Futility Now

So full of hope, we all sort of trundled down to lovely Ashland, Oregon to spend Thanksgiving with the paternal side of my family. Things were okay until about Thursday morning when it became clear that Zia was deathly allergic to my grandmother’s dog. This was compounded later in the day by my being visited by either food poisoning or a virulent stomach flu. We made it through that night, although I barely tasted any of the fare, and drove home on Friday, something I had to endure on one piece of toast and one glass of water. So yeah, it was pretty grim.

We watched the Disney live-action classic The Journey of Natty Gann. It may have been because I was cocooned in blankets and preoccupied primarily with bemoaning my state, but at the time it seemed pretty reasonable, aside from the creepy underage-makeout at the end (oh John Cusack, you rogue.) What did penetrate my deadened senses as being overwhelmingly awful was the James Horner score, which went back and forth between two horribly cliched themes, one denoting the dynamic bustle of modern life and one denoting the lonely nobility of the iconoclast. At any rate: James Horner, the worst thing about a live-action Disney kid’s movie from the 80s. A true American!

As you know, Luc Besson is a talentless hack. He did, however, make one really fun movie, and it looks like he might be putting out a second.

Take note, film makers, any movie whose trailer kicks off with a Tintin reference is pretty much guaranteed to take in some of my hard-earned Yankee dollars.