The other other other Miracle on 34th Street

I’m a big fan of the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street - perhaps surprisingly so, considering how much I’m in accord with the beliefs that the mother holds toward the beginning of the film. So when I saw a DVD of Miracle on 34th Street for sale at the 99 cent store for their now-standard desperation price of 99.99 cents (that’s an awful lot of effort to up your prices 1%!), I had to give it an extra look. A great and popular film like that isn’t that likely to end up on those shelves there, particularly in a cheap package. It’s not a public domain film. The manufacturer was one I’d bought cheap animation disks from before, but they seemed like a legit company; I didn’t think it was a knock off. Taking a closer look at it… a run time of 47 minutes? And wait, what’s this cast? I would’ve noticed immediately if it were either of the color remakes (the 1990s workmanlike John Hughes remake, or the gawdawful drained-of-all-magic 1970s telefilm.) But… that cast, that’s not the Miracle cast. No Natalie Wood. And Hans Conreid is listed!

So naturally, I invested the dollar (they don’t give you back that hundredth of a penny, the cheapskates!)

There is a slight changed title (It’s “The Miracle on 34th Street”; the original had no “The”). a couple of altered scenes, and a few stray changed lines (“Macy’s sending other people to other stores?” – which has to be a messed up line delivery – and “The district attorney’s Repulican” come to mind) to the degree that my memories can note, but for the most part it’s just the original edited down for length. The result feels a bit like a speed-through reading of a play, but overall is acceptable, except when contrasted with the original. The story is good enough that it survives the lost of the comfortable building of the reality of the work. And the couple of plot changes (such as the mom suggesting to the post office how they might clear out some of their dead letters) are, though not necessary, defensible and not significantly destructive (in contrast to the 1973 attempt.

Doing a bit of research, it turns out this was a 1955 TV adaptation (as I expected from its length), which was presented as an episode of The 20th Century-Fox Hour. This was actually one of two hourlong TV versions of the 1950s; the 1959 version stars Ed Wynn in the Kringle role.

This isn’t a must-see and certainly not a replacement for the 1947 film, but it’s an interesting curiosity for the Miracle fans out there. It was worth my 99.99 cents, and they can keep the change! (The disk is even padded out with a bonus cartoons;: a washed-out print of an English redubbing of a short by Soviet animation house Soyuzmultfilm

Punching up the auction

I was just browsing through some charity auctions on eBay, offering up celebrity encounters, walk-on film roles, and so forth. An I came across:

Round Of Golf w/ Sugar Ray Leonard Plus Signed Gloves

…and I couldn’t help thinking I’d much rather bid on a round of boxing with Jack Nicklaus.

I think the thing that’ll be the biggest of their current auctions isn’t Sugar Ray, isn’t the Spider-Man 4 walk on. It’s the set visit and walk-on role for the new Judd Apatow Adam Sandler film. But the thing that gives it its true value isn’t in the headline, it’s in the smaller print. “Have Judd review your comedy script and offer notes.” They’re presenting that as if its of about the same amount of interest as the autographed Pineapple Express poster… but for some folks of likely undue optimism, it’ll be worth it to get their comedy script in front of the current king of the comedy producers, with the hope that he’ll say “this is so brilliant, I’ll produce it immediately.” And for those a mite more realistic in their hopes, just being able to shop their script around saying that it’s had Judd’s input, that’s gotta be worth a few thou.

Chickeny meatloaf

Now working on a meatloaf with:

• 20 ounces ground chicken (so I’m going with less “base meat” than usual, aiming for a smaller loaf.
• Vegetarian refried beans (which I went ahead and added the whole can of, just to not end up with a partial can of this stuff laying around. So that’s 16 ounces right there, which kills this being a truly smaller meatloaf, although it’s not as overstuffed as some.)
• Half a can of leftover canned pasta (shaped like Peanuts characters) with meatballs
• Raisin bran
• A little hunk of leftover salmon, maybe 3 ounces
• Two veggie burgers
• One medium egg

I wanted to add barbecue sauce, but looking at the sheer amount of sodium in the above – certainly more than 200% of the recommended daily allowance – I had to shy away. Watching the blood pressure, doncha know. And it’s not that I’m going to eat the whole meatloaf all by myself in one sitting, but I do consume hearty amounts of these things pretty quickly.

It’s now sitting in the fridge, and I’ll put it in the oven about halfway through Xanadu (never saw it before, got a kid who likes musicals, and it was on sale with a free ticket for Mama Mia! for about 20 cents more than buying a ticket for Mama Mia!, which Mrs. Nat’s TV wanted to see. Plus, it came with a free soundtrack CD, so if the wee lass likes it, we got a bargain.)

Added later: At least a medium success here. The result is definitely food, and nicely edible food. It is not, however, quite meatloaf. It came out too moist and soft to really invoke “meatloaf” in the mind. And considering the small amount of salmon present, that really is the strong central taste factor, which works (and means the barbecue sauce would likely have been a mistake). Plus, we all get to play “guess which Peanuts character is in this bite!”

Speak of the Geek

I think my good friend Evanier is missing the evolution of language when he complains about the depiction of the San Diego Comic-Con as an event loaded with geeks:

I’m not even sure what the word “geek” means in this day and age but it has something to do with being outta-sync with the tastes and interests of the majority.

No, not really. As best as I can judge as a participant in this culture, “geek” has less to do with ones tastes and interests, and more to do with the intensity of one’s involvement, the focus that one has, and the intelligence one brings to it. The term is now less “nerd” and more “wonk”. It may be easier to point to the geekdom in traditionally nerd categories – continuity-centric sci-fi and fantasy material like Battlestar and Buffy seem designed to capture those with geek tendencies. But there are geekdoms built around mainstream fair that is far from being for geeks alone; there are geekdoms for How I Met Your Mother, and CSI, and I’m willing to bet that there’s not only a House geekdom, but that it extends not only into the nerddom of fanfic but all the way into Mary Suism, with House and the other doctors all having fallen so hard for some enchanting young lass that they miss that the way her eyes change color is an important symptom.

And so the Comic-Con is legitimately a geek event, because while it does attract some local onlookers for the day, most of the attendants at any given moment are people who traveled significant distances to spend several days in a row immersing themselves in their pop culture. That is an intensity that takes us beyond the default experience. It makes us (generally proudly) geeks.

(As a not-Evanier-related footnote: folks used to argue that superhero comics should not be considered “mainstream”, because superheroes aren’t mainstream material in the real world. Some folks still try to make that claim. They’re clearly not paying attention to the real world. Of the top 10 grossing films of 2008 to date, numbers 1, 2, 4, and 10 are superhero movies. Superheroes make up about 1/3 of this year’s box office total.)

Grandmama Mia

Mrs. Nat’s TV and I snuck out to see Mama Mia! this weekend. Well, “snuck” is relative. For us to get out sans the sweet li’l gal requires planning and expense; between movie tickets (actually, “free-with-DVD” tickets, getting Housesitter and Xanadu at Costco for $10 apiece), gas, popcorn, dinner after the movie, and sitter, we’re talking north of $100.

The film was actually dumb fun, in an old-fashioned anything-excuses-a-song type of way. Pretty people (not all of whom should really be in a musical), pretty settings, nothing too inobvious or surprising; a good thing to take your best gal to. And like many such things, it falls apart a bit if you look at it carefully. It’s not giving away anything that isn’t in the first five minutes (or the trailers) to say that it’s about a mother (played by Meryl Streep) who conceived a child during a, shall we say “active” period in her young life, and the about-to-be-married 20 year old doesn’t know which of three men is her dad.

Except… well, if Meryl’s Donna character is as old as she looks (as old as Meryl is), then these youthful indiscretions took place during her late 30s. That doesn’t exactly match with the world-view they’re depicting.

What humans can do

There’s this episode of the worshipable series SportsNight where Dana, who has just gone to see the Broadway musical adaptation of The Lion King, comes back totally enraptured. She felt it was an amazing creation, the whole thing a sign of the greatest of what humans are capable of. “I didn’t know we could do that!” she gushes. But the play she was gushing about was a Disney production; the network the showed aired on was ABC, a Disney-owned network. It felt like awkward product placement.

I went to see Wall-E yesterday. It is an achievement, an almost completely artificial construct, brought about by the designs of humans: writers, actors, many tons of artists, musicians, and so forth. And it’s fun, and it has honest intent, and it speaks of the dire parts of humanity, but of the better aspects as well. It speaks of danger and of hope. It is truly a fine example of what humans can do when they choose to.

And yes, it’s a Disney product.

add-on update cards for Starcrossed game players

I hope my regular readers will forgive me posting this.

There’s this game, Starcrossed: Hollywood’s Movie Game. Basically, it’s a commercial version of the six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon concept; you pull out two cards featuring movie stars and try to connect them via movies they were in with other stars who were in movies with other stars who were in… well, you get the drift. Or you pull two cards with movies, and try to connect them via the stars. There’s a game board, bonus rounds, and so forth. It’s a game, and it’s the favorite at our weekly game nights.

Problem is, the game is from 1996, which means that all of the movies referenced are from then or earlier. It was a small irritant in normal playing, and one member of our crew always insisted that there must be an update, updated cards with new movies and new stars. But there wasn’t. (The original set was not only the only Starcrossed thing issued, it appears to be the only game published by “Dunaway Partners, Inc.”, two brokers and a graphic designer.) And it became a real issue when a teenager wanted to join us in play. So I spent a surprisingly long time yesterday and put together a set of 10  movie cards and 10 star cards, which should be compatible with movie connections playing. Here, in PDF form, are the front and the back of the cards.

The trick is to print them on those sheets of print-your-own-business-cards stock available at any office supply store. Cut each card in half, and they’ll be the right size to fit correctly into your card boxes.

If any Starcrossed board game fan out there does card sets of their own, let me know; I’d like to have more cards without taking the time to work them up myself. Oh, and let me share with you our own favorite house rule: if you land on the final Take Two on the board, treat it like a Take Three. If someone can name three films with both of the listed stars, they’re allowed to move three spaces and thus get into the final round. For most Take Two cards, it isn’t possible, but its a way to keep that hope alive in the final stretch.

And now, we return you to our normal blog. With luck, the search engines will index this page, and the two or three people out there who would be interested will find this.

Even frost giants get the odds

With the in-laws in town, there’s been some time when Mrs. Nat’s TV, the wee one, and the in-laws have all gone out, leaving me alone. The opportunity to lay on the couch and actually just read a book in the quiet comfort of my own home, that couldn’t be passed up. I may only have had time for a short book – there is much to be done – but it was lovely.

It helped, of course, that it was a good book. Odd and the Frost Giants is a juvenile from Neil Gaiman, created for World Book Day (a holiday not celebrated in the U.S., which I sure thought was part of the world — it involves publishers offering up interesting new books for youth for a low price.) Now, Neil is quite a capable storyteller, but the best of his book-length prose works so far was Coraline, another juvenile, so don’t let that descriptor put you off.

When the crippled son of a dead viking rescues a stuck bear, you’re likely to end up either with a very short story or a very big heroic adventure, and luckily for the reader, Neil chose the latter course. Neil is in comfortable territory for him, dealing with the often human-seeming foibles of supernatural beings (realms he has mined in much of his book-length prose and more than a little of his comics work), and he brings his key strengths – most notably, a sense that there is a logical structure to the worlds he depicts. The gods of mythology have clear emotional logic – they want things, and they do things to get what they want, and like most of us, their efforts can be understood by understanding what they want. Far too often in fantasy, particularly for the younger set, such concerns seem to be sloughed off. And in this case, the hero’s success (and it’s not really giving away anything to say that he has success – this is, after all, a juvenile adventure book) comes because he bothers understanding that these are beings who want something and bothers figuring out what they want.

It’s not a perfect book, there are one or two little missteps – there’s an unconvincing use of science (not in a “science doesn’t work that way” aspect, but in an “I don’t believe he would’ve known how to do that” sense), but they are not at crucial moments and are not crucial failures. Still, it’s one worth the reading time. It’s certainly worth the small amount of money the book sells for in the UK, it was worth the bigger-but-not-extravagant amount that it cost me to get it (the edition intended for this country won’t come out until October), and it will likely be worth your time to read it. (Or, if Neil is good enough to record this one, to listen to it; Neil is probably the best author I’ve heard when it comes to reading one’s own work for an audiobook.)

I followed up reading the book by watching Stardust last night, the rollicking film adaptation of the best of Neil’s not-intended-as-a-juvenile books. I’d seen it in the theater – something which is unfortunately true for far too few – but this fun film was well worth watching again, and was enjoyed by Mrs. Nat’s TV as well. And it is so good to see that people have not given up on Peter O’Toole; as a person likely near the end of his run but playing a man who still has strong character near the end of his run, he does quite well.

The problem with the movie 10,000 BC…

… is that if it’s successful, the sequel will have to be called 9,999 BC.

Yay movie violence!

Apparently, the release of violent movies immediately decreases real world violence. This does not, of course, completely counter concerns about long-term effects, but it does provide an interesting balance to those claims.