Movies and TV this week

A Wii catastrophe averted!

Hung out with Reed on Friday, as usual, and had a blast. One of regular entertainments is multiplayer gaming on the Wii. Wii Sports is, of course, a favorite--mainly Tennis, Bowling and Boxing. I've got Street Fighter 2 on the Virtual Console and that is a blast as well, but our absolute favorite multiplayer game is Excite Truck. It's just the right mix of challenging and accessible and has become a mainstay of our gaming.

A few weeks ago we tried to play Wii Sports Boxing and the motion sensor on my second Wii Remote seemed to be busted! I kept putting off calling Nintendo about it but I finally did that on Thursday and ... the support rep told me to whap the remote against my hand a couple of times, and it started working. So it's back to Wii as usual again!

Pan's Labyrinth and Little Miss Sunshine

Saw two movies this week, and they were both excellent in different ways. Pan's Labyrinth was dark and mysterious, simultaneously a beautiful fable of fairies and magic and an intense depiction of fascist brutality and its drive to crush the life out of everything. The star, Ivana Baquero, is definitely going to be an actress to watch, she has the kind of natural depth of emotion that Natalie Portman had in The Professional, and with some luck she'll go on to do great things.


Also watched Little Miss Sunshine, another terrific movie with an excellent young actress at the center. Little Miss Sunshine is about the best example of an indie movie I can think of: it's quirky and unusual, with rich, interesting characters who each seem to have so much depth you could make an entire movie about any of them. Great performances from the stars, especially Steve Carell and Alan Arkin. Abigail Breslin, the central character, actually says relatively little in the movie, but she's such a captivating character who drives the whole story that you just have to adore her. Absolutely one of my favorite movies this year.

Veronica Mars

After having it recommended by both close friends and the likes of Joss Whedon, I've finally picked up the first season of Veronica Mars and started watching it. It's strange, television keeps finding ways of making us care about what happens to rich, pretty white girls in southern California!

I'm a few episodes into it, and I'm digging it so far, although I am having a hell of a time telling the guys apart. Except for her best friend, who's black, they all seem to look roughly the same, from the cute boy she's starting to date to the brooding ex-boyfriend with the mysterious past to the cocky smartass who gives her trouble all the time. It always takes me a minute once they come on screen to tell which one is which.

I have to give props again to Joss Whedon, because somehow on his shows, NONE of the characters look alike. On "Buffy" there were a big variety of teenage girls on the show over the years, but they always looked distinct in shape, wardrobe, hair color and style*, so they never seemed to blend together the way the boys on Veronica Mars do. And on Buffy, there were even fewer guy characters so they all stood apart from each other: Xander, Angel, Oz, Spike... It would be impossible to mix those characters up. Anyway, yet another in a three million part series on why Joss Whedon is great.

Jeff

* except in the last few seasons when Emma Caulfield (Anya) kept changing her hair color and style, in some cases duplicating Sarah-Michelle Gellar's style exactly. A number of the episode commentaries mentioned how this caused some problems in setting up shots with the two of them occasionally.