January 20, 2003
5:41pm Monday

MY SUPER EGO, WHERE I GO HE GO

Never have I been so wrong. Well, never have I been so wrong since "The Crimson Tide" opened and I predicted it would make no money and then it was gigantic. But come on, this time there was no way to be wrong. I was in the money. I have bets with my friends, see, about how movies will do on their opening weekends, and usually we bet on the big ones but sometimes the ones that'll guaranteed sink to the bottom of the abysmal depths of the ocean are fun to guess about, too. Like Kangaroo Jack. I blinked at that page four hundred and fifty times, got checked for glaucoma, then came back and it was still right there in front of me -- seventeen-point-seven million dollars. For a movie about Jerry O'Connell and a kangaroo? A CG Kangaroo who steals money? A movie that has no idea who it wants its audience to be? I tell you, there are flukes in the time-space continuum, and this is one of them. Someone tell me how that full-on crap attack got made in the first place, please.

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The Golden Globes are always enjoyable because the celebrities drink more than they do at the Oscars and take Valium like Jack Nicholson. And they dress up like it's Halloween, like how Lara Flynn Boyle came as an anorexic pink ballerina circa herself age six, and how Sharon Stone came directly from the goth/bondage Stigmata club in West Hollywood. Wouldn't it be fun to have drinks with Sharon Stone, though? She could tell stories that'd make your hair curl.

My favorite moments of the Globes were Arnold Schwarzenegger saying "The Big Fat Greek Wedding"; seeing who's coupled up with whom, like John Corbett and Bo Derek and Ed Norton and Salma Hayek; Renee Zellweger's saying, "You were my first boyfriend, Richard, and I'm so proud of you!" and Gray and I looking at each other and going, "How random that she's thanking some little junior high boyfriend in Texas!" when she was thanking Richard Gere; sitting gape-mouthed when Richard Gere won best actor for Chicago because okay, he can dance and sing a little, but come on Hollywood Foreign Pressers, I can tapdance too and I shouldn't get an award; watching Diane Lane be nervous and knowing she really thought she was going to win and then waiting with predictable certainty for Nicole Kidman to accept the award and voila; shaking my head at the strange lost-on-me chess club nerd patter between Alexander Payne and Jim Thompson as they accepted the best screenplay award for About Schmidt; watching Gene Hackman look the same at 70 as he did at 30 and realizing what an amazing body of work he has and how cool he is.

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Now, I must scratch. If I never come back here it's because I got multiple big welty spider bites over the weekend while building exciting above-ground garden planter boxes. The only problem is it's hard to enjoy a crop of winter lettuce and carrots and cabbage when you're dead.