No, not the one we saw after dissing BBB's flatware collection.
Instead, the stupidly-titled Virtual Nightmare, aka a direct-to-video remake of Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress (a book far more enjoyable than that link would lead you to believe).
How could you hate a movie that opens with an advertising executive in a 50's roadster, holding an unlit pipe in his hand and quoting Magritte just before driving head on into a haywagon? And then, when the hero visits a library to find out what the famous line means, gives us dusty leatherbound 18th-century volume with a woodcut of the image?
For a while, I even thought I was back in Koyanisquasset watching The Chronicle.
The other evening Julie and I were whiling away some time before dinner and a movie (Hero with Jet Li, wonderful style, fighting dulled a little by westernized cinematopgraphy) in the flatware section of one of Williston's finer boxe stores, and we were just blown away by the general crappiness.
Knives and forks with handles barely thick enough for a self-respecting pencil, knives with blades you could flip fish with. Forks suitable for eating meals only in the future as imagined by Kubrick and Clarke (which is to say, the past). Place settings that weighed no more than a business envelope, or with handles that would stick quivering into the floor if your dropped them wrong. C'mon, folks, this isn't rocket science (or clown cars or cave are or Dali on a bad day); it's making a fundamental tool of daily life.
What is so hard about making a handle that's big enough to curl your fingers around, not so decorated that you throw up when you look at it, and free of sharp corners, all connected to a blade that isn't oval or triangular or the size of a small spatula and -- dare I say it -- with an edge capable of cutting things (food isn't really that tough) rather than separating them by mashing them down and sawing them into insensibility?
Where is the justice? Back in the 50s they knew how to stamp steel into blades that cut without even any steenkin' serrations. But that knowledge is lost to us now. In the future.
