serving up a silent birthday wish

The October 3 TV listings in the Chicago Sun-Times offered a preview of that night's episode of Saturday Night Live:

"Saturday Night Live" (10:30 p.m., WMAQ-Channel 5): Ryan Reynolds ("Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story") hosts, with Lady Gaga providing musical and visual entertainment.

Never mind that Reynolds starred in two of the summer's biggest movies, the superhero adventure X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the romantic comedy The Proposal, or that he's signed up to play the Green Lantern in his own big-screen superhero franchise—as far as the Sun-Times is concerned, he'll never be better than he was in a TV movie that aired on NBC in February of '95. The stars of Serving in Silence were Glenn Close and Judy Davis, but an 18-year-old Reynolds really must have impressed someone in the Chicago newspaper's fact-checking department.

Coincidentally, Reynolds turns 33 today, but I refuse to say HAPPY BIRTHDAY, RYAN REYNOLDS! YOU'RE SO CHARMING AND FUNNY AND IMPOSINGLY MUSCULAR! I MEAN, I GUESS THAT THIRD QUALITY IS WHY YOU GET HIRED TO PLAY SUPERHEROES, BUT I DON'T REMEMBER HEARING STORIES ABOUT MICHAEL KEATON OBSESSIVELY HITTING THE GYM BEFORE HE PLAYED BATMAN 20 YEARS AGO! BUT MAYBE HE DID AND I JUST DON'T REMEMBER! IT WAS A LONG TIME AGO, OBVIOUSLY! WE'RE ALL GETTING OLDER! AND IF IT SOUNDS LIKE I'M SOMEWHAT JEALOUS OF YOUR PHYSIQUE, WELL, SURE, I'M MAN ENOUGH TO ADMIT THAT! YOU KNOW, I PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE TURNED OFF THE CAPS LOCK AND STOPPED USING EXCLAMATION POINTS AFTER THE FIRST SENTENCE OF THIS BIRTHDAY WISH, BUT I'M ALMOST FINISHED, SO BEAR WITH ME FOR A FEW MORE SECONDS, OKAY?! LET ME JUST CONCLUDE BY SAYING YOU'RE SWELL, RYAN REYNOLDS, AND I HOPE YOU HAVE A TERRIFIC BIRTHDAY, AND THAT YOUR WIFE, THE LOVELY SCARLETT JOHANSSON, TREATS YOU TO SOME ADULT SITUATIONS AND PARTIAL NUDITY!

Yep, I refuse to say any of that. (The part about Reynolds's wife is inappropriate, for one thing.) Not gonna happen.

By the way, you can read more about Wolverine and other freaky creatures in a few entries I didn't finish writing on the dates listed below:

4/10: "No, my brother—you've got to buy your own."
7/6: the boomerang of satire
8/20: sassy cannibals spawning, preaching, living, and loving

lists

I used to like making lists of things when I was younger: favorite movies, biggest-grossing movies, favorite songs, favorite TV shows, girls I liked. It went on and on.

I don't like making lists of things anymore. Now I waste my time in more mature ways, like endlessly moving stacks of old newspapers and newspaper clippings around my apartment.

I'm proud of myself.

Yes, I do love "Die Hard," but I also love my memory.

And what I remember of that 1988 classic doesn't sound anything like the new Jamie Foxx-Gerard Butler movie Law Abiding Citizen, at least not according to this description from an advertisement on Facebook:

Love DIE HARD? Click for Law Abiding Citizen where a man turns raging assassin, avenging the murder of his family.

That sounds more like Death Wish. But since Bonnie Bedelia hasn't appeared in a Die Hard film since the first sequel in 1990, why not kill her off for the fifth installment? It can go into production once Bruce Willis gets bored with his career again or needs a new yacht or needs to prove to himself that he's still in shape.

John McClane has to be tired of saving the world from terrorists by now, even if they do occasionally threaten members of his family. He needs a more, shall we say, personal project to complete next time around.

I'd like to suggest that the Die Hard series return to the template of the first two films, in which all the action takes place in a central location: a skyscraper in the first film, an airport in the second. And to make things topical, how's about Holly McClane (Bedelia) loses her home in a foreclosure and goes to the bank to set things right when an insane lender blows up the place with Holly inside?

Cut to John McClane in ... wherever he's living (we'll figure that out later) as he learns his ex-wife is dead! He goes into a rage! He still loved her, see! It's not fair! Why not him?! Nooooooooo!

So he goes to ... another bank ... where he finds the lender ... lending in a new position ... and ... look, we'll figure all of this out later. The main points are: (1) Holly dies; (2) John seeks revenge; (3) banks blow up so Americans feel better about this miserable recession.

Save a seat for me!

thirty-four

I turned 34 on Friday. And right before I went to bed that night I noticed something about the "wallpaper" on my computer screen, which changes every 30 minutes at the MacBook's whim.

For those of you without a magnifying glass, the photo on the left features Michael McDonald and the stars of 1986's Running Scared, Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines; it's a still from the music video for McDonald's "Sweet Freedom." That photo's been in the wallpaper rotation for several years now, but I didn't notice the number on Hines's jersey until Friday night. It also happens to be the number worn by Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton, who in 1986 led his team to a Super Bowl victory. Running Scared is set in Chicago and was filmed there during the Bears' 1985 season, when they lost only one of their 16 regular-season games.

Shortly after I turned 33, I read a newspaper article that quoted statistics from The Death of the Grownup: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, including this factoid: "The MacArthur Foundation has funded a research project that argues that the 'transition to adulthood' doesn't end till age 34."

When I read that last year I thought, "Woo-hoo! One more year!" Of course, one year later, with almost nine months of unemployment taking a bite out of my self-esteem, Officially Authorized Adulthood® isn't making a strong first impression. Lucky for it, I believe in second chances.

We are the invisible people. (Springsteen, write us a song.)

Last week I was leaving the grocery store when a woman approached me and asked if I'd like to buy a copy of StreetWise, the local magazine sold by homeless and at-risk vendors. She said she was trying to get off the street and that selling StreetWise allowed her to not have to panhandle anymore.

I've been volunteering as a proofreader at StreetWise since March. I tried mentioning this to the woman for the sake of small talk, i.e. "Here's something we have in common," but she just looked past me and said, "Uh-huh." As I handed her my two dollars and she gave me a copy of the latest issue, I tried again, thinking maybe I should point to my name on the masthead on the inside cover. "Okay," she said. She wasn't listening.

It's hard being a proofreader. People pretend you don't exist, but the "problem" isn't just going to go away, no matter how many of us you don't employ.

Which movie currently in theaters is a sequel to a remake and a remake of a sequel?

The correct answer is Rob Zombie's Halloween II.

What will you think of next, Hollywood?

"Halloween 3D," as it turns out, because even though Halloween II opened in third place last weekend, far behind The Final Destination (another horror sequel, with the "The" apparently indicating that this is the last installment in the series, i.e. "This is the end for you rubberneckers who love watching teenagers die gruesome yet imaginatively staged deaths"), Hollywood can't have enough sequels or 3-D movies or "reboots" in theaters.

I have a feeling "Halloween 3D" won't be a remake of 1982's Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a sequel that ditched the Michael Myers character from the first two films to tell a story about unrelated characters who have to stop a Halloween-mask manufacturer from killing millions of children with its black-magic-enhanced product. Halloween III wasn't well received by moviegoers or critics, so my script for "Halloween 3A: Season of the Witch 2" never came to pass, with our heroes from the first Witch harassing the neighborhood dry cleaner until he agrees to stop using plastic bags.

the day Dustin Hoffman met George Clooney's uncle

On Tuesday night I watched Sydney Pollack's Tootsie (1982) at Butler Field in Chicago's Grant Park. It was the final film in this summer's Chicago Outdoor Film Festival (in July I saw Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard), and the first time I'd seen Pollack's best film on a big screen, with an appreciative audience.

Yesterday I discovered the following Late Show With David Letterman clip from December 22, 2008, on YouTube.