Murderball (2005)

This documentary on paralympic rugby has been in the netflix queue for a long time, and has a lot of rave reviews, but is ultimately disappointing.  I didn't care about Joe Soares "defecting" to coach the Canadian team, and the filming of his semi-functional relationship with his son is forced and hackneyed.  I *did* care about the stories of the people who were actually playing, and wanted to actually see a game played and explained, rather than 20 seconds of explanation of how the game works and a lot of highlight-reel cuts that give no sense of the flow of the game.  Searching youtube reveals few useful stretches of actual gameplay.  Boo.

My new favorite apple farm

Even though I haven't visited there yet, is Scott Farm in Dummerston, VT.  Their apples are now being sold at City Market, and over the weekend I decided to buy and try some... wow.  The varieties I pick locally are more or less the same regardless of the orchard I picked them at.  The Scott Farm heirloom varieties are a shift in what it means to eat an apple, with thicker skins and greater variability in texture and taste.  I still love empires and early macs and will probably continue to eat empires as my winter staple, but these are an amazing change of pace.

City on Fire (Williams, Walter Jon) 1997

This is the sequel to Metropolitan (which I read some while ago) that I finally got around to reading.  I'd forgotten enough of Metropolitan that I was grateful that City on Fire contains enough backstory to make it unnecessary to have actually read Metropolitan first.  It takes a little while for the story to kick into gear, and I spent a fair amount of time annoyed at our primary protagonist, Aiah, but the end comes all too soon and... BOLLOCKS!  there isn't a sequel yet, and according to this interview and Williams' website, and the fact that 12 years have passed since the publication of City on Fire, I'm not sanguine about its chances.

This is a shame. The world of Metropolitan is so visually rich that someone should have exercised the film options by now.

Fixing Return of the Jedi

Our 5-year old likes Star Wars, and recently completed the first trilogy by watching Return of the Jedi with some judicious fast forwarding through the rancor and the Emperor electrocuting Luke.  It's been a long time since I watched RotJ.  I remembered there being lots of problems with this movie (though the good far outweighs the bad) and I winced through the painful Luke and Leia scene in the Ewok village, as expected, and shortly after Mark Hamill awkwardly zigzag exits somewhere backstage, he's replaced onscreen by Harrison Ford... and the scene just gets *worse*.  The killer is that Leia won't talk to Han about what she's just learned.  This isn't some deadly secret that you can't tell, this is a burden that you share!  The only reason I can imagine why the script doesn't call for her to tell Han at this point is so that they can have that "funny" reveal near the end.


Okay, here's how you get the funny reveal and remove that particularly horrendous scene: Han pilots the Falcon during the attack on the Death Star with Lando as his co-pilot.  It never made sense that two of the rebellion's three best pilots go on a ground assault anyway, so we're fixing that, too.  Leia leads the ground team on Endor.  Chewie goes with Leia because he wants to make sure that Han's not-quite-fiance is safe.  Luke goes because... he needs to start passing on his knowledge to Leia?  Hey, it's still not going to be perfect, but in the fixed version, Luke can tell Leia shortly after feeling he's endangered the mission.  Han reaches the surface and rejoins his friends before Luke can get there, wants to know where Luke is, looks up at the remains of the Death Star, and the reveal proceeds as it does now.