quote from my nine year old son who wants to be a filmmaker

"As long as it's a good movie, with a good begining, a good middle and a good end, no one cares about the credits."

from the mouths of pokemon

From Spongebob I learned to ride the Hasselhoff. From the Fairly Odd Parents I learned that even the animation world is not without hideously selfish and neglectful parents. And when I overheard a particular line on one of the countless episodes of Pokemon (that my children could watch over and over again without regard for life or limb--like some kind of pre-tween Clockwork Orange), I stopped and replayed the line in my head several times. I thought it sounded dangerously close to trite, and yet uncommonly profound. So for you poor adults who actually have lives and (coincidentally?) no children, a pokemon is one of 400 types of various stuffed animal looking creatures that kicks ass like Bruce Lee and lives in baseball-like shrinking sphere--big hit. A trainer is a child who beats up, then captures these creatures, training them to battle other pokemon on command, like some kind of extraterrestrial cock fight. Who says kid's TV isn't morally enriching...So anyway, a trainer is complaining to his pokemon that they can't do the one move that would get them out of the random dramatic situation, because the pokemon isn't trained for it and blah blah blah. And the pokemon says to his trainer, "IF YOU BELIEVE IN ME, I CAN DO ANYTHING." I ran through that again. "If you believe in me, I can do anything." Not, "if you believe in yourself..." or, "if I believe in myself," but if YOU believe in ME, I can do ANYTHING. I thought hard over this while clearing the family room around the nintendo addicted children. I pondered it over loading the dishwasher. If YOU believe in ME...there was, I realized, a requirement for such a leap of faith in that statement, a trust in that believer...that you are putting yourself in their hands, depending on them believing in you. You are giving them the absolute control over your access to strength, giving yourself over to the validity of their faith. IN WHOM could you possibly invest that much trust??? And why does it still seem so hard to do so, when the second half of the statement is so crystal clear...I CAN DO ANYTHING. I will succeed. If I place my trust in the fact that this person believes in me, I can do anything. Sounds awfully like letting go of the steering wheel to me...those wise old pokemon. Oh, and from Scooby-Doo, I learned that smart girls are geeks.

what if

I burst into my husband's room and flashed on the light. "Wake up. Wake up. We have to go. They just hit L.A. with a dirty bomb and they think one is heading to San Francisco." He sat covering his eyes and looking pissed. "We need to take both cars...that way we can take more stuff and we can siphon everything if we need to go down to one vehicle. I'm going to get mine and the kids' things. You go to Safeway and get every penny you can out of every account. Get water...come on! Wake up!" I snapped my fingers in his face. He gave me the "dumb bitch, what are you talking about" look. I lunged at the remote control and turned on CNN. He sat riveted to the "Breaking News" as his wide eyes darted back and forth across the screen, following the burned and screaming victims, the lights of fire trucks desperately pushing through the rioting, dying crowds...mayhem. I think it all clicked then. "Get all the water you can...at least 50 gallons, and all the beef jerkey and granola bars--some canned food...tuna, get all the tuna...I'm going to get the two camping boxes from the garage. Get any propane fuel they have. And candles! It's, what, 3:18 a.m., so I hope most people aren't up. We should be okay, but still go as fast as you can. We need to be out of town within the hour..."

king of kings and lord of lords

In all fairness, if I am going to pay hommage to my favorite satan, I should also take note of my favorite portrayal of The Big Guy, The Man Upstairs, God. Now, this could be a tough one: George Burns was not a bad 1970s god, and John Cleese makes a great British god, but when you take a man who stands head and shoulders above the rest as any character at all, and you make him Al Mighty, you have a winner. In my favorite film of all time, "Glory, " Morgan Freeman played the first former slave to be comissioned an NCO in the Union Army...an fantastic role for a man with incredible depth in his portrayals. In the poorly timed and overly preachy "Deep Impact," Freeman is the first man to play a black President of the United States, and he does so quite believably. Although the film's meager success was trumped by the entertainment value of the similarly premised "Armageddon" (where a bunch of smart-assed, porn addicted oil riggers led by Bruce Willis--nuff said--save the world by imbedding explosives into and destroying an approaching asteroid), it was hard not to recognize the sincere and solid leadership of President Freeman. And although W. Bush would probably like to follow Morgan's rise from U.S. president to Almighty God, let's hope he get's his fat dose of reality soon enough. Morgan Freeman, on the other hand, makes this transition fluidly in the cute but insignificant film "Evan Almighty." Predictable dialogue and the amazingly funny Steve Carell aside, Morgan Freeman makes a sincere God: humerous, reasonable, comforting, and shockingly un-self-rightous. His attire is simple, his manner of speech is unpretentious and his countenance is approachable. And when "dishing out" advice to the wife of the millenium John Denver, who has just left her nut-case husband, he appears as the waiter who serves her and her kids in a diner, and sports the nametag "Al Mighty." Now, I think of God as a balance to the universe, an as-of-yet undetectable harmonic that unites everything, but if I thought of god as a conscious, cohesive being, Al would be my kind of God. And despite how NOT religious I am, I think of Al Mighty, and I think, "I'd pray to him..." Contemplation over a Starbucks...and I'm sure he would have a venti low fat caramel macchiato, just made for the 7th day...