Toy Stores

If you have read The Muse's blog in the last couple of months, then you know that we -- after an election on the issue -- are getting a Target here in Carmel-by-the-Causeway. (Apparently, our town was the first town in the country to require a public vote to approve a Target. There is a first time for all things, apparently.) This pleases me. I like Target. I like the concept of being able to shop for socks, among other things, in town. Yeah to reducing our town's daily hemorrage of sales tax money to other local communities. One thing about the Target concerns me, however. That is I am pretty concerned about what it will do to our local toy store.

We have a pretty good toy store downtown. It's not the greatest toy store ever, but you can easily spend enjoyable 30-45 minutes in there while your kid shops for a birthday party (which is usually in about an hour, but that's a different issue). It is unfotunately one of a dying breed.

I'm old enough to have very fond memories of local toy stores. The next town over from where I grew up had a toy store to which my mom took my sister and I many times. My mom, my Grandma and my aunt used to go have lunch every Saturday -- usually at a very dark Mexican restaurant where I usually had a hamburger, which is one of the many things about which I now kick myself -- and then go shopping. One of the few appeals of participating in this to me -- shoe and garden-plant shopping often was involved -- was that, if we were good, we got to go to the toy store and spend $1. Even more importantly, after Star Wars came out, we could go and put an action figure on layaway for when I was able to come up with $3 to actually buy it. Ooh, that was awesome.

A local toy store was something of a metaphor for your community. In my hometown, a woman opened a toy store on the main drag (right near the B of A, as I recall) and gave it a go. I was about eight or nine and that was great. A toy store in our town!!! The store closed within a year or two, though, and what I remember people saying is that "I guess town just isn't big enough for a toy store yet." We apparently lived in a small town, although it get a stoplight right around the time that the toy store closed.

The bigger the town, the better the toy store. Our local big city -- known for many things, including being Kevin Federline's hometown -- had a huge, spectacular toy store. We went there about once or twice a year. It had whole separate departments of toys. You could spend days there as a kid.

Toy stores like these, however, are an endangered species. Target and Wal-Mart and probably Costco can buy toys in much larger quantities and therefore probably get much better prices. I recognize that this is the situation with small stores that sell many things that these big stores sell. In relation to toy stores, however, this situation seems particularly troubling. Toys are for fun. (If you leave them in the box so they are pristine, so you can sell them on EBay a la the 40-year-old virgin, I fear for you.) Our kids probably are not going to know how fun it is to go to a really good toy store. "Toy aisle" isn't the same as "toy store."

So, while I am quite glad that Target is coming to town, I think that our kids will keep going to the local toy store for birthday presents. Given our kids' ages, that should for another year or so.

Customer Service

I am sitting here on the phone trying to call JVC's customer service and, in with the usual soothing Muzak, they have an automated function that tells you what number you are in the queue to have your call answered. What a novel concept! After many, many calls to many, many customer service black holes, this is the first time that I have ever called one that actually told how many are in front of you. There ought to be a law requiring this of all customer service lines. Even the ones in India.

Casino Royale

When I was a teenager, I loved James Bond movies. One time when I was about 14, I stayed up until 11 p.m. on a school night to watch On Her Majesty's Secret Service on TV, just so I could say that I had seen all of the movies (to that time). Perhaps even more amazingly, my parents let me do this because they knew the depth of my obsession. And, man, that movie blew. George Lazenby as Bond? Telly Salavas as Blofeld? Not good.

Some time around the time that I went to college, though, I lost interest. Every movie that came out basically sounded about the same. They picked Pierce Brosnan to replace the lame Timothy Dalton (who has done at least one pretty entertaining parody of being James Bond -- in Looney Tunes Back in Action, to be precise). Yawn. John Cleese became Q when the original Q -- Desmond someone, as I recall -- died. Whoa, shocker. Denise Richards played the love interest in one. She was supposed to be a nuclear scientist. Now you have gone too far.

When I read that they were getting a new Bond and doing a simpler story about Bond's first 00 mission, though, I was intrigued. When I saw this guy Daniel Craig that they picked, I thought that he looked like he could be a brutal kind of guy in the same way that Sean Connery looked like he could be a brutal kind of guy. So I was looking forward to Casino Royale, especially after seeing Craig in Munich, which I really liked.

I saw Casino Royale today and it was excellent. You believe Craig as someone who would kill bad guys with his bare hands and then change his tuxedo shirt and go play poker some more. The female lead was much more substantial than the female lead in any other Bond movie. Their relationship was very believeable, although it got uncomfortably . . . mushy for about five minutes. It was kind of like From Here To Eternity. I found myself thinking, "Where in the hell are they going with this?" But then things changed and there was a very well done ending. The movie has some stereotypical Bond elements -- the hot woman in the middle of the movie who ends up dead (although, in a huge upset, Bond doesn't actually sleep with her), blatant product placements, the creepy villian with some facial disfiguration, etc. -- but I highly recommend it.

What I found fascinating both about the movie and, by omission, reviews of it is the debt that the movie owes to 24 and Jack Bauer. The stunts were really more complicated versions of the kinds of things that happen on 24. Chases through construction sites. Fighting in buildings. Bond gets beaten up a lot. People throwing each other down stairts. Things that might actually happen in the real world. There was no skiing away from anonynous bad guys in black suits who descend from the skies on go-karts with parachutes.

Lots more of the movie was like a really high-budget 24. Bond chasing down one terrorist after another, all of whom are working together or for each other. Moles in your organization. People getting tortured for information. Lots of people talking on cell phones and getting information from their PDA's.

Bond movies generally have not been this complicated. Usually, in Bond movies, the one big, bad guy has one grandiose scheme to take over the world and has one really unusual henchman/woman. Yeah, their nefarious plots were complicated, but the actual stories have not been. Casino Royale, though, has the kinds of wheels within wheels that 24 does.

None of the reviews of Casino Royale -- at least the ones that I read -- mentioned how much the movie is like 24. To some extent, the similarity is not a surprise. After September 11, Bond couldn't be interesting if he was going after meglomaniacal fiends with killer satellites. That would have come off as stupid and frivolous now. So, naturally, Bond was going to go after terrorists like Jack Bauer does. But that doesn't explain all of the similarities.

Whatever studio makes Bond movies supposedly wasn't very happy about the producers wanting to shake up the franchise because the previous movie had been the highest grossing one ever. I'm guessing that the producers told the studio, "Look, it's going to be like a 24 movie." And so it was. Which is a good thing.

Casino Royale: Film minus