Brazil - The Third Installment

So, I went to Brazil about a week ago for the purpose of, among other things, attending my daughter’s first birthday bash. I set foot on American soil again a couple of days ago and felt compelled to share some observations and experiences I had on this particular journey.

Loyal Vituperator readers may recall my “Luxuries I Missed” rant in Part 1, as well as my list of kvetches in Part 2. This third installment is really just a review of what happened as well as some of the odd things I noticed. Yes, I have a few new b*tchings to get out of my system, but trust me, they’re far fewer in quantity when compared to the amount I shelled out for Part 2 (…after all, I wasn’t even there a full week this time). And I must say, most of the proverbial fan-hitting sh*t seemed to happen to my wife while I just kept dodging bullets.

So, here’s the story.

During our January/February Brazil trip this year, the wife and I agreed on what looked to be a great function hall to have our daughter’s first birthday party. Granted, our little girl was fewer than two months old at the time, yet we had already started making plans in anticipation of the big event. First birthdays are a really big deal in Brazil and those who remembered our huge wedding were sure to be keeping their eyes on us to see how (or if) we’d ever top our 2004 nuptials.

So, in an effort to keep some sort of organization to this blog, I’ll separate my observations and comments into three categories with subsets for each.

CATEGORY 1: GETTING TO BRAZIL

For starters, whoever coined the phrase “Getting there is half the fun” clearly never had to fly to Brazil. Oh, and we flew with the same F-Me Airline as last time (click here for my F-Me rant). We didn’t choose them because we liked them, rather because pickins were slim by the time we had enough money to buy our tickets and F-Me had the best prices. So, we get to the airport and the fun starts… for my wife.

A.) PAY NOW OR WE KEEP YOUR DAUGHTER: My mother-in-law, Dalva needed to get to Brazil about a week before the wife and I were able to fly out and she really wanted to take our daughter with her for a plethora of reasons. We acquiesced, but to make this a reality, she’d need our daughter’s name (we’ll just use the pseudonym of Sabrina for the sake of the story) printed on her tickets for the flight over... and on my wife’s tickets for the flight back. We were given assurances from the travel agency that once we had Sabrina’s name on those tickets AND got written and notarized permission slips into Dalva’s hands, all would be well.

Dalva had no problem getting our daughter out of the country, but when it came time for us to check in, an F-Me clerk told my wife that she’d need to pay for Sabrina’s tickets if she wanted to bring her back home. My wife showed him her tickets and how Sabrina’s name was already printed on all of them, but since Sabrina wasn’t with us for check-in, she somehow got disqualified on all counts and would be ineligible to join her own mother back on the flight to America. My wife was broke to begin with, so I fronted the money to ensure that Sabrina would fly home with my wife.

Fear not though. The travel agency has already promised to refund what we paid for the first tickets. Whether they uphold their end of the bargain when we go to collect, well… we’ll just have to jump off that bridge when we come to it.

B.) COUGH UP THE PERFUMES, TERRORIST!: I have like a MILLION reasons why I prefer to travel light, but ever since marrying the Transporter, I haven’t had an occasion to enjoy my "Light Travel" preference. Everybody in Brazil wants American paraphernalia, especially when it comes to Nike sneakers and electronics, so whenever the family down in South America gets wind that my wife’s heading down there, they all cut deals with her to have her buy stuff for them with the promise of reimbursing her when she arrives. For example, we might pay $200.00 for a digital camera here, but try buying that exact same brand in Brazil and you’re guaranteed to shell out at least DOUBLE that. So, one of the many things she was asked to bring was perfume. Her brother’s wife has a thing for Victoria’s Secret crap and she cut a deal to reimburse her for a variety of perfumes and lotions. The only thing is that my wife forgot that we can’t fill up a carry-on bag with liquids (…not even water), so she wound up having like sixty bucks worth of Vickie’s Secret goop confiscated. Plus, she was gone for like a f**king half hour, so my guess is that they must have “white rubber gloved” the hell out of her for having the audacity to attempt such an evil deed.

C.) SPEAKING OF TERRORISTS: For all of your frequent (and even semi-frequent) flyers, I wanted to ask you a question. Is it just me or is it impossible to get on a plane these days without seeing at least two guys who look exactly like they just graduated from Osama bin Laden’s Infidel Decapitation Academy? It’s weird because I can spend months in the city without seeing so much as one turban. I get on any plane in the States and it’s almost a given that I’ll see at least one poster boy for al-Qaeda with a beard thick enough to hide a Beretta and a few extra magazines. And if he doesn’t look like a terrorist, he most certainly will look sketchy enough to want to bring the plane down just for sh*ts and giggles.

D.) SKYMALL IS MY CRACK: I travel the F-Me Airline and these damn SkyMall catalogs are on every damn plane. They’re the most addictive catalogs in existence because they have all of the crap you never knew you always wanted. All of the really innovative inventions of the day are featured here and they create a demand for stuff that, twenty minutes ago, you didn’t even know existed. Plus, they let you take the catalog home so that your torment can continue long after the wheels touch down on the runway. “Hey, now that I think about it, I do need remote-controlled laser combat cars… and a singing animatronic Elvis robot… and a Steinhausen chronograph watch… and a vintage hot dog cart… and roses hand-dipped in 24K gold… and a scoop-free self-cleaning cat box… and an Oh GOD get this damn catalog away from me before I liquidate my house!”

I don’t even HAVE a cat!

E.) NEVER BUY ANYTHING FROM DUTY FREE: Those of you who have flown to other countries will have heard of duty free items. I’ll summarize the phenomenon for those of you who haven’t. Folks who bring more than $500.00 worth of certain types of crap to another country are required to pay an extra fee. I’ll illustrate the reason for this with an example. Let’s say someone in Brazil wants to buy a digital camera, but can’t afford it at Brazil’s prices. Then, they realize they can get this item much cheaper in the states. If they get somebody to buy them a camera in the states and then give them the money for it when they arrive, they have, in a sense, hurt Brazil’s economy. That’s money they could have kept in the country, had it not been for the nice American contraband smuggler.

So, as an incentive to buy expensive sh*t without penalty, they offer duty free items at airports (…and in some cases, on the airplanes themselves). Buy a digital camera at a duty free shop and, as long as you keep your receipt, said item is exempt from that extra penalty fee. The problem is that duty free items are f**king expensive. Seriously, buy duty free stuff only if you have money to burn because I guarantee you’ll find the exact same items almost anywhere else for a much more reasonable price.

I mean seriously, who the f**k is stupid enough to blow $500.00 on a $300.00 iPod?

F.) LUGGAGE? WHAT LUGGAGE?: Want to hear another great reason for packing light? Because you never know what the airline will do with the luggage you choose to stow away. Case in point: I checked in two huge, heavy-ass suitcases filled with stuff for my daughter’s birthday party. So, where did I put my clean clothes? In my carry-on bag… because I pack light and have little difficulty fitting my clothes into one small bag. Good thing, too... because while we may have arrived in Brazil without a problem, our luggage stayed in f**king Miami. Was this a big deal for me? Not really. I had my hygiene items and all of my clothes so I was sound as a pound. As for my wife, she chose to fill her carry-on bag with perfumes and a laptop she bought for her brother. Her clothes were checked in, so she was stuck wearing the same clothes for almost three full days before the airline got our luggage delivered to our Brazil address.

G.) YEAH, WE’LL TAKE THAT OFF YOUR HANDS NOW: Remember that laptop I mentioned just a moment ago? Remember that extra fee? If you bring expensive electronics with you, you need to declare them when you arrive. If you don’t, you run the risk of getting heavily fined. Well, my wife might have had a shot at slipping the laptop past the prying eyes of Brazil’s finest had it not been for the fact that she needed to fill out claim slips to get our luggage back. But fortune failed to smile upon her here as well and she was told she’d need to cough up $500.00 for the privilege of stepping onto Brazilian soil with the laptop for which she already paid $900.00. Meanwhile, I strolled right past everybody with my digital camera and my video camera. Go figure.

H.) IT’S ME! IT'S DADDY!: This part kinda broke my heart a little. I don’t know how strong the long-term memory of an infant is, so for fear that Sabrina wouldn’t recognize us after being without us for a week, I decided to burn a DVD for her. The DVD was basically a short video of me, talking to her, showing her all of the things she likes to play with at home, saying all of the things she has come to expect from me and showing her pictures of her mom and me to ensure that she wouldn’t forget us. Dalva assured us that she had Sabrina watch the video at least once a day and sometimes twice, yet when Sabrina and I saw each other, she didn’t smile like she usually does. I knelt down with my arms outstretched and called to her to come give me a hug. She didn’t move. She just looked at me with her wide eyes and her pout. Inside, I almost panicked.

“Has she actually forgotten who I am?”

I’m the only one who sings the ABCs to her, so I quickly belted an ABC tune out for her, followed by a tune that I made up that she loves to hear. I did all of my signature sound effects and kept repeating the fact that “Daddy” was here. She says “Daddy” a lot when she sees me and, according to Dalva, she said “Daddy” whenever she saw the video. After a few more seconds of nervous tension, something must have clicked because she walked towards me and stretched out her arms. Her facial expression revealed nothing, but her hug assured me that she remembered me.

I swear I almost cried tears of joy with her in my arms again. I’d missed her terribly and the thought that she might have forgotten me nearly tore my heart to shreds. A few giggles later and she was happy as could be, belting out “Da das” and “Daddies” as if not a day was lost.

CATEGORY 2: BRAZIL STORIES AND GRIPES

I said that I didn’t have many gripes, but I did have a few and I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention a few of them. Again, nothing huge – just me having a little b*tch session, but fear not. Some of what I have to say this time around is actually good.

A.) SANTA’S DAUGHTER: One of the things that Dalva wanted to do with Sabrina in the week prior to our arrival is to attend a Catholic church event for underprivileged kids. It’s called “Festa dos Pobres” which quite literally means “Poor People’s Party.” It’s like Brazil’s version of “Toys for Tots,” except on a smaller scale. The church members raised money to buy toys for children who would otherwise have nothing for Christmas and, though it would make more sense to have this shindig closer to Christmas itself, it was held in the first week of December.

Anyway, Dalva thought it’d be great if Sabrina helped with the distribution of gifts, so Dalva dressed Sabrina in her “Baby Claus” outfit for the party. Many of the kids actually believed that Sabrina was Santa Claus’s daughter and one of them actually said, “Santa didn’t bring us any gifts this year, but Santa’s daughter did!” Many of the kids posed for pictures with her and one of the kids even gave her a picture of him to keep and share with Santa when she gets back to the North Pole.

I just really thought that was awesome and I felt honored and flattered that these underprivileged kids thought of my little girl as being responsible for making their Christmas holiday a little bit brighter and happier. It's a short and sweet holiday anecdote to keep for the future when Sabrina gets a little older.

Okay, time for the gripes.

B.) WOULD A QUICK SWEEP REALLY KILL YA?: My wife’s family is great. I’ve said that on numerous occasions, so whenever possible, I give them every benefit of every doubt imaginable. Yet I couldn’t help getting just a little bit pissed off when I saw some of the areas where Sabrina was playing. One house we went to had a concrete floor patio area thingy just outside of the house. There were a TON of little bits of plastic lying around, not to mention cigarette butts and a few sharp metal objects and shards of broken glass, all within a baby's reach. Now, Sabrina had been there for a full week before we arrived and I’m fairly certain this wasn’t the first time she’d been in this area. My question is why couldn’t they have at least tried to sweep the area up? They knew a baby was coming. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that she might want to check out some of this debris for herself?

Sabrina may be a year old, but she's still small enough to want to pick up everything she finds on the ground. True, she doesn’t put absolutely everything in her mouth anymore, but that’s not to say she’s given up the pastime altogether. In the few short minutes I was in there with her, I had to pull several of those plastic bits out of her hand and one out of her mouth. Once she got a hold of one of the cigarette butts, I picked her up and brought her to the sink to wash her hands. From there, Sabrina walked to another house owned by one of my wife’s family members. Only this person owns a poodle who took a dump in the walkway leading to her house. Naturally, Sabrina made a bee line to the dog droppings and cried hysterically when I stopped her from picking them up. I’m sorry, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before I let her juggle pieces of dog sh*t in her hands.

C.) PLEASE TRY TO KEEP HER ALIVE, WILL YA?: It was this lack of proper baby care that made me suspicious when I saw Sabrina for the first time. Back home, we keep the house pretty clean and we do our darndest to ensure that Sabrina is healthy. She’d been in Brazil for all of a week and it seemed like she was falling apart at the seams. When we arrived, she was coughing quite a bit with night sweats. A couple of days later, she busted up her nose and forehead and two days after that, her throat was inflamed and she was screaming into and past midnight. Plus, she had a nasty diaper rash; something she virtually never gets under our care. So, what happened? Well, for the busted up nose and head, all accusing fingers pointed at her grandfather.

Dalva asked "Granddaddy" to watch her for five minutes and, within that time, Sabrina apparently made a break for it and landed face first onto the ground. Yet from what I’ve learned about this guy, I can’t get mad at him. He never did much in the way of parenting when my wife was a baby, so I can’t imagine he somehow magically learned how to do the job now. As for Sabrina's other maladies, I told Dalva to keep her in clean environments whenever possible and to try and keep her physical contact with other kids to a minimum. She did the opposite, so perhaps my fears were warranted. After all, under grandpa’s short watch, Sabrina almost f**king died and in the time before my arrival, she had a measles/rubella shot and a shot to clear up her inflamed throat.

D.) NOBODY HAD ANYTHING: To be more specific, I had a great degree of difficulty finding the following six things:

- FOOD: I went to a small number of houses during my brief stay in Brazil, but the refrigerators in these houses were, for the most part, empty. I don’t need food several times a day like some people. If need be, I can get through an entire day on a very minimal amount of food, yet it seemed that if I wanted to eat, somebody had to order a pizza or something else like that because nobody did any grocery shopping for real food like fruits, veggies and meats. Yet, I wasn’t mad or anything because I realize that money is tight and it’s hard to keep your refrigerator full when you’re busting your ass just to pay the bills. That leads me into the other great necessity of life that was in scarce supply.

- WATER: Sure, I like Coca-Cola, Pepsi and other such carbonated drinks, but when it’s as hot as it is down in Brazil this time of year, all a man really wants is some cold, refreshing spring water. Nobody had any. Some houses stocked Coke, so in the absence of water, that’s what I drank. Not a huge deal because at least they had something, but I would have thought water to be a cheaper beverage to buy than soda. Maybe I’m wrong, though.

- TOILET PAPER: This I didn’t understand quite as easily because a wise owl with glasses once told me to read and stay in school whilst handing me a book that said, “Everybody Poops.” Yet apparently, Brazilians don’t because it was damn near impossible to find toilet paper in any of the houses I visited. For those few times where a house did have T.P., it was in a room that was inexplicably nowhere near the bathroom. Does it make sense to keep toilet paper in your bedroom while the bathroom has nothing?

- SOAP: Speaking of bathroom necessities, I was hard-pressed to find hand soap in half of the places I visited. I’ll admit that I may not have looked hard enough in some situations, but seriously, if you want your guests to wash their hands, are you really gonna wanna tempt fate by hiding the hand soap like it's Round One of an anti-bacterial scavenger hunt?

- TOWELS: Both the paper and cloth variety were in scarce supply and I have no idea why. Go to my bathroom and, at any given time, you’ll find anywhere from two to three available towels that you can use to dry your hands after washing them. In Brazil (...and with hands sopping wet), I’d ask, “Hey, do you happen to have any towels around here?” Then, whoever I asked would look around the house and pull out a towel from some secret hiding spot. And you can forget about paper towels. Apparently, that is a luxury that few can afford, so if you spill your drink, you’re pretty much f**ked if you have to use your one house towel to mop it up.

- INTERNET: In Part 1, I spoke of how very few people in my wife’s family have internet access, but on this trip, even the few stand-bys that I knew of were of no help. One girl’s computer monitor was burnt out. Another family member’s internet was disconnected and even the Internet shop at the mall had shut down temporarily due to some weird reason. Once the Internet shop got their system back online, there was like a 90 minute wait to use it. Suffice it to say, I settled for waiting until after I got home to mess with the net.

E.) NOCTURNAL NOISES: I mentioned the annoying dogs in Part 2, but it’s an even worse problem now. Not only are the same damn dogs still barking away, but apparently the neighborhood picked up like eight new ones to join the debate. Of course, none of them are leashed and one night, I could swear I heard a battle royal of dogs barking (and fighting) louder than a Friday night in Michael Vick's garage. But the startling noise I heard on that same night was a couple of guys feverishly arguing with each other from a few streets away.

My Portuguese is fairly strong now, so I was able to pick up the basic theme of the argument; that being that some guy slept with another guy’s wife. After about maybe thirty seconds of yelling, I heard a gunshot go off and then dead silence. “Well, he’s done.” I thought as I attempted to go back to sleep. Apparently, I’ve lost the will to be shocked because within five minutes, I was in dreamland again. Sure, it’s not the ideal neighborhood to raise a baby, but she wasn’t even sleeping at the house that night. She was sleeping a city away in a much safer house with a security gate.

F.) DEAD CHICKENS: Our time in Brazil is usually hectic as we’re usually prepping for a big event. This time, it was the birthday party. Earlier this year, it was the baptism and my brother-in-law’s wedding. In 2004, it was my wedding. Always something… and we’re always running around like headless chickens, which is ironic because I actually saw headless chickens on this trip. I swear, my wife, her cousin and I were walking with Sabrina in the stroller when I came upon two small buckets. Inside both buckets were white feathered blobs with chicken feet sticking out. I asked my wife, “Is this what I think it is?” She said, “Yes... and please stay away from there. You don’t want to get too close to those.”

Hey, no arm-twisting necessary. I’m gone.

CATEGORY 3: THE PARTY AND THE PARTING

In this last part, I’ll end with just a few comments about the birthday party and the pain involved with leaving my family behind.

A.) THE PARTY: What can I say? This party was fantastic. We might have spent a lot of money on stuff, but it was great to see it all go to good use. We had a puppet show, a hair and make-up table, a table for designer nails, a mini-ferris wheel, a monorail, ball pools, a couple of slides, crawling tubes, bridges to cross, nets to climb, ropes to swing from, a mini amusement park-style pirate ship, a basketball game, foosball table, remote controlled cars on a 15 foot race track, open bar and barbecued buffet food, not to mention the goodie bags we made, the retrospective video I rendered and the Disney characters that dropped by for a surprise visit. The funny part is that with all I just mentioned, I’m positive I’m forgetting something. We just had so much for the kids to do and my daughter’s party has been the talk of the town ever since.

B.) FAULTY DVD PLAYERS: What really burned my butt was the part about the DVD videos I burned. I took video clips from this past year, spent months putting together the best clips and rendered what, in my humble opinion, was a kick-ass video. I burned back-up copies and tested each one of them out prior to my trip. I even played one on my brother-in-law’s DVD player and it worked fine. Yet, that next day, it not only didn’t work, but didn’t even recognize that a DVD was in the machine.

Other DVDs were tested and they worked, but I asked my wife to test my DVD when she arrived at the party (…she was getting there early to set up some stuff). The player played my video, but skipped and stuttered a bit at the beginning. My back-up video did likewise, though in slightly different spots which led me to believe that their DVD player might be ready for a replacement. Most of the video played smoothly, but it just got me mad that 100% of it didn’t play perfectly, since 100% of it played perfectly at home and I'd spent so much time ensuring that we'd have the perfect video.

C.) SABRINA THE POOH: Probably my favorite part of the party came at the end of the puppet show. My wife was asked to bring Sabrina behind the platform where the puppets were doing their thing. The hostess opened a door in the front to reveal an area of black velvet. She closed it, said a few “magic” words and when she opened the door once more, there was Sabrina wearing a Winnie the Pooh outfit. The effect really went over big with the kids and I just thought it was the most endearing thing. Naturally, she looked bewildered, but I’m sure she’ll appreciate the cuteness of it all when she’s old enough to watch the video and understand what it is she’s seeing.

D.) THE RICH GET RICHER: My wife told me a story of a certain boy on her side of the family who comes from a poor home and is, by and large, a pretty annoying kid. He certainly doesn’t mean to be annoying – he just is. But regardless of his behavior, he still deserves to have nice birthdays, right? For his most recent birthday, his mom invited a bunch of people over for a humble party. Roughly 25 people showed up… and only one of them brought a present for him. They’re poor as it is. Shouldn’t the invitees have compensated by bringing at least a few presents? That’s my opinion at least.

As for our daughter, she’s not necessarily a rich girl, but compared to this boy and most of my wife’s side of the family, she’s a privileged kid. I personally bought Sabrina a small number of very good toys, saving the others for Christmas. For this party, my daughter received something in the neighborhood of thirty toys! If anybody should have received a bunch of toys, it’s the downtrodden boy; not the privileged girl. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the gifts and am thankful that she has plenty of toys to play with, but c’mon! She really didn’t need so many gifts. It just doesn’t seem fair to the underprivileged children of the family when the one who needs the toys the least gets the most.

E.) SAYING GOOD-BYE: This was probably the saddest I’ve ever been to leave Brazil and go back home because I was doing it alone, leaving my wife and daughter behind. When you become a father, there’s a chance you can get attached to your child(ren) and at this age she’s in right now, she’s just learning so much stuff so fast. You almost hate seeing her do the new things she learned in your absence because you feel like the next time you see her, she’ll be starting college and you will have missed her entire childhood. This obviously isn’t the case, but who said that love was rational?

Anyway, it was all I could do to keep from getting teary-eyed as I held her to say good-bye. I insisted on saying my good-byes to Sabrina privately and before we left for the airport because I just didn’t think I could bear seeing her directly before I had to get in line to have my carry-on bags x-rayed. It was heart-wrenching enough when I waved good-bye to her after getting in the car because she learned how to do that baby wave where she just holds out her arm and moves the four fingers of her right hand up and down. It’s so cute and so sad because she’s got that little baby pout thing happening, too. I miss her to death and I'm counting the days until I can see her again.

Anyway, they’re slated to return on Christmas Day, so here’s hoping there are no delays or snowstorms to prevent me from spending quality time with my family on the most important holiday of the year. <")))><

My Top 20 Favorite Movies

Not long ago, I gave myself what I thought was going to be a relatively easy challenge.

I said to myself, “Okay, you love movies. Lord knows you’ve seen a LOT of them. Now, make a list of your top five!”

So, I got to work and figured I’d start by compiling a list of the movies that I really love. From there, I’d shave off movies here and there until I was left with five. My list started with over forty movies and right away, shaving some of them off was like killing children. I had an immensely difficult time justifying the elimination of any of them! So, I made a deal with myself.

Pick your TEN favorite movies of all time.

Hmmm? Well, that certainly was better, but here again, there were just so many movies that I couldn’t imagine leaving out of such a prestigious list. So, here for your mild amusement…… are my top TWENTY movies. Even that was hard, but to make myself feel a little better, I tried to place the ten better ones above the other ten in this list, so know that numbers one through ten have, in my humble opinion, just a little something extra going for them.

Perhaps they’re the kind of movies I can watch over and over again even today. I don’t know. But in compiling this list, I noticed a couple of things. Quite a few of these movies remain my favorites today because of the profound impact they had on my when I was a kid. Also notice how many of my favorites spawned subsequent sequels.

Yes, some of my faves won’t surprise anybody, but I’ll bet a few of them might. I’m not gonna get too heavy into plot lines. Rather I’ll summarize or otherwise allude to them when I’m pointing something out. The reasons I give will be what make these movies MY favorites – not what makes them everybody else’s. If you disagree with my reasoning, well.... make your own list. Having written all of that, let’s begin:

1.) Superman: The Movie (1978): Ahhhh, yes! My all-time favorite movie about my all-time favorite comic strip character. The Man of Steel has been, for pretty much as long as I can remember, the one guy I’ve always wished I could be, but knew I never would be. Yet, that never discouraged me from thoroughly enjoying this movie. It literally has everything. It’s crazy, but it’s almost like you’re watching three distinct movies, all wrapped up into one.

You start off on the planet Krypton where everybody is highly civilized, technologically advanced, sophisticated and speaks as if they all had their doctorate degrees. The planet explodes and before you know it, you’re in Part II of the movie – something that looks like it’s coming straight out of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World. We spend some time in the nothingness of Smallville at the Kent farm and before too long, BAM! – right into the heart of Metropolis where the fast-paced comic strip world begins and ushers in the third major part of the movie.

Now, the action begins and doesn’t let up until the closing credits. For those who expected to see camp, they didn’t get it, or at least not nearly as much as they might have expected. They saw moving, realistic performances and they witnessed a virtual nobody named Christopher Reeve become immortalized as the new Man of Steel. And if the great backdrops, top-notch script, innovative special effects and excellent cast weren’t enough, you have the essential topping on the cake – the music!

I really credit the movies of my youth like Superman, Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark for instilling me with the love of orchestral music that I have today. I mean, who in this country can hear the opening notes of the main title march and not immediately tell you that it’s from Superman? Literally every single piece from the Superman soundtrack is a recognizable, timeless masterpiece of symphonic harmony and grace. This was the movie that had me, at the age of like six, running around my neighborhood with arms outstretched in my blue thermals and my Superman Underoos, almost convinced that I could fly.

Couple that with my best friend’s mother who was handy enough with a needle, thread and Velcro to fashion us both with kid-sized Superman capes, and I was forever enchanted with this movie. Of all of the movies I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching in my 32 years of life, none thus far have quite managed to top this 1978 classic. So far, the movie has spawned four other sequels (…one that just came out in June, 2006), but you always remember your first. Superman II was almost as good as the first one and Superman Returns was, in my humble opinion, not too shabby, either (…I won’t even discuss the abysmal numbers III and IV). Even rip-off ideas such as “Super Fuzz” weren’t too terrible, but none came close to Superman.

2.) Back to the Future (1985): Great Scott! What an AMAZING movie to see on the big screen. The year was 1985 and my dad took me to this one. Why do I love this movie? Well, along with flying like Superman, my other biggest fantasy as a kid was to travel through time. Bill and Ted are good, but for my money, I gotta go with Doc Brown and Marty McFly. In an odd way, it’s actually a little like Superman. Marty’s in 1955 and quickly learns that, to blend in better, he must don the clothes of the average 50’s kid. He’s really a kid from the future, but nobody can know his secret. To reveal that he’s from the future would unravel the very fabric of the universe! Whoa, this is heavy!

Even his car – the DeLorean time machine – must be hidden at all costs. A few seemingly innocuous actions cause a disruption just big enough to endanger Marty’s very existence and it makes me wonder what kind of small ripple in history would have been necessary to prevent my own birth. I love movies that make you think and, for its time, this one was a thinker for sure. Knowing where a lightning bolt will strike is the key to getting Marty home, but here again, a great movie is likely to spawn a sequel… and this one spawned two of them. What’s strange is that, in my mind, both sequels are virtually as excellent as the original, which is extraordinarily rare when it comes to movie sequels.

3.) Star Wars (1977): I know what you’re thinking. Which one? There’ve been six Star Wars movies, after all. But for now, we’re just dealing with the one from 1976 - the one that got the ball rolling and helped make George Lucas the Godfather of special effects masturbation. Given how very limited George and company were in the seventies with regards to special effects, the original Star Wars is still the one to beat.

You gotta give it to the guy.

He had this really big idea for an epic sci-fi film, had tons of ideas as to what he wanted to see, didn’t have the technology to match… so he literally had to will into existence the various effects he needed to realize his vision. As for campiness, movies don’t have nearly as much of it these days as they once did, but Star Wars was different. Think of the old Batman television shows with Adam West and compare them to Batman Begins with Christian Bale. Batman went from ultra-campy to having a dark, haunted past, right? Well, Star Wars started with Han Solo bringing a realistic, yet cocky attitude that lent credibility to the movie and by the time the nineties rolled around, we got hit with Super-Camp Jar Jar Binks.

Proof positive that, just because you can do it, doesn't mean you should.

4.) The Matrix (1999): The second one was decent and the third one may have sucked, but the first one was, by far, the most impressive. It’s another thinker of a movie, which I like. Imagining that the world as you know it has all been digitally fabricated and that you’re nothing more than a glorified battery is a mind-blower for sure. Then, of course, we have our hero – Neo. Guess what he does by the end of the movie. That’s right. He flies! See? Everybody’s a Superman fan... and it’s a formula that always seems to work.

And, in the event that people needed more, they got Carrie-Anne Moss dressed in shiny black latex from head-to-high-heeled boot, kicking everybody’s ass. This, no doubt, made the “dominant woman in leather” fetishists happy. I think that this movie, along with introducing everybody to this new “digital world” concept, also appealed to the audience because they got to see Neo’s development from ignorant office slave to savior of Zion, endowed with amazing powers he never knew he could possess.

Again, it took that winning Superman formula and added some new flavors.

5.) Vanilla Sky (2001): Another movie along the lines of “the world you know is not real,” Vanilla Sky is one of the few movies I saw where, at the closing credits, everybody else around me in the theater was like, “I don’t get it.” I loved this movie because, well…. I did get it. In fact, I think this movie would have been a much bigger hit if the majority of people who went to see it got it the first time around.

One of my favorite scenes comes at the very end of the movie. Not only are the details of David Aames’s confusing world elucidated (the part of the movie that was supposed to help more people “get it”), but they’re done so while ascending in a glass elevator that just never seems to stop going up and up and up (…David is acrophobic). Getting him to conquer his last fear of heights by jumping off of this ridiculously tall New York skyscraper to make his choice was a stroke of genius and also allowed for an amazing visual.

It was also where an unknown Icelandic band known as Sigur Rós made their mark on mainstream America with an unintelligible yet fascinating song called Njósnavélin, otherwise known as “The Nothing Song.” It’s the song that starts shortly before David takes that final leap. Give it a listen if you can, though oddly enough, you won’t find it on the Vanilla Sky soundtrack. If you can't find it, let me know and I'll forward you the one I downloaded a while back.

6.) Rocky (1976): The quintessential million-to-one-underdog movie! So good was this movie that it spawned five sequels. From the streets of Philadelphia, a mediocre Italian boxer punches his way to earning a meager salary on fight nights, then works in a run down gym and does loan-sharking work to cover rent in his dingy rat’s hole of an apartment. Rocky’s life is basically going nowhere and nobody is more aware of it than he is. Meanwhile, the heavyweight champion of the boxing world is looking for a total unknown to trade jabs with him for the bicentennial event in Philly because his original opponent canceled on him.

So, the champ (…knowing that he’s gonna kick his opponent’s ass) worries more about publicizing the event than training for it and, not surprisingly, Rocky trains balls-to-the-wall. The end result? Rocky gives Apollo Creed a handful and nearly, nearly upsets him for the title. But, in a final attempt at realism, they award Creed the decision by virtue of him “outscoring” Rocky. Awesome, awesome movie and, as we all very well know, ripe for sequels.

7.) Nothing in Common (1986): Now, here’s a movie that I’m guessing many people have never even seen, though it starred five fairly well-known actors: Tom Hanks, Jackie Gleason, Eva Marie Saint, Sela Ward and Hector Elizondo.

This movie made it to my top ten primarily because it reminded me never to take my own father for granted, though it also happens to be a great story. Tom Hanks plays David Basner; a guy who has become so preoccupied with being a partner in the advertising firm for which he works that he’s pretty much forgotten his familial roots. He’s got a new girl in his bed every week, yet never stops yearning for his high school sweetheart.

Anyway, his parents suddenly give him a sobering reminder that they still exist…. by separating. He spends the next several weeks basically getting to know his mom and dad all over again. Before David realizes it, he’s become the parent and his folks have become a couple of old, but very needy “children.” Sometimes, his folks are petulant and stubborn and other times, they’re competing for his time and attention.

Along with a great story, this movie carries with it a brilliant and quick-witted performance by Tom Hanks and what I also believe was Jackie Gleason’s last movie before he passed away. It’s definitely worth watching and, in my mind, this is one of Tom’s best movies out there, along with the next movie on my list.

8.) Apollo 13 (1995): I’ve probably watched this movie at least fifteen times. I wouldn’t have been nearly as impressed with it if it hadn’t been based on a true story. In the spirit of those “thinker” movies, I was just floored with how intelligent those NASA guys had to be to put all of the little (...yet essential) pieces together to bring the Apollo 13 crew home. Excellent movie and excellent acting.

Most importantly, if you have the DVD and you’ve already seen the movie before, watch it again with Jim Lovell’s audio commentary. He assures the audience that, with the exception of a few liberties that the director took with minor details, the movie is an extremely accurate account of the entire odyssey from launch prep to landing.

9.) Training Day (2001): Yes, it’s good against evil, but where’s the line that separates the two? The reason why I think this movie is so great is because it challenges you to decide for yourself which path you’d take if you were in Jake’s shoes. How far would you bend the rules to catch the bad guys? Because, like Alonzo (…played to perfection by Denzel Washington), you could just as easily spend enough time in the gray to the point where you no longer know what’s black and white anymore.

Having been a criminal justice major in college, I did my fair share of studying about being an honest cop, an honest detective, an honest corrections officer, an honest judge, an honest prosecutor, etc. Along with that studying came the knowledge that, more oftentimes than not, the legal system favored the criminals because they could often find a minor loophole that could set them free. It was easy to see how tempting it would be to falsify evidence or otherwise buy justice, knowing full well that following the letter of the law was something akin to trying to do your job with both hands tied behind your back.

10.) The Karate Kid (1984): Campy music aside, this is a feel good movie with a climactic, albeit predictable, ending. The wimp wants the girl who happens to be dating the villain of the story. The wimp is getting his ass handed to him on a daily basis, so the geriatric neighbor downstairs (...who just happens to be a master of martial arts) tutors him on how to kick ass the old-fashioned way. The wimp overcomes all obstacles, beats the bully and gets the girl. The end. But still, it’s got that certain quality that allows you to watch it over and over again before you get tired of it.

11.) Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981): This movie gets props for originality, as well as for its stunt work. It has that weekly serial feel to it, complete with cliffhangers and aforementioned stunts, but it’s not exactly a story that’s been done too often, if at all. I mean, how many archaeologists do you know carry a bullwhip with them? This is another movie that not only spawned some excellent sequels, but also managed to burn itself into my memory with a fantastic soundtrack and excellent action sequences.

12.) Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995): This movie struck a chord with me (…no pun intended) primarily because suspending disbelief wasn’t at all difficult with Richard Dreyfuss. You could actually believe that you were looking at the same man aging over the span of thirty years. Plus, the ending of the film was tear-jerking greatness. In a very dramatic way, Mr. Holland sees just how many lives he's managed to touch over the course of his thirty year teaching career, proving once and for all that it was a life well-lived.

The lead character also deals with having to decide when the school comes first and when his deaf son does. As you can imagine, his own son resents the father for not spending more time with him, but as you’ll see near the end, he figures out a way to combine his school life with his son’s to finally reconcile the two.

13.) The American President (1995): Near as I can tell, this movie was directly responsible for the television series called “The West Wing.” I minored in Political Science and have always had a fascination with the American presidency, but I figured that this would be a boring movie and almost never gave it a chance.

Michael Douglas showed the kind of confidence, strength and charisma that we all wish our presidents could have and he almost single-handedly carried the movie from start to finish. The rapid-fire script keeps you interested in the goings-on within the confines of the White House and the story’s not too bad, either. As a bonus, here's my favorite line from the movie:

Robin: "Fellas, we haven't slept in three years. Can't we forget work for one night and take this moment to enjoy each other as friends? It's Christmas."

Lewis: "It's Christmas?"

Kodak: "Yeah. You didn't get the memo?"

14.) The Truman Show (1998): It’s literally a Sociologist’s dream scenario. Build a domed structure so big that it’s visible from the moon, build an entire world within that dome and throw thousands of cameras in there with thousands of actors and one adopted baby who unwittingly spends his entire life on film. The Truman Show is what you get.

The title character is completely unaware that the world in which he lives is fake and that millions of people watch him on their televisions every day. Think EdTV, but on a massive grand scale and without the awareness of his situation. It’s another thinker because they find cruel ways to keep him from wanting to explore beyond his picture-perfect town.

One particularly funny visual is when he goes into the travel agency (…fake, of course) and as he’s waiting for service, you see a poster in the background, showing an airplane with a lightning bolt going through one of the wings. The caption says something along the lines of, “It could happen to you” and you just have to laugh because they’ll obviously never sell airline tickets THAT way. They even have his TV father act out a scene where he drowns to give Truman the fear of water that, of course, petrifies him enough to stay on solid ground.

15.) Sin City (2005): In my opinion, this is the first movie based on a comic strip that actually plays like a comic strip. It’s mostly in black and white, but has color splashed in here and there, just like in the comic. It’s hard-hitting and not even remotely campy. The lighting of the characters really brought out the features in their faces and, with some digital assistance, even broke a few rules (i.e.: how the dark shadow on left side of Clive Owen’s face doesn’t prevent you from seeing the white of his eye).

In my opinion, the storyline involving Marv was the best of the bunch and it also managed to do something that I wouldn't have thought possible - portray Elijah Wood as somebody you could actually be fearful of. It's an awesome and visually stunning movie with a decent soundtrack.

16.) Saw (2004): This is one of those movies that, when it ends, the only words you can think of to say are, “That’s really f**ked up!” I never fully understood why the guy goes to such lengths to make people die in such elaborately f**ked up ways, but it’s a bone-chiller of a movie for sure. Just how much and to what extent would you maim yourself in order to save your own life? What's unique about the movie is that the guy responsible for the deaths of all of these people doesn't actually do the killing at all, leading one to wonder if he could be classified as a killer.

The other crazy "mess with your mind" part was at the very end of the movie, especially if you happened to catch Saw II. It’s obvious that the screaming dude at the end of the first movie never gets out of that room because you see his decaying remains in a scene from the second movie. It’s a messed up movie, but messed up in a good, freaky kind of way.

17.) Paycheck (2003): This one kinda plays to my love for anything to do with time travel and figuring sh*t out. The way the title character engineers his own survival plan (…by seeing into the future and equipping himself with seemingly innocuous tools to use at the right moment) was, in my opinion, really well thought out. It also reminded me that, while being able to see your own future would be cool, knowing how your life will go and how it will end would most definitely remove all hope from your existence. And, in doing so, would probably also remove your reason for living as well.

18.) Threesome (1994): It’s tough to say exactly why this movie appealed to me the way it did, especially with the whole “gay” element thrown in. I thought the movie was good because it gave you an interesting glimpse into a world of false reality.

Think about it.

When you’re a kid, your life is pretty much mapped out for you and is not fully yours to control. When you’re in the real world as an adult, working for a living and keeping up with the bills, you live an equally structured existence. College life seems to represent a gray area of your life when you have more control over your existence. The only caveat is that the world around you seems totally out of control.

Sure, you go where you want, eat what you want, live how you want, pick the courses you want, go to those classes when you want, pursue who you want, f**k who you want, yet in the grand scheme of things, you’re not entirely sure what you want out of life. It’s a crazy time and this movie shows just how crazy and random the life of a college kid can get.

It reminds me of my college days, only without the f**ked up roommate or the deviant sexcapades.

19.) Before Sunrise (1995): Speaking of college, I first saw this movie as an extra credit assignment for my Sociology course at Northeastern University. Our professor told us to meet him at a theater that NU owns to watch this movie. The plan was that, after watching it, we were gonna head over to a café or pizza shack nearby to “bullsh*t about the movie,” compare ideas and give insights. What was funny was that, when the movie ended, our professor was so disappointed in the movie that he told our class, “You guys can just take off. You’ll get full credit for showing up and sticking this movie out.”

Apparently, he found nothing remotely fulfilling about this movie to justify taking up anymore of his or our time. In an odd twist, I actually came away from the theater, thinking it was a pretty decent flick. A casual glance between two people on a train (...blasting through Europe) leads to an adventure that wasn’t even remotely planned by either person. They just interrupt their lives, like a fissure in the timeline, to disembark in Vienna and get to know each other, allowing for only that one night.

They spend that whole night and early morning just talking each other to death and sharing all kinds of hidden secrets with each other. I also liked it because the crap they talk about only really seems to matter to those f**king nouveau-riche, hummus-eating college students who read Nietzsche and think that their thoughts are so f**king deep. To the rest of the planet, it's just a lot of hot air.

On the plus side, this movie served as a sobering reminder of just how awkward it can be when a guy and a girl meet for the first time and try to find out if they click. It reminds you of how good that first spark feels and how nervous it makes you feel in the pit of your stomach when you actually think you've stumbled onto a new love connection.

20.) The Fighting Sullivans (1944): This is another movie that I saw as a kid and it just stuck with me. This film is based upon a true story of five brothers, brought up in a close-knit family in Iowa, during the days of the Great Depression. It's your typical, Irish-American, Catholic family in the 1930's. The boys are inseparable. They spend all of their time together, they do yard work together, they go fishing together and they get into trouble together. When one of the boys gets into a fight, the other four jump into the fray.

Fast-forward several years and now the boys are young men. Life seems to be going very well. Then, Pearl Harbor happens. The brothers decide that they just can't sit idly by as our country enters the war. They all enlist and against the recommendation of the Navy, they all get assigned to the same ship. The youngest brother by this time even has a wife and child, but that doesn’t deter him from staying right by the side of his four older brothers.

The actors who played the mother and father were awesome. The father busts his ass every day to feed his family, but like any human, he can sometimes let his emotions get the better of him. The mother is loving, but strict and seems to act as the glue that keeps everybody together. You gotta love how the father reacts whenever the boys do something wrong or, in one scene, damn near wreck the house. The movie ends sadly with all five brothers dying on the ship, but it strikes a very patriotic chord. As far as movies go, The Fighting Sullivans is about as apple pie as they come.

Okay, I'm officially burnt out. Maybe I should have just stuck to the top ten.

The Spectrum of Airline Intelligence

Personally, I find the varying levels of intelligence found in airports to be truly amazing. Think about how intelligent aircraft pilots have to be, then think about the dudes that clean the airport bathrooms. I mean, sure, you’d find this intelligence spectrum in pretty much any company, but my recent airline debacle “inspired” the rantings you're about to read.

I actually think that getting several tons of humanity and machinery to remain airborne for any length of time is just short of miraculous. I only wish that some of the intelligence needed to make the magic happen could trickle down to some of the other hosers I had to deal with last month. I don’t know if I can use the name of the airline that pissed me off so much, so let’s just say it rhymes with Famerican Meirlines (or F-Me for short).

Now, this is a story that I could easily drag on for ages, so I’ll try and just give you the highlights.

I had tickets to fly from Boston to JFK Airport in New York, then from New York to São Paulo, Brazil. The sole purpose of this particular trip was to attend a visa interview with my parents-in-law to try to smooth the way so that the interviewer wouldn’t hesitate in granting them their visas. Now, based on my previous experience with F-Me, I decided to have the flight booked two days earlier than the interview just in case somebody f**ked something up.

Strong winds and the late arrival of the flight crew in New York caused the first delay, but the F-Me rep with whom I spoke assured me that I’d still be able to make my connection flight. Fair enough. We finally boarded the plane, but couldn’t get clearance to takeoff for about a half an hour. Now the clock’s ticking, so I just hope against hope that when I get to JFK, the transition to my next flight will be a smooth one.

Upon arrival at JFK, the F-Me employee at the end of the ramp told me where I needed to go. Now, it’d be one thing if I didn’t speak the English language and couldn’t figure out which end was up, but my English is better than okay and I still wound up missing my flight.

How?

Well, one person told me to go to Baggage Claim A, yet there was nobody there. A woman working nearby Baggage Claim A directed me to a floor where F-Me agents would supposedly be standing by, ready to help. Naturally, this meant that, when I got there, I saw plenty of EMPTY F-Me booths, yet not a soul ready to help anybody do jack sh*t about anything.

It's amazing how, even though flights seem to arrive at all hours of every day and every night at this airport, the F-Me employees have a funny way of disappearing when people like myself need them the most. And I love how nobody has a clue about anything in these airports. Unlike F-Me clerks, the janitorial staffers seem to be everywhere, which is great if I ever have a question about the best cleaning agents to use for my bathroom or if I want to brush up on my Spanish. However, when answering basic airline-related questions, they’re (not surprisingly) sorely inept.

In a now desperate panic, I literally ran from floor to floor and, though every floor came equipped with F-Me stations, nobody was working in any of them and all of the lights were turned off. After a good cardio workout which involved me running like a decapitated chicken all over JFK, I finally managed to find an F-Me agent who, after having to wait several minutes, shook her head in disbelief.

Apparently, several of us from this ill-fated flight had been misdirected to the wrong section of the airport (no sh*t).

“Fine, just tell the flight to hold on, direct me to where I need to go and I’ll run to get there… again!”

Stupid me, I figured that the head shake that this F-Me agent gave me (complete with exasperated sigh and eye roll) meant that, though an incompetent fool was responsible for starting my journey to futility, Miss Head-Shaker was 100% competent and fully up to the task of righting the wrongs and getting my tired ass on the right plane.

What she actually did was direct me to take an AirTrain to a particular section of the airport, speak to one of the F-Me agents on the other side and get a boarding pass. I went there as directed, caught the AirTrain (which took forever to show up), then eventually encountered another F-Me clerk who not only didn’t know what flight I was trying to connect to, but told me that any flights they might have had going to São Paulo have long since left and if I wanted to get to Brazil before Christmas, I’d need to go to a Chilean airline, fly first to Santiago f**king Chile, and then catch a connection flight to Brazil.

The funny thing was that, as weird as that seemed, I didn’t even give a sh*t. She could have told me that I needed to take a shuttle bus to the center of the earth, hop on a flying unicorn and soar just over a rainbow near the crescent moon and I’d have done it if it meant getting me on the correct damn plane.

So, off I went, again running like a frickin’ idiot, until I arrived at the "correct" gate for this Lan Chile airline or whatever the hell it was called. Between pants of exhaustion and exasperation, I summarized my reason for being there and awaited nods of assurance and maybe even a “right this way, sir.” What I actually GOT were blank stares by two ass-clowns who looked like they wouldn’t be able to walk ten feet without either falling down or getting tarred and feathered along the way.

Naturally, I’m desperate for somebody who knows something about anything at this point. So, Clown #1 speaks into his walkie-talkie with his all-too-evident look of bewilderment and, after several more minutes of tense waiting, I get directed back to the same damn F-Me clerk who told me to go to this ass-backwards Chilean airline desk in the first place!

I sh*t you not - it was well past one in the morning by the time I finally found somebody who could sort this huge mess out. And of course, the F-Me agent who “helped” me was snippy and sarcastic as all hell because she had to deal with about twelve other people who were given the same bullsh*t instructions that did nothing but cause us grief and allow us to miss the flight to Brazil.

The best she could do was to book me on another flight from JFK to Miami which was literally gonna be leaving in a few hours. From there, I’d have to take one more flight from Miami to Brazil using a Brazil-based airline called Tam. Well, when you're out of options, you take what you can get... and that was the best I was gonna get out of these brain surgeons, so I took it.

In a final stroke of pure genius, I was given a hotel voucher for the Ramada Inn, along with breakfast and dinner vouchers. Okay folks, it’s past one o’clock in the morning, my flight to Miami leaves in fewer than five hours... and you got me a hotel room with breakfast and dinner? Well, that’s just terrific… IF I WERE STAYING IN NEW YORK!

The truly funny part was that the F-Me lady saw no flaws in her logic at all. She thought that giving me a free breakfast and dinner (…in a situation where I’d be airborne two hours before I would have even qualified for the breakfast) was just a golden stroke of brilliance. All I could think at this point was, "Somebody needs to tell this lady that when she uses a Q-Tip, she's supposed to STOP pushing when she feels resistance."

I did take advantage of the hotel, though - partly because it was like five minutes away, partly because I figured a shower would loosen me up a bit, and partly because I didn't feel like sitting on the floor and staring at all of the closed food kiosks for four and a half hours.

If not for my foresight in booking two days before the interview, I’d have surely missed it. Instead, I got to São Paulo the night before and managed to get a fairly decent night’s sleep before that next morning’s interview.

I’m just thankful that these clueless F-Me clerks aren’t the ones building or flying the aircraft, otherwise I’d be paying a LOT more attention to the pre-flight “in case of emergency” instructions that most everybody ritualistically ignores.

I Can Fly

Yes, it’s true. I can fly!

And I don’t mean “…in a plane” or “run really fast.” When the mood hits me, I can take off from the ground and fly like Superman. I can fly wherever I want as fast as I want. I don’t need wings, rockets, wires or even a cape.

There is, however, one catch. I need to be sleeping.

You see, for quite a few years now, I’ve been trying to get a handle on my dreams to the point where I can control at least one or more parts of them. It wasn’t until just a few months ago that I felt confident that I somehow cracked the cerebral code necessary to manipulate my dreams to the point where I could seize and maintain control over something.

I’m sure that tons of people can do as I do when they sleep, but this was a personal victory for me because I didn’t do any research or studying to figure this out. I just kinda willed it to happen and eventually, it did.

In my case, my biggest desire was to be able to fly like Superman whenever I wanted. For years, I’ve have the occasional, sporadic and totally unpredictable dream about flying over trees or buildings and such, but I never knew when I’d have those dreams again or how to continue having them whenever I wanted.

My dreams, much like my nightmares, seemed to be controlled by a part of my brain that I couldn’t quite reach using conventional thought. Most people who have regularly occurring dreams will tell you that everything feels real when you’re in the dream, but a quick analysis of the logistics of some of the things you saw in the dream after you're awake reveals that, had you been awake during that time and saw what you saw, there’s no way you would have accepted what you saw as normal.

That’s where I started.

I didn’t need to figure out that what I was experiencing was not real. I just needed to gain an awareness of the fact that what I was experiencing was abnormal. Once I was able to do that, I just needed to convince myself that, since my dreams didn’t obey the laws of nature or physics, I didn’t have to obey them, either.

So, if I fly in my dream, it’s because I’m choosing to do so; not because it's a random subconscious thought playing itself out. If I stay grounded, it’s probably because I’ve got enough interesting stuff going on at the time that I don’t feel the need to fly away. This may seem dumb, but being able to fly whenever I want has been so liberating and stress-relieving! There's not another feeling quite like it (IMHO).

Just the other night, my nightmare involved being chased down my own street by a cockroach the size of a house, scuttling towards me at a frantic pace. My wife called out to me and screamed, “Go on! Fly! FLY!” I remember thinking, “Oh, yeah! Cockroaches can’t fly.... but I can!” Sure enough, in mid-run, I took off and flew so high and so fast that the cockroach made one huge jump to reach me and missed.

Knowing that my wife was now in danger, I swooped back down and scooped her up before the cockroach could get her. I flew so fast that we reached the Prudential Tower in Boston in mere seconds. And so, my nightmare-turned-dream ended with us sitting on top of the tower, looking out over Boston as my wife remarked how happy she was that I learned how to fly.

So, no longer content with only having one of Superman’s attributes, I’ve moved on to flying AND having superhuman strength. In two of my most recent dreams, I was able to use both abilities. It makes me wonder just how far and how much I can learn to control in my dream world. Time will tell.

Superman Returns (2006) - My Review

SPOILER WARNING: If you haven't seen "Superman Returns" yet and don't want me to spoil anything, please see the movie before reading my review.

First off, I'm totally old school and I love the classic Richard Donner movies of Superman I and II. Though Donner had been fired after the first Superman movie rose to blockbusting success, enough of his influence in the scenes that he'd shot for Part II remained to make the second movie awesome as well (diehard fans know that scenes from both of those movies were shot simultaneously).

I'll admit that I was beside myself with glee when I first learned that a new Superman movie was in the works (I'd read a 2004 article stating that they were filming scenes in Australia of all places). I'll also admit that I was remarkably skeptical when I caught my first glimpse of Brandon Routh posing as the Man of Steel.

Remember how the public first regarded Christopher Reeve when he donned the red cape and blue tights? Too skinny, right? Well, Brandon Routh didn't exactly impress me with his musculature, either. After all, a quick look at the comics will tell you that Superman would be far more believable if he were to be portrayed by, say, a professional bodybuilder.

I was like, "Can't they, like, dye Jay Cutler's hair black and throw a cape on his ass? Who cares if he can't act. He's got muscles on top of muscles and, damn it, that's how Superman should look!" I was also thinking that Milos Sarcev had the perfect Superman look, but with his thick-ass foreign accent, they'd have probably needed to pull a "Darth Maul" on him and dub an American male's voice over his real one for the entire movie.

However, director Bryan Singer (of X-Men fame) went with Routh. "Fine, but if he's a suck-ass Superman, I'm done!" Or so I thought.

Well, last night I got my chance to see the greatly anticipated "Superman Returns." Having heard early (...and surprisingly harsh) reviews, I wasn't too optimistic. I heard Routh didn't fill the role adequately. I heard Kate Bosworth wasn't anything like what we would expect of Lois Lane. I even heard that Kevin Spacey was the worst Luthor ever.

Maybe that's why I loved this freakin' movie!

Give me a whole host of sh*tty reviews and my expectations pretty much have nowhere to go but up, right? I mean, maybe there wasn't quite as much action as everybody expected, but I certainly thought it had enough to lift my spirits and keep me interested. I mean, that big shuttle/ball park scene was absolutely f'n AWESOME!

Without a doubt, this was the first Superman movie that actually made Superman look like he was flying faster than a speeding bullet. Those frantic flying scenes were totally what you'd expect from Superman. Another criticism I read about was that whole Jason White (played by Tristan Lake Leabu) plot twist, but personally, I thought it was a great variation on the old tried-and-true Superman formula. I mean, who ever thinks of Superman as being the father of a child?

Director Bryan Singer made it no secret that part of his intent in making this film was to pay homage to the first two Donner films that I loved so much. To that end, he did a fantastic job. He kept the classic Superman orchestral music and even rendered the opening credits similar to the 1978 version. However, I'd say that Singer and company made what I consider to be the one small flaw in their rationale for the whole "son of Superman" idea.

Some would ask, "How could Superman be a father if he disappeared for five years?" Others might answer, "Just think back to Superman II when he and Lois consummated their relationship in the Fortress of Solitude." (...by the way, the Fortress in "Superman Returns" is pretty sweet). Well, if Singer was banking on that reasoning to allow for a Super-offspring, I'd make one tiny observation - Superman had just been nuked into a mortal man prior to their consummation, so he wouldn't have passed on any Super-genetics, per se, to Jason.

Then again, one could also make a couple of arguments against what I just wrote. For one, Superman's genetics probably weren't altered, even though his powers were taken away, right? It's like being a man who, in his early twenties, loses his arm in a car accident. If he were to subsequently father a child, that child would still be born with two arms, right? So, there's one rebuttal.

Plus, Supes and Lois could have conceivably (no pun intended) gone against Kryptonian consent and bumped uglies after Superman's powers were restored at the tail-end of Part II. We're left to speculate I suppose.

Well, at any rate, let's hop onto Lois - figuratively. As Lois Lane, Kate Bosworth might not have been as convincingly gritty as Margot Kidder was, but guys like myself can forgive her for that, given the fact that she's fairly easy on the eyes. I mean, there's no sense in me pullin' punches here - Kate Bosworth's quite the honey. Yet, in my mind, Kate's no Lois Lane (...at least not the 1978 version). She's a good-looking chick - no doubt, but she just kinda fell short of the Margot mark.

For example, when Kidder reached for a cigarette, it wasn't hard to imagine her being a human chimney, but Bosworth just doesn't look like much of a stress-smoker, you know? Her skin's too youthful and soft for that image. Trust me to tell ya, chain-smokers like Margot start to look like freakin' Leatherface by the time they hit their thirties. But on the Lois vein, hats off to Singer for incorporating some of those old, classic lines, pulled directly from the first movie.
"Uh, you really shouldnt smoke, Miss Lane!" Good stuff.

Also, big kudos to Singer for including Marlon Brando's voice in this movie. Back in the day, Brando was paid quite a hefty salary for the few minutes of film time that he had contributed, but it would seem that filmmakers are still benefiting from those classic lines that he recorded oh-so-long ago. Long after Brando's passing, his memory is kept alive, so.. money well spent, right?

Now for Kevin Spacey. I gotta hand it to him. In my humble opinion, he put the true evil and villainy back into Lex Luthor. Don't get me wrong. Hackman was good in his role, but he never really had that "strike terror in your heart" quality that Kevin Spacey summoned.

Spacey brought some authentic EVIL to the Lex Luthor role, while maintaining Hackman's lust for real estate, cheap women and easy profit. I mean, can you really imagine Hackman's version of Luthor kicking the sh*t out of Superman and then stabbing him with a Kryptonite dagger? That scene was disturbingly evil and, in my mind, it was that evilness that made Spacey's rendition of Luthor one to be feared. Excellent job, Kevin!

And for all of the crap that I said about Brandon Routh, I gotta admit that he did an outstanding job of accurately (...and respectfully) capturing Chris Reeve's mannerisms, while still managing to be just unique enough to add another layer to the Superman persona.

I know the trend with superheroes in the 21st century is to give them all haunted pasts and make them out to be tortured souls (Read: "Batman Begins" with Christian Bale), but Routh's rendition of Superman was edgy without being overly morbid. Brandon Routh provided an already multi-dimensional hero with another (very human) layer and, in my opinion, did it quite well (i.e.: his jealousy for the new man in Lois's life, his stalker tendencies, his feeling like an outcast, etc). And, not for nothin,' but Brandon Routh's not a bad-lookin' dude (...as I'm sure my wife will unhesitatingly attest).

Look-wise, Routh has that Reeve-esque quality about him that suits him well for the dual role of Superman and Clark Kent and while he's no Milos Sarcev, he's no pipsqueak, either. He packs just enough muscle to allow you to suspend disbelief when he performs some of the amazing feats of strength featured in "Superman Returns."

And for those who have always seen the Christ allegory in Superman, there's no mistaking the visuals you get from this film. For one thing, listen when Lois Lane delivers her line about how this world doesn't need a Savior. Superman takes Lois up in the sky to view the city from a great height. He asks her, "What do you hear?" She says, "Nothing," to which Superman responds, "I hear everything. You say this world doesn't need a savior, yet every day, I hear people crying for one." This is not a verbatim quote, but it's pretty close.

All I could think of was God on high as our Omnipotent Lord who hears all and knows all and it just seemed like they were trying to say that Superman has this same sort of far-reaching ability.

Then there was Luthor and his henchman kicking the sh*t out of a weakened Superman, right before Luthor stabs him with that kryptonite dagger. Not surprisingly, that scene brought an image of Christ's Passion to my mind as He suffered immeasurable pain prior to his crucifixion.
And finally, there was Superman's enormous feat of lifting that gargantuan, kryptonite-littered "island" into the sky (a buddy of mine went so far as to call it a continent). If you go to see the movie, notice Superman's body after he has pushed the destructive land mass into outer space. He passes out and falls through the earth's heat shield, plunging to certain doom. However, before he descends to earth, see if you notice that his near lifeless body takes on the form of Christ's body on the cross!

It's undeniable - Superman looked just as if he'd been nailed to an invisible cross before he plummeted to earth! That kinda irked me a bit, just because it was such an obvious allusion to Jesus on the cross. Jesus made an unimaginably huge sacrifice for the good of mankind, right? Well, suffice it to say that it's not too hard to see the similarities between the sacrifice of Jesus and the one made by Superman at the end of this movie.

I don't know how anybody else feels about that last scene, but Bryan Singer HAD to have been going for a crucifixion image with that shot. I just don't see how that could have possibly been a coincidence. It might seem weird, but one of my favorite scenes in the whole movie only lasts for a couple of seconds. It's right after Clark gets the coordinates that Lois faxed to the Daily Planet.

Clark slips away, the music starts and Clark gets in the elevator. He takes off his glasses in full Kent civilian attire, points his arm straight up and just flies through the elevator shaft. I thought to myself, "How cool is that? You're just chillin' in your work suit, decide it's time to fly.... and you just hit the skies." Who wouldn't LOVE to be able to do that, you know?

But, criticisms aside, I really thought that this was a triumphant return for the Man of Steel. From what I gathered, the movie was left open enough for at least one sequel, so here's hoping.