I don’t know what it means either, but it’s the two words that popped, side by side, into my head while staring into the freezer before dinner. State of mind indicators?

Caught “Wallace & Gromit - The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” at the Cinerama on Friday. It was good but ultimately unsatisfying, since I had such high expectations for it. I first saw Wallace & Gromit in “A Close Shave” at a Spike & Mike’s festival a decade ago, and at the time thought it was one of the most wonderful pieces of animation ever put on film. The shot where Gromit’s motorcycle sidecar careens off the cliff only to be saved in spectacular inventive fashion left me in stunned, awed delight, which persisted for the rest of the sheep chase and the showdown at the factory - and I was just revelling in the storytelling aspect; subsequent endeavours both in computer animation and claymation have distilled in me a proper appreciation of how hard the process itself is. (Geeks who revel in all things process-related should definitely check out Creating 3-D Animation: The Aardman Book of Filmmaking by Sibley and Lord; it’s light on practical detail but it’s still a nice read about Aardman. After that, pick up more hardcore texts on stuff like armatures or model-making at the SIGGRAPH bookstore; I’ve always seen them deeply discounted there.) I rewatched all three shorts again and “A Close Shave” and “The Wrong Trousers” still hold up after repeated watchings as fantastic storytelling; which is why I was disappointed with “Were-Rabbit”. The story felt stretched, and though I don’t want to say that Aardman should have kept the characters in a half-hour short format, the last third of the film felt draggy and forced. The humor left me with dry chuckles but no out and out laughter, and the film’s climax felt like it had been done before (no surprise; the planes looked like they were recycled from “Shave”). I think what I most missed was that aforementioned moment of delight where Gromit brilliantly gets out of a jam (perhaps in conjunction with one of Wallace’s inventions, perhaps not). There’s at least two of these in “Shave”, one in “Trousers” during the train chase, and I’m hard pressed to come up with even one in “Were-Rabbit”. I feel like I’m slagging the film, but I’m not; I really love those two characters, I liked the film enough, and just had unreasonably high hopes that were sadly not met.

Watched hockey on television for the first time in over a year on Saturday - NHL only shows up on CBC in my cable lineup, so it’s going to be a once a week habit for me. It was the Vancouver vs Edmonton game. While I appreciated the lack of clutching and grabbing and the faster paced game (courtesy of the new NHL rules) it was disappointing to see Bertuzzi and Chris Pronger keeping a restraint on their more physical style style of play. (Okay, Bertuzzi is a goon, but he’s still *our* goon.) And of course, after mouthing off about the new NHL rule that I detest most - ties ultimately determined by shootout - the first game of the season I watch ends up in a shootout! My shootout apathy dates back at least to the gold medal hockey match between Canada vs Sweden in the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics. Watching Sweden tie it up in the last few seconds of regular play, tie Canada in the first best-of-five shootout, and then break the hearts of millions of Canadians in the second shootout, has pretty much left me down on that system. This was repeated four years later, but in 1994 Olympic hockey was still amateurs only, and as a result much more fun to watch, so in 1998 I didn’t care. It doesn’t help that Cloutier (Vancouver’s goalie) obviously still panics under pressure, helping lose it for Vancouver. Hockey games should go into overtime periods as long as it takes, even during the regular season. I want to see players collapse on the ice from sheer exhaustion after five consecutive periods, dammit.