Favorite movies: Avatar or Mega Shark?

A couple of days ago we took the kids to see Avatar. I’m a huge science fiction fan and have been looking forward to this movie for months — with trepidation. As I told a friend beforehand, I didn’t know which James Cameron would show up to write and direct: T2 Cameron, or The Abyss Cameron. I managed my expectations about the movie, even after Manohla Dargis raved about it in the New York Times.

I didn’t need to worry. Avatar blew me away. It’s fantastically entertaining. The cast is terrific, the 3D makes it an immersive experience, and the world Cameron creates is jaw-droppingly beautiful. I found the story gripping and at points deeply emotional. It has elements of Quest, Rebirth… okay, the action sequences are awesome.

I walked out of the theater thunderstruck. Then my daughter said, “Well, that was Fern Gully on crack.”

Further wisecracks from the kids and the Husband ensued, referencing Ewok battles, Pearl Harbor, Titanic, Mel Gibson, and Dances With Wolves. Maybe other jokes as well, but at that point I drove off without them.

Well, now the snarking has stopped, thanks to our stumbling on the most awesomely awful science fiction movie of all time: Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus.

It features hideous, stilted acting, bad sex, a battleship firing guns in the wrong direction as a sixty-foot shark fin bears down on it, and former ’80s teen singing sensation Debbie Gibson, looking bizarrely like Birther-Queen/lawyer/dentist Orly Taitz.

And it has the most off-the-wall shark attack — poorly executed, badly acted, implausible in the extreme — ever put on screen. It was so amazing that the Daughter gaped in wonder at the screen and said, like a child discovering Santa’s gifts under the tree on Christmas morning, “Can we see that again? Please?”

Here you go, honey.

UPDATE: A big thank you to WordPress.com for promoting this post to the WordPress.com homepage.

UPDATE 2: In the comments, Patti writes The Mega Shark Song.

Quote of the day: Paul Rudnick

From The Writer’s Almanac:

“As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It’s a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.”

Of course, my life is vastly different from this. I tend to eat trail mix and watch America’s Next Top Model. But the truth remains: Watching a writer write would be grisly.

(Thanks to Ron for the link.)

The Dude abides

“If the phrases ‘Nice marmot, or ‘You’re entering a world of pain,’ or ‘I can get you a toe’ mean anything to you, then ‘Lebowski’ has entered your private sectarian world.”

It’s the world of Lebowski Studies. White Russians and Umberto Eco are mentioned.

Dissertations on His Dudeness.

Merry, Merry

More Christmas music! Here’s “Come, Join in Praise.” Written by the Husband. Vocals: Dan Hiatt, Jane Maurer. Flute: Dave Tolegian. Keyboards: David Potter. Guitar: Paul Shreve.

Merry Christmas

Christmas needs music. Here’s Handel’s “Praise The Lord,” sung by St. Barbara’s Parish Choir, with Ronald Thompson on trumpet. Recorded at the Old Mission, Santa Barbara, in 1984. The organist on this recording is my father, Frank Gardiner.

Feliz Navidad, Joyeux Noel, Frohe Weihnachten, Buon Natale!

To quote, or not to quote?

In Salon, Laura Miller takes to task authors who refuse to put dialogue in quotation marks, including “E.L. Doctorow, David Guterson, Charles Frazier, Nadine Gordimer, Kate Grenville, William Gaddis and (sometimes) Raymond Carver.”

[T]he elimination of quotation marks does make a work of fiction at least slightly harder to follow. You will need to read it a little more slowly, if only to figure out whether any given sentence is dialogue or narration. Defenders of the practice will insist that such techniques “force” the reader to contemplate the author’s prose more carefully because apparently we need to have our arms twisted to make us do so. And it’s true that the extra effort that goes into reading quotation-mark-free fiction does resonate with the widespread and rather Puritanical notion that reading you have to work at must be serious and therefore literary.

This justification doesn’t, however, take into account the low quality of the labor demanded of readers by the jettisoning of quotation marks. What, exactly, does anyone gain aesthetically from the chore of sorting out lines of dialogue?

Miller concludes that “the proposition that you can improve the literary quality of a text by arbitrarily cutting out some expected element to reduce its readability is, when baldly stated, just plain silly.”

Some commenters disagree, in what I would call high dudgeon.

And I’m not battling the bird, either

A public service announcement from Britain’s Food Standards Agency.

Maybe, but I’m not spending Christmas camped out in the Underground

As I walked into the grocery store this morning, which was packed and rowdy with folks shopping for Christmas dinner, a woman rushed past, looking frantic, saying to anybody within earshot, “It’s like the bloody Blitz in there.”

“My grandson dared me, and I said, ‘Sure.’”

Brazil grandmother, 100, to take parachute plunge for Christmas.

This detective’s waaay too stressed about the holidays

D.C. cop brandishes gun at snowball fight.

Favorite movies of 2009

Lists, glorious lists! How about my favorite movies of the year:

• Star Trek
• Inglourious Basterds
• A Serious Man

And a few I saw on DVD:

• In Bruges
• Frost/Nixon
• Milk

Two notes: (1) Mom, I’m sorry I suggested we continue our Coen Brothers marathon by watching No Country For Old Men right after A Serious Man; and (2) My daughter is about to disown me for failing to list 2012 among my top three flicks, so excuse me while I go offline to debate her.

Edgar secretly gets festive

Here’s how preoccupied I’ve been with finishing my next novel — somebody at my house helped Edgar get ready to celebrate Christmas, and I only noticed it today.

Oh, and I had to climb on a stool to photograph him. He not only managed to get a stocking cap on, he got himself on the top of a tall bookshelf, from where he’s staring down at us like The Raven.

Snow Day II: Everybody really panic

Remember the other day, when I mentioned that snowflakes make the UK go insane? Well, even cold temperatures can make the transportation network freak out.

Passengers trapped on Eurostar trains relive ordeal.

Passengers trapped on board broken-down Eurostar trains for up to 16 hours have been talking about their ordeals.

More than 2,000 people were trapped inside the Channel Tunnel for hours after five trains suffered electrical failure due to freezing conditions.

Picture 700 people coming home from Disneyland Paris, trapped in a broken train beneath the English Channel, with no water and, apparently, air running out — on the radio today, the Husband and I heard that passengers had been told “not to breathe deeply.”

Here’s what I want to know: I can understand one train breaking down in the tunnel, and a second train getting stuck behind it. But, when the second train broke down, why did Eurotunnel send the third train in, and the fourth?

Sounds like a thriller setting to me.

Jack Bauer gets a lump of coal in his stocking

And he thoroughly deserves it.

(Thanks to Mike Pugh for the link.)