Lightning & Lobsters

Last evening at about six, Theresa and I turned on the TV to discover that our cable company had disconnected the cable two weeks earlier than we requested. When we called, they explained that while it was very easy for them to "cut the wire" (as they put it) it was very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very hard - impossible, really - for them to ever, ever, ever correct any mistake. They would try to send someone out one day but they really couldn't promise anything. All this is preamble to explaining how we ended up renting and watching MISSION TO MARS last night. I said, "Hey, we should watch that OTHER Mars movie that came out around the same time as RED PLANET." See, we had so much innocent fun stumbling across the latter film on cable the other night... Well, our experiment proved that lightning does not strike twice. Or, as was demonstrated in ANNIE HALL, you cannot force a second amusing and romantic accident involving escaped lobsters. What can I say about MISSION TO MARS? Not much without violating the principles of the "blog." But I will say that like RED PLANET it contained an allusion to WAY... WAY OUT (a different one): Within the first five minutes a character explains, in roughly these words, that "marriage is a stabilizing factor on long space missions," a sentiment that is also the premise of the Jerry Lewis film.