nouns. One person turns a green card over, and then the rest of the players pick a red card each from their hand that they feel best matches the adjective. If the judge, the person who flipped over the green card, agrees with your noun-adjective matching, then you win– which means that you get to keep the green card. Whoever gets to ten green cards first wins.

Wait, did I say simple? I meant painful to explain, but the game ends up being fun anyway.

The main thing is that Apples to Apples is a sly game– winning at it is sometimes about having an imaginative vocabulary, or being quick with pop-cultural references, and other times it really is about you making connections that are weird enough to get noticed, but popular enough to get you get picked a lot. (For example, I picked Thunder as the best noun for the adjective Cranky– but I couldn’t tell you why.) Then again, sometimes it’s about an affection for puns, and sometimes it’s about simple associations between concepts. Who knows? Not me, since I didn’t actually win.

What I do know is that a sure-fire way to make it fun is to play this game with five other loud, oustpoken people. Or, to be honest, with four loud, outspoken people and a petite, quiet woman. (Well, to be perfectly fair, with one petite and quiet woman, one outspoken stoned guy, two moderately enthusiastic people, one fairly enthusaistic player, and a partridge in a pear tree. Plus wine.)

Regardless, it’s an incredibly fun game, and I know that some reader/contributor of 12apostrophes recently got it as a birthday present so I’m waiting to get invited over, especially now that I hear you can buy a bible expansion pack.

$24.99 at Target.com

A friend of ours (we’ll call him “Coal” man, to protect the innocent) had to do his homework at the Como zoo in St. Paul Saturday morning, and he invited Pulao and me along.

He’s taking an “animal” class at the University of Minnesota, and the assignment was to observe people interacting with animals. First stop was the big cats enclosure, where the tiger was framed nicely behind chain-links, and traced his own pawprints in the snow, around and around his cage.

For some reason or the other, there were zoo workers with a tiger pelt (hope it was nobody he knew) for the children to pet. One little boy, who I honestly believe was mentally handicapped, quickly got to the crux of the matter.

“Did you shoot the tiger?” he asked the zoo personnel.

“No, we don’t shoot tigers,” his dad said.

“Can we shoot the tiger?” he said.

“No, I don’t want to shoot tigers,” Dad said. “I don’t like to shoot tigers.”

“Then we’ll shoot the tiger?” the boy asked.

Later on the same boy talked to me about the seals at great length, and how each of the five seals named “Sparky” had died, and that’s when I formed my opinion that he wasn’t like other kids, or at least had an unhealthy youthful obsession with death.

At the time our academic friend gleefully wrote all this down and more. “This is good stuff,” he said, all his misanthropy confirmed.

We ended with the polar bears, and again, human kind came through for our friend’s assignment. Three kids were skimming snow off the ample heaps on the zoo grounds and throwing snowballs at one of the polar bears.

Only one kid had any aim worth a damn. One never got near the bear, and one, who must have been 3 years old, commited the cutest attempt at animal cruelty ever seen, forming a haphazard clump of snow and hurling it with all his might, only to have it poof into harmles powder about 4 centimeters from his own foot.

But one boy was able to hit the bear — twice! The bear in question was sitting and licking its back paw at the time, and it’s hard for me to imagine anything being less perturbed than this 1-ton bear was by the 2-ounce snowballs it took on the fur. He cocked his head slightly to the side where the ball landed on his other paw and took a quick taste, to see if outside snow was any better than cage snow, then resumed the paw-cleaning.

Finally, in the pics, I have high-life man with giraffe. Is there anything else to say?

This is old news, but new to me, and it really freaks me out. A teenager in Cloquet, MN, is on trial for dousing elderly nursing home residents with ice water.

To reiterate: this kid and 2-3 of his firends took pitchers of ice water and poured them on old people’s heads. Like four different times since last summer.

From the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

According to a criminal complaint, the Cloquet teenager told police he found it so funny when he dumped a pitcher of ice water on a 90-year-old nursing home resident in June that he returned and did it twice more, in December and again last month.

Cold water on old people! What will they think of next! This will be hi-larious! OK, I realize you live in Cloquet, Minnesota. There aren’t any good movies playing. You’re bored out of your skull. But can’t you just get stoned in your parents’ basement like all the other small-town teenagers? Set fire to the woods or something? Develop a harmless crush on your second cousin?

From the Star Tribune:

“They got the idea from a movie, and they thought it would be funny,” said detective Jeff Palmer, who questioned the boys. He said the teens, who were about 15 or 16 years old, said they couldn’t remember the name of the movie.

I knew it was Hollywood’s fault . . . Or maybe video games; isn’t drenching the aged with ice water one of the harder levels in Grand Theft Auto Miami?

OK, they can’t remember the name of the movie (because there brain cells are all filled up with being mean); how about you? Anybody remember that movie with the ice-soaking of old folks? Matt?

I fell down in the bathroom last week. In my apartment, this is actually quite an accomplishment, since the bathroom is only slightly larger than our refridgerator, and the walls pressing in on you tend to restrict any kind of movement.

I went down due to vertigo, which I don’t usually suffer from, but my inner ear was all wonky from a cold. I’d had a cold for about a week and a half, and I was so tired of having a stuffed head, I’d become kind of liberal about my nose-blowing. None of this polite sniffling demurely into a tissue. I was trumpeting like an elephant, in the desperate hope that I could breathe though my nose for 3 or 4 seconds before it filled up with snot again.

This nose-blowing is some dangerous stuff. Apparently I upset the delicate pressure balance between inner and outer ear because, after hearing a pop and a crackle, the bathroom spun like I was back in my college dormroom.

I was fine after a couple of minutes, but the lasting damage was that, between flinging my hands to my ears and going down on one knee, I managed to knock my glasses into the toilet. If falling down in my tiny bathroom was an accomplishment, this was the coup de grace.

I didn’t have a lot of options. My hand would have to go into the toilet. That was obvious. I could have looked around for some kind of stick. Or claw. If I had a claw. But I wasn’t thinking straight (a claw?!) and it seemed like the longer my glasses stayed in the toilet, the worse they became. Like they were melting in there — or getting dirtier, some kind of clause in the 2-second rule.

I got them out and put ‘em in the sink. I washed my hands, a lot. I looked at my glasses. I washed my hands again. My glasses just sat there. One more hand wash. My eyesight seemed to improve by the minute. Did I really even need glasses? I mean, really?

I ran them under scalding water for a long time. Then I steadied my nerves with a stiff drink, closed my eyes, and stuffed them back onto my face.

There’ll be dire consequences, I’m sure. I’ll let you know.