Go Balls Deep!

We've been watching quite a few movies lately - Spiderman 2, Before Sunset, The Bourne Supremacy, Shrek 2, Fahrenheit 9/11. And there's a great deal more that we want to see - Garden State, Anchorman, The Hunting of the President, Harold and Kumar, Napolean Dynamite. But last night, we headed out to the Parkway and watched Dodgeball. Yes, I know the movie looks terrible. Yes, I know it's very lowbrow. And I absolutely detest dodgeball. I mean, why on earth would you play a "sport" that involves having high velocity projectiles launched at you in order to hit and or possibly maim you? But I love Ben Stiller, and I enjoy a good "bad" flick as much as any other 12 year old. You know what kind of movie I'm talking about. Movies that make absolutely no pretensions about the sort of entertainment level they're shooting for. Happy Gilmore, Deuce Bigalow Male Gigolo, Kingpin, Zoolander, hell, just about all Adam Sandler movies. Wes Anderson they're not, but admit it, you love them. Anyways, I had zero expectations about the movie, and I laughed my ass off. The "you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball" scene that's been broadcast a million times in the trailer is even funnier onscreen and hey, there's even a pirate. But the reason I'm writing about this and not 9/11 or Spiderman 2 is because when we got home, there was a rather bizarre turn of events. We flipped on the telly, and in a case of life imitating art (or was is art imitating life?), the Game Show Network was showing... Extreme Dodgball. I shit you not. The rules were only slightly different than those on film, but the teams on the show were just as big losers as they were in the fictional movie. Yeah, I know I sound harsh, but there was a team of mimes! Seriously! And when they were showing individual player profiles, their personal bylines were (in addition to age, height, weight, ball velocity) blurbs like "does not own a bed" (???), "thinks she looks like Daryl Dannah" (Daryl Hall is more like it). And the commentators were actually said something about being left with only a rash after "getting inside" one of the players during spring break. I actually had to prod Zack awake this morning, asking, "Was that real? What the hell was that?"