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How stoked am I that the Goonies DVD finally comes out this month? I just pre-ordered. And check out the Goonies all grown up! Some thoughts…

• Data: So cute now. He looks like my uncle Jimmy. (You guys knew my family was Korean, right?) He should be in more movies.
• Mikey: In a weird psychic way, Sean Astin’s movie roles are intertwined with my life. Seriously. First, there was The Goonies when I was 7-years-old, which I loved. My sister and I’ve been quoting that movie ever since. Then Sean starred in a little film called Rudy. Two years later, I found myself at Notre Dame. Now Sean’s playing Sam Gamgee in the three Lord of the Rings movies. And me? I happen to be dating the biggest Tolkien fan in Europe right now. It’s fate, I tell ya.
• Stef – Martha Plimpton looks like Martha Plimpton. She has awkward bangs. At least she looks like a girl now (as opposed to that weird “doing-gender-ambiguous-fashion-shoots” phase).
• Mouth – Oh Corey Feldman. How I loved you and your parachute pants. Too bad you’re scary now.
• Andie – She seriously looks way different from what I expected. She looks like she’s aged a lot less than the other people. I wonder if she’s had some work done.
• Chunk – He’s adorable! All skinny too! He looks the most normal out of all of them.
• Brand – Yum. He’s been hot forever. I can’t even see him now without thinking of the “armpit licking” scene from Flirting With Disaster. He’s gonna marry Minnie Driver and they’re gonna have a passel of tall, broad-shouldered striking-looking children.
• Who’s that in the back? Is that Richard Donner, or Mikey and Brand’s dad?

I’m gonna go listen to some Cyndi Lauper.

I can’t resist. There are some really hilarious alternate titles for SW Ep 2: Attack of the Clones on Slashdot. My favorites:

Episode II: Luke’s Dad Was a Whiner, Too
Star Wars Episode 2: All your clone are belong to…
Star Wars: Dude, Where’s My Clone?
Star Wars: Episode 2: The Secret of Clone Inish
Star Wars 2: Electric Boogaloo
Episode II: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Force

R.I.P Mr. Belvedere.

Star Wars: Episode II–Attack of the Clones??? I’m gonna go on the record here and say that sucks.

Update: Snookums’s response to the title:

Isn’t it rich, are we a pair? / Me here at last on the ground, / You in mid-air. / Send in the clones.

Isn’t it bliss, don’t you approve? / One who keeps tearing around / One who can’t move / Where are the clones? / Send in the clones.

Actually he goes on through the entire song, but I think you get the idea. 🙂

AICN‘s got some big Buffy premiere spoilers. They certainly sound more plausible than some of the other stuff I’ve read.

Not to keep tootin’ my own horn, but I made lots of updates to my Roald Dahl site this weekend. Oh, and I was totally cheered up by the fact that the first (non-profane) name for my Trivia Master Board was none other than… my dad. 🙂

Everybody’s mentioning BBC1’s showing of Johnny Mnemonic last night. I didn’t watch it; I was bakin’ banana bread. Actually, I probably wouldn’t have turned it on if you’d paid me. I saw that film in high school and hated it. I only went because I’d been infiltrating the “computer crowd” (I was getting tired of hanging around with the marching band) and I thought that it might give me a little nerd cred. Unfortunately it was so laughably bad, so horribly clichéd that I couldn’t even feign approval. The next day before History class somebody asked me what I thought of it, and I launched into a rant about the perils of thinking of such excrement as high cinema. In the middle of the “Talking super-intelligent dolphins? PLEASE. That was futuristic in, like, 1972…” portion of my speech, I was rudely interrupted by a fuming nerd named Bob Robinson. He told me in no uncertain terms that “Gibson invented all those clichés, so they’re not really clichés” and that I had no idea what I was talking about. Whatever. That perfectly encapsulates my feelings about sci-fi and why it often fails to catch the public’s imagination. For the hard-core nerds, simply the fact that something geeky exists is reason enough to venerate it, whether it’s actually well-crafted or not. I’m as guilty of this as the next person (as evidenced by the fact that I sat through The Phantom Menace eight times). The reason The Matrix worked is that it was more than just computer-speak and future-babble.

Oh, and if Bob Robinson is reading, I finally read Gibson’s “masterpiece” and I hated it too. Making a text impenetrable with jargon and neologisms is not always a sign of intelligence. And neither is claiming to understand it.

Everybody in my family learned a long time ago that if I’m reading a book or sitting at the computer, you’re not going to get my attention unless you tap me on the shoulder or throw a shoe at me or something. I always figured it was just a side effect of my intense concentration (ahem), but now it looks like it may actually be a type of learning disorder. CAPD (Central Auditory Processing Disorder) occurs “when the ear and the brain do not coordinate fully.” I’ve got all the typical “at risk” behaviors other than the last four. (I was county spelling bee champion and I’ve never had a problem with language stuff.) And where did I learn of this potentially life-affecting diagnosis? A Slashdot comment.

A chastised Roger Ebert apologises to Barbara Bush for “fueling the denim ruckus”. Whatever. I still think it was hilarious.

New Poll: Inspired by my rant today (scroll down), I want to know if you consider yourself as an optimist or pessimist with regards to the rest of humanity. I mean, I think I generally trust people to behave decently, but time and time again I get let down (that jerk at my Dahl site, Bill Clinton, eBay sellers, etc.). Am I just being terribly naïve? Should I adopt a cynical tone of mistrust and then I’ll never be disappointed? What works for you?