Hollywood Sausages

Just like any other sausages, you really can't examine the ingredients of movies too carefully, or you'll be completely turned off.

• Like the trailers, which indicate pretty unmistakeably that the War on Drugs has not interdicted any of the hallucingens commonly consumed by the idiots who green-light this stuff. At screenings both last week and the week before, separated by half a continent, the only commonality is that the people who approved G-Force, Shorts, and half-a-dozen other forthcoming trainwrecks had dropped acid, followed by a variety of other illicit substances.
• The idiots who design the seats in cinemas should be treated by an expert neurosurgeon to create two or three bulging spinal disks each, then forced to sit in their creations for three hours. And the same goes, of course, for the idiots who design the seats in airliners. If my 1986 Chevy (from a 1985 Toyota design) could have adjustable back support, there's little reason that one can't have the same — or even just some back support — a quarter-century later.
• Squirrel! (made you look)

  Hypothesis: The primary difference between Pixar's films and other animations is that Pixar treats the animation as a method of telling a story, while the others treat the story as a method for assembling kewl visual set-pieces. Thus, the latter will be stuck wearing the Collar of Shame. That particularly includes the forthcoming Disney nightmare The Princess and the Frog, which includes a lot of stereotypical "kewl black guy" behavior in the frog... and just tints a stereotypical caucasian Disney princess brown, at least in the trailer.

• The latest Harry Potter film has taken a radical turn in its storytelling style: It no longer relies upon verbalizing all significant aspects of the story, even the throw-away devices in the visual and/or audio background. In many ways, this is an immense improvement, and represents possibly the only hope for condensing the (sadly overlong, primarily because they didn't get a hard-enough edit) last two novels. On the whole, HP&tHBP was a successful-enough placeholder, or more accurately rececitive in the series. The individual performances were more interesting, although Rupert Grint retains an unfortunate tendency toward predictable, broad, old-school-vaudeville overacting.

  Those comments aside, HP&tHBP is sort of a mid-grade imported dark chocolate bar: It has satisfying dark undertones, is just sweet enough to be noticed, and it doesn't melt in the hands. Emma Watson and Bonnie Wright did a nice job of restraining the impulse to go emo.

• On a distinctly sillier note, I took the younger remora to Burger King for lunch today. We sat down next to some of those clean-cut young men in white shirts and black pants (who probably ignored us thanks to the remora's t-shirt), and he then wondered which was worse: Kingons or Mormulans. I think I know how to deal with the latter, though (or, for that matter, any solicitors who come to my door and can't read the "no soliciting" sign).