For the first time in a long time I stepped outside to let the dog have her late night tinkle and didn’t freeze my ass off. I’ll take that as either a sure sign of spring or the fallout from a thermonuclear explosion over in little India.

UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN (ONE SPUD)

Diane Lane is carrying on the tradition that Lana Turner started about 60 years ago, to
wit, the sultry movie goddess. Diane does it with her own particular flair, just like those who came before her like Kathleen Turner, Faye Dunaway, Lauren Bacall, and Barbara Stanwyck to name a few. These are some of my personal favourite actresses because they tended to wear their sexuality and vulnerability on their sleeves.

As much as I admire Diane Lane and as good a job as she does in this film, it’s the film itself that I have the problem with. In it, Diane plays a best selling writer who goes
through a nasty divorce and climbs into a cocoon, which she is forced out of by a lesbian friend who gives her a ticket to Italy, where she finds and buys a villa in Tuscany yadda yadda. And they all live happily ever after Under The Tuscan Sun.
Of course there are the requisite number of charming performances by eccentric
characters, love struck teenagers, good looking gigolos and all kinds of idyllic romantic stuff to happen to Diane. But at the end of the day this movie feels like it has been written by a focus group of Harlequin romance addicted soccer moms with one pitcher too much of Sangria on the table and a decidedly gay moderator.

In other words it’s all just floating on a billowy cloud of predictable Hollywood fluff.
Diane looks good, but then she always does. Diane finds love, but then she deserves to. Diane starts writing again and it will be a huge best seller. Diane has made friends with a whole hectare of wacky dagos and other Euro mongels, and that’s the way it should be. Nothing about this movie surprised me in the least and that was it’s single biggest shortcoming.

THE DA (TWO SPUDS) (TV—Fridays @ 10 pm on ABC)

Well it’s been a hell of a long time since I have seen anything new in the way of series
programming on TV that I could watch for longer than 20 minutes. Last week there was this futuristic lawyer show called Century City about lawyers in the year 2030 (in LA, of course) and the kind of Jetson style legal issues they have to deal with. Like I give a shit.

Even if I did, this show was so boring and filled with aw shucks references to all the cool futuristic stuff they have at their disposal that it made me want to…well switch over to something else, which I did.

Anyway, I taped this new one called The DA on Friday while I was out at the Raptors
game and watched it when I got home. This is flat out one of the best new shows I have seen in a couple of years. It’s all about the DA’s office in Los Angeles, present day, but it has a lot less to do with freaky cases than it does with the politics involved in getting elected to the DA’s position and moving further up on the food chain. Steven Weber, who is usually some sort of good guy since he got stereotyped that way on Wings, plays the DA in question, who is completely obsessed with his re-election, his TV image and a lot of other stuff that have little or nothing to do with his actual job. There was an article about this show in the Star TV Week and they said that they recruited a former DA as a technical consultant, which is probably the reason that
this show crackles with intensity and whatever passes for realism out in La La Land
these days. This is one smart TV show with great writing, tight plotting, level upon level of intrigue and a solid cast projecting all this exciting goodness right at little old me.

The DA is on Fridays at 10:00. And it’s really worth a look. I just hope it can keep up the intensity and resist the temptation to become just another formula TV drama like just about everything else has this season.

THE STONES (TWO SPUDS) (Wednesday @ 9:30 on ABC)

Also debuting this week is a pretty decent sitcom called The Stones, which stars Robert Klein and a bunch of other people I don’t know. The Stones is a family with two grown kids. The husband and wife have decided to get a divorce, but he’s not actually moving out, just into a room he built over the garage to watch sports. So you kind of have to ask yourself if this is such a tragedy? I mean most men would kill for a lifestyle like that.

Anyway, the kids are great. The daughter is a flakier version of my own Princess of Pain and the son is a molecular scientist supernerd who is very funny to watch. Anyway, this is kind of formula stuff that’s elevated by a good cast , which makes it fun to watch, which, in turn means it probably won’t be around for long. It’s also on Wednesday’s at 9:30, which means you have to tape it, cause it’s up against The West Wing, which of course is another kiss of death. Too bad -- this one had some promise.

DREAMCATCHER (NO SPUD 4U)

My ‘Monday night while the Wife is out at her miniatures club meeting’ movie. Yet
another lame-o attempt at putting Stephen King material on film. I swear to God
nobody’s been able to do it right since Stanley Kubrick did The Shining way back in the day. This one was directed by Lawrence Kasdan, who is actually a writer director who has proven to me on a number of occasions (The Big Chill, Silverado, Mumford (a
personal fave), French Kiss, Wyatt Earp, Grand Canyon, The Accidental Tourist, Body Heat), that he actually knows what he’s doing. Lawrence? What the hell happened? This movie struggles from minute one with what kind of movie it wants to be. Is it a sci-fi spoof? A badly rendered supernatural horror flick? A Buddy pic? Or para-military caper?

I can’t tell you what this movie is about, not because it would spoil it for you by
revealing the plot, but because, alas, there just isn’t any plot to speak of. It does contain some cool Stephen King childhood stuff, but after that it’s pretty much a dog’s
breakfast. Big studio indulging A-list director, while he works in a genre he doesn’t get, creating a movie that ends up confusing the hell out of poor spuds like me, making me pissed off and just generally grumpy, which causes me to sleep poorly and need more coffee than usual the next day. Thanks Lawrence.

SPUDITORIAL -- RAPTORS VS BULLS LIVE AT THE ACC (ONE SPUD)

The other day, my bud Andrew Smith called and asked if I would be interested in going to see the Raptors play the Chicago Bulls on Friday night at the Air Canada Centre. Normally, I would politely refuse since, being essentially who I am, I prefer to stay home and watch basketball from the comfort of the Loblaws’ rocker. But the Wife had declared a chick flick night at our place so I said, what the hell.

Admittedly, I don’t get downtown very much at night and I have never actually been to
the ACC so I was flabbergasted at the level of hyperactivity which surrounds a typical
Friday night game down in the bowels of The Centre Of The Universe. From the scalpers barking from as far away as four to the incessant honking of horns from the endless traffic jam to get into the $20 parking lot right across the street to the testosterone rich crowd that hovered in the cavernous entrance, pouring into the building from all directions including a rather large stream coming off the subway at Union Station. After hooking up with Andrew, (the soon to be Mrs) Kuljit and Mike ‘Where’s’ Waldin, we found our way to the entrance where my bag was searched, allegedly for weapons of mass athletic destruction and my water bottle confiscated. When I asked why, they said it was a potential projectile. Genuinely curious, I asked if I could buy another bottle of water inside and was told that I could. So the conclusion I drew from this was that I could, indeed, carry a projectile into the game, but only if I bought it at the game and paid too much for it.Oi.

We had to go about half way around the west side of the building to get to our gate. This experience was like going to a busy shopping mall sidewalk sale stoned out on Peyote. Waldin and I couldn’t stop marveling at the orgy of super high priced consumerism that was firing on all cylinders here. T-shirts, tacos, goods of all kinds, beer, Coke Pepsi, lottery ticket, game programs, souvenirs, rows and rows of popcorn hot dogs, Big Macs, Pizza Pizza . It just went on and on. All in aid of taking as much money from the pockets of passers by as humanly possible within the three hour window in the space time continuum that this game represented.

Our seats were just about the same distance from the court as I was used to seeing on TV, which meant they were actually very good seats. The court itself is a hotbed of
activity, with pre-game telecasting, kids shooting baskets, the insipid Raptor mascot
running around, greeting all the kids in the real expensive seats, lots of security people with swagger and attitude, the sports paparazzi and a whole bunch of people who seem to be affiliated with the teams somehow and who just seem to hang around chatting with each other. We had a guy behind us who had one of those booming voices. When I turned around to look at him, I could see why. He was built like a Mac Truck and his wife and kid were just about the same size. Better behind us than beside us I thought. Next to them was a gaggle of Ginas who all seemed to be in love with Morris Peterson, one of the Raptors’ shooting guards. The seats were comfortable but legroom, especially for a Spud who likes to stretch out, was really at a premium.

Eventually the teams came onto the court, dressed in all their warm-up gear. They
looked like a bunch of supertall, skinnyass high school kids who should have been at
chilling at the mall out in Don Mills somewhere. They loped and bopped to the music
and shot baskets with a kind of half assed intensity. It was interesting but very quiet,
almost subdued. I guess that they all had on their ‘game’ attitudes goin’ on. The Bulls
were slightly taller and for the most part slightly skinnier than the Raps and it wasn’t
until they got their uniforms off that you could start to see that they were actually adult males.

The game was a pretty good one by Raptor’s standards, a crappy one by NBA standards. But I have to admit that I missed the ongoing commentary that accompanies the game on TV. During the timeouts and halftime there was all kinds of stuff going on in the way of PR events for institutions like Bell Canada and the Bank of Montreal or Beemo, as they like to be known (a-holes). Some guy won a satellite dish and a cell phone. Somebody else won $2500 (.000000000001% of the bank’s profits last year).

At halftime, a bunch of extremely athletic kids called the Lincoln Leapers came out and skipped rope with all the skill and dexterity of a bunch of pre-teen black girls from The Bronx projects. (That’s a compliment). I got up and walked around a bit, as my knees were getting a little sore from the cramped quarters. As I walked through the surrealistic orgy of consumption, I kept asking myself who the hell all these people were and how come they all looked so at home in this land of $5 hot dogs?

The second half of the game was a little better than the first half. The crowd got a little
more into it, mostly, I would contend, out of boredom. Because, as exciting as it all is, it does get old pretty fast.

When it was clear, at the end of the fourth quarter, that the Raps weren’t going to win,
things really started to slow down. There was no entertainment during the interminable
sequence of time outs and Vince Carter, the Raptors star, began hobbling even worse
than he did in the first half, after he was laid out by one of the taller, skinnier Bulls.
I lost Andrew, Kuljit and Waldin in the crowd after the game and as I rode home, I had to ask myself: if Andrew hadn’t gotten the tickets for free would I have paid $140 to see what I just saw. The answer was: give the wife a hundred and thirty, buy $10 worth of goodies and watch the game from Spud Central.

The sad footnote to this experience is that this loss pretty much eliminated the Raptors from any hope of getting into the playoffs this year. I think it’s time to clean house in Raptorland, from attic to the basement. This isn’t working. The basketball I saw last night was mediocre at best. Yet, this is the major sport centre in Canada. Don’t we deserve better or at least something comparable to say Indianapolis, which is about the size of Scarborough? Jeez Louise.

Well that’s all the literary abuse I’m prepared to heap on you for now. Get out there and start working on your tans.