Irascibility makes the world go round

Dustin Hoffman, scientist

I caught Sphere on TV the other day, a mediocre yet entertaining version of one of Michael Crichton’s page-turners.  In it, Dustin Hoffman plays a psychologist, Sharon Stone plays a marine biologist, Samuel L. Jackson plays a mathemetician, and Liev Schreiber plays an astrophysicist.

Right now Outbreak is on TV, where Dustin Hoffman plays a microbiologist along with Kevin Spacey (with some fantastic nigh-orange hair dye), Rene Russo, and Cuba Gooding Junior (!).  The parallels between the two casts is amusing and completely stereotypical for these kinds of movies (Stone and Russo play Hoffman’s former love interests who then rediscover their feelings over the course of the movie, etc), but it’s Hoffman who really ties the bizarre casting choices together.

Hoffman plays a harried scientist in a crisis situation well and I think he also gets the audience to identify with him because he does seem like an everyman.  He’s well-educated and all of that, but when he’s put in a crisis situation he reacts like we’d all like to react: he has strong emotions but ultimately responds in a rational manner in order to figure out the mystery and save the day.

I don’t know whether there’s a point to this post…Hoffman is a great actor who’s put in some great performances, and he brings some gravitas to otherwise pedestrian material in these two movies.  These two movies have some fine casts and he plays well with other strong actors (Schreiber, Spacey, and Morgan Freeman).  And it just seems like these kinds of movies haven’t come out a lot lately, science-y disaster movies with good casts.  Day After Tomorrow and The Core weren’t very good (side note: I wonder if the status of popular science determines what kind of natural disaster movies we get.  We worry about global warming, we get Day After Tomorrow.  With the swine flu, might we get some more epidemic movies?) and I can’t think of any coming out this summer.

As another side note, it’s hard to watch Hoffman and not think of the iconic performance in Rain Man.  Whenever he gets all heated in a disaster movie, I half-expect him to start rocking back and forth and muttering about pancakes and maple syrup.

Albert Pujols and Spanish Grammar

So…in a move away from the usual high standards of propriety and grace with which I comport myself on this blog, here comes some vulgarity.

In 2004, during the World Series, whenever Albert Pujols would come to the plate Tai would start giggling.  The reason is that the word ‘pujo’ in Spanish, roughly translated, means ‘s**t grunt’.

Today Tai looked it up in a Spanish online dictionary for some reason.  Reprinted here is the first definition provided in Spanish:

1. m. Gana continua o frecuente de defecar o de orinar, con gran dificultad de lograrlo y acompañada de dolores.

Here, for your amusement, is the definition provided by Babelfish:

1. m. Continuous desire or frequents to defecate or to tinkle, with great difficulty to obtain it and accompanied of pains.

Nuff said.