Microbial
We had the nephews over this weekend, twin eleven-year-olds, very sportif, so we took them bowling. I love bowling, although it isn’t the sport I remember from my misspent youth, where you sat between frames drinking and smoking. Bowling alleys otherwise are the same, and the same world over, I’d say, redolent of wax and shoes. As fun as that was, it was over pretty quickly, so even though we’d already watched the night before our now-traditional video (A Series of Unfortunate Events, which was fun enough, if Jim Carrey’s ad libs weren’t a bit too already-dated), we went to see War of the Worlds. This has been touted as Spielberg’s anti-Schindler, an allegorical war movie for our war-on-terror times, similar to the original intent of the Wells story in putting man’s inhumanity to man in a larger perspective, but while the movie is certainly more true to the original than the 1953 version, and more bleak (as noted by many critics, a church is destroyed early in the attack, while in the Cold War-era adaptation it’s a place of ultimate refuge), you’re hard pressed to come out of the theatre with any message, having been subjected to a tour-de-force of tension in what is, largely, just a chase movie. Tom Cruise may yet grow up to be a good actor – he’s given a bit more to do here than his usual insouciant hero role, but also a bit less. The finale is pure schmaltz and entirely inexplicable: how Boston comes off better in this than New York is beyond understanding, unless it has something to do with the Kennedys or the Kerrys. It was a fun movie, even for its dark tone, and well done, too, worth the price of admission. I can’t help think, however, there might have been something else a bit more challenging and therefore a bit more enjoyable. Maybe something with subtitles next.