Scott Pilgrim vs. 30 Years of Pop Culture Iconography

So, I saw Scott Pilgrim vs. The World today. It was funny. It was cool. Michael Cera wasn't even very much like Michael Cera (the character). It was a love letter to people who love video games and/or comic books. It wasn't the most amazing movie I've ever seen, but I was grinning from ear to ear for a lot of it. It was just downright fun.

It does make me wonder a little bit about when video games will stop being a geeky thing and become widely accepted as a part of our culture. Super Mario Bros. came out roughly 25 years ago, for crying out loud. I suppose the Wii, and casual gaming in general, has helped things along. It's a huge, multi-billion-dollar industry, but the people who partake, especially adults, are still somewhat marginalized.

Anyway, there were a lot of wink-and-nod references to video games throughout the film that were fantastic, and really cleverly inserted into what could otherwise have been a pretty boring movie - Pilgrim's foes explode into coins when defeated, and scores pop up. He "levels up" a couple of times in the movie. There is a visible combo counter at one point. There's a lot more that I won't spoil, but you get the point. There's not much plot to speak of, but plot really isn't the point here. Sometimes style over substance just kind of works (e.g. Sin City), and this is one of the cases where it works really, really well. Great movie, great soundtrack, and hey, Michael Cera didn't irritate the hell out of me, which is a bonus.

Trailer, if you still need convincing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wd5KEaOtm4

Cerebral stuff this is not. But it's a hell of a fun movie.

Rik and I spent most of the weekend repainting our spare bedroom a cream color, as well as touching up paint in some other places. It looks much better than the deep red that was there before. We've also got a handyman in to help us finally finish up the bathroom, which will ideally be out of the way this week. We're both kind of exhausted, but I have to give Rikki props for just generally working harder than me this weekend. The house is starting to look pretty great. Cleaning, organizing, getting rid of stuff, touching up the caulking around the house (along with the requisite uses of "caulk" in totally immature ways), sweeping (it's always fun to see the weird looks from the neighbors as I stand on top of our garage sweeping), all kinds of good stuff. We had a four hour (yes, FOUR HOURS) adventure where we looked for tile. We started at Habitat ReStore, but they didn't have what we were looking for. The Home Depot (nope) The Tile Shop (yes, but with a week and a half lead time), and then finally Lowe's (success, and for less than half the price of the tile shop). As a side note, I am pretty sure my personal hell in some way involves The Tile Shop. That store is horrible. ANYWAY, the point is that we are doing some long overdue things to get the house in shape, and it's nice to see the results coming together.

Good music I've picked up lately: Best Coast, Arcade Fire, The Heavy, Wavves, Florence and the Machine, Scissor Sisters, Kings Go Forth, and The Books. So if you're REALLY bored, go check all of those out. If you're only partially bored, I'd say go with Best Coast, Arcade Fire, Scissor Sisters, and The Books.

We were on vacation in Iowa for the last most-of-a-week. It was nice to see friends and family and just generally chill out. Last Saturday was our 10 year high school reunion. It was pretty much like paying a $20 cover to go to a bar where 100 people you graduated high school with (side note: my class was around 300) happened to be. All of those things they say about reunions are true - mostly that everyone just kind of talks to who they talked to in high school. Only everyone was a little drunker. I mostly keep up with my friends from high school, so with a few exceptions, I'd say it wasn't really worth the bother. HOWEVER, we did run into Rikki's old friend Anne, who figures into the third act of this vacation story.

After the reunion, we drove to Dubuque for a few days to visit with Rikki's extended family. Lots of walking the dog and playing cards. It was fun and pretty laid back. Nitro and Daisy (Rikki's aunt's dog) got to walk off leash for a while in this awesome park area that had a lake and a creek. Nitro swam around for a little bit. Then, disaster struck (or nearly struck). Daisy heard some ducks going along in the stream and TORE off after them. The resulting scene was like something out of Looney Toons - daisy swimming along behind a duck going one direction, the duck swimming away and quacking frantically - and then the same thing happens in the opposite direction. Then, the water gets shallow enough that Daisy can run instead of swim - and then she takes off after the duck, out of our field of vision. Suddenly, there's no much quacking, and no more dog noise. Oh no... we lost Daisy for a little bit, and she may have killed a duck. After calling after her for a while, we finally got her back, and she wasn't covered in blood or anything, so we figured the duck just got away. We hope. Anyway, the visit to Dubuque was good times.

On the way back from Dubuque (Act III), we stopped by Iowa City. You see, Anne now works full time as a tattoo artist, so Rikki and I thought we would get our first tattoos. Who better than someone we know from way back, right? Rikki got the Hyde Park fleur de lis, and it looks really great. I got - nothing, because I guess my design was too hard. I wanted to get the Amen Break tattooed in a loop around my arm, but I guess it's really hard to do parallel lines well (music staff). Oh well. I still want to make it work somehow. I will have to think on it. What's the Amen Break? It's a 6-second drum loop that's used all over the place in popular music (and lots of generally unpopular music), usually spliced and rearranged. Here's a handy video about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac Anyway, after Rikki got inked, we wandered Iowa City for a bit and got dinner at Quinton's. Then we drove back to Ankeny, stayed the night, and then drove back to KC and started the grand home improvement adventure. This whole blog post has taken kind of a Pulp Fiction sequence of events, huh? Oh well. Toodles for now.