AA Furniture & Appliance

My new rule is three hours (per day) with the computer on, with maybe an hour in the late afternoon, but that's it. If I want to watch "TV", it's a DVD player hooked up to a monitor (I don't have basic cable). My afternoon walks are based on DVD availability, and I know all the shops. One of them is AA Furniture & Appliance, whose owner, Lee, is celebrating her fortieth year in Canada after emigrating from Malaysia.

Lee had a new box of DVDs in back, but I had to help her dig it out. This wall of recent acquisitions was not the orderly wall of boxes you see at Best Buy, but a blend of boxes supporting (or supported by) overstuffed black garbage bags, ironing boards, plastic tubs, lampshades, ottomans ... One false move and the whole thing could come crashing down!

The DVDs were priced at a dollar each, and that included multi-volume sets. I purchased The Sopranos first season (never seen it), a Leo DiCaprio triple feature (I have seen The Beach, but not his Man in the Iron Mask or Romeo & Juliette), Dances With Wolves (never seen it), X-Men (saw it during its theatrical release), Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (never seen it), Behind Enemy Lines (seen parts of it three times on airplanes), Terminator 2 (theatrical release), Traffic (never seen it), The Day the Earth Stood Still (turns out the Keanu Reeves remake had the original in its box as well), Lord of War (about the rise and fall of a Ukranian-American arms dealer) and the film I watched the other night, Jurassic Park: the Lost World.

I had seen the first Jurassic Park in a theatre. Apart from its special effects, I was not particularly wowed by it. As for the sequel, it's like there are two movies going on at once -- one beholden to the script, the other to the odd energies of Jeff Goldblum, who has what Warren Beatty has in mutter and movement, but is unable to meld. The only time I have seen Goldblum in a role that suited his style was when he played the lead in David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly (Geena Davis: "What does the disease want?" Goldblum: "It wants to turn me into something else"). His and Cyndi Lauper's Vibes (1988) is quite possibly the worst (bad-bad) film I have ever seen.

At bottom is my favourite "scene" in Lost World. We're near the end of the film, when the adult tyrannosaurus rex is ravaging San Diego in search of its kid. People take shelter in a Blockbuster store, where one of the movie posters has Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role of King Lear.