I made pancakes from scratch, all by myself. And I’m proud of them way out of proportion to the amount of effort it took. But still, they were damn good.

And when you spend so much time in front of computers, making things that are purely digital (even on productive days), getting up only to have some more prepackaged and preprocessed high fructose corn-syrup laden stuff, there’s something satisfying about starting with flour and ending up with food. Especially if it’s really good food, as I mentioned these were. I even put fresh blueberries in ‘em; that’s how dedicated I was to this experience.

“But Chuck,” some of you may be ready to point out. “Didn’t you say, way back when, that one of the main purposes of this whole website thing was to have an outlet so you could avoid yammering on about stuff that’s as mundane as what you had for lunch?” And I’d have to think that some of you are dicks for throwing that back in my face, but I’d also have to begrudgingly admit that you have a point.

But I’ve been looking forward to these for at least two weeks now. I even got all the stuff yesterday in preparation for a big breakfast this morning, but I’ve been stuck on conference calls so I had to wait until 4pm to eat anything, spending the whole time thinking about pancakes.

And more importantly: if I weren’t yammering on about pancakes, then I’d be whining about everything else. Like how I’ve been having fairly consistent nightmares for over a month now, and can only just barely remember details when I wake up. And there’s this vague sense of dread hanging over everything — it feels like something terrible is going to happen, not exactly soon, but it’s coming, and there’s nothing I can really do about it because I don’t know exactly what it is.

So I think next time I’ll use a little bit less salt and more sugar.

Even though I was warned against it on this very weblog, I still went to see The DaVinci Code Wednesday night. Whoo! Somebody light a match! I didn’t expect it to be good, but I didn’t expect it to be the cinematic equivalent of lying under the chair of a guy who’s delivering a two-and-a-half-hour-long, post-three-bean-and-cheese-burrito fart.

They should’ve… no, wait. That would be going too far. But then again, it was bad enough that I think it’s warranted: they should’ve called it The DaStinky Code. Yeah, I said it.

Roger Ebert’s review says “The movie works; it’s involving, intriguing and constantly seems on the edge of startling revelations.” Which is more confounding than anything presented in the movie — how can he say the movie “works” when it’s always on the edge of being interesting, but never crossing over?

I’ll concede that there are elements that, if given more work, could be used to make either a predictable but passable thriller, or a pretty interesting History Channel documentary. Knights Templar are always good, and everybody loves a good multi-national secret organization. I’ll even admit that a deranged, fanatical albino monk, if he weren’t portrayed as a completely impotent moron, might make a good secondary villain.

But it’s like this movie didn’t even try to make a good story. I’m giving Ron Howard the benefit of the doubt, assuming that he was trying too hard to be faithful to a dumb book. Because the problems with the movie are so obvious I can’t imagine why nobody did anything to fix them. The movie is:

Pandering. You’re never given one second to figure anything out on your own; some character always rushes in to explain exactly what you just saw. When a character isn’t available, helpful CGI effects point the way — it’s a triangle, that looks like a womb… GET IT?

Muddled. It’s never clear who planted what clues and when. As Mac asked when we were leaving, “So wait… I.M. Pei was a Templar?” For all the exposition we subjected to, we’re still never given even a rudimentary timeline — who was supposed to be writing these riddles? Why would a French guy, leaving clues for his French granddaughter, use English riddles and “APPLE” instead of “POMME?”

Stone dull. About nine hours into Ian McKellan’s Flash presentation on The Last Supper (the one he keeps ready down in the basement in case any wanted criminals show up with questions), crazy albino monk jumps out of nowhere and attacks him. Ostensibly, this was to stop our heroes from uncovering the secret, but I say he was just thinking, “For the love of Christ will you stop with the exposition already!”

Stupid. As pandering and dull and exposition-heavy as the movie is, there are still plenty of places where they figured the audiences would still be too dense to be able to follow along, so they had to dumb it down for us. Again, as Mac pointed out: Tom Hanks’ character is introduced as a Professor of “symbology,” because apparently Harvard University isn’t familiar with the term “semiotics.”

Implausible. Which would be okay if it were exciting. National Treasure, the Bruckheimer “let’s be secular so as not to piss anyone off” attempt to capitalize on the craze around The DaVinci Code book, was a really stupid movie. But it at least was a decent action/thriller, so you suspend disbelief and let things slide so they can tell their story. And still its clues and plot points were better and made more dramatic sense than The DaVinci Code’s.

For starters, we’re supposed to believe that an old man who’s just been shot in the gut is able to go around leaving a series of complicated clues for his estranged granddaughter? No. And even if I were feeling charitable and were willing to give the movie that one so it can get things going, it’s still a movie. Show him, gut shot bleeding profusely, staggering around the Louvre, thinking up anagrams, writing them on priceless paintings, hiding keys, then stripping naked, writing more needlessly cryptic anagrams and numeric sequences on the floor in his own blood, then lying down and drawing a pentagram on himself. Preferably, to the tune of “Yakety Sax.” Show, don’t tell. Or, in the case of this movie, show, don’t smell. Yeah, I said it again.

Insulting. One of those anagrams, if I’m remembering it right, was for “LEONARDO DAVINCI THE MONA LISA.” Which is good, because people standing in the Louvre aren’t going to pick up on your clue if you just said “Mona Lisa.” (All the promotional stuff around the book has pictures of the Mona Lisa, which always implied to me some ancient mystery revealed in the painting — nope, turns out it’s a message written, in English, on the painting). But maybe grandpa knew he had to be explicit, on account of Sophie’s learning disability. For a story whose central conceit is the idea of evil men in the Catholic Church concealing a secret for millennia in order to preserve their oppressive patriarchy, you’d think the one woman in the story wouldn’t be such a simpleton. She spends the entire movie having things explained to her. Supposedly trained from the age of four to solve riddles and puzzles, she can’t figure out any of the basics, even at gunpoint.

I’d said earlier that I was doomed to see the movie no matter what, just to see what all the fuss was about. So I guess at least I can say that’s over. I just read an excerpt from the book online, and it looks like the movie was pretty much a line-for-line reverse-novelization. So at least I only wasted two and a half hours on it, instead of however long it would’ve taken me to read the book.

It has shaken my faith, though. The book has sold over 60 million copies and has plenty of people who still defend it. How could a loving God let this happen?

The season finale of “Alias” aired on Monday night. There’s a bit where Sydney tells her evil mom, “I’m through being disappointed by you.” That pretty much sums it up.

I’m not going to bother with spoilers, since it’s already up for free on ABC’s website, and anyone who’s still interested in this show has probably already seen it.

As episodes of disposable television series go, it wasn’t all that bad. There were explosions, and stunt scenes, and espionage setups, and a teary dramatic moment between Sydney and her dad that was actually pretty well done. Still, the whole thing soured me on the series and was enough to make me kind of embarrassed I ever got into the show in the first place.

The deal with “Alias” was always that you go the sense they knew exactly what they were doing. They knew exactly how ridiculous their plots were, but damn if they weren’t going to give you the best CIA family drama with evil twins and zombies and explosions story it’s possible to make. When it worked, it was populist without being pandering, not taking itself too seriously but also not resorting to arch parody.

When you’ve got that balance, you can keep ratcheting up the action sequences without worrying about its getting too unrealistic — as long as it makes dramatic sense, you’re golden, ancient prophecies and sentient bee swarms and all. And you can throw in character drama without it devolving into melodrama or being just a whiny soap opera. But without that balance, it just lays bare the unbelievability of the plot and the characters.

That’s my problem with the finale; it just made it obvious that they didn’t know what they were doing. There’s really no excuse for it, either — they had a long maternity leave, and they knew that the series was going to end, so they had plenty of time to build up to a big finish. Instead, they dicked around for five or six episodes, and then tried to tie up everything in the last 15 minutes or so. I’m even fine with what they did, just not how they did it. It was like they had a bullet list of things that had to happen: these people have to die, these have to live, we’ve got to blow up headquarters, we’ve got to have clandestine picture-taking, two bomb countdowns, tie up the Rambaldi business, have dramatic death scenes, and tie up Sydney Bristow’s Personal Journey. You’ve got an hour and a half. Go.

It was all so by-the-numbers that none of it mattered, and it in retrospect, it made the whole series seem pretty stupid and cobbled together. The whole season has been like that — storylines like the one with Tom that just went nowhere. To get into “why can’t you be more like your brother?” territory — when “Lost” had its big shocking episode a couple of weeks ago, the episode of “Alias” that aired the same night technically did the exact same thing (killed off two major characters with one plot twist). But while “Lost” had me sitting on the couch feeling like I’d had the wind knocked out of me, “Alias” just had me thinking, “Well, that happened.”

The worst is that I can take their bullet list of things that had to happen, and come up with a much better scenario that would’ve worked and tied everything together, without even trying that hard: All they had to do is have the first hour be the build-up to a big showdown on Mt. Subasio. Most of the main characters get killed as Sloane does the “horizon” thing with the sunlight (skip the bit in Rambaldi’s tomb; that was dumb). Jack sacrifices himself to save Sydney and kills Sloane in the process. Sydney’s left standing there looking just like the drawing in the manuscript, then she decides to use the horizon’s power to “fix” everything. (In this version, it actually lets you control time and such, instead of some immortality juice that’s a huge let-down after five seasons of build-up).

The whole second hour is flashbacks/alternate reality type deals where she’s going back through series and saving people she couldn’t save before. Like her fiance, and Francie, and everybody that got killed in the first hour. But the whole time, she keeps being reminded that people choose their own path, and she can’t save everyone. When she sees the results of all her changes, it’s the end of the world, with the “stars falling from the sky” and all the other prophecies we were promised. Irina gives her speech about power being the most important thing, but Sydney tells her she’s wrong, because she has all the power in the world now and still can’t fix everything. Jack tells her he wanted to keep her safe from the whole spy business, but now he realizes that he didn’t control her; she made her own choices to save the world. With that, she goes back to the final showdown and lets it play out with most everybody surviving. Jack still sacrifices himself to save her, Irina and Sloane die, and we get the exact same epilogue we had in the “real” episode.

There. (If you want a better resolution for Sloane, he could be in a mental institution with Nadia and Emily haunting him for the rest of his life). That only took about 20 minutes, and even that is better than what they came up with after five months. You get all the stuff they were trying to say about power and choices and sacrifice, and you get all the cheesy sci-fi spy stuff, and you still get a semi-happy ending.

And that doesn’t count as “fan fiction,” so shut up.

Tonight I went with Mac to see Poseidon. Yes, on purpose.

The reviews will tell you this movie is bad, and the reviews will be correct. It’s really tough to recommend; we had fun watching it, but we had to put a lot of effort into it. I think even if I were Joel Siegel and I were desperate to come up with quotable blurbs to put on the poster, the best I’d be able to come up with would be “Guaranteed to make you have to pee!”

It was pretty clear it was going to be bad as soon as the opening shot started. It was a long fly-over of the boat that didn’t look like an ad for a cruise ship line as much as an ad for a piece of open-source CGI rendering software. Set against a sunset straight out of one of those inspirational “Footsteps in the Sand” posters.

I think the whole point of the scene was to introduce us to our hero, who is not Matthew McConaughey. Dude likes to run, and he had some type of previous career involving the Navy. That’s about all the character background we get for him, but that’s all right because that’s pretty much all the character background we get for anybody. The movie’s got an assload of dead bodies throughout, meant I guess to imply how horrible a disaster the Rogue Wave caused but without having to go into a lot of exposition as to who these people are. But you don’t really care much more about the main characters than you care about Random Immolation Victim #38.

There’s the ex-Mayor of New York who loves his daughter, the daughter who needs to prove to Daddy that she’s a grown woman, the boyfriend who’s there, sleazy greasy gambler Lucky Larry, a waiter, a captain who’s clearly slumming after “Homicide” got cancelled, and a woman who has a kid.

Fergie from the Black-Eyed Peas is in the movie. Ironically, she’s the only actor in the main credits who remains dry throughout the entire film. When I’d heard she was in it, I was hoping there’d be a dramatic scene where everybody’s standing hip-deep in water and they say, “Wait… did it just suddenly get warmer?” And then the camera pans over to Fergie and she shrugs and there’s the sound of tinkling bells and a slide trombone.

Richard Dreyfuss goes against type and plays a mopey, fussy, annoying old gay architect. I couldn’t tell if he was acting so prissy because they wanted to play up that he was old, or because they wanted to play up that he was gay, or because he’s Richard Dreyfuss. Mac pointed out that he exclaims “oy vey!” at one point, and also calls the waiter guy “gorgeous,” so I’m guessing his role in the movie was to combine Shelley Winters’ and Red Buttons’ characters from the original into one show-stopping performance.

Nadia from “Alias” is also in the movie, playing the Catholic claustrophobic Elena who’s Catholic. Also, she’s Catholic. This is crucial, because her crucifix is the only thing the movie has that resembles a plot point. In case you were in danger of forgetting that she’s Catholic, they make sure to show her making the Sign of the Cross every 30 seconds. This was clever re-enforcement of the idea (to wit: she’s Catholic), otherwise audiences would be completely bewildered at the sight of a Hispanic woman wearing a crucifix. On “Alias,” she only appeared for like 20 episodes, and by my calculations, she was impaled by glass shards about 18 times and turned into a zombie. In Poseidon, she isn’t much less clumsy.

I never liked disaster movies, because they always seemed completely pointless. This movie is so pointless and inessential it makes the original seem profound. I kept hoping for some sign of cleverness or suspense, or even irony, but the people making the movie just wouldn’t meet me halfway. They just really wanted to be faithful to the canon of the original, I guess, and exhaustively document the story of a ship that sinks and almost everybody except a few people dies.

Which reminds me: the death count is disappointingly low. I kept hoping for random shark attacks or electrocutions or getting sucked into jet engines or even ravaged by an unexpected shipment of snakes that break loose from the cargo hold. There’s only two main character deaths that are cool at all, and they’re both telegraphed way in advance and happen too soon and too close to each other. The annoying child character comes tantalizingly close to death about a dozen times, but for whatever reason he shows a Terminator-like knack for surviving.

There’s exactly one sequence in the movie that’s genuinely kind of cool. It’s after crash when Kurt Russell suddenly climbs out of a pile of open-eyed dead bodies, horrifying the mom and her kid. It lasts about 8 seconds. That’s not too good for a movie that’s about 100 minutes long.

But the summer movie season ain’t over yet. Next week: The DaVinci Code. I really want to go to the theater a day early and wait in line, wearing my albino monk costume. Incidentally, every time a big blockbuster movie comes out, there’s always a porn movie with a parody title released soon afterwards. When are they going to come out with The DaVinci Choad?

Through the Scientific Process I have made a discovery: drinking caffeine makes me stay awake.

Shocking yes, but science doesn’t lie. I thought I’d developed a tolerance to caffeine what with the years of swilling Coke non-stop. When I got sick a while back, I swore allegiance to the Un-Cola for a while, and ended up sticking with it. It didn’t take too long to ween myself off the Coke, down to one a day and then none at all for a week and a half. I can’t shake the Lymon monkey, though, so I’m still going through twelve-packs of Sprite and 7-Up. But at least it’s a start, and even though I remain a fat-ass, I’ll be a well-rested fat-ass.

After a week and a half caffeine-free, I was actually getting to bed around midnight and feeling slightly but noticeably better off. This weekend, a home intruder left a pack of Cokes, and I’ve been drinking them, and I’m back to being up at 2 AM, watching “Lost” (sure, I would’ve done that anyway) and making rambling blog posts. A connection!

But I have been having cooler dreams, which is the only point of this post; I want to write it down before I forget. Last night I was part of a mystery-party contest in an old Japanese castle in Kyoto. Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Mario Bros. and Link and Donkey Kong) had gathered people who work in videogames to solve a murder mystery, using a Nintendo DS.

That part is just because of what I’d been doing all day; reading about E3 on the internets and then reading a Japanese comic book about a murder mystery in a German castle. The cool part, though: I was in Miyamoto’s secret lab to find the crucial clue that would unlock the whole case. I found that he’d been cross-breeding different species of plants and animals, and his secret lab was a giant terrarium.

The whole table was littered with Chinese take-out boxes, which I’d assumed he’d been eating out of while he worked. Suddenly, one of the boxes unfolded and started hopping across the table. When it moved, you could tell it was a tree frog, but when it stopped, it looked exactly like a take-out box. Kind of like a stick bug, or the insects that look exactly like leaves. Miyamoto explained that there was so much litter now, that insects that used leaves and sticks as camouflage would stand out, so he was working on versions that would blend it with urban environments.

He then said that since I’d discovered his secret, he was going to have to kill me. He pulled out one of the Wii remote controllers to club me, and then my alarm clock went off.

A few weeks ago I was outside the multiplex of the soulless Glendale Galleria, looking at the posters of coming attractions and dreading the summer. Larry the Cable Guy was still playing, and the movies we had to look forward to were The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift and Garfield 2.

I was thinking that there is a reason people aren’t going to see movies much anymore, and the MPAA needs to learn that it’s not because of pirates or bootleggers or DVRs.

But I just got back from seeing Mission: Impossible 3, and not only was it good, but every single trailer they showed beforehand looked like something I’d want to see.

Tonight’s movie first: it’s not going to make anybody’s best movie ever list, but it’s a good, solid summer action movie with plenty of explosions and enough intelligence behind it to never kick you out of the experience. I’d heard people say it’s like “Alias” with Tom Cruise, but not really — it’s a good bit less goofy than “Alias.” And I’ve heard people were averse to see it because of Mr. Cruise, but for all his faults you’ve got to give him credit: once the movie starts, he usually disappears and does a good job. There’s only one bit where he was acting, where he’s telling his fiancee to trust him. The rest is all running from stuff getting blown up, and, which struck me as unusual for an action movie, acting like he’s winded afterwards.

So that’s one down. My take on the rest of the movies I’m interested in seeing, in order, just based on the trailers:

1. Pirates of the Caribbean 2: I dunno, maybe that makes me a company yes-man or something. The trailer kicks ass. (The trailer I saw tonight isn’t online yet as far as I can tell). Great villain, good one-liners, neat effects, looks like a hell of a lot of fun.
2. X-Men 3: The buzz around this one is looking worse and worse, but I’m sticking by it.
3. Superman Returns: I haven’t been able to put my finger on it, but this one just hasn’t really grabbed me. I still think the actor, the suit, Lois Lane, everything except Kevin Spacey as Luthor, just seems “off.” The new trailer is great, though, so that bumped it up the list.
4. The DaVinci Code: Remember this list is relative. I’m not expecting the movie to be good, but I’m going to see it anyway — I sure as hell am not going to read the book, and the story sounds just interesting enough to make me wonder what all the fuss is about. Plus, Audrey Tautou.
5. Over the Hedge: I know! I’m surprised too, but it looks like it might actuall be kind of funny. What sells it is William Shatner as a possum.
6. The Omen: Why do I want to see this one? For you, Damien! It’s all for you! But really, it’s for Mia Farrow as creepy nanny. And because the original is just about the stupidest “thriller” movie ever made, and I’m curious whether it’s possible to make a scary movie out of it. Seriously, the whole movie is like two hours of Gregory Peck going from person to person and having them say, “your son is the devil,” and then dying horribly, and still he never clues in.
7. Poseidon: And this getting down to the very bottom of the barrel, but it’s summer, and it’s a giant ship that rolls over and sinks. Which is a metaphor for something or other.

Not an outstanding line-up, but still. It should be enough of a diversion until Fall and Snakes on a Plane.

I woke up this morning just after having a dream where I was Superman.

But it wasn’t a cool dream, where I was flying, or beating up on people, or kickin’ it with Lois or Lana, or even bringing back souvenirs for my pal Jimmy Olsen.

No, in my dream it was: “Oh HELL no I don’t need this! I’ve got enough to deal with as it is, and now I gotta be Superman? People are going to be asking me to do stuff for them, and I’m going to have to be flying all over the place getting in fights and stopping evil.”

So I didn’t even get to the flying part, or even put on the suit for that matter; I was too busy pitching a fit. In retrospect it’s a good thing I woke up when I did, because I hadn’t remembered about Kryptonite yet. That and Mr. Mxyzptlk would’ve probably gotten me on a tirade that would’ve lasted into the afternoon.

The whole incident reminded me that I’ve never had a dream where I was flying. If you believe what you read, it’s pretty common, but the closest I’ve ever come that I can remember was dreaming I was in the observation deck of the World Trade Center and the glass wasn’t there, so I fell out but didn’t hit the ground. I just kind of hung there, over that big globe statue that used to be there, then got bored and the dream switched to something else.

If I were into dream analysis, I’m sure this would all lead me to believe that I’ve got a lack of imagination and I’m repressed and inclined to be pessimistic and negative. But then, if I were into dream analysis, I’d have to start putting more weight in those dreams I keep having about me, Rachael Ray, Larry the Cable Guy, Velma, and Sayid from “Lost” all snowboarding down a mountain but it turns out the snow is actually sausage gravy and we all crash into a giant biscuit and then fall as one big pile onto the conveyor belt of a lumber-mill and as we inch closer to the giant saw blade I can feel one of them start grabbing me, you know, down there and I’m afraid to look down and see which one it is and I wake up screaming.

Lucasfilm finally caved and are releasing the original Star Wars movies on DVD. I’m not happy about it.

Reason one: I already bought the “special editions.” I don’t like the special editions. The Death Star did not blow up with a shock wave. Either time. And as the Star Wars.com main page reminds us now, even though they’ve been denying it for years because of you know “original artistic vision” and all that crap, Han shot first.

I put off buying the special editions for a long time, and then finally caved when I realized it was the only way I was going to be able to have copies of the original movies on DVD. If I could exchange the special editions for the real ones, then I’d be okay with that. Something tells me they’re not going to let you do that, though. When I do some ciphering and calculate how much money I made from working for Lucas companies vs. how much money I’ve given to Lucas companies, I think I’m at a net loss.

Reason two: “This release will only be available for a limited time: from September 12th to December 31st.” On the press release, they should just replace this sentence with a picture of George flipping us the bird. Haven’t these guys heard of ebay? Don’t they realize that this is going to make it impossible for people to just go into a store and pick up a copy of the DVDs? There’s going to be speculators all over the place waiting in line to snatch up all the available copies, then sell them online for a huge mark-up.

Disney gets a lot of grief — and very deservedly so — for their whole “Disney vault” nonsense and creating an artificial demand for DVD releases by only leaving them out for a limited time. It may generate revenue for them (although considering they’re down to doing it with direct-to-video stuff like Mulan VIII or Bambi’s Revenge, even that well may have dried up), but it just pisses off the fans.