The Dotted Logline

If you’d told me yesterday that there was a movie that featured Jackie Chan, Roger Moore, Burt Reynolds, Sammy Davis Jr, Dean Martin, Dom DeLuise, Jack Elam, and Adrienne Barbeau fighting a biker gang while Farrah Fawcett waited off to the side, I wouldn’t have believed you.

Cannonball Run is an awful, stupid movie. But aside from above fight scene, it has Roger Moore as a Jewish guy who thinks he’s Roger Moore and Dom DeLuise running around in a cape and mask, so it’s worth seeing at least once.

I hate to say it, but Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka just didn’t work for me. It’s a painful thing to say about an actor whose work you’ve always admired and respected. A lot of it might have been the hair and makeup, but the squeaky voice was definitely a big factor. On the plus side, the facial expressions killed.

Overall, even though I thought the designs and most of the kids, and Charlie’s family were better than the classic Willy Wonka flick, it didn’t have the same sense of magic. It did convince me I really need to get off my duff and find a copy of the book. It is one of the only Roald Dahl books I haven’t read. He was a favorite author of mine when I was young, and The Witches was, in a way, the book that first inspired me to write when I was seven, almost a year before I started writing seriously .

One of the local Barnes & Noble stores has a capacity of seven hundred people. It was already full with a very, very long line outside when I arrived shortly after 11:00 PM for the midnight sale of HP:HBP. I really would have shown up a bit earlier if I’d thought there would be that many people there; it was very hot and the bugs were biting. There were store employees walking around selling water as though it were some sporting event. It was overpriced, but I was very tempted.

It was an evening of lines. A line to get a bracelet signifying that I had preordered. The very long line to get into the store itself. Waiting until the group was called that had my number in it to go get in line for the register (I was #329.) I have to say everything was pretty efficient… the books were all prebagged, and I was out of there by 1:00 AM. And all the freebie goodies were a nice touch, although most of mine will probably be hitting eBay very soon (those rubber bracelets are always way too big for me.)

As for the book itself? My thoughts below…

*SPOILERS*

And so Snape proves that he is the most loyal to Dumbledore of the entire Order. Because who else would have actually been able to kill Dumbledore, even at his own request? (Yes, Harry did forcefeed him that nasty potion in the cave, but I don’t think he would have been able to strike him down in cold blood like Snape did.) I doubt Snape will ever forgive Dumbledore for making him do that, but he did it nonetheless and insured that he is perfectly placed to assist the side of good (i.e. Harry) in the final battle. I only hope that in book 7 (EARLY in book 7), Dumbledore has some means of communicating to Harry that Snape was acting on his orders, or things are going to get very messy when they meet up.

I honestly think that this is the reason that Snape has hated Harry so much throughout the books. Because I believe that this plan was a failsafe set up before Harry even came to Hogwarts. If Snape had been able to prove that Harry was a complete waste of space as he tried to so many times, than he felt that Dumbledore would have known that he wasn’t up for the task of fighting Voldemort and Snape wouldn’t have had to go through Dumbledore’s plan. Conversely, he probably wishes Harry had been able to take care of the job before it came to this.

Actually, I had predicted before I read the book that Dumbledore was going to be in a situation where one of the good guys was going to have to kill him. My first guess was Snape, and my second was Harry, although Snape was much more likely because having to kill Dumbledore would have probably driven Harry completely mad. But it was still shocking. I had also predicted that Snape would be DADA prof, because otherwise Harry wouldn’t have had a class with him, but I was still surprised by that.

I do still want to smack the little boy who opened up his book to the end after purchasing it and screamed “Snape killed Dumbledore!” to the several hundred people waiting in line to buy it.

It’s funny that when given the opportunity to see either a movie I know I will be seeing at a future date or a movie I have already seen twice, I go with the one that I know I definitely like. Yes, I saw Batman Begins again. No, I’m not tired of it yet. At least I’m doing my best to contribute to pulling the industry I want to work for in the future out of a supposed slump. And at least this is a better movie than the last Batman flick I saw three times in theater, Batman Forever (and of course it’s miles above Batman and Robin, which I had to suffer through twice.)

I caught Toy Story 2 again today, the movie that makes all toy collectors feel incredibly guilty. In many ways, I think it is equal to or better than the original. But at the same time, there is something painful about toys contemplating their mortality, especially when the indication is that their final fate will be lying around in a junkyard somewhere with full awareness. True, they are independently mobile, but it’s a far darker destiny than that of my favorite childhood fictional toy, the Velveteen Rabbit.

Hopefully, most children don’t put quite as much thought into this or parents will never get them to give up their old toys.