I was pleased to notice in a photo with the article on Lauritzen Gardens' holiday poinsettia show that the Model Railroad Garden buildings are used, Central High and the Rose Theater amid the bright Christmas flowers. An even better chance to see them up close.
I was displeased to be reminded of my age by Knocked Up, which had been recommended as very funny by family and had gotten generally good reviews as the best summer comedy (now on Pay Per View/PPV). Supposedly it showed off Katherine Heigl's real acting talents and made a star of a chubby, curly-headed Seth Rogen. I knew Heigl best for her being the sister in an alien pair in the sci-fi series, Roswell, though she's more famous now as Dr. Isobel (Izzie) Stevens on Grey's Anatomy, that tedious soap about randy doctors playing musical gurneys. (And it's true: we had some of those medical tomcats and their mehitabels in divorce trials, notably a specialist who kept screwing his nurse, who became his next wife, only to lose him to his next nurse, who became his next wife, etc. It cost him a lot of money, since he was on his fourth, I think, the last I knew, but he just couldn't help himself.) That's probably why I am not impressed by Dr. McDreamy and the rest of the unzipped.
Anyway, briefly, Knocked Up is this really trashy Hollywood fairy tale about a pretty, ambitious, rising TV star drunkenly having an improbable--well, desperate is more accurate--one-night stand with an overweight, average-looking slacker whose goal is a website for those who want to find by timing every sex/nude scene in every movie (already done, as the movie jokes), but otherwise is content to be unemployed and to get high with his equally moronic friends with IQs somewhere south of, say, 70--average is 100--as when they argue that if the woman's on top, the man's sperm won't rise and impregnate her. Because, of course, as a result of the one-night stand, Alison Scott (Heigl) finds herself pregnant, inexplicably decides to keep the baby and somehow integrate Sweetly Stupid--uh, Ben Stone (Rogen)--into her upwardly mobile career life, and in a quick jeez-let-me-out-of-this-mess we have the slacker reformed, living neatly on his own, holding a job, forsaking his buddies, marrying the TV star, and the two happily raising their little girl together, all shown in a rapid blurring including future photos of the fairytale trio so the ditwads watching will swallow this swill.
The dialogue definitely dated me, which is why, to repeat myself, I have to flee again back to good ol' Will Shakespeare. The single line I could remember of what the movie presents as sparkling repartee was "Don't let a vagina hit you on the way out!" But I find on the IMDb entry a whole page of "Memorable quotes," including the following: "Fuck me in the beard!" "Because your face looks like a vagina," "Steely Dan can gargle my balls," as well as the outrageous tirade Heigl throws in overaged brattiness and Me Generation (MyFace) egoism at a doorman with that frequent favorite F word, including, "You're a doorman, doorman, doorman, doorman, doorman, so . . . Fuck you! You fucking fag with your fucking little faggy gloves." Granted, there are a few mild drolleries amid the obscenities: "Marriage is like a tense unfunny version of Everybody Loves Raymond, only it doesn't last 22 minutes. It lasts forever." But if you think I've misrepresented the page, you're welcome to read them all yourself. "Memorable Quotes, Uh-Huh."
How about some genuinely memorable quotes, decided by the ages? "I am sick at heart." "Not a mouse stirring." "A little more than kin, and less than kind." O! that this too too solid flesh would melt." "Frailty, thy name is woman." "I shall not look upon his like again." "Neither a borrower, nor a lender be . . . This above all: to thine own self be true,/And it must follow, as the night the day,/Thou canst not then be false to any man." "It is a custom/More honor'd in the breach than the observance." "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." "Murder most foul." "Leave her to heaven." "The time is out of joint; O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!" "Brevity is the soul of wit." "Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't." "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." "More matter, with less art." "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." "When sorrows come, they come not single spies,/But in battalions." "Sweets to the sweet, farewell!" "There's a divinity that shapes our ends,/rough-hew them how we will." "A hit, a very palpable hit." "The rest is silence."
After checking the thudding vulgarities ("Memorable quotes") of Knocked Up, consider instead this typical exchange with its wordplay, between Hamlet and his mother, dependent upon Hamlet's anger that his mother has married his uncle very soon after his uncle murdered Hamlet's father to become king, becoming Hamlet's step-father. As we aged know, the play rests on Hamlet's learning of that murder through his father's ghost at the beginning of the play and deciding whether to make it public and take revenge.
HAMLET: Now, mother, what's the matter? QUEEN GERTRUDE: Hamlet, thou hast thy father [Hamlet's uncle-stepfather] much offended. HAMLET: Mother, you have my father {his real father] much offended. QUEEN GERTRUDE: Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue. HAMLET: Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.
Sometimes I am downright overjoyed to be old.
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