I Speak With the Tongue of a Thousand White-Hot Lies!

My mom has the boy.

She's planning on keeping him for a couple of days, assuming he's willing, so I've got at least today all to myself. I have work I need to do, and the house needs straightening, but I keep thinking that I could get my iPod and take a bike ride without 35 extra pounds of weight-shifting chaos ...

... eek!

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Also, on an unrelated note: Tom Kenny is, like, the voice actor of all voice actors.

Okay, I've been watching a lot of cartoons over the past 2 years. I watched cartoons before, but not like this. And I noticed that the Disney Channel keeps using this one guy over and over--Rob Paulsen, who did the voice of Yakko on Animaniacs. Dude was a voice on the Lilo and Stitch cartoon, he was the narrator in the Mickey Mouse Three Musketeers movie, he's a tinker fairy in the new Tinker Bell movies, and they do these little five-minute cartoons in between shows, and he's a voice on two of those, plus he's pretty much every voice on another.

Anyway, you can tell it's the same guy. (If you're the mother of a two year old who's married to a radio guy, anyway. Your mileage may vary.) Even with his impressive array of accents, it's still the same guy.

So what's this got to do with Tom Kenny? Well, Tom Kenny is the voice of Mr. Lopart on Handy Manny. He was also Barney. Those are the only two voices of his that sound alike. He's also the voice of Spongebob Squarepants, and while I knew that, I thought I had to be wrong. He had to be Squidward. Nope, he's Spongebob. And Pat the Hammer (from Handy Manny as well).

(And, like a lot of voice actors, he's been in everything.)

I have to say, it must be pretty neat to have two ginormous characters like Barney and Spongebob on your resume.

So we went to see Zombieland this weekend with jkason and David. (Really funny movie, grossest zombies ever.) And we saw a preview for Saw 5768365845 (or whatever). And I whispered to Jason that I wanted to write a Saw movie where he manages to kidnap an escape artist and a guy from special ops.

"So a Saw/MacGyver crossover, then?"

Yes! And MacGyver wakes up, looks around, and says, "I got a tab from a soda can and a stick of gum. Gimme ten seconds."

Then Scott and I finessed it on the way home--you see hands and legs in a slow pan, which then start moving as people wake up, and over this is the Saw Dude monologuing about death and pain and cancer or whatever.

1st reveal: MacGyver. See his line above. "What about you guys?"

2nd reveal: James Bond (Pierce Brosnan or Roger Moore). "I have a laser pen and my watch is a supercomputer."

3rd reveal: Samuel L. Jackson. "I got nothing. But watch this." He begins looking at things, and they melt/explode/break.

Bond and MacGyver: "Aw, come on man, let us do something!"

We considered Jason Bourne, but we figured the Saw Dude would try to capture him, fail, and then Bourne would spend the rest of the movie hunting him down and eventually kill him with a table napkin. (Perhaps that's the B-plot to our other movie.)

Okay. So I saw and dug Breakfast Club in ... junior high? I think? I consider Weird Science a total guilty pleasure (though I think Robert Downey Jr. was wasted in that film, and would have made a really great whatever the Anthony Michael Hall chracter's name was). And what 80s high schooler could resist Ferris Bueller? I faked sick so much in high school, I'd be a hypocrite not to like it.

However, I still see Heathers as a more fundamental shaping of my teenage psyche. So I was all prepared to not post anything about John Hughes because, while I liked those movies, they weren't quite that ... momentous to me.

And then I remembered this:



Pretty in Pink, people. Probably not John Hughes's masterpiece, and we all know the ending is problematic whatever way it goes, and that dress at the end ... really?

But still. I am a sucker for the whole "cup her face and kiss her" thing, and it's all that movie's fault. And I am too old to be Andie now, so I want to be Iona. (Except without her yuppie boyfriend--I'll rewrite the part for Scott and keep half an ounce of cred.)

djmrswhite wrote an article about how he and his husband bonded over a line in Sixteen Candles (go read it, it's cool). Which got me thinking, because Scott and I could, I think, communicate entirely in movie lines and song lyrics (we're so GenX it's ridiculous). And I realized John Hughes wrote two lines that are a part of our repertoire:

"You missed my eye by an inch!"
"Half an inch."

and, yes, from The Breakfast Club:

"Smoke up Johnny!"

(I know, you're thinking, seriously, that's the line? But it has become more and more appropriate now that we're parents.)

I joke that I was born a Star Trek fan like a lot of people are born Catholic. There was no choice involved: my mother was a Star Trek fan, loved the original series (that was all there was at the time), read all the books, watched the re-runs, could tell you what episode was on within three minutes even when she was in another room and just heard the dialogue ... Kirk and Spock and McCoy were basically part of my life from the start.

So I watched all the re-runs, read some of the books (Spock's World was a good one, and there was this collection of essays that I remember because it had one, written at the time of the show, discussing Spock's "surprising" sex appeal), saw the movies when they came out (the first one? Boring. Second one? Awesome. Particularly when Mom, on the way out of the theater, informed Dad and me that it was based on an epsiode), watched Next Generation (Picard converted my father to the Star Trek fandom, and got him to shave his comb-over, so well done Gene Roddenberry), watched DS9 (my husband's favorite), watched Voyager ... and, well, I fell away from the faith.

There's actually other things there--like my little punk rock high school friends who'd come to my house and pile into our living room to watch Next Generation, or how I stopped watching DS9 for while until the Cardassian war got going--but that's the basic timeline.

Anyway, that's a long way of getting to the point of: Mom and I went to see the new Star Trek movie, and we both really, really liked it. A lot.

I had one quibble, and that was ( placed behind a cut for your convenience! ).

I also found out something about myself that I did not know before. Apparently the one character in Star Trek that I cannot stand to see played by someone new is ... Sulu.

Sulu. Seriously? Sulu.

I totally expected to find Chris Pine or Zachary Quinto feeling wrong. I was prepared for personal issues with the new casting of my two favorite characters (Scotty and McCoy), but Karl Urban and Simon Pegg actually managed to be my favorites in the film, too. But nope, it was Sulu I couldn't get past. He's George Takei, and that's it. I think it's the voice. The man has a gorgeous voice. Well, and he was totally hot when he went all shirtless in the hall with his saber ... but I digress.

So, yeah, I loved it. Mom and I spent the ride home discussing every little homage moment, every weird little reference (she got the Enterprise shout-out, but we missed the rumored tribble cameo). It was cool. Dad can have his Next Generation, Scott can have his DS9, somebody out there can probably have Voyager and Enterprise ... but my mother and I remain old-school Trek fans. Not fundamentalist, mind you, but old-school. :)

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And then we watched the season finale of Lost, which I missed due to work. We bought it off iTunes and watched it on Scott's MacBook, so we saw it in HD. I kept getting distracted by the picture quality, which was annoying me--oh my god the beach looked good!--but the episode was really really good!

I kept doing my call-it-two-seconds-before-the-reveal thing, and now I'm trying to figure out who's working for who, and is Jack's crazy-ass plan actually going to work? because if it does, I am not sure how I feel about that.

AAAND ... Scott watched the finale of Fringe yesterday, too (on Hulu), so it was one giant JJ Abrams day, with extra bonus Spock. Really, one of the two guys on the beach should have been Leonard Nimoy.

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Winona Ryder?

The Zweeble has this tendency, as he naps, to wake up a little and look around, frowning and uncertain, then settle back to sleep. He does this at least once, maybe twice.

Anyway, today when he did it, he looked like Corey Feldman circa Stand By Me.

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Thelma & Louise is on ... ah, young Brad Pitt, you baby-faced heart-throb. He and Ben Affleck--they both looked, at one time, like they could have been guys at my high school.

The Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends float just Rick-rolled the Macy's Parade!

I didn't realize this until I read it elsewhere, but it is really pretty awesome that Bat Manuel is in the new Batman movie.

So I was disappointed in the ending of Dr. Horrible (though the first two bits and part of the third are good, so still go see it), and Scott and I were discussing it, and I think I know how it ought to have ended. ( totally spoilery )

Really loved Doctor Who last night--if the Library episodes weren't as creepy as I'd been hoping, "Midnight" more than made up for it. Holy cats.

Also saw Hellboy II: The Golden Army today, which was gorgeous and funny and a really, really good time. Though I have two quibbles. ( One of these is super, super spoilery )

I laughed my way through the preview of Death Race. Um. The hard-core prisoners have machine guns, rocket launchers, and napalm, not to mention working vehicles, and what are they doing? Building race cars. As opposed to, oh, I dunno, USING THE STUFF TO STAGE A BREAKOUT?!?! What are the guards carrying that's dissuading them, nuclear weapons? Are they in space?

Next up is Batman. And then I think I'm through my list.

Again???

Frankly, sartorias makes a good point. However, I'm sorry, but if you're planning on eating my brains, I'm not wild about protecting your undead human rights. I won't torture you or anything (mostly because that's close work and I, you know, don't want my brains eaten), but there is a line, here.

Anyway. I'd write more, but I'm stuck in this mall with my fancy video-game-action shotgun, dealio, the Doctor, and Samuel L. Jackson (you'd be shocked and appalled what that guy can do to the undead with a golf club). sugarcoatedlie and Faith were really kicking ass, at least until Spike showed up ...

At least the music's good.