Dumbledore double

We've reached the third third of our trip, arriving in Los Angeles yesterday for the final eight days in the U.S., so I thought it was long past time to check in with you.

Fortunately, my in-flight entertainment from Boston to LAX gave me just the sort of excuse I like to write a quick something: a coincidence.

It was rather unlikely, you will agree, that I would watch two movies in which Albus Dumbledore, the Harry Potter character who has now appeared in more movies than any other, would appear, or at least be referenced.

This would not be unlikely if I had chosen to revisit one of the ten other Harry Potter movies available on my American Airlines flight, to accompany the newest, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, which I didn't manage to see in the theater. 

The second movie I watched was, indeed, a revisit, but it was a revisit of last year's Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.

Why Barb and Star? Well, although I really appreciated that movie the first time -- it ended up at #32 out of the 170 films I ranked in 2021 -- my affection for it didn't land in the same vicinity as that of its most ardent fans, so I wondered what I'd missed. In fact, I remember not long after thinking that I could only remember a few jokes that had really worked for me. I remembered marveling at the absurdity of the whole thing, but was it actually hilarious? I didn't know.

I only laughed once or twice on my second viewing. I still appreciate the movie quite a bit -- like I still really enjoy Jamie Dornan's dramatic ode to the seagulls, and I love that both Barb and Star come up with lies about what they were doing that involve turtles. But it isn't the home run for me that it is for others.

However, it does contain a reference to Dumbledore. When Dornan's character says something about a phoenix to Barb (Annie Mumolo), she shouts out "Dumbledore's bird!" And then says "Dumbledore" again more quietly when she gets a perplexed look from Dornan. 

The movie that features a lot more Dumbledore was a minor comeback for the Fantastic Beasts series.

I really liked the original, And Where to Find Them, but The Crimes of Grindelwald was bad. I don't intend to revisit it to find out, but I suspect the difference in my affection for the two movies has something to do with not being burned out by digital wizardry (so to speak) when I saw the first. Of course, sometimes a reboot/prequel/what have you works for you because you realize you longed for a return to that world, and it got a lot of things right. But the freshness of that return is no longer there with the second movie, so it has to stand on its two feet, and proves ill-equipped to do so.

My feelings toward The Secrets of Dumbledore don't approach my feelings for And Where to Find Them, but at least this movie is solidly in the three star range, meaning I would recommend others see it. Grindelwald had been a two-star experience -- competently made, I suppose, but entirely lacking in anything that excited or thrilled me.

Of course, the difference could just come down to them replacing Johnny Depp with Mads Mikkelsen. 

It won't be a Dumbledore triple as we have chosen to go to Disneyland (on Tuesday) rather than Universal Studios, as my wife had hoped, where there would be plenty of Harry's wizarding world. I have to see the new Star Wars rides, and besides, we went to Universal on our last trip in August of 2019. We haven't been to Disney since January of 2017.

Before then, we have to clean out the garage of our house in Van Nuys, which we have been renting for nine years since we moved. We'll be shipping some things, donating others, and throwing a third group in the garbage, in all likelihood. And while that will make for a busy next few days before the shippers come and box up our stuff on Monday -- we can't pack it ourselves so as not to try our hand at international drug smuggling -- it may feel like a breeze compared to two solid weeks of seeing family in Indiana and New England. Which went as well as can be expected, maybe even better than that, but I need a bit of a change of pace that isn't so emotionally demanding and fraught with potential hurt feelings.

So it's really nice to be sitting in the backyard of the house where we're staying in the Hollywood Hills, a bit of a treat to ourselves in expectation of turning a healthy profit on the house we're about to sell. Here, check out my view:

With any luck I'll be checking in with you a bit more regularly before I fly back to Australia next Thursday night. 

Richard Cheese is having a moment

If you haven't heard of Richard Cheese, then you haven't been listening to parody lounge music.

Okay, no one's been listening to parody lounge music. But I did listen to it like 20 years ago, when I first discovered Cheese, who is actually a man named Mark Jonathan Davis. His accompanying band, which he does not always play with, has cheese-related names as well -- Bobby Ricotta, Frank Feta and Billy Bleu. But it seems like the whole thing is designed to make us think of a variation on the lead singer's name -- Dick Cheese. Sophomoric, but amusing enough.

In 2000 -- though I think I discovered it three or four years later -- Cheese and company released an album called Lounge Against the Machine, which was comprised of lounge covers of alternative music from that time. I just checked iTunes, and the 11 tracks I have may have been acquired through a music sharing service or something because they contain some of the tracks from Lounge but then some others that are not on there. Anyway, the ones I remember most from my collection are "Suck My Kiss," "Smack My Bitch Up" and "More Human than Human," though the one that gets played the most in the general world is his cover of Disturbed's "Down with the Sickness."

If you can imagine a cheesy (pun intended) lounge singer singing "Change my pitch up, smack my bitch up" in a swing style, with an imaginary martini in his hand (though he usually requires both hands for his piano), you get what Cheese is all about. It's amusing to be sure, but you aren't going to listen to him round the clock or anything. It's not that kind of thing. It's Weird Al adjacent.

"Down With the Sickness" was what appeared in Zack Snyder's 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake. I'd been turned on to Cheese just a year or two before that, so this was not where I discovered the musician. However, I feel like it was one of the most recent times I'd actually been reminded of him. Which is not all that recent. 

Until the past month, when his work has now appeared in two different new movies.

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar was actually released in February, but I didn't watch it until the last day of April. Here, Cheese appears as a lounge singer in the titular resort that Barb and Star visit, though he's not singing White Zombie covers. The song from this movie that may have crept out into the zeitgeist a bit is called "I Love Boobies," and it's perfectly in keeping with Cheese's puerile sensibilities. One appearance in the film might have served him best, but they go back to him three or four times, with diminishing returns.

Then last night it was Snyder again with Army of the Dead, as both Cheese and Snyder come full circle to the origins of our general awareness of them. Dawn of the Dead, another zombie movie, was the film that introduced most of us to Snyder, before he became a particular type of director with films like 300, Watchmen and all his work for DC. He returns to that realm and brings Cheese with him, as the classic Snyder opening montage -- which was so great in Watchmen -- is accompanied here by Cheese's music. I suppose a White Zombie cover would have been thematically appropriate, but instead it's Cheese's take on "Viva Las Vegas," as the movie is about Vegas getting overrun by zombies and walled off from the rest of the world to contain the infection. 

Snyder is obviously Cheese's biggest fan, as he also used Cheese in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, the internet now tells me. I must not have noticed or it must not have made an impression on me, because it really had felt like the middle of the aughts since I'd last thought of Cheese.

Who knows if this is the beginning of a Cheese-assaince, or just a director returning to the same well for the third time and one random one-off appearance. But I'm sure Cheese is pretty psyched about it, because if I, one of his "biggest fans," had not had occasion to think about him in 15 years, I doubt many others had either.