This kid should definitely consider an internship as a contributing author for The Word.

Comedy Gold!

My first instinct when I heard this rumor was, “Huh???”  And when I read that it was refuted I thought, “Thank goodness.”  Tobey Maguire as Bilbo Baggins?  It just didn’t seem to fit at all, especially since the casting of the LOTR trilogy was so spot-on.   But I don’t know.  I didn’t think he could have pulled off Spiderman either, and he was great in that (Spiderman 3 excluded for reasons of total crapness).

Too bad Ian Holm is getting on in years now, because he was great as Bilbo in LOTR.  I hope they get somebody with a similar look and manner.  Or maybe they should just make him look young with all that magic CGI that James Cameron is inventing.

This is a follow up post to report that Snow Buddies was just every bit as good as the trailer would lead one to believe.  Oh yes!  I’ve seen it like four times now, thanks largely to my dear friend Acute Viral Rhinopharyngitis, aka the common cold, which has infected my kids and left us largely housebound over the weekend, looking for ways to keep the three-year-old occupied so the five-month-old can sleep in relative peace.  Snow Buddies was pretty much on repeat play, and can it get any better?  I submit that it cannot!

I won’t go into a detailed review, except to say that I applaud the way these kinds of kids movies are teaching our children in a simplified manner.  For instance, Snow Buddies relied heavily on one-dimensional characterization for pretty much everybody in the film.  The producers of the movie gave each character some notable trait, behavior, or style, which defined the basic nature of that person.   I imagine that as a child, this approach would have made it so much easier for me to recognize the character archetypes and to take from that a simpler world view, a lens through which I could shape my developing interactions with the people around me, who I could more easily define and understand because movies like this taught me how to stereotype.  Cheers to you, Snow Buddies maker people!

There was Jean Jorge the Third (aka, as Atticusser pointed out, “My fazher waz a bakher too!”), the mean French dogsled racer, who wore raccoon furs and cheated shamelessly.

There was a Chinese dogsled racer, who was the token Asian, I think.

There was a Finnish dogsled racer, a pretty blond woman, whose only line was, “Stay avay from Jean Jorge, he vould do anysing to vin.”

There was a Russian dogsled racer, who said things like “Da, comrade,” and gave enthusiastic thumbs-ups.

There was Deputy Dan, the bumbling deputy sheriff who was looking for the lost puppies.

And of course there were the five puppies themselves.  I won’t give away this part, because this could be a fun game.  See if you can guess in the comments the personalities of the five starring puppies.  I’ll tell you this: they were each distinctive and very recognizable, and they were matched perfectly with the personalities of the kids who owned them, of course.  So guess away.  If you were writing this movie about five talking, adventurous, troublemaking, good-hearted puppies, what personalities would you give them?

And don’t worry, at our house we’re anxiously awaiting the arrival of the next adventure: Santa Buddies!

It’s great to watch your kids grow up.  It’s incredibly fun and satisfying to have real conversations with my three-year-old (going on thirty already).  It’s not always roses, but most of the time, it’s pretty fantastic.  He’s like a little version of me running around the house.  And, like me, he likes to be entertained.  He likes a good book, and he likes to watch TV more than my wife generally approves of.  I’m pretty cool with it.  I don’t mind watching his shows with him.  In fact, some of his shows, like The Wonder Pets and Shaun the Sheep are downright funny.

There is a side-effect of this combination of his growing up and watching TV that I should have seen coming, though, which is that the commercials are starting to register with him.  I’m suddenly being inundated with stories about these amazing new toys and games that he’s seeing on TV.  What’s more, since he watches a lot of Disney channel, I’ve learned that our Netflix queue has some unexpected new additions.  So this is what I’ll get to look forward to watching this weekend:

Wheeeeee!  I can’t tell you how excited I am for this one.

I typically keep my BYU football banter over on my Thor’s BYU Board site and separate from the Word, but worlds are colliding today because this is a topic that I feel compelled to address.

Why is Max Hall smiling?

I’ll tell you why: because he’s a moron.

Most of you, Word readers, are probably already familiar with the events of this last Saturday, in which rival collegiate football teams BYU and Utah played their annual game (if you can call it that).  It was about the ugliest game I’ve ever watched, marred by a ridiculous number of penalties for personal fouls and unsportsmanlike conduct.  A friend of mine said it well when he told me that we really didn’t get to see which team was better at football.  Too true.

Well BYU came out the victor in a 26-23 overtime result, but the story continued after the game when BYU quarterback Max Hall elected to speak his mind to the press with regard to the Utah football program.  He later issued an apology for the way in which his comments “came out” (and I love that they just came out that way, because he’s not at all responsible for forming the words in his mind and then directing them through his larynx and out his mouth, right?), but this whole thing reaffirmed for me something that I perceived when Max Hall first took the field three years ago: this is one arrogant kid.  He’s got a lot of talent in the game of football, don’t get me wrong, and at times I’ve been very impressed with his skills, but as his collegiate career winds to a close, I can tell you one thing: he will not be missed.  He’s a choke artist who can’t handle the pressure of a big game, who played like an absolute chump in the Utah game, forcing his defense to stay on the field pretty much the entire second half and do all the work, then claims “We deserve this.  We played our guts out,”  and who then sets his rabid ego loose and starts spouting off about how classless Utah is, etc. etc.

Well Max, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.