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My wife and I saw Up yesterday at the Irvine Spectrum. The movie features a “talking” dog — a whole pack of talking dogs actually. When the main dog character meets the main human character, the dog jumps up, licks his face and says, “I have just met you and I love you.” If dogs could talk, that’s exactly what they’d say.

After the movie, we walked over to Spectrum Pets and looked at a puggle puppy. Same reaction — jumping, face licking. I have just met you and I love you.

Of course, there are some people who feel that they don’t deserve this kind of unconditional love. We call them “cat people.”

My wife brings home a Da Vinci Code DVD from Blockbuster . . .

“You want to see Da Vinci Code?” I ask.

She says, “That’s what you asked me to get, right?”

“Mmmmm, no. Why would I do that?”

“Dad hates The Da Vinci Code,” the boy chimes in. “He hates everything about it. He hates the book, he hates the movie, he hates Da Vinci . . .”

“No, Da Vinci is the one bright spot in the whole sorry situation. Da Vinci himself was a great man. Everyone else involved in these projects is a shameless hack.”

This has been making the rounds of my Facebook friends so I thought I’d repost my answers here:

A – Age: Extremely late 30s

B – Bed Size: Procrustean

C – Chore You Hate? If it’s a chore, I hate it

D – Dogs Name? Lightning

E – Essential Daily Items? Nothing is essential

F – Favorite Color? Blue. No, yell– AUUUUUUUUGH!

G – Gold Or Silver? Whatever

H – Height? 6-0, give or take

I – Instruments You Play? Drums and piano, both poorly

J – Job Title? Lord of Logic

K – Kids? Son, age 15

L – Living Arrangements? Wife, kid and dog, in a rapidly depreciating house

M – Mom’s Name? Good question…I only knew her as “Mom”

N – Nicknames? Like Charlie Brown, I always wanted to be called “Flash”

O – Overnight hospital stay other than birth? Burst fracture, L1 (i.e. broken back); laparascopic cholecystectomy (i.e. gall bladder out)

P – Pet Peeves? Other people and their pet peeves

Q – Quote From A Movie? “I am letting you into the secret of all secrets, mirrors are gates through which death comes and goes. Moreover if you see your whole life in a mirror you will see death at work as you see bees behind the glass in a hive.” — Jean Cocteau, Orphée

R – Right Or Left Handed? Right

S – Siblings? One sister, two brothers, and two more sisters

T – Time You Wake Up? Weekdays 5 AM, weekends whenever

U – Underwear? To paraphrase the Dos Equis guy, “I don’t always wear underwear, but when I do, I prefer boxer briefs.”

V – Vegetable You Dislike? “Sex is good, but not as good as fresh, sweet corn.” — Garrison Keillor. Oh wait, DIS-like? Are yams a vegetable? If not, lima beans or squash.

W – Ways You Run Late? Spending too much time on the Internet

X – X-Rays You’ve Had? Dental, foot, wrist, back, head, finger, blah blah blah…do MRIs count too?

Y – Yummy Food You Make? Bourbon and coke. Is that a food? Sometimes I combine two kinds of cereal and it comes out really good.

Z – Zoo Favorites? Meerkats probably

• Don’t talk about improving efficiency or productivity without defining your unit of measure. #
• Kelly McGillis is GAY?! http://is.gd/vHmp When she was naked in Witness I had an erection lasting more than 4 hrs and had to call my doctor #

‘Top Gun’s’ McGillis ‘done with the man thing’

— msnbc.com

Wow . . . she’ll make a nice tuna sandwich for some lucky lesbo.

I remember when I saw her naked in Witness. I had an erection lasting more than four hours and had to call my doctor.

He said don’t worry about it, he had the same thing . . .

Everyone’s got armbands and 3-D glasses . . .

— Elvis Costello

Irvine schools are on spring break this week. I took a day off for father-son activities with my boy, age 15.

As we were driving back from lunch at Wingstop, I said, “You want to see Monsters vs. Aliens in 3-D IMAX?”

“Not particularly,” he said.

I’d already decided that I did want to see it so I got off at the Irvine Spectrum exit.

“I guess this means we’re going to see it,” he said.

“You know what they say: Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time, but regret for the things we didn’t do is inconsolable.”

“Oh shut up, Sophocles. It’s a movie for two-year-olds.”

“No it isn’t. There’s a giant girl in it. It looks cool.”

“I’ll be the combined age of everyone else in the theater.”

We got there a little early so we bought the movie tickets and walked around the Spectrum for a while. I bought a Tommy Bahama shirt and the boy got some red sneakers at Vans.

I have to admit that the movie didn’t really live up to my expectations, but the 3-D IMAX was good and I liked this line from BOB, the monster with no brain, when the battle against the aliens looks hopeless:

“Gentlemen, I may not have a brain — but I have an idea!”

In the evening, the boy had a high school roller hockey game and his mom and I watched him. It was a good day . . .

   

What’s with all these awards? They’re always giving out awards. Best Fascist Dictator: Adolf Hitler.

— Woody Allen, Annie Hall

LOL! Woody Allen cracks me up!

I’m not going to watch the Oscars but I hope Slumdog Millionaire wins a lot of awards because my owner says it’s good and because I love movies about dogs.

Unless Owen Wilson is in it.

— Lightning

Good story, good music, brilliant editing and cinematography.

One of the things I don’t like about movies is that conflict, even in feel-good movies about love and destiny, is too often resolved with violence, whereas much of the dramatic tension in real life stems from the number of people you’d like to physically assault but can’t.

Rating: Four stars (out of five).

It’s sad to see Clint Eastwood get old but somebody’s got to do it.

It seemed to me as far back as Unforgiven and In the Line of Fire that while other actors were trying to stay artificially young forever, no one else was putting on screen an honest portrayal of what it’s like to be an old man, what it’s like to feel yourself diminished.

And that was 15 years ago, when Eastwood was in his early 60s. He’s now 78 and looks it.

I was trying to think of another leading actor who’s doing roles where the central fact about the character is that he’s gotten old and tired and scared . . .

Robert De Niro? No, he’s still doing the same cops and mobsters roles he’s been doing for decades.

Al Pacino? Dustin Hoffman? No. Same roles, plus they’re both around 70 years old with absurd fake pompadours piled on top of their heads. In order to do these roles, you can’t be someone with cosmetic surgery and fake hair who has to use makeup effects to look his own age.

I once read where Michael Douglas is proud of the fact that he has taken on “challenging” roles. You want a challenge? Knock it off with the facelifts and the young wife and show people what it’s really like to get old.

They can’t even admit it to themselves, these guys.

Jack Nicholson? He looks his age, but he’s doing wacky old guy roles in Rob Reiner and Adam Sandler movies. Eccentrics. Not the same thing.

Sylvester Stallone? He’s only 60 but you can tell already that he’s not going to do it. He’s still making Rocky and Rambo movies, for god’s sake.

Rating: Four stars (out of five). I added one star for Clint Eastwood being the only man brave enough to get old in front of a camera.

I love movies about dogs! Wait — is Owen Wilson in that? I HATE Owen Wilson!

Whenever I meet a new bitch at the dog park, the first thing I ask her is “Do you think Owen Wilson is funny?”

And if she says yes, I am OUTTA there.

Rating: Two paws down.

— Lightning

“I wish I could go back and be eight years old again for a couple days . . .”

When Righteous Kill came out recently, the build-up was that it featured Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, “the most acclaimed actors of our time.”

So what’s the big hit at the box office? Beverly Hills Chihuahua, a talking dog movie.

When you’re “the most acclaimed X of our time” and you can be replaced by a trained dog, you know you’re in a stupid profession.

As Warner Baxter said to Ruby Keeler in 42nd Street:

You’re going out there a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a star!

Finally, a breath of fresh Alaskan air!

Not yet another Ivy League lawyer, yet another warmed-over political hack, yet another condescending, posturing, preening, pandering, pontificating blowhard who’s lost sight of the fact that politicians are employees. We hire them, we pay them, we give them trillions of dollars to spend any way they want to . . . if we didn’t hold them to such ridiculously low standards of accountability, it might be easier to remember who works for whom.

And hockey moms are hot! Why? Because hockey’s an expensive sport, so hockey dads have to knock down a pretty good income, which in our materialistic society allows them to be more selective in the spouse department.

My wife is sort of a hockey mom, in that she has a kid who plays hockey, even though she hardly ever goes to the games or the practices.

But she supports McCain-Palin! And she’s looking forward to seeing Mrs. Palin kick Joe Biden’s ass in the vice-presidential debate.

“Argue with a woman?!” she shouts, shaking both fists in the air. “HA HA HA! You are just going to lose and lose!”

It was a sickness: this great interest in a medium that relentlessly and consistently failed to produce anything at all. People became so used to seeing shit on film that they no longer realized it was shit.

— Charles Bukowski, Hollywood

Haven’t seen it. Might see it . . . not sure yet. I’ve seen the trailer though and I’ll tell you something: Heath Ledger is TERRIBLE!

That’s not acting! Put the same makeup on somebody else, give ‘em a script, let ‘em read the same lines . . . there’s a million people who could do the same thing.

You don’t think so? You don’t think Heath Ledger knew that? Why do you think he’s dead of an overdose?

A co-worker tells me that when she was growing up in Seattle, people did their own yardwork . . . not like here in Southern California where that work is done by Mexicans for hire.

I told her we used to mow our own lawns in SoCal too. In fact, if you like A Christmas Story, you would have loved our neighbor next door. He was like Darren McGavin, but instead of the furnace, he’d curse at his beaten-down jalopy of a lawn mower. And not in the basement — right out on his front lawn.

I mowed my own lawn at the first house I ever owned. Pride of ownership! And this was not in Irvine, where I live now and the lawns are the size of postage stamps, it was on a large lot in La Verne.

Of course, I soon tired of it and paid a Mexican to do it while I sipped a refreshing iced tea . . .

It was a sickness: this great interest in a medium that relentlessly and consistently failed to produce anything at all. People became so used to seeing shit on film that they no longer realized it was shit.

— Charles Bukowski, Hollywood

I keep seeing commercials during the NBA Finals for The Incredible Hulk.

Wasn’t there an Incredible Hulk movie out just a few years ago?

Why do we have to keep making Incredible Hulk movies?

Way to reach for the stars, thespians.

Shit . . .

I am letting you into the secret of all secrets, mirrors are gates through which death comes and goes. Moreover if you see your whole life in a mirror you will see death at work as you see bees behind the glass in a hive.

— Jean Cocteau, Orphée

In memory of Heath Ledger, here’s a list of 79 more stars killed by drugs . . .