Wow, I haven’t updated in awhile. Let me start from where I left off. The weekend of the 19th, we went to see Dodgeball and The Terminal.

In Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, Ben Stiller plays White Goodman, a pumped-up fitness guru, pretty much a variation of Derek Zoolander. White owns a multi-million-dollar health club called Globo Gym, whose slogan is “We’re better than you and we know it.” Vince Vaughn plays Peter La Fleur, a nice, absent-minded guy, who owns a shabby, run-down health club, called Average Joe’s Gym, with a nutty, but loyal clientele, including Milton from Office Space!

Peter has to save Average Joe’s from foreclosure and prevent White from turning it into a parking lot. The absurd moneymaking scheme that Peter's nerdy pals come up with is to compete for the $50,000 grand prize in the World Series Dodgeball Tournament in Las Vegas, an event “bigger than the World Cup, the World Series, and WWII combined.” Never mind that none of them know anything about the sport.

To learn about dodgeball, they watch a 1950’s instructional film in which Patches O’Houlihan (Hank Azaria), a legendary dodgeball champion, explains “the sport of violence, exclusion, and degradation.” Then, an aged Patches (Rip Torn) turns up in a motorized wheelchair to train the Average Joes. He teaches them the five D’s of the sport: “Dodge, dip, duck, dive, and dodge.” Yes, both #1 and #5 are dodge. But his funniest training method is when he hurls wrenches full-force at the heads of his students, saying “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.”

The dodgeball finals are telecast on ESPN8 (The Ocho): "If it's almost a sport, we have it here!" The gushing sports announcers are the boss from Office Space and the brother from Arrested Development. My favorite part was late in the movie when a famous man approaches Peter at the airport (I don’t want to give it away for those who haven’t seen it yet, since it was one of the few funny scenes not revealed in the trailers).

The Terminal, on the other hand, is a sweet comedy that has big laughs, but never seems to make an effort for them. Tom Hanks plays Viktor Navorski, a passenger that has arrived in New York just as his nation, Krakozia, has fallen in a coup. Therefore his passport and visa are worthless, since his country no longer exists, and he cannot go forward or go back. He is free to remain in the international terminal of the airport, but forbidden to step foot on American soil. The story is loosely based on the real experience of an Iranian traveler marooned for a much longer period in a Paris airport after the fall of the Shah.

Tom Hanks plays his entire role with an accent of varying degrees, but it never seems like a comic turn or a gimmick, and he never seems to be doing it to get a laugh. He gets a lot of laughs, but his acting and the writing are so good that they seem to evolve naturally. The screenplay also sidesteps various hazards that a lesser film would have used, such as a phony crisis or a big action climax. In fact, the movie doesn't have a plot, instead it tells a story, and makes us want to know what will happen next.

The terminal is filled with other characters Viktor gets to know, such as Amelia the flight attendant (Catherine Zeta-Jones, gorgeous as usual), who is so used to being mistreated by the married men she dates that she has forgotten how to respond to genuine kindness. And Gupta the janitor, who leaves the floor wet and watches as passengers ignore the little yellow warning pyramids and slip and fall. "This is the only fun I have," he says. And a food services employee, who is in love with an INS official and uses Viktor as his go-between.

The coolest part of the movie is that most of it was shot on a three-story set. The pretend terminal included four working escalators, 60,000 square feet of marble floors, and 35 individual stores — including Burger King, Borders Books, Godiva chocolates, and Hugo Boss clothing. There was a working food court because all the vendors who lent their names also lent their personnel and working kitchens. All the retail shops had working products too. Steven Spielberg said he would go to the Brookstone and sit in the vibrating chair and read his script. And Tom Hanks confessed that he took a headset for his cell phone from the Verizon store.

Okay, it’s getting late and this entry is getting long. So, I’ll write about my fun free trips to New York and San Francisco next time!