Flicks

I was just thinking that I ought to do more exercising. ‘More’ is somewhat of a misstatement, as in order to do more, I’d have to be doing some now, unless of course you say well, none is a number....but I think that would be being sly.

What puts this into my mind is all of the contortions and flips that I saw Antonio Banderas do last night in The Legend of Zorro. LOZ wasn’t my first choice for a film, but as my child was coming along, it was either that or Chicken Little. I think I would have liked CL, but the offspring chose LOZ, so thats where we went. And that was okay, because the goal wasn’t to see either of these so much as it was to spend some time with both the partner and the offspring, and we did that. An extra benefit for the offspring was that at the end of LOZ I made a bet regarding how the hero would escape the perilous situation, and I lost, so this morning’s payment of allowance included an extra buck. She actually doesn’t care about money too much – she is well known for leaving dollar bills wherever she was standing when she got them – but she liked the idea of winning, especially since the odds were that if I won, I wouldn’t have asked her to pay up.

As it happens, I thought LOZ was not all that great as a film, unless you liked contemplating what it’d be like to have CZJ as a mother, with all of that cleavage showing up all the time. What’s the equivalent of the Oedipus complex – is it Electra? Whatever, any male offspring of someone who looked like that would certainly have Issues. The kid did, anyway, but they stemmed more from being an arrogant mouthy kid than anything else. I think that the people who made the film thought they’d make one that Disney would have been proud of, and insofar as they broadcast just about every plot point, and had very simple dialogue, they did it. I wasn’t expecting or wanting Great Acting, but CZJ's heaving bosom was about the extent of it. Though seeing a horse leap on top of a moving train was kind of interesting..

Of course, I didn’t really think that it was a real horse on top of a real train any more than I thought that it was Antonio himself doing all those flips, twirls, and leaps, but it was nice, anyway, and as I said, it did make me think that I ought to exercise more. It also put my in mind of how I’ve always liked Spanish architecture – or perhaps I should say ‘americanized spanish architecture’, as I recall that one piece I always liked was a spanish-style chair and table that the lead actor on the Mission:Impossible series had (the second one, not the original), and I would bet that that hardly qualifies as ‘liking Spanish architecture’. Neither does liking refectory tables, either, though I do.

The movie – parts of it were so bad that I spent time out in the lobby, which was good for a different reason; I got to watch about a hundred fifty teens mill around before going in to see Saw II, which I know nothing about but which was apparently quite the deal for them. Most of them were just kids going through whatever forms of adolescent angst is normal, but some of them – well, I thought that I wished the girls had been around when I was in high school, they being apparently full-fledged members of Slutz R’ Us, and I thought that if any of the guys ever showed up at our house, we’d have had an instant ‘no way are you going out with that guy’ conversation with the offspring.

Of course, I know that not all of the apparent sluts actually are, no matter what the current articles about kids and oral sex say, and not all of the apparent gang-bangers are, either – but my feeling is, if thats the way they chose to look, then they get the benefit of how I feel about that. And giving me the opportunity to think about adolescents a little bit, just sitting and watching them mill around, cringing at some of the things they said and did (Not with my daughter, you don’t, you son of a bitch!) – that was all worthwhile. And I did go back in time to see the big ending, which Walt would have loved.

But I think that next time, I’ll see Chicken Little. At least that way, I wouldn't be thinking about exercise.