The reason I mention this movie right now is because I just saw it on television.

It’s a hoot.

It’s about pickleball.

I haven’t played pickleball yet, but I could. I think I want to, now that I can walk better. After a hip replacement, and the dissipation and diminishment of a life-threatening disease where, as far as they can tell, my stomach climbed part way out past its sphincter and ballooned near the turn-off to my operatic lungs.

Kristina says I should play pickleball because I need the exercise.

The movie has a lot of famous people, like Andy Roddick and Ben Stiller and Mary Steenburgen and Ed Harris and Patton Oswalt and Chris Parnell and John McEnroe. The star is Jake Johnson. I don’t think I knew him before, but I do now. Like many several others in the cast.

Andy Roddick is powerful.

Mary Steenburgen is as she is.

McEnroe is McEnroe.

I hear you can learn how to play pickleball in less than 30 minutes. For me it should take less, since I played tennis in high school on the team, though I never learned how to hold the racket.

Pickleball is not just what old people do when they can’t do what they did.

I should do some investigative research, because the way Andy Roddick slams that “hollow perforated plastic ball” sure looks like tennis.

Anyway, the reason I want to say something about it now is because it was filmed at the Altadena Country Club, just around the corner from my house. I knew every inch of the place.

There it is in full glory, inside and out. It was filmed before the Eaton fire burned it down. So it’s a documentary of my local life in detail and technicolor.

It makes my life a movie that I can watch again.

Join me, won’t you? I’ll make popcorn.