A Benign Mutation

Don’t expect excellence, but X-Men III extends excitement.

Director Brett Ratner packs plenty of action and comic-book drama into this enjoyable summer flick, X-Men: The Last Stand, a third installment in the X-Men series about a motley group of action heroes whose DNA mutations have given them extraordinary superpowers.

Though the genetically enhanced are now more accepted than they previously were, Professor Charles Xavier, played by the ageless Patrick Stewart, still runs a private school to shelter and hone the talents of young, misunderstood mutants and exercise a team of crime-fighting heroes who step in when misguided mutants, such as the sexy and deadly shape-shifting succubus known as Mystique (Rebecca Romijn) wreck havoc on society.

Proving that you don’t always have to be pretty to be a good guy, Hank McCoy, played by the unrecognizable Kelsey Grammer, a blue-haired mutant, burly in appearance though stately in manner, (with his Founding Fathers accent he should have been called Ape Lincoln) has been named Secretary of Mutant Affairs for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to ensure that the historically embroiled mutant-nonmutant relations stay smooth.

However, even in these supposedly mutant-friendly times, prejudices linger, and a heart-wrenching scene in which a young boy, the fledgling Swan, tries desperately and secretly to hack off his own mutant wings reminds us how difficult it still is to be a mutant.

In an attempt to quiet public concern, government scientists have developed a treatment that strips mutants of their powers (or afflictions, depending on your point of view), sending ripples of controversy through the briefly serene mutant community.

Recognizing that such a “cure” would render him powerless, arch-nemesis Magneto, in an uncharacteristically lukewarm performance by Ian McKellen, rallies support from a new breed of bad-guy mutants—scrawny, androgynous punks, complete with black garb, gang-style tattoos, and facial piercings—to assist him in his quest to destroy the cure, which has been hidden in a shiny new research facility on Alcatraz.

The chance resurrection of erstwhile heroine Jean Gray, played by Famke Janssen, along with her long-squelched alter ego Phoenix, a powerful sorceress-like personality with questionable loyalties presents Magneto with the upper hand he may need to carry off the heist.

Continuing sexual tension between the ambivalent Jean Gray and rival good-guy lovers Cyclops (James Marsden) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is both steamy and dangerous. Jackman, as Wolverine, delivers yet another smoldering, manly performance as the loner rebel who’s been tamed by the good professor. However, Halle Barry, as Storm, who in this movie seems to be nothing more than a schoolmarm and lifter of pesky fogs, leaves a weak, clammy impression with only the occasional bolt of lightning. And sadly, the continuation of the compelling mutant-coming-of-age storyline for Rogue, played by Anna Paquin, is awkwardly dropped for most of the movie, and we don’t even get to see her superpowers in action.

With no time wasted on ridiculous explanations of the pseudoscience behind such fantastic events, X-Men III is a fun summer movie that entertains without straining the brain. Don’t forget to stay past the credits for a glimpse at the plot workings of a possible sequel.

[Image from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_4990000/newsid_4995200/4995250.stm]

Smashy Smashy

Someone ran into our car AGAIN yesterday. This is the third time that our parked car has been violated by drunken barhoppers. How does that catchy little maxim go? Smash my car once, you’re a bastard. Smash my car three times and I’m a big sucker for parking in the same spot. Something like that… As much fun as our neighborhood is for eating out and getting places easily, I’m beginning to think I’m ready to move back to the sleepy little ‘burbs.

Driving in Boston is not a pleasure, and fortunately when you live where we do, you rarely have to do it. Granted, I’m always complaining about the two or three things you can’t do without a car, but it’s relatively rare to need one for the essentials. Yet, as much fun as it is to sit around feeling smug about not consuming gasoline, I really miss getting to drive places. And I miss my cute little Subaru! (But thank god she is at my mom’s house, safe from the dangers of parking here in my ‘hood!)

Why do we have a car at all? It’s hard to say. I have to do some reporting in faraway places. Also, you need a car to get to a decent quilting store. And, I need some herb plants, too, and there don’t seem to be any decent nurseries within walking distance. I hesitate to drive for non-professional or essential errands because the three or four times that I have braved that activity resulted in hysterical crying: twice in Cambridge and once in Framingham. I’m proud of my trip to Cape Cod, because I didn’t break into tears until I got stuck in a labyrinth of construction detours hours later in downtown Boston on the way home. This city is just impossible to navigate. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. True, I’m particularly bad at finding my way around, but this place really is notorious for crooked roads, unnamed avenues, aggressive drivers, unorganized neighborhood street layouts, and hideously congested traffic. I swear!

The damage:

Massachusetts Table Saw Massacre

Well, we are having a regular scorcher here in Boston, 70-something degrees, which means that we’ve opened the windows. Last September, I remember it took me a few nights to get used to the sounds of the city coming in so stridently through my windows along with the breeze:

• drunken college stumbling from the bars to their cars, singing, howling, and finally puking
• loud Brazilian pop music blasting from my neighbors’ apartments (I wish they liked Bossa Nova instead, oh well)
• one particular Celine Dionne album over and over and over (I started singing along eventually.)
• children laughing and toddlers gurgling (My neighbors have 4 or 5 darlings who seem to always be playing joyfully outside.)
• emergency vehicle sirens howling, though they do so intermittently here, only when people are actually in their way, rather than nonstop until they reach their destination like they do back home
• firecrackers detonating at midnight on what I can only assume to be traditional holidays in some culture (not mine)
• the can lady rolling her groaning, overfilled shopping cart and rifling through our recyclables (In the summer she wears a traditional Asian rice-paddy hat, the kind that looks like a flattened cone.)
• one mystery sound, which Scott proudly figured out last Fall: The taco truck comes every morning at 8:15 am to the post office behind us and toots his old fashioned horn to let them know that breakfast is here.

But, the hullabaloo soon went away, because it got too freakin’ cold and we shut out the chill and the noise. It’s now back, with screaming table saws from our g*ddamn next-door neighbor’s landlord. He’s building an ugly wall and it’s making an ugly racket. At 10 am on a Saturday. I’m having murderous thoughts.

[Image from: http://www.event.is/frettir/nr/38]

Please Flush the Da Vinci Commode

There’s no need to crack The Da Vinci Code. Ron Howard’s latest movie based on the fun and only superficially intellectual book of the same name is already broken. Any controversy that church-types have derived from the intriguing trailers or even Dan Brown’s low-brow pop novel might pad opening weekend box-office revenues, but even die-hard fans of cheesy conspiracy movies will be disappointed by Howard’s sloppy filmmaking.

The plot opens intriguingly enough, but soon tumbles into an awkward, chaotic muddle. French police are stumped by clues left by a murdered museum curator and enlist the help of the victim’s associate, Robert Langdon, played by Tom Hanks, whose perpetually wrinkled brow, pasty complexion, and scruffy, new-age hairdo make him perfect as the innocent Harvard “symbology” professor who finds himself the main suspect in the serial murder case a millennium in the making. French government agent and granddaughter of the murdered man Sophie Neveu, played by Audrey Tautou, rescues Langdon from near arrest and recruits him to help her puzzle out her grandfather’s message, which turns out to be a treasure hunt for the holy grail and an expose into a 2,000-year-old boys-vs-girls conspiracy involving Opus Dei, an obscure sect within the Catholic church.

Our first clues that the film’s plot goes beyond the quotidian murder mystery are the gory crime-scene photos. The Louvre’s curator has been shot, but instead of dying with a whimper, he strips naked, draws pagan symbols in blood on his nude body and leaves cryptic messages about Leonardo da Vinci’s famous works written in invisible ink all over the grand art museum before he dies. Though the mysterious message contains baffling number sequences and anagrams that could give your average sudoku or crossword puzzle fanatic a thrill, hasty pacing and un-illuminating computer graphics give viewers little chance to follow in the main characters’ unraveling of the titular brainteaser.

Few of the acting performances are stellar. Hanks adequately conveys tired, agnostic, and claustrophobic, but gives us little clue as to how Langdon feels about his jolting new role as adventurer nor about his attractive partner in code-cracking. Tautou as Neveu strikes neither an intelligent nor glamorous profile, always staring with wide-eyed wonder that her enigmatic grandfather could have entangled her and his colleague in such a jostling escapade, whose violent twists serve only to further confuse her and rumple her dull Parisian suit. Paul Bettany grosses us out as Silas, a scary, murderous monk with albinism and a penchant for self torture—he regularly beats himself bloody with a whip and always wears around his thigh a flesh-ripping salice, a device that looks like a doggy choke chain collar. As if his pale, scabby skin and grimy robes aren’t enough of a stereotype, he keeps showing up in classic horror movie style—suddenly, violently, and out of nowhere, right after a potential victim has completed his or her last line. Only Langdon’s colleague, grail expert Leigh Teabing, played by Ian McKellen, displays any depth of character, with simultaneous affection and envy of his old friend, as a well as an all-consuming passion for his life’s work—brilliantly illustrated in a delightful moment in which he meticulously examines a precious gewgaw through reading glasses and magnifying lenses all the while muttering sighs of ecstasy over this new clue to the whereabouts of the holy grail.

Brown’s book, though full of gory and symbolic imagery, spooky architecture, historical references, and cryptic intrigue failed to inspire even a moderate air of grandiose mystery on the big screen. Though all of the scenes take place in famous cathedrals, ancient castles, and art museums, Howard squanders all opportunities for great cinematography and uses tight shots, dark shadows, and hectic editing to create a feeling of immanent danger. Bright, washed out, grainy flashbacks describing the plot’s historical background are the brightest moments in movie, but only in the sense that they are well lit and give the audience a clue that the film’s dimness is intentional rather than the fault of the theater’s projectionist.

As if such murkiness and close quarters aren’t enough to strip even a holy-grail quest of its due grand scale, the characters’ use of fantastical and unnecessary technologies further dilutes the movie’s historical heft. In at least two scenes, professors explain their craft using unrealistic, ultra-fancy power-point presentations in which computers magically project illustrations of their spoken explications. Even Langdon’s terrific academic-turned-superhero line, “I have to get to a library fast,” takes a turn for the cheap and easy when instead of hunting down a dusty, velum tome, he uses a stranger’s cell-phone internet service to access the information he needs. (A generous pause on the phone’s screen perhaps accommodates a lucrative product placement?)

The Da Vinci Code’s overall effect is a cross between National Treasure and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, only you’ll get more laughs out of those light-hearted movies than from this dim, brutal failure of a summer action-adventure flick.

[Image from: http://www.theage.com.au/news/film/murderous-monk-business/2006/05/18/1147545446120.html]

Blog Jam

I’m beginning to see why blogging is such a sticky medium. It’s meant to be ephemeral, yet it has more permanence than verbal communication. I can mouth off on the blog one day and feel certain that after a few posts, people probably won’t dip too far into the archives. Thus, that bitchy blog hardly carries a lasting effect. However, the archive is still there for anyone’s perusal as long as you don’t delete the posts, and even when you do there are weird search sites that can keep copies of your postings long after you wished they were gone.

Also, I’ve found that I tend to blog most often when I’m angry, and thus, the overall effect of my blog has become more of a whine-fest and less of what I had originally wanted it to be: a posting of journal style, literary entries. I tend to get this desired, more writerly effect when I handwrite letters to friends or family, yet when I write in a hard-copy journal, I tend to just complain. I’ve started several journals to practice my personal writing, but they always dwindle off. Instead, I’ve started keeping copies of letters that I write so that I can look back at the kinds of things that inspire me to write well and when I’m just blathering on.

Another reason I wanted to keep a blog, other than practicing writing for an audience (albeit a very supportive and small one), was to keep in touch with friends and family. Only a couple of my friends keep blogs, but I tend to feel most in touch with them because of it. Now that I live so far from all the people that I really care about, it seemed like a good way of maintaining closeness even with great distance. However, because the blog is a public medium, I end up writing less personal accounts. I hesitate to post freely about the uglier passing emotions, such as depression, embarrassment, or anger with one’s spouse or family members. I still need handwritten correspondence, email, and telephone to really keep in touch with people.

Finally, blogging is quite a bit more of a commitment than I thought it would be. Not posting on your blog often has more meaning than you want it to. For example, when I took a month-long break at the end of the semester, I heard from readers (all two of them) that for weeks I hadn’t been doing anything but whining about gardening (the topic of my last entry). Like a newspaper or magazine editor, the blogger has to maintain a steady stream of fresh material to keep her audience happy. My schoolmates want to have a blog associated with our student on-line science magazine (in the works), but I don't think that I could take that on without serious hestitation. On top of all my other school work, I'd hate to feel obligated to post as often as you need to to keep appearances up-to-date. I mean, how often do you have something brilliant or even semi-interesting to say about science, or life for that matter?

[Image from: http://perfectlyimperfect.blogspot.com/the_blog_345.jpg]

‘Maters

I planted some tomatoes today. This act--jolting me out of my month-long pout about how short the Boston growing season is--was inspired by a talk I went to yesterday, given by Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I haven’t read either of these books yet in their entirety, but from reading bits and parts and from listening to his talk, I’m psyched to read on. He captured two things perfectly: One is the luxuriously nurturing feeling you get from planting seeds on a sunny spring day. The other is the simultaneous glee and monotony of purchasing an organic-farm vegetable subscription. On the one hand, you are inspired by weekly surprises of arugula, beets, turnips, and okra--rare vegetables one seldom thinks to experiment with--and thus, one gets to look through and try out some fun new recipes. On the other hand, there can be a few weeks when the box is mostly okra, and you get real sick of okra, even in the form of such Cajun delights as gumbo and jumbalaya. Anyway, Pollan talked about this fun way of getting great veggies, though kind of glossing over the negative side in order to prop up his PR campaign for supporting the local farmer. He also reminded us how good a garden-grown tomato tastes. Mmm! I can’t wait for a crop. Sadly, neither my shady little porch nor the lead-poisoned, dog-bespoiled backyard that I share with my neighbors will likely yield any real tomatoes, but it’s fun to have something to water again.

Irish greenhouse

You Ain’t From Around Here

This week I discovered two ingredients that are sadly missing from New England cuisine: queso and ground sausage. Now the queso part isn’t too surprising. I mean, we’re pretty far from the border, so why would Tex Mex be any good up here. But, you ask a local whether they want to order chips and queso and they don’t know what you are talking about. Very sad. I will have to enlighten some of these folks in the near future. (By the way, they think that enchiladas use flour tortillas…yick, very soggy.)

The ground sausage thing blew my mind, though. I just can’t imagine a large grocery store not carrying this staple. I mean obviously I don’t cook with it very often these days, but how are these people supposed to make sausage lasagna? Or, breakfast sausage patties? Or creamed corn and sausage? (Okay, that last one is just gross, but it was a regular meal in the Frohlich household when I was growing up.) The butcher man at the super market said that they don’t carry sausage out of its casing except during the holidays. This explains why I was able to buy it no problem for my Thanksgiving turkey stuffing.

Come to think of it, I might want to shake things up around here and make Southern Surprise, a recipe I just made up: queso with ground sausage. Sounds delish, no? I’d have to import the ingredients, but Jimmy Dean would approve.

[Image from: http://www.jimmydean.com/products.asp?p=1]

Ill Communication

When I read about people living in squalor, having too many cats, or staying in abusive relationships, I think “Man, how could they let it get so bad?” But, then a part of me thinks maybe they started out like me, doing okay but letting some things slide occasionally, and they just let one new detail slip every day until an acceptable situation slowly evolved into an unacceptable situation. You know, sometimes I leave garbage out on the countertop for a day. What if I did that every day? Then it would be squalor, right? Well, I’m one of those people--not in a poor hygiene or abusive sense. But, I’ve nearly crossed the line over to the criminally negligent arena of having crappy phone service. And, it’s mostly self-inflicted. We have two cordless phones, two cell phones, two fax machines, one cable modem, two wireless modems, and a corded phone--all told about $1,000 worth of equipment. In addition, we pay over $200 a month on telecommunications bills and services. Yet, because of a bad combination of crappy cell phone service, old batteries, poor location of land-line connections, general laziness, and some recent financial setbacks, Scott and I have let ourselves get into a situation where we can enjoy no more than one hour-long phone call per day, and any other phone calls that we make that day have to be limited to 15-20 min bursts before we are cut off. The solution: about $200+ in new phone equipment, new batteries, or new cell phone service. Normally, I wouldn’t mind spending that amount to improve my life and get a service that gives me so much comfort, safety, and pleasure. I’m just sick and tired of giving people so much money and not getting what I want! Aaaargh!

[Image from: http://www.amazon.com/]

Scooped and Deceived!

I could just spit! As my final radio documentary, I had wanted to do a piece on this local facility that trains monkeys to help paraplegics, a monkey college. Six weeks ago, I called them and explained what I wanted to do and that I would try to sell it to WBUR, the local public radio station. The rep at the monkey college said that they couldn’t let me interview someone there because they were all booked up on media events, blah, blah, blah. He said maybe I could call in a year and he might have time for me then. So, what do I see on the WBUR website this past week?! A freakin’ radio story on the monkey college! They aired it last week, with an intro that implies that they conceived of the idea just two weeks ago. Follow this linkfor a listen.

This is proof that it’s all about your connections. I’m sure when they called, he didn’t give them the call-me-in-a-year bs. Grrrr!! I feel like a chump. (Or, should I say a chimp?) I want to throw some feces at them, like a monkey who failed out of monkey college.

P.S. Scott says that I wouldn’t have lasted a minute in that place anyway. It’s true. I’m scared of monkeys. But, I swear I would have pulled myself together for such a great story!

[Image from: http://www.here-now.org/shows/2006/04/20060427_17.asp]