Saw A Christmas Carol in 3D with Julia with both of us bored with stomach aches...

Now where was I? I haven't had much time to write this blog lately. I've had a pretty brutal release coming up and have been working late a lot.

Laura had to work today, which she normally doesn't do, so I decided that Julia and I should see a movie.

I had seen the trailers for the new movie, A Christmas Carol, and it looked decent. I was even thinking that I would see it when it came out since I love 3D movies, but decided against it once I read the tepid reviews. It's getting a 58 percent positive average rating on the website rottentomatoes.com, but some of the bad reviews highlight what I didn't like about it.

I had read words like 'lifeless' in the reviews and was scared about that so I decided not to see it. A Christmas Carol was never my favorite Christmas story. I only really liked the comedy versions of it like the movie "Scrooged". Also, I still fondly remember the HBO production of it with Rich Little playing almost all the parts. I'm sure it's awfully dated now, but it was pretty funny. In that version, Rich Little, the comedian, plays as W.C. Fields as Scrooge, Richard Nixon as Jacob Marley, Humphrey Bogart as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Peter Falk as Columbo as the Ghost of Christmas Present and Peter Sellers as Inspector Cluseau as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. What I remember most about it was his choice to play Tiny Tim as Truman Capote.

That special was in my mind as I was watching this movie today because I was wishing that I was seeing that one. I almost felt sorry to drag Julia to see it, but I thought she should at least see it to have a background in the play since it's a classic and often referenced in shows and pop culture.

The previews and even the movie trailer seemed to suggest that this is a modern retelling of A Christmas Carol with more comedy seeing as how Jim Carey plays the role of Scrooge, but that's not the case.

I could not believe how dark this movie was. It was so dark and quiet in the parts leading to Scrooge's ghostly visits that I was worried that they didn't have the projector bright enough. But then when things started to happen, it was all bright and noisy, which I guess was the point.

Robert Zemeckis wrote and directed this adaptation. Maybe Robert is manic depressive because that's how this movie feels. At some points, it's dark, gloomy, quiet and humorless. At other points, it's so loud and silly that you wonder if you're watching two movies. The movie also faithfully uses a lot of the lines of dialogue from the book, which made it hard to follow. I had to explain to Julia what some of the things meant as they really weren't explained well. Some parts felt rushed. Others took forever.

I was so disappointed that they didn't make a more humorous adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Since they didn't, I'm wondering why they even bothered making an animated movie about the story of Scrooge.

I asked Julia what she thought of the movie was and her response was that she liked it somewhere in the middle. It was okay for her, which is my sentiments, too.

One last thing, Robert Zemeckis committed what I think it his greatest sin from The Polar Express in that rather than have several talented people voice the different characters, he had Jim Carey and others voice several characters. Not only is Carey Scrooge, but he's all three ghosts of Christmas. It's pretty obvious during the ghost of Christmas Present sequence because he laughs a lot, which sounds exactly like Scrooge's laugh. It's distracting for me to hear that, just like it was to have Tom Hanks voice multiple characters in The Polar Express. It's a minor gripe, but that's just me.

My daughter is so much like my wife, it's scary...

They say that the mother's curse is that you will have a child that will act just like you did when you were a child. In my case, there are a few things that Julia does that it totally me. Like my inability to get out of the door without a prolonged getting dressed process that involves me taking an insanely long amount of time to get ready.

Julia seems to have that ability in spades. The speed that this kid moves is scary in that now I know how my Mom and Dad must have felt to watch me move so slow. You don't know how often I have to restrain myself from vocally urging her to move faster. I end up taking a deep breath more often than not and then, after a few more moments of inaction, I'll vocally urge her to move it or lose it.

Laura goes nuts trying to get her ready because Julia is the exact opposite of her getting ready. She'll moan at Julia to hurry up and then point at me as if to say, "This is all your fault. She got this from you!"

Julia also has my love of all things electronic. She's a gamer. She started by just watching me play video games. She would sit there and watch me play the same game, Rayman 2, over and over. I got so good at the game that I could play it while watching TV.

Unlike me, she's a girl, but besides that she seems to be a mirror image of Laura not only for facial features, but with her attitude as well.

I think, if you've ever read my notes here, that I've mentioned that my wife, Laura, is rather direct and strong willed. She's not afraid to stand up for herself or vocalize her true feelings, which sometimes gets her in trouble. That happened a lot more in the past when she was all young and spirited. Now that she's older, she's mellowed a bit. Thank God... Just kidding, honey!

Laura say that Julia is learning bad road rage habits from me as I'll voice my displeasure at the various stupid people that cut me off or are being slow. I counter back to Laura that there have been many times when we'll be behind a slow person in a parking lot. I'll mutter, "Come on!" Julia will add, "Honk at him!"

Now I'll complain, but I never honk. "She didn't learn that from me!" I retort.

Laura smirks at this.

Recently, Julia went to play with a friend at the park. I told her to be back by sundown, but she walked through the door about 15 minutes later. She looked upset. I asked her what was wrong. Apparently, when they had gotten to the park, Julia's friend decided that she wanted to play another game with some other friends. Julia didn't like this. She's very much an alpha female when it comes to playing. She generally likes telling kids what she wants to do.

Julia vented about not wanting to play the game by adding, "I came over to the park to play with her. I didn't come to the park so she can play that stupid game with other kids. She needs to understand that!"

Suddenly, Julia had an idea, "I'm going to take Mommy with me to the park and we're going to tell her what's what!"

I had to work hard to not laugh. That reminded me a lot of Laura.

Saturday, we were at the mall. We at at the food court. Julia went to Burger King. I went to a Japanese grill. Laura got Taco Del Mar.

Julia and Laura had to wait a long time for Julia's dinner of chicken nuggets and fries. I was already starting to eat when they showed up. Laura left to go get her dinner while Julia ate hers.

Julia grabbed the bags and opened the kid's meal.

She looked inside and muttered, "Thanks a LOT lady! She dumped my fries all over the bottom of my bag!"

She sighed, shook her head and added, "That is NOT very nice."

I have heard many horror stories about Laura's teenage years. We feel that we are in for an entertaining teenager.

My daughter doesn't take checks...

Julia gets paid on Sundays. We decided to give her an allowance a few years ago at an huge two dollars a week. I thought she'd scoff. She was thrilled! Then she was even more thrilled when I upped it last year to four dollars a week.

Her allowance is dependent on her doing chores and cleaning up after herself. On the weeks where she makes no attempt to clean, I tend to forget to pay her. If she remembers, I'll make her clean.

Yesterday, she had cleaned up a lot of toys and had even gone through some old ones to put into storage or to give away. Laura told me to pay her.

I looked in my wallet. All I had was a twenty dollar bill.

I said, "I can't pay you."

Julia's face sank.

"Unless you have change for a twenty?"

She shook her head.

"I could write you a check?" I asked.

I was kidding, of course. Being eight, she doesn't have a bank account. I'd have to cash it for her anyway, so it would be redundant to cash a check that I wrote in my credit union when I could just withdraw the money when I'm there.

Julia wrinkled her nose and said in a very serious voice, "I don't take checks."

"Oh, you don't?" I laughed.

"No. It's cash only. Or I'll take change, too."

She's young, but she has her priorities.

Laura was the main character in my crazy dream...

The comedian Daniel Tosh said in his stand up CD "True Stories I Made", which by the way is highly recommended by me if you are not easily offended and can stand jokes that go on a stream of consciousness where you're not sure how you got to his end point.

Wait... I forgot to mention what he said. He said something like on whether or not it's possible to describe a dream without sounding mentally challenged.

I had one about Laura the other night that was so vivid that I actually remembered most of it. Usually, a lot of my dreams involve crazy action that never resolves itself. They seem so real and disturbing, but when I wake up, I realize that I can't remember what was so disturbing in the first place.

My dreams usually run through several incarnations.

- The 'tornado' dream - This type of dream happens a few times a month. In this dream, I or my family and I are stuck out in the middle of nowhere while tornadoes on every side of us/me are closing in. I/we take shelter, but usually in some place inappropriate like a basement with nothing but windows. The dream never resolves itself and I usually wake up anxious to get out of weather that isn't there. This particular dream started when I was a kid when my family and I would stay every summer weekend in a small trailer that was centered perfectly on both sides between the Platte river and the small lake in front of us. There was no tornado shelter, so if the weather hit the fan, there was no place to go. My dreams then usually ended with our dinky trailer getting picked up and chucked in either the river or the lake.

- The 'new location' dream - In this dream, I am in a mystery city living in a mystery house. In this dream, I'm usually by myself without my immediate family, although some people I know inhabit the dream.

- The 'I'm Rich!' dream - In this dream, I hit the jackpot! This is always followed by the crushing realization that I am not rich when I wake up. That sucks.

- The 'I'm getting fired!' dream - In this dream, I do something really stupid like steal from my employer, surf porn at work, or piss everyone off.

- The 'I'm naked' dream - Good God is this one frequent. It's not that I'm totally naked, just usually naked from the waist down. It's either at school or at work.

- The 'what the frak?' dream - A dream that defies all description and logic.

This dream I had the other night seemed like a 'what the frak?' dream, but it actually made a little sense.

So here's what happened. My wife, Laura, was planning a heist on a department store. For some reason, she chose to rob the Scheels sporting goods store. I'm not sure why she chose this, but it seemed to make sense to her. My brother, Bill, was also in on the heist.

Each day, we'd drive down to Scheels to stake it out. On the way, we'd pass a stretch of road where we'd see a cougar just walking along the road. Each time we saw the cougar, Laura would have me take the wheel and she'd get out her rifle (which she doesn't own, by the way) and start shooting rounds at the cougar. Each time, the cougar would scatter and so would all the people in the neighborhood.

I'd chastise Laura for this reckless behavior because 1. I'm pretty sure shooting a rifle in a crowded neighborhood is against the law and 2. it's not exactly being on the down low for staking out a robbery target if you're firing rifle shots on the way there.

Because of the constant firing of Laura's rifle, Bill and I decided that we needed to go in disguise. So of course, we decided that we would dress up as Jedis from Star Wars. I was dressed up as the Liam Neeson character from the God-awful Phantom Menace film.

One day, Laura hit the jackpot while on the way to our stake out. She saw the cougar again and decided to act. She pulled out the rifle and fired at the cougar, which was just about to pounce on a man and his child. The cougar dropped dead and the man thanked Laura profusely.

Because I had been worried about being caught, Laura had to rub it in.

"See?" she sneered. "I didn't get caught. The guy even thanked me for shooting it!"

It was right about this point in the dream where I decided that I couldn't go through with the heist. For one thing, I was worried about getting caught. If both of us went on this heist and we both got caught, who would watch Julia? Besides, why Scheels? Did they have a massive amount of cash on hand?

Laura was sure of the target because they didn't have security guards. I was thinking more of the security cameras and silent alarms.

I backed out. I told Laura that I couldn't do it.

She asked me, "What are you, a pussy?!"

That's about when I woke up.

Laura loved the dream by the way.

Hot Rod and Space Chimps...

I just finished the movie starring Andy Sandberg called "Hot Rod". In the movie, a guy named, Rod, has always been trying to do stunts to emulate his deceased Dad, who used to set up stunts for Evel Kenieval. He rides around on his moped in a stunt suit wearing a fake mustache and generally fails at every jump he tries.

All that changes when his step-Dad, Frank, who Rod longs to beat the crap out of, is stricken with a heart defect diagnosis and needs a transplant, which the family can't afford. Rod resolves to do a big jump that even Evel couldn't do to raise money for the operation so he can get Frank better so he can kick his ass.

The premise is funnier than the movie. To be fair, it has some hilarious sequences that make little sense in a logical movie, but feel at home here. Like when he finds out that Frank is dying before he can kick his ass, he goes to his 'happy place' in the forest and proceeds to dance verbatim the Kevin Bacon construction site solo dance from Footloose. Things like that are sprinkled through this movie.

The movie stars Sissy Spasek as Rod's mother. Bill Hader and Danny McBride appear as his two buddies. Will Arnett plays a rich jerk that is dating Rod's secret crush, played by Isla Fisher of Wedding Crashers.

I was asking my brother, Bill, if he had seen this movie, but he had not.

"But I've seen Space Chimps!" he said, which also starred Andy Sandberg as the voice of the lead chimp whose grandfather had been the first chimp in space.



I laughed because Space Chimps is not awful, but it's really kind of embarrassing to watch. It had some definite potential, but it's as if they stopped trying halfway through and just tried to shove it out in time for Summer. Want proof? Rent the movie. You'll notice that the first part of the movie, which takes place in the space training camp for the chimps is fairly detailed and had some good jokes. Then there is the second part, which is set on a distant planet. It's one of the ugliest planets that I've ever seen. It's as if the programmers showed the pre-rendered version of the planet's surface and when told how long it would take to render with effects like textures, shading and what not, the producers on the film balked and told them to cut some corners. That is how ugly the planet looks.



The "villain", and I'm using that term very loosely here, is voiced by Jeff Daniels. Yes, that Jeff Daniels. He's hardly recognizable playing the incredibly annoying, effeminate and high-pitched alien, Zartog, who finds a piece of space equipment that made it to his planet and is using it to torture and terrorize the residents of the planet. All of whom look like squishy, shiny aliens crossed with gummy bears. The chimps make it through space and apparently the last bit of rendered graphics and make it to the ugly planet. Once there, they encounter a helpful glowing creature that screams a lot and looks like a running boob. And when I say a boob, I mean it looks like just that.

I saw this the first time at our really crappy dollar theater on West Center. I took Julia to it and was treated to a constant buzzing from the arcane speaker system. The movie looked like absolute crap because it was grainy and scratched from the constant showings. Turns out, DVD does it no justice. It looks bad...

Top Story: Chinese food befuddles old couple. News at 11.

A new chain restaurant just opened in our neighborhood, Panda Express. When we first saw it being build, Laura thought that it would be a Wendy's because it had a Wendy's color and shape. Soon it had a sign up announcing the new Panda Express restaurant.

I had been meaning to try Panda Express, but I just hadn't had the right opportunity because Laura generally doesn't go for Chinese food and Julia has never tried it. So if I want it, I have to go and get it alone.

The other night provided a perfect opportunity for me to get it. Julia and I had been coming home from a school function, and Laura was at work, which provided me the opening I was waiting for.

I told Julia we'd get her meal at Burger King after I got mine, so we stopped at Panda Express first. The drive in wasn't working yet, so we had to run in. Immediately, it was as if I hit a brick wall decorated with indecisive old people.

There was a couple there that appeared to be in their early 60s or late 50s. Either way, it was clear from the start that they had never ever set foot in a Chinese restaurant before. The woman behind the glass was explaining the process which is simple enough. If you order a 2 dish entree, you choose one of four "sides", which include fried rice, steamed rice, noodles and something else. Then you choose two of the main dishes to go with it.

They were startled by the myriad of choices in that they had never seen any of these dishes before. The next several minutes consisted of one or both asking, "What is this?" or "What does this taste like?" Pretty much any and all dishes had to be explained to the couple. I tried not to look at them. Instead, I was just looking slightly up and sometimes back at the menu board.

I looked down at Julia, who was clinging to my leg and placing her head on my stomach in utter boredom. She said, "Let's go!" in a whisper.

I explained that I still hadn't ordered and that she was just going to have to be patient.

It was at this moment that the wife turned and said to me, "I'm sorry that you have to wait for us."

I smiled and lied, "Oh, it's no bother."

Finally, they had decided that they were going to get started, but soon enough, there was a snag. The wife had just told the woman behind the glass that she wanted rice for her side. Just as she was scooping up steamed rice and placing it on her plate, the husband asked incredulously, "Since when is rice considered a side?"

Now I can understand maybe why he was confused. To be fair, their use of the term 'side' is more like calling it the bed of the dish. It's generally what the Chinese food rests on in most restaurants.

Finally, they started to get going, but when I finally got my say in my first side, I had hit another snag. The couple was stuck in the second half of the food tables. They again started to ask what every dish was like, what crab rangoon was, and what egg rolls were.

Julia at this point was about to exit this world from boredom that was fatal. Again she asked to leave and again I had to remind her that I had not yet gotten my food. She sighed and moaned, "I'm so hungry!"

"Well, if you only ate Chinese food, we'd be in the right place."

I got to go around the couple since they were holding up the whole line. I paid and motioned for Julia to come.

"Finally!" Julia exclaimed.

Watched 'Zach and Miri Make a..."

I just watched the newest Kevin Smith film called Zach and Miri Make a Prono. I'm purposely misspelling the title so it doesn't get stopped by internet filters. A lot of chain stores stocked it with just the title of 'Zach and Miri', which is shown above.

Kevin Smith is the guy who directed Clerks, Mallrats (loved it), Chasing Amy (meh), Dogma (loved), Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (loved) and Clerks II (very good).

His movies are generally dialogue driven with a lot of character back and forth. Usually, there's a lot of cursing and a lot of vulgar discussions. In Zach and Miri, Zach, played by Seth Rogan, and Miri, played by Elizabeth Banks, are two friends who, on the eve of their high school reunion (in the middle of winter for some reason), find their utilities turned off. In danger of getting thrown in the poor house and realizing that they haven't done anything of value, Zach gets the bright idea to shoot an adult movie to pay off their debts due to the fact that all the people they went to high school would probably buy it.

They scrap together a coffee shop co-worker as the producer, a hockey goalie as the camera man, and get some enthusiastic locals to be in the picture with them. The original idea is a Star Wars rip-off, but bad luck occurs the night before shooting and they are forced to shoot in the coffee shop.

The main conflict in the movie is 'Are Zach and Miri going to follow through on their love scene?' and 'Will it ruin their friendship?'

It has some big laughs here and there, but I would only recommend it to people that are not offended by some very raunchy humor in places.