Attempting to fill in the gaps of my pop culture knowledge, I chose to watch it from the beginning last Sat. night on Cinemax, taking 30 minutes out after the first hour to watch the 11 o'clock news.
Obviously I liked enough of what I saw the first time to want to see the rest.
And, as simple as the story line is, the first twenty minutes sets up characters and relationships that I was kinda in the dark about during the first viewing. David's obsessive dance with the video camera made more sense, a little more sense, and was funnier, knowing about his most recent break-up.
The use of music in the movie is good, especially the theme to "The Greatest American Hero" TV show which I remember as an early favorite when I was a kid. Can't say that I noticed its use in Fahrenheit 9/11 but that may have primed me in some unconscious way to appreciate it more when I heard it again later. And the finale, The 5th Dimension's "The Age of Aquarius" is, well, another favorite song of mine. I should say that I like Bruce Almighty as well, and not only because it disses Buffalo. I've seen very little of Jim Carrey on screen, including most of his not-so-good stuff. Never watched In Living Color even 'though Jeff used to rave about it (didn't own a TV in those years), so I'm not sick of Carrey's antics as most people probably are.
Right after The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Cinemax ran a trailer, a montage of Star Wars clips to promote their showing of all six episodes on 11/10. My kids are into Star Wars, so I switched on TiVo recording to capture the promo for them to watch the next morning. But, TiVo stopped recording when the present feature ended, at midnight, even though the trailer ran over.
To bail me out, Jeff found the QuickTime video at Cinemax's web site (can't find it there now) and also at You Tube. I didn't know the music but Jeff identified it as ColdPlay, rather serendipitous, given this dialogue bit from the previous feature:
David: You know how I know you're gay?
Cal: How?
David: You like Coldplay.
Wikiquote - The 40 Year-Old Virgin
The kids' fascination with Star Wars has progressed slowly over the past year, beginning with the Lego short Revenge of the Brick. Then the Lego Star Wars game on XBox which exposes them to the significant bits of the saga's story line.
Being young boys, they are more interested in vehicles than in people, so I recently bought a DK reader on the ships. Tim has long enjoyed playing with Jeff's original (of course) Millennium Falcon. They mull over the evolution of ship design and identify which types are proper to each side. Recently, they have started watching portions of the movies on DVD, battle and chase scenes primarily. They think it's futuristic but I remind them, "It happened 'a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.'" Like all good myth.
The music captivates them, as it should. For weeks, the younger two have hummed Darth Vader's theme, "dom, dom, dom, da-da dom, da-da dom." Tim even got in trouble at school for humming in class, apparently. He told me, "Singing is for music class!" Indeed, I can well imagine his teacher telling him that!
I know the latter (older) episodes better than the prequels even though I probably saw all in the cinema at release and re-release. When Kenny asks to watch "the first one," I have to assume that he means "The Phantom Menace" even though I would think of "A New Hope" as "the first one". I don't know whether they teach kids Roman numerals anymore, so I drilled Kenny a little bit on the mechanics. Recently, a friend and I were commenting on how children can't tell time on analog clocks anymore and I said, "Imagine an analog clock with Roman numerals!"
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