On Thursday, the Princess of Pain climbed aboard a jet for England. One way ticket on Zoom Airlines. Destination: Stonehenge, where she will charge up her crystals with all that good old Druid energy and begin the next stage of her 21 year old existence, as an intrepid traveler. These are sad and happy occasions. Sad because we are losing an extremely vibrant and energizing presence in our lives, which we will miss immensely. Happy because the excitement, optimism and energy with which she has leapt into this voyage, can't help but make us feel that she will find what she is looking for out there. Which, at the end of the day, is really all any parent can hope for. Of course, none of this sentimentality has prevented us from quickly beginning the process of converting her room back into a guest room. In fact the Wife is in there painting the trim as I write this. But were keeping her lava lamp on the dresser, and all the rest of her stuff in the basement, because you just never know.

PAYCHECK (ONE SMALLISH SPUD)

As we follow the ever so stunning career of Mr. Ben Affleck, we see that he is prone to stumble at many places along the way in his quest to replace Harrison Ford as the
'Hollywood Action Hero Without Much In The Way Of Muscles'. As we follow the ever so stunning career of Hong Kong actionmeister John Woo, we find that he too has had more than his share of one spud outings. Windtalkers, Broken Arrow and Face Off were all pretty abysmal. So what, you ask, would really possess me to invest two hard earned hours of relax time in the latest John Woo epic. When pressed, I would have to say it was that damn two for one special that the new Blockbuster has been running all this month. When pressed even harder, I would also say Philip K. Dick.

Philip K. Dick was one of the favourite authors of my misbegotten youth. When interrogated regarding the reason for the pile of Playboys in my closet, Philip K Dick,
whose stories were published there regularly, was my big plausible deniability factor. Dick was not so much a science fiction writer, as he was a future oriented action adventure scribe. He always managed to put his characters before his storylines,creating real humanity in a very chaotic looking future. Fortunately for Mr. Dick, he cashed in his chips in '82 and wasn't around to see how all but one of his adapted to the screen stories were pretty much butchered in the process. The one that remained relatively unscathed was Blade Runner, which managed to honestly capture the essence of Dick's writing and vision, even if it did leave out a whole
dimension to the story and the characters therein contained. Of all the Philip K Dick adapts, Paycheck is by far the worst. The characters are wooden and one dimensional, not full of the irony and cynicism of the real Dick characters.The movie
itself, instead of being a showcase for clever futuristic storytelling is nothing more than a staging ground for the chase scenes, special effects and hyperactive violence that have become the sophomoric earmarks of a John Woo film. There is never any
attempt made to deepen our understanding of the characters and their motivation. In fact, the only conscious attempt that I could discern to really give us any feeling for the story was in the overtly obvious statements which regularly occurred to keep us up to speed on the various plot developments. I felt like I was being treated like some sort of brain dead idiot.

In Paycheck, hero Ben plays an engineer/programmer who does big jobs for megacorps in the world of the future and then has his memory of those jobs erased so nobody will have to kill him for knowing too much about stuff he has no real stake in, which is pretty cool.

Needless to say, the movie then lapses into a virtually never ending mish mosh of Ben trying to stay alive with and eventually live happily ever after with Uma Thurman. No reason is ever really given for wanting to kill Ben, as his memory had been erased and he didn't know anything anyhow. But hey, richer people than me worked this stuff out and have decided that it makes sense, right?

This movie was almost a complete waste of time, in spite of the fact that the story held together pretty much and that the bad guys all got it in the end. If you do rent it, smoke a doob and imagine how good it could have been, with say, a story that made
sense, characters that actually had some depth, and a director like Ridley Scott,
Tony Scott, Richard Donner, Peter Jackson, Michael Bay, Robert Zemecis, Kevin Costner or Ang Lee at the helm. Anybody but the honorable Mr. Woo. If you do all that you might find this film oddly watchable.

MYSTIC RIVER (2 SPUDS)

I was a little skeptical about watching this film. Not because of the stars Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, Marcia Gay Hardin, Kevin Bacon, Laurence Fishburne and Laura Linny.
You can always count on them for a big time effort. And not because of the screenwriter, Brian Helgeland, whose bigger credits include LA Confidential for which he won an Oscar, and this year's Man on Fire. No, my skepticism rested squarely on the crusty old shoulders of Senor Clint Eastwood, the director, who in my humble opinion hasn't made a really good movie since Midnight In The Garden of Good and Evil in 1997. And his last film Blood Work (a book by one of my favourite writers, Michael Connelly) was dog's breakfast from a casting and acting point of view.

Suffice it to say that all is forgiven. Clint has made himself a truly magnificent film from start to finish. There is an intricate story, with amazing performances right down
the line, a beautiful tone of sadness and suppressed rage leading to high-end tragedy.
And there is a real feeling of truth that the characters share with each other that is  easily the hardest thing for a director to capture on film. And in Mystic River, it's captured as purely and effectively as I have ever seen it.

This movie takes place in an Irish area of Boston. Sean Penn's daughter is mysteriously killed. Kevin Bacon, a childhood friend of Sean's and now a cop, draws the case and he and his partner (Laurence Fishburne) start putting the pieces together. When they do it leads to Tim Robbins another childhood chum of Kevin and Sean, who gets to play the character that isn't quite right in the head, as he was abducted by pedophiles back in the day.

Mystic River is composed of a series of set pieces and is powered mainly by the emotions of Sean Penn's character. Clint seems to understand rage very well and in Sean Penn he has the perfect specimen to work with. He plays what seems to be a reformed gang leader. But as the movie rolls along, two streams begin to flow. The cops following the investigation and Sean's and his crazy ass henchmen doing some investigating in their own fashion.

Mystic River is a great American film. Its pacing, cinematography and score are every bit the equal of its amazing performances and brilliant less-is-more script. It's
not what you would call a happy film, but it's a solid story extremely well told from front to back. I will probably watch this film again in a couple of months, just to groove on the great acting. My apologies to Clint Eastwood for thinking that maybe its time to hang up his spurs.

CITY OF GOD (2 SPUDS)

We didn't go to see this film when it was running in theatres, because from the trailers I saw I knew the Wife would have problems with it. She still hasn't seen it, as I watched it while she was out with her pal Nina seeing Harry Potter.

This film is actually a hyperactive kissing cousin to the brilliant Barbet Schroeder film, Our Lady of The Assassins, which dealt with the same subject matter but in a much more poetic and lyrical way. City Of God is a highly stylized blunt instrument of a movie. And being such, it kind of does a bit of a disservice to its subject matter.

City of God is the story of a kid named Rocket who grows up in a slum city outside of Rio de Janeiro, which is called the City of God. This movie is a kind of documentary style Goodfellas, complete with voice over narration and a cast of characters that define the absolute insanity of life in this terrible, terrible place.

Like sports is to black kids trapped in the large urban ghettos of America, crime (mostly drugs and robbery) was the ticket out for a lot of these Brazilian kids. Rocket is the central character because he is stuck in the middle. He's trying to avoid a life of crime by going to school, yet all his friends have fallen into that world and he is kind of being swept along with the wave of extreme violence they are creating.

City of God is a movie that will scare the shit out of you if you are thinking about going to Brazil for a vacation. The children who populate this film have absolutely no sense of morality, and why should they. They are living in a world where their chances of surviving childhood are almost non-existent. They all carry guns and have no compunction about shooting anybody with them. Because it's very much a kill or be killed day to day existence.

This is about as far from the world that most us live in as you can get and still see daylight. City of God tells a hugely compelling story, but I kind of felt that the super stylized look, the frenetic quick cut editing and the jumping around from place to place and time to time tended to over-glitz the story and in so doing, trivialize it. While it shows you a number of characters and explains them adequately, it spends relatively little time in letting us get to know them so we can really develop a little empathy. Our Lady Of The Assassins, which makes the same points as City of God is trying to make, does so in a much more effective way, by letting us really get to know and understand the characters and also the reasons why they are the way they are.

That being said, City of God is still an important film. Mostly because of what it's trying to do, which is to examine a gargantuan social problem in South America's
largest country. What it actually achieves is, at least in my opinion, impacted negatively by the all the hyperactivity and buzzy film stuff that is layered over it.

SPUDSPORTITORIAL--THE STANLEY CUP FINALS (2 XL SPUDS)

One of the US commentators summed up the NHL playoffs beautifully, calling it a second hockey season that's nearly as long and about ten times tougher than the
regular one. That struck a real cord with me, especially as I followed the exploits of the two teams who would eventually end up in the finals--the Calgary Flames and the Tampa Bay Lightning.

After the Leafs got knocked out in the second round by the Philadelphia Flyers, I thought I would lose interest and simply concentrate on basketball. But when the last 4 teams were left standing in the divisional semi finals (Tampa and Philadelphia in the
east, Calgary and San Jose in the west, I thought, hey what the hell. After all, there was still a Canadian teams in the mix. I felt it to be, more or less, my patriotic duty to keep watching and see what happened.

Well I'm very glad I did because for the past 5 weeks or so, I have been treated to some of the best professional hockey I have ever seen. All four of the aforementioned teams are what I like to call 'real hockey' teams, meaning that their style of play was all about playing the game the way I always thought it was meant to be played. Instead of trying to outmuscle your opponent as the Leafs, Senators and Bruins do. In fact, that the endurance and stamina required to make it all the way in post season NHL hockeyland definitely favours the speed and skill teams over the knockaround guys. When the Flyers, who had to go through the Leafs in the semi finals, came up against Tampa in the divisional finals, there was, as they say, very little gas in the tank. With the exception of Keith Primeau, who played a Hall Of Fame series in a losing cause, the Flyers were simply outskated and outscored. In the west, the injury ridden Flames, who had just squeaked into the playoffs and weren' t expected to go very far at all, simply worked their asses off, beating the teams they had to beat, including the heavily favoured Vancouver Canuks and Detroit Red Wings in series that were both long and extremely hard fought. But in the middle of the divisional final with San Jose, you couldn't help but feel that these kids were on a mission from God.

They were beat up and had more disabled players than any team in the playoffs, but they kept on grinding out the wins. Then one day, Caruso called me and said, "You know, I think this Calgary team can go all the way." I couldn't disagree.

The final series between Tampa Bay and Calgary started off a little on the
tentative side. But once these team figured eachother out, the games turning into fast, elegant, freewheeling skills contests. And right up the about the middle period of the seventh game, it was like the best mystery novel you ever read. You had no clue who would or could win.

Then almost suddenly something happened. I'm not sure what it was. Either the Calgary Flames ran out of gas, or the octane level in the Lightning's tank shot up perceptibly. But the realization materialized in crystal clear fashion that this was going to be Tampa's Stanley cup.

After the game, I watched the lads from Tampa, as they took turns skating around the rink with the cup held high over their heads and thought, well there's another left handed victory for Canada either way, since the majority of player on both teams were still Canuks. And here we were on a major US network in prime time with ratings that are extremely respectable showing the whole world what a great game this is when it's played the way it was meant to be played.

Well that's all she wrote for this edition. See you in the funny papers.