Some time during our California trip last summer, apropos of I don't remember what, my wife made an idle remark about bowling which, for the first time in my life, gave me some inkling of the appeal of this sport.

I remember having similar epiphanies in my youth about fishing and golf. Evidently there really are some people who enjoy the sport as such, and I won't try to understand them, but for many golf is just a convenient excuse to take a long walk in a beautiful park with lovely manicured lawns. Fishing is just an excuse to spend all day sitting by a creek or a lake doing nothing. This makes sense to me. Personally, I've never needed an excuse to do things like that, but I can see how one might.

Bowling, I now realize, is an excuse to look at people's butts. Think about it. You take turns walking to the front of the group, you face the other direction, do a little walk, and then lean over a bit. Could they have planned it any better? The spectators, meanwhile, have absolutely nothing else to do but sit and watch. You don't even have to be sly or pretend to be looking at something else because you're supposed to be watching. And then, since fair is fair, every time around you go up and take your turn showing off your own butt to the others.

Finally, bowling makes sense to me.

She has yet to make me see the appeal of going to a movie theater, though, and not for lack of effort. Ericka is a huge movie fan, which I am not. I like watching a movie occasionally -- provided it's in one of the genres I like -- but I can't for the life of me see why one would prefer to see a movie at the theater rather than at home: You have to watch with a whole bunch of strangers; they turn out all the lights except for the screen; the volume is turned up way too loud (and you can't turn it down); you have to stay in your chair, where you aren't allowed to stand up, stretch, swivel, or fidget; you aren't supposed to get up until the movie is over; you can't stop the movie to take a break to go to the bathroom or whatever; you're not allowed to talk; you can't rewind to replay a particularly good scene that you want to see again; you have to wear clothes; you have to gather up your stuff and leave the house and drive somewhere else; you have to pass through a lobby that reeks of buttery popcorn; and they charge you money for it. And for all this, what do you get? A bigger screen? I just don't get it.

Apparently some people like it this way. Ericka does, or at least most of it. At home, she's always trying to make the room with the TV more like a theater. She turns the lights down and the volume up, she doesn't like it when I talk or fidget, and when we do pause it to take a break I know it's only for me and she'd much rather go the whole two-plus hours without interruption. That drives me crazy. I'm that way about sports, too. One of the reasons the only spectator sports I've ever really liked are baseball and (American) football is that they have plenty of breaks for contemplation. The other sports are too fast. Or rather it's not so much that they move too quickly; it's that they never stop.

For me there's really only one reason to go to a movie theater: because my wife loves to go, and it's nice to go with her occasionally. I saw three movies in the theater last year (which I'm pretty sure is the same number of movies I've seen in the theater in the last five years). The latest of these three was Dream Girls, which we saw on Christmas day. I saw the show on stage a few years ago and I loved it, and considering the nature of the script I figured it would convert well to film.

Obviously I'm no film buff, so I wouldn't presume to properly review it. I'll just say that my instincts were correct: The screenplay was excellently done. There are a lot of ways to ruin a story when converting from a non-film medium (book, play) to film, and heaven knows I've complained about plenty of them (Dune, for instance, which was unutterably atrocious). Dream Girls, however, was wonderful. It was remarkably true to the stage script, and where it did diverge it did for good artistic reason to take good advantage of what the film medium has to offer that stage does not.

The publicity for the film was all about Eddie Murphy and Beyoncé, and Ericka and her mother raved about Murphy in particular. Both of them were fine, and Murphy sang better than I expected (which is really not saying much), but I was more impressed by the other two leads. Of the three big names, I thought Jamie Foxx put in the best performance. I think my wife's family may have a bit of a personal bias against Foxx; one member has known him in real life, and in their encounters he has shown himself a not very pleasant person. That may well be, but I still like him as a performer. I admire an actor who is able and willing to be convincing while playing a truly unattractive character. It's one thing to play a charismatic villain like Hannibal Lecter with admirable monstrousness, but it's quite another to play a less flamboyant bad guy who isn't so much villainous as just icky. There are a lot of actors, both on screen and on stage, whose egos won't let them really embrace such a role. (Another actor whom I admired for a performance which was not just icky but pathetic as well was Julian Sands in Boxing Helena.)

But I digress. The best performance in Dream Girls by far is none of the big names at all, but newcomer Jennifer Hudson as Effie. She is marvelous. Stupendous. I knew nothing of her, but apparently she was a runner-up for American Idol one year (proving that AI isn't completely incapable of finding talent, the recent Seattle auditions notwithstanding). Strange, because the woman I saw in the same role on stage, Frenchie Davis, was also an American Idol runner-up. Davis was good, too, but not as good as Hudson, whom I can't praise enough.

Postscript: While I was writing this, Ericka called. When I mentioned that I was writing about bowling for the blog, she mentioned -- casually, again -- that pool is a butt sport, too. How could I not have noticed? It seems so obvious now. Maybe it's because in my younger days I actually enjoyed playing pool, for completely non-butt-related reasons. I was terrible at it, though.

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