Like a pork chop in a synagogue

Just the other day, I was trying to remember the idiomatic expression, “get along famously,” and rather than rack my brain, I decided to give the good ol’ Internet a whack at it. I kept thinking the expression went “carry on like . . . [something],” so I typed into my Google toolbar, “carry on like.” Lo and behold, the auto fill-in feature, known as Google Suggest, so memorably featured (albeit as a supporting character) in the recent Super Bowl ad, offered this right away:

“carry on like a pork chop”

Like a pork chop? This was too good to resist, so I went with it. It turns out that this is an Australian expression that means “to behave in a silly or excited way,” or more generally, “to behave foolishly.” It’s believed to be derived from the older (also primarily Aussie) expression, “like a pork chop in a synagogue,” defined by one source as being “highly inappropriate, embarrassingly out of place, and quite unwelcome,” pork being, of course, forbidden to Jews.

Why these hammy sayings are the peculiar province of the Aussies, I have no idea. But the next time you’re in Melbourne, sipping on a Foster’s while riding a kangaroo, listening to a koala play the didgeridoo, please do look in the mirror, mate, and raise a cold one to the English language, for you are indeed carrying on like a pork chop (in a synagogue, at that).

O Captain! My Captain!

For those of you who were looking for a reason to spring for that Disneyland 2fer ticket, behold:

After a 13-year absence, Captain EO returned to Disneyland yesterday, February 23, for what is described as a “limited engagement,” though some sources report that the stay will be indefinite. Good riddance to Honey, I Shrunk the Audience, which this replaces.

I saw Captain EO more than once when I was a kid, and I remember not one jot of detail from it. But when news of Michael Jackson’s death broke back in June, one of the first stray thoughts that moonwalked into my mind was, “I wonder if they’ll bring back Captain EO at last.” What? You didn’t wonder the same thing?

Notes from Vancouver: Vicarious Edition

Men's Figure Skating

It’s sad that figure skating is a sport where the controversy is more interesting than the sport.

I shed no tears for Evgeni Plushenko or his countrymen, who think he was robbed of a gold by Evan Lysacek. Plushenko’s whole appearance here was predicated on the idea that he could just waltz into the Olympic Games and de-pants the field with his quad jump, and if anyone didn’t want to put his Russian cream and sugar in their coffee, then they were idiots. That self-important attitude doesn’t fly with me. The fact is, Plushenko knew what the rules were before he came, and he lost because the rules didn’t favor (flavor!) what he was cooking.

I understand that without this particular scenario of him losing this way in this place before this world audience (to an American, no less), there would have been no reasonable platform for Plushenko to criticize the advancement, or lack thereof, of his sport. If he had held a press conference before the Olympic Games to say, “Without the quad, you can’t be considered the true Olympic champion,” it probably would have elicited a collective (?) over the heads of viewers. Nevertheless, if he had won, do you think we would have heard such a well-articulated philosophy of the future of men’s figure skating? I don’t think so, and to rip his sport and his rival after losing the competition is a pretty shabby thing to do.

I wasn’t fond of Lysacek’s “rebuttal” interview with Bob Costas on NBC, either, but that has more to do with that network and its stable of preening commentators than it does with Lysacek. When I first saw the interview on TV, I thought it was a passive-aggressive slap in Plushenko’s face, all of Lysacek’s talk about how Plushenko had come back after a three-year absence to miraculously win a silver, as if to say the old dog still remembers a few tricks, so maybe we don’t have to put him down just yet. Watching the interview again online, it didn’t seem so bad. Costas tries his best to bait Lysacek into saying something clearly derogatory, but the youngster is apparently well-coached in the peculiarly bland vocabulary of big-time athletes.

But then came the second televised interview. Why on earth did we need to see Dick Bottoms and Scott “Bald Eagle” Hamilton plop themselves into a couple of easy chairs to tell us how wonderful Lysacek’s “package” was, and how ridiculous it was to even question his victory? Really? I can’t even suggest that a judged sport can produce questionable results without it sounding like sour grapes? Even after years of criticism of its jingoistic coverage, NBC still panders to the most xenophobic tendencies of its viewers.

Plushenko’s right about one thing: the skating federation needs to decide if this is a sport or a show. The sport is based on looking good while performing difficult figures. Fair enough. But it’s already subjective enough by that definition, and when the judges and the federation can’t even convincingly decide whether it’s more important to look good or to perform ever more difficult figures, then the subjectivity overcomes legitimacy, especially when the scoring system is notoriously inscrutable for the typical Olympics viewer.

Forgive the delicious pun, but I don’t understand why these skaters, men and women, insist on sticking to jumps that they just can’t stick. Maybe some day, someone will come along and do six quad jumps and throw in a quint, landing all of them perfectly, and it’ll be the most thrilling and exquisite figure skating performance of all time. Until then, though, I feel like the performances would be much more enjoyable to watch if the skaters didn’t overreach their abilities. Hence, why the Stars on Ice don’t tour the country charging you $50 a seat to watch them fall on their hindquarters on failed quad jump combinations. They want to look good in a show. Maybe the sport could stand to look a little more like a sport.

Coming from a ballroom dance background, I can appreciate the distinction between a sport and a show. I would love to see ballroom added to the Olympic roster, but the line between sport and show is so blurry, even by the standard of judged sports, that I don’t think ballroom would have sufficient legitimacy when placed alongside other sports.

Given figure skating’s illustrious history, I’d hate to see it lose its marquee status because of the growing discernment of its rapacious viewers. Plushenko thinks that the quad is the future of men’s skating, but the sport’s future relies on more than just bigger, tougher figures. It relies on a viewership that understands the sport and will continue to take it seriously, if only once every four years.

UPDATED: QUAD IS QUAD
February 22, 2010

Looking at some more barbs slung between these two men, I feel like I should clarify exactly what I think men's figure skating should be (because my opinion, after all, is the one that counts).

Plushenko: "I think we need to change the judging system because quad is quad. If the Olympic champion doesn't know how to jump a quad, it isn't men's figure skating, it's men's ice dancing."

Lysacek: "If it were a jumping competition, they would give you 10 seconds to run and do your best jump. But it's a four-minute, 40-second program, and it's about sustaining that level of skating and excitement from start to finish. And that's what I've been working on every day."

Lysacek is more or less right, but he's dodging the issue, isn't he? Can he or can he not do the quad? Obviously not. The Olympics challenged him to work within some arbitrary rules, and he succeeded, so congratulations. But why hide behind the rules when a rival makes a direct accusation?

Maybe it's more fun and entertaining to watch beautiful skating in competition, even if it dumbs down the competition a bit. Or maybe it's more of a gas to watch exceptional athletes wilt like daisies before figures that they just can't hack. I don't know.

But in the future, even if the rules discourage it, I think there will be skaters who can do quads, and lots of them, and with consistency and grace, and when these skaters come along and start hitting them at the Olympics, then the rest of the world will have no choice but to follow suit, rules be damned. Will things be more fun to watch? Again, I don't know. But that's sport, and sport isn't always pretty.

Hype does not a legacy make

Before seeing Avatar, I had read a quote by director, James Cameron, in an Entertainment Weekly blog:

On the legacy of Titanic: “It’s like nobody admits they went to see Titanic, like it was something you did when you were a kid that you’re not too proud of now, like wearing bell-bottoms.”

I didn’t expect to follow up my last blog post about Avatar, but after I saw the film (and especially now as the movie is set to take over the top all-time box office spot, and in light of the recent announcement of Oscar nominations), I immediately thought back to the above quote, and it made me think that Avatar really is the next Titanic, yes because of the box office records and the awards, but more relevantly, because its eventual irrelevance is assured.

Despite Cameron’s penchant for over-portraying himself as the maligned underdog genius of Hollywood, what he says about his last mega-movie is not really an exaggeration. Think back. You know you saw Titanic, and you probably liked it. Maybe you even remember it fondly. But ask yourself: Who shows Titanic at movie night? Who names their beagles Jack and Rose? Who rocks “My Heart Will Go On” at the karaoke bar (disregarding the fact that you probably know all the words)? Maybe it’s not because you’re ashamed of having liked the movie then, but because you have so little concern for it now.

Until the hype machine started hammering Avatar into the collective consciousness, most people probably hadn’t thought of Titanic in over a decade. Sadly, the release of Avatar triggered as many memories of Dances with Wolves and even Ferngully as it did Titanic. And the interest wasn’t regarding whether Avatar would be as good a movie as Titanic, but whether it would make as much . . . what’s the word . . . cheddar?

Titanic was a whale at the box office, approved by critics, glazed with awards, and yet in the end, it was just a movie, and not even a particularly great one. It certainly didn’t become a cultural reference point, not even by movie standards, and neither will Avatar. And exactly what high horse am I riding, you ask? Well, just off the top of my head:

• “May the Force be with you.”
• “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
• “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” (pilfered, like so many other things, by Avatar)
  
• “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
• “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

What does Avatar bring to the cultural lexicon?

• “So, you find yourself some local tail, and you just completely forget what team you're playin' for?”

Yeah, I’m not sure about that.

***

As a side note, I’ve railed against the Oscars (and praised James Cameron) in the past, and it’s not worth giving that freak show of upturned noses and meager intellects any more breath than it deserves. I’ll just say that anyone with a hankering for an effects-laden sci-fi spectacle starring Zoe Saldana would do well to reach not for Avatar, but Star Trek, thank you very much!

Guero friends!

Sent to some Latin American jungle with first-time partner, Jack Krauser, on some mission called Operation Javier, erstwhile zombie-slayer Leon Kennedy passes the time by spinning yarns about people he has never met and events he has never witnessed.

Here, Leon regales his partner with the tragedy of Steve Burnside:

“And then, as the lovely Claire Redfield is about to be drawn and quartered by the Alexia beast, an unrecognizably generic Chris Redfield can only swat helplessly at Alexia’s barbaric tentacles. Is this the end for our plucky heroine? Nay! Just when all seems lost, the last shred of human compassion inside gruesome B.O.W. abomination Steve Burnside somehow emerges to conquer the darkside of his diseased soul, and he hacks at Alexia with his mammoth battleaxe, freeing his darling Claire. Alexia is wounded, yes, but Steve has not struck deep enough, and before she retreats, Alexia signals her farewell with a spear-headed tentacle, shot forth and impaling our fair-haired boy monstrosity, a fatal blow. For some reason, Steve shrinks back into the saintly, smooth-skinned young go-getter he once was, even though none of the other infected creatures ever did when they were killed. Claire rushes to his side and speaks words of strength and grit, willing herself to believe that he might actually pull through. Chris stands behind her, trying to remain inconspicuous. She takes Steve in her arms, weeping over this doomed youth who had vanquished the demon inside and saved her life. Steve’s pale head rolls to the side, and with his last breath, so gentle that even a woman could not be that gentle, he whispers the words he has longed to say to her: ‘I love you.’ His voice, as soft as a feather falling on a pillow, can only be heard by her, and the words slip like the last grains of sand in an hourglass, exhaling the final moments of an unlikely hero’s misspent life. . . .

Krauser, did you catch all that? Krauser! Are you even listening to what I’m saying?”

Botched thought for the day

One of the great debacles of human evolution is the fact that we have to eat and breathe through the same hole.

Where no moviegoer has gone before

I’m sure everyone with a television or Internet access or friends who talk has heard of James Cameron’s Avatar by now, which alone indicates a greenback-laden future for the movie. But as far as its grandiloquent claims of changing the way movies are made and even being “something we’ve never seen before,” I’m skeptical. With its release just a few days away, I’ll tempt fate and say that it doesn’t look like the game-changer it’s touted as. Not that it doesn’t look like a good, fun movie. I mean, tall, skinny cat/goat people sure beat the second breakfast out of Hobbits. But for Avatar to really be the movie I’ve never seen but always wanted to see even without knowing it, it would probably have to be something like a Star Wars-style epic narrative delivered through the immersive atmosphere of the Soarin' Over California ride at Disney’s California Adventure theme park. And I don’t mean a juiced-up version of Star Tours. That would be nice, but without visionary storytelling to quicken it, it would just be a nice theme park ride.

Cameron’s the guy who brought us a Universal Studios stage show “sequel” to his film, Terminator 2, so it’s no stretch to think that he might like to bring a bit of that theme park scale to the big screen. I’m not necessarily saying that the next big leap in feature films has to include staged stunts and live explosions, or that your seating area has to lift you off the ground and fly you over the screen. Though all that might constitute a real leap, none of it would be reproducible on your couch/flat-screen setup, and it’s unlikely that technology that further separates the movie theater and the home theater would replace movies as they exist now. But if Avatar aspires to be a turning point in the very nature of cinema, it will have to be much more than Dances With Wolves meets Ferngully, shot with a camera that costs more than most McMansions.

If we’re lucky, we’ll come out of Avatar having seen merely a great movie. And that wouldn’t be so bad, except for Cameron, who may really believe that he’s bringing us into a brave new world of moviegoing.