NFL Thoughts, Week 8

This was a pretty terrible week of football. There weren’t any marquee matchups, and the two I got in New York were particularly bad. The best thing about the Giants’ sloppy win over Miami was Jeremy Shockey’s new haircut, while the only redeeming feature of the Jets-Bills game was that it ended. And yet I watched both of them, because I just like football—even if it’s really crappy, it’s still football. Where else but football can you get a guy like Devin Hester, who took speaking in the 3rd person to new, unprecedented levels this week? Discussing the dilemma opposing teams face when kicking off to the Bears, Hester boasted: “You can either give it to us on the 40, or you can pitch to Barry Bonds.” What do you call speaking of yourself in the 3rd person, only the 3rd person is someone else? 3rd person metaphorical?

Anyway, my wife is the same way about vampire movies that I am about football. We saw (read: “she dragged me to”) 30 Days of Night, which is a poor facsimile of 28 Days Later, itself a sequel to 28 Days, which was a riff on Dawn of the Dead, the weak remake of the original Dawn of the Dead, sequel to Night of the Living Dead. As you can imagine, very little new ground was broken or blood was spurted on this one. Josh Hartnett, whose star has clearly fallen, was reduced to peering out of a barricaded window every twenty minutes or so and grimly announcing to the others, “We’ve got to move.” Meanwhile, the standard conflicts cycled through their expected motions: what to do when a character gets bitten but doesn’t die right away (answer: tearfully apologize, then decapitate him with an axe); characters weighed the pros and cons of staying safe in the attic vs. making a run for supplies; plot contrivances led to identifying the vampires’ ONE weakness (and actually, I’ll give the writers a couple of points on this one: it’s the UV lamp Grandma uses to grow her medical marijuana), etc., etc., etc.

I think the best testament to the utter lack of originality here was the high number of audience members who went to the bathroom—even during the middle of “key” sequences. It was a collectively tacit admission that we’d seen this all before, and it made it feel very much like we were all just watching a crappy movie in someone’s living room (which I suppose would be comforting if the tickets hadn’t cost $12 a pop). Come to think of it, even the characters in the movie were relatively unfazed by the events that unfolded, considering they revolved around an entire town being ravaged by hordes of undead flesh-eaters. Erin was no exception. She openly acknowledged afterward (and heck, even beforehand) that the movie was not only unoriginal and terrible, but clumsily executed. But at the end of the day—or in this case, 30 days—she just likes vampires.

Similarly, I got just about what I expected out of Week 8, and it wasn’t much. But I still watched anyway, because, hey, it’s football. In Carolina, the Panthers were predictably run over by the Colts. Even though Indianapolis fumbled twice and dropped six passes, Carolina couldn’t be led to water to drink if Peyton Manning were to pour it for them out of his protective cup. And though I was disappointed—not only by the Panthers, but by the games in general—I wouldn’t call it a wasted experience. For some of us, when it comes football games and vampires, irony and quality productions aren’t a requirement.

Offensive Player of the Week: Reggie Wayne, Colts. 7 catches for 168 yards and a touchdown. Without Marvin Harrison to steal his glory, Wayne torched Carolina’s secondary like it was southern California forestry.

Defensive Player of the Week: Mike Vrabel, Patriots. 13 tackles, 3 forced fumbles, 3 sacks. I think he also caught some touchdown passes, assisted Kevin Garnett, and homered off Manny Corpus. All hail the Kingdom of Boston.

PS—

If you go this site, you can download a radio interview with yours truly—along with my better half—speaking extremely knowledgeably about the 2008 elections. Among the many poignant observations I make is that the President is, in fact, the Commander-in-Chief. I also note that Fred Thompson resembles a St. Bernard (the ball’s in your court, Tim Russert). In my defense, I was answering the reporter’s questions while trying unsuccessfully to prevent my dog, Lincoln, from rolling in a pile of mud and emerging looking like a grinning Al Jolson. Because I had bathed him approximately fifteen minutes beforehand, I was a bit preoccupied.