Extraordinary Gentlemen

The weekend started with disappointment: For dinner Friday evening, Debbi and I went to my favorite rib joint in the area, Armadillo Willy's. Although a chain, I like their ribs and sides quite a bit, and go perhaps a little more often than I probably should.

Alas, their Los Altos location, at least, has changed their menu, and not for the better! The ribs are more expensive, and come with fewer sides. Plus, they've eliminated my two favorite sides: Corn bread muffins and potato salad. Apparently they got enough complaints that they've brought back the corn bread, but even so I passed on the ribs and got a beef brisket sandwich. It came with one side (I think it used to come with two), a rather small portion of fries.

I left a very critical customer comment card. If this is the way it's going to stay, then I'm darned well going to find a new favorite rib place, because Willy's has just shot themselves in the foot.

(By the way, their Web site doesn't seem to have their new menus. So I don't know whether other locations have the new menu, too.)

That aside, it was a fun weekend. I got last-minute e-mail from my friend Rob on Friday saying that his wife and kids were back east, so he wondered whether we could get together. So Saturday evening he and his german shepherd, Hannah, came down for dinner and to see The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Well, we never did make it to the movie, since dinner ran longer than expected, and then we walked around Castro St. and prowled the bookstores. But that was okay, since we all had fun. Well, except Hannah, who got left in the car while we ate and walked and shopped. "Now for the boring part of the evening, Hannah," said Rob.

All wasn't lost for the dog, though. She got to come inside my house for a little while, and to lie on my tile entryway while Newton watched warily from the living room. (Jefferson vanished upstairs.) Both animals behaved themselves, though. And when we returned from shopping we took her for a walk around the neighborhood, and into the nearby field, where I ran around with her for a while, thus tiring the both of us out pretty effectively. Shepherds are great because they'll run after you when you desert the herd, so you can get them wound up pretty effectively without too much work.

Longtime readers know that Rob's one of my oldest friends. I sometimes envy him his life. He has a stable and well-paying job, whereas these last few years in the tech industry sometimes make me worry that I should have a backup plan in case the worst happens. (Hell, in ten or twenty years I may want a backup plan just because if and when Micro$uck finishes taking over the rest of the industry, I have fairly little interest in working for them or with their crummy technologies.) He's also married and has two sons, neither of which has ever been high on my list of things to do with my life (for those wondering, Debbi's not interested in having children either), though sometimes I wonder whether maybe it should be.

On the other hand, it sometimes seems like Rob has little time in his life for anything other than working or family. And I don't think that's a trade-off I'm prepared to make. So, maybe it all works out.

Well today Debbi and I did get to see The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, based on Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's semi-steampunk comic book of the same name (and extensively annotated by one Jess Nevins, also available in book form). Ultimately, the only piece of Moore's story which survives the transition to film is this: A group of 19th-century popular heroes are assembled by the British government to combat a threat to the empire. Oh, okay, the surprise twist of the villain's identity is also preserved. But that's about it.

Here, our heroes are Allan Quatermain (Sean Connery; Quatermain is repeatedly pronounced "Quartermain" in the film); Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah); Mina Harker (Peta Wilson); The Invisible Man (Tony Curran); Dorian Gray (Stuart Townshend; I kept wondering if it was Johnny Depp); "special agent" Tom Sawyer (Shane West), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Jason Flemyng, and his computer-generated stand-in). They're pursuing a madman dubbed the Phantom ("How operatic!" remarks Quatermain) who's attacked both Britain and Germany and seems to be trying to spark a world war. He's supposed to next strike at Venice, where a secret conference among heads of state is to be held.

The first half of the film involves the assembly of the League, notably the recruitment of the disspirited and retired Quatermain; the negotiations with the immortal Gray, and the capture of Hyde. Then we launch into the pursuit of the Phantom, the revelation of what's really going on, and the build-up to the final confrontation.

The film is fun, but very silly. Fortunately I checked my BS-o-meter at the door and just enjoyed it, or else I'd have worried more than in a passing manner about Mina - who is a vampire - walking around in broad daylight, the overly-polished nature of the automobiles we see, or the somewhat-inconsistent handling of Jekyll-and-Hyde's nature. Not to mention that the villain's plot is basically ridiculous.

Still, it's lots of good, almost-clean fun, some nice special effects (although Hyde isn't very well-done; he just looks computer-generated), and lots of humorous throw-away dialogue. In the end it tries to be a old-century-turning-into-new story, and doesn't really succeed because it doesn't spend enough time with its characters. It does do a pretty believable job of painting Quatermain as the greatest adventurer of his century (with Nemo second only because of his political motives). Connery's career has been in decline for years (he has done anything noteworthy since The Hunt for Red October (1990)?), but there are worse adventure films to go out on than this one.