Demolition Man and Philadelphia (A Blogpost in Two Parts)

I.

#1tomatolover has a slight crush on Sandra Bullock since watching Demolition Man, so he made Ilana and I watch it with him.

The movie combined action flick with distopian future and was interesting and funny. Sylvester Stallone is a cop who does something wrong (the beginning wasn't entirely clear to me) sometime around 1993 (when the movie was made). As a result, he's cryogenically frozen (which, as a nurse explained to me and Mr. and Mrs. Sayers last evening, means quickly frozen, like how you freeze snap peas so that they don't get mushy) and thawed in the 2020's to help apprehend a criminal that he had already apprehended in the 90's.

The 2020's are a scary place: after some big earthquake decimated parts of California, the remaining cities joined together to form one big city. A big brother society says flattering things to all its citizens (cheering them up, for instance, at an ATM-type machine). In addition, every time you curse, a machine prints out a demerit card with a reprimand. This gave a funny, constant backdrop to the film; as you can imagine, Sylvester Stallone swore from time to time. Salt and sex are outlawed (you put on some sort of helmet to have virtual sex) because they're dangerous, and all restaurants have become Taco Bells (Taco Bell won the franchise war). Oldies on the radio are is old jingles from advertisements.

Sandra Bullock plays a cop in the 2020's who's obsessed with the previous century (she's adorable--she loves 20th century slang, but accidentally messes it up, leaving her with phrases such as, "Shovel it!" instead of "Shove it."). She longs for something to happen in a society where they are past things happening. She longs for some sort of crime to solve (their society has lapsed into an extreme equality in which their freedom has been severely restricted in the way that Tocqueville fears--the citizens are all equal under a tyrant who has encouraged them to drift into inaction).

In the end (sorry, I can't help spoiling things, but this isn't exactly a surprise, either), Sandra Bullock discovers that for all of the dangers involved in fluid transfer, kissing is a bit better than sticking on a helmet.

II.

In other (not exactly related) news, I visited Mr. and Mrs. Sayers' brand spanking new (that is to say, 85-year-old) house in Philadelphia yesterday. They live in a charming neighborhood and have a patio/balcony and real hardwood floors and french doors and an herb garden and can walk to church and their friends' houses, and it's lovely. Well, they have an herb garden, but can't exactly tell all of the herbs apart, yet: there are basil (which we ate with bread and tomatoes and cheese) and curry (who knew you could grow that?!) and lavender and rosemary. They grilled salmon and potatoes and squash and zucchini for dinner the night I arrived, and we picked rosemary to sprinkle on the potatoes and vegetables, only to realize after dinner that we'd actually picked the lavender! You would think that the purple flowers would have tipped us off, but no. So we had lavender potatoes and vegetables. Of course, it still tasted excellent. The next night, we found the actual rosemary and used that in the dishes.