Vacation All I Ever Wanted

It is Sunday night and I just got back from a very nice holiday gathering at casa Greg and Mary Jo (aka "Dr. Overboard & Prof. Evenkeel") in Glenview and wanted to thank them again for their hospitality. It was great to catch up with friends, enjoy a nice home-cooked meal and drink a few glasses of wine. Sorry I forgot the food, MJ :)

OK, so I am not even going to try to rationalize how little I have posted lately. Not going to try to blame it on the craziness of the holidays, taking my work home with me, having a pregnant wife, a Netflix addiction, a hangover from the Red Sox World Series run, depression over the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike or anything like that. The reality is that I can't make as strong or as entertaining a case for my absence from the blogosphere as my buddy Chris (aka "Our Man in LA") did recently, so let's just say that the dog ate my blog mojo (or whatever the homework equivalent is) and move on.

Anyway, I had a little time off from work and just got back from a nice week long visit to northern California for Christmas with my sister and her family, a Blair/Fenyo family tradition since 1999. My mom was out there, too, as well as my brother-in-law Ken's parents from San Diego. At first, it was a little weird spending the holiday in a place where the odds of a white Christmas was somewhere between that of a tiger escaping from its habitat at the San Francisco Zoo and mauling someone and Britney Spears not making a fool of herself. However, as a veteran of many white Christmases growing up in Connecticut and a current resident of frequently snowy Chicago, I have come to appreciate the snow-free and more fall like December weather conditions in Silicon Valley. It may not be 70 degrees like southern California, but I'll take the 50's and sunny in late December thank you very much.

The visit got off to a most auspicious start when I found out that I would get to use the finished office/guest room at my sister's house, as my mom would be upstairs in my oldest niece Caroline's room. They recently installed one of those fold out beds that drops down from the wall, and when you couple that with my own full bathroom as well as Internet access I could pretty much have stayed in that room for a week if: a) I was a crappy, unsocial guest; and b) You brought me food. Not that it hasn't been a treat to sleep in Caroline's room, with its yellow walls, pink pillowcases and, well, it's an 8 year-old girls' room so you get the picture. When you consider I started out sleeping on a couch for my first few X-Mas visits, we have made tremendous strides here.

Since I only make it out to visit 2-3 times a year, I always marvel at how much each of my nieces worlds has changed in the time I was gone. By this I mean what they are talking about, the things that they are interested in, etc. After a few days in the Blair/Fenyo home I realized that Disney's "High School Musical" and Webkinz reigned supreme for the moment. Unless you have been living under a rock you have at least heard of the former, but the whole Webkinz thing was a bit new to me. Basically, you buy a stuffed animal with a secret code that allows you to enter a virtual "Webkinz World" where you care for your pet, answer trivia, earn KinzCash and play games. Caroline (age 8) has like 6 of them and Meredith (age 6) has some also. I would imagine this hobby is the adult equivalent of juggling multiple fantasy sports teams in terms of the amount of computer time it requires and the amount of potentially productive time that is wasted on it. As I quickly learned, if you want to hit Caroline and Meredith where it hurts these days, you take away their Webkinz computer time.

This time around I was able to do a lot of bonding with Erica, 2 1/2 years old going on 20. Every day after X-Mas she said "Santa came while I was sleeping" and then asked "Is Santa Coming?" as if this would be a daily occurence. We got in some quality horsey ride on Uncle Grant's knee time, practiced identifying different colors at the Gap Kids store at Stanford Mall (according to Erica, her vast knowledge of colors is self-taught) and sat next to each other each night at dinner. I struck gold early on with the choo-choo train method of getting her to eat. I'd take a spoon/fork of food, say "chug a chug a chug a CHOO CHOO" and pretend like I was pulling down on the train whistle before I said "Next stop: Erica's mouth in 5 seconds" and she literally ate it up every time. It was perhaps my crowning achievement of the visit.

No vacation of mine would be complete without a heavy slate of movie viewing, and this one was no different. I saw "Charlie Wilson's War" and "Enchanted" in the theater as well as "Superbad" (even better the second time), "Eastern Promises" and "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" on DVD. "War" is solid entertainment with an all-star cast, a non-threatening war/political movie. Despite big name actors like Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts around him in larger roles, the brilliant Phillip Seymour Hoffman once again steals a movie with his portrayal of a CIA spy. "Enchanted" is cute, a clever send up of the Disney animated princess movies with enough humor, McDreamy and Amy Adams to keep the adults interested. "Promises" is a good drama/thriller with personal favorite Naomi Watts in a lead role, but rather graphic with the violence at times so be warned. "Order of the Phoenix" is just so-so.

As this will be my last post of 2007, I wanted to wish my readers a safe and happy New Year and all the best for 2008. I know that you have a lot of choices when it comes to reading blogs, and I hope that you consider G's Spot again the next time you are avoiding work or are unable to sleep for some reason.

Grant About Town

December 10, 2007
Free Screening of "I Am Legend"

Spoiler Alert: This post contains plot elements of the movie, so if you are not familiar with the story read on at your own risk (or after you see the movie).

Being the cinephile that I am, I joined a movie meetup group when I moved back to Chicago last fall. We see movies at a few theaters around the city and also up north in Evanston, where they built this dynamite 18 cinema movie complex complete with stadium seating, THX sound and a cafe AFTER I was long gone as a Northwestern student. Nice. Anyway, I figured it would be a good way to meet some new folks while also satisfying my movie jones. Assuming there is something out there of interest I could go to a movie every week, and fortunately with this group that is an option.

Anyway, most of the time it is your standard go to the theater and buy your ticket routine. However, once and a while the group organizer comes up with freebies from one of the studios. Such was the case this week when Dreamworks hooked us up with free passes for the new Will Smith sci-fi flick "I Am Legend" at AMC River East downtown. I made my way over to the theater after work, got my pass and queued up in the lobby. At that point I proceeded to watch person after person cut in front of me in line to join their waiting friends. I said to my buddy Jough "Could just one of these people cut in line BEHIND me so I feel like I'll actually get into the theater?" You see, the pass does not guarantee admittance, as they always overbook for screenings with the assumption of no-shows.

The first casualties of the night were my friends Scott and Katie, as Katie got held up on the bus from work and arrived too late for the two of them to get in. The remaining casualties of this night were on the screen, namely all of mankind save for military virologist Robert Neville (Will Smith), who is the last man standing on Earth after a man-made virus intended to cure cancer goes horribly wrong and causes worldwide death as well as the severe mutation of survivors. So, as the movie poster says, he is not alone. The desolate streets of New York City are teeming with these mutated zombie creatures who hide in the catacombs and abandoned buildings of the city by day and come out looking for blood when the sun goes down.

The eerie tone is set early on as we see Neville speeding around the streets of the city with his trusty companion, Sam, a dog that is not only man's best friend but man's ONLY friend at this point. He tries to maintain some semblance of a routine, going to the video store and talking to a bunch of mannequins arranged throughout the room as if they are real people, trying to find an antidote in his basement lab and having dinner while watching old TV reruns. You wonder just why he is in such a hurry when he drives around and how he is able to have fully functioning utilities in this apolcalyptic world. As Kirk Honeycutt wrote in his review in the Hollywood Reporter, "All utilities work perfectly, which might come as a shock to New Yorkers who experience problems with water, gas or electricity when a full work force mans those departments."

Neville's loneliness and isolation is established for the better part of the first two acts of this 100 minute film, when we are quite suddenly introduced to a young woman (Alice Braga) and her son (Charlie Tahan) and the story moves into more standard action film territory. It also takes on a religious tone, as the woman expresses a faith in God that is not shared (to put it mildly) by the skeptical Neville. He was witness to the annihilation of humanity, after all, so you can't blame the guy for having his doubts in the powers of the Almighty. Here we see the Will Smith that many fans were probably expecting to see much earlier: Gun in hand, blowing up and shooting the CGI creatures that come storming into his house.

That said, this is not your standard Will Smith action movie. Smith is onscreen alone for 2/3 of the movie's running time, a daunting task but one that Smith pulls off admirably with his trademark charisma and some funny one-liners that include frequent quoting of the "Shrek" films. Smith shows some serious acting chops as he tries to reconcile his solitary place in this new world with his efforts to ensure the future survival of mankind. Slowly, the madness begins to set in as he tries to go it alone. The fact that I was more moved by the death of his virus infected dog than I was by the deaths of his wife and daughter is a little troubling, but that probably had more to do with the latter's presence only in brief flashbacks.

In general, I felt that a bit too much time was spent establishing Neville's routine and his isolation in New York City, at the expense of later character and plot development. Another problem I had is the film tries to be a cross between an action/horror picture as well as an old time sci-fi contagion paranoia fest a la the 1971 version "The Omega Man" with Charlton Heston. I suspect that some will prefer the early, more contemplative portion of the movie that deals quite effectively with Neville's inner struggle, while some will prefer the third act's CGI action splatter fest and tidy feel good ending. It didn't quite all add up for me, but maybe it will for you.