Argh.

Okay, I need to stop referring to unpleasant current events in this blog, otherwise the ads on the top will be mocking me for the rest of the time. I will commence to only discuss happy things, like butterflies and puppies and rubber cement dripping through homemade valentines. Yes, hopefully that will wash the nasty aftertaste of the google generated advertising schemes off my blog.

I saw the movie Word Wars last night, and though it was billed as a Spellbound-esque program, I had to admit that it fell rather short on that triple-letter score. The big difference: the filmmaker's ability to get into the characters and really convey who we were watching. The plot was simple enough; as simple as Spellbound's and structured similarly in some ways. Though, it fell well short of the characters that appeared in Spellbound -- the kids were far more compelling characters. Not that the adult stars of Word Wars didn't have their moments, but they were clearly not as open to revealing enough of themselves...or, more likely, because they had become so obsessed with their hobby/habit, they didn't have much depth to relay to a viewer. The overall effect was one of a kind of isolating, claustrophobic, disconnection. I suppose that's something, but I got the sense that wasn't really the goal of the program. The kids of Spellbound seemed to rise above their own particular obsession, handling loss and win with equal grace and true feeling, whereas the word warriors all seemed to have become completely subsumed by the scrabble addiction.