21 What?

Apple's got this QuickTime movie preview running for a new movie called 21 Grams from Focus Features. Sean Penn's in it. Benicio Del Toro's in it. Naomi Watts is in it. It's directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. The movie's supposed to be pretty good.

I really really hope so, because the preview's been driving me up the frickin' wall more each time I'm forced to sit through it. It's been showing in theatres around town seemingly before every bloody film I choose to go see.

"They say we all lose twenty-one grams at the exact moment of our death," the preview narrator's voice (sounding an awful lot like Sean Penn) creepily announces. "Everyone," he continues, "twenty-one grams. The weight of a stack of five nickels. The weight of a chocolate bar. The weight of a hummingbird."

Let's see. "A stack of five nickels." Did you know that a nickel weighs exactly what two dimes weigh? That means a stack of five nickels weighs the same as a stack of ten dimes. Now, according to the logic of the universe where Focus Features comes from, such a stack weighs twenty-one grams. They're close. A single nickel is 4.5 grams (whereas a dime is 2.25). So a stack of five very clean nickels would weigh 22.5 grams. Alright. So they're off by 1.5 grams. Here's your dramatic license back. I'll let ya off with a warning just this once.

But wait. "The weight of a chocolate bar." It'd have to be a very, very small chocolate bar. Did you know that there are 28.35 grams in one ounce? When was the last time you bought a chocolate bar that weighed less than an ounce? Who writes this stuff?

Twenty-one grams, the preview narrator goes on to tell us, is "the weight of a hummingbird." Perhaps a hummingbird from Jupiter, or a really, really obese terrestrial hummingbird that just ate six other hummingbirds, but not a plain ordinary hummingbird.

Of the 338 species and 116 genera of Trochilidae, the biological family of hummingbirds, the typical weight is 3 to 5 grams. Three grams seems to be more common. Five grams, well, that's one hummingbird that should seriously consider Atkins.

So, what hummingbird were the producers of this film thinking of when they made this preview? Certainly not Mellisuga helenae. Why, you'd need a bleeding flock of them to total twenty-one grams. They each weigh about one tenth of that. What then? Threnetes ruckeri? Come now. Perhaps Campylopterus hemileucurus, one of the largest of the hummers. Sorry, still too light by a wide margin.

Three grams, why, that's less than a penny, which is certainly less than the "stack of five nickels." Three grams, that's, that's what, about six average-sized paperclips? Three grams, that's less than a bleeding pencil, for Christ's sake.

Go ahead, find a hummingbird, stun it gently, place it on one end of a balance scale and stack ten first-class letters on the other end, and the balance will stay in the middle.

Like hell, twenty-one grams!

This movie has an awful lot of explaining to do!