#2,341: Operation Avalanche

Hide and Seek - ★★★☆☆
Four young adults disengage from society to go live a big, crazy, all-consuming art project. They make themselves outsiders, but nothing gold can stay.

The Lego Batman Movie - ★★★☆☆
I don't know if it's on the page, or in the hands of the animators, but there are a delightful sack of deep cuts in this thing. DVD buying freeze-framers, if they still exist, are going to have a lot to look for. Maybe that's the secret to selling DVDs.

Somehow this movie still wasn't immune to the DC light-and-noise ending - I think I might have started to doze a little during that part.

Operation Avalanche - ★★★☆☆
Operation Lune - ★★½☆☆
A very moon-y double feature.

I tell a joke in my stand-up, "I think there must have been one week each year at Space Camp when every kid there was a Double Dare champion."

And sometimes I make the mistake of telling that to college kids. It's the kind of sentence that will make a drunken 19-year-old just stare at you. 

But the real mistake is that I don't just move on, I get the idea that I should unpack it for them. 

"Okay," I start in, "Space Camp is this thing that doesn't exist anymore, but it was a place where you could send fancy children so that they could pretend to be a part of the Space Program, which is this thing that doesn't exist anymore, but it was this thing we cooked up in the 60s and it was a plan to shoot United States citizens at the moon. And it worked!  Of course, some people don't believe it, they think the whole thing was faked by Stanley Kubrick, who was a filmmaker that doesn't exist anymore–"

Eventually I realize that I have not so much lost them as never regained them in the first place, because I had unpacked the wrong part of the sentence. 

"Okay," I try again, "Double Dare was a game show, that doesn't exist anymore, where the grand prize, so named for its size compared to the other, lesser prizes, was a trip to Space Camp. Now obviously, we're talking about original Double Dare, and not Double Dare 2000, not Family Double Dare, and definitely not Super Sloppy Double Dare, because as we all know, the grand prize of these latter-day Doubles Dare was a trip to Universal Studios Florida. 

"Also known as the place where Double Dare was taped."

That's right, if you someone found yourself on the show, played your ten-year-old heart out, and won?

You got to go outside.

To the theme park you already paid to enter, so that you could be on Double Dare.

At least runners-up got a home copy of the game, which, if they took it home and played and won, they could put away! And take an all-expenses-paid trip to their kitchen!