Once again, it is my new year’s resolution to lose 15 pounds. It appears my exercise buddy for this year is Netflix.
It starts with a movie that my wife has no interest in viewing with me. Nothing holds her interest less than a plotless foreign language movie. Then it has to age unviewed for several weeks on top of the TV hutch.
When the guilt for paying for a movie yet not seeing it reaches a fever pitch only then do I carry the laptop down to the basement and prop it up on treadmill.
The movie The Band’s Visit, I give 3 stars, 6 miles and 500 calories.
Run-in movie
Saving Face is a 1:37 minute romantic comedy, where the couple’s pivotal reconcilation speech occurs at 1:29:15 into the movie.
Why do these timestamps stick in my brain?
Because the DVD from Netflix goes bad on me at 1:29:01.
To return the favor to the in-laws for watching Claire while the rest of us were on vacation, Chris agreed to watch Precious, their dog, for the past four days.
The original plan was for Chris to drive to grandma’s on Thursday with the kids. Halfway through dog sitting, I was to bring the girls home while Chris finished her duties.
During my temporary bachelorhood days, I invited a few friends to see movies that I wouldn’t normally have an opportunity to see. Non G-rated ones! Thursday night a couple of friends saw Cinderella Man and Mr. & Mrs. Smith with me.
I called Chris to coordinate the kid switch, but when the kids found out they were to be picked up by me, they all pouted. And they were at grandma’s house without grandma or their toys. (The sound you hear in the background is that of my ego being crushed.)
So the women in my life are spending another couple of days house/dog/cat sitting.
So I spent another day of bachelorhood seeing Wedding Crashers and The 40-year-old Virgin. Not surprisingly, I couldn’t convince my friends to see those movies.
Side note: When you go to a wine tasting, you start with the sweetest wines and work your way to the dry ones. This is because if you went the other way around (with wines getting sweeter and sweeter) your palette would revolt because the latter wines would seem, in comparison, as bad as hard candy. Better to go with delayed gratification.
Each movie I saw this weekend ended up more sophomoric than the previous. It appears I watched these four movies in the exact wrong order.
Marissa and Katie have been good movie watchers for years, but the last movie we took the entire family to see was Polar Express last winter. Claire was two and a half and we figured it would a good first non-drive-in movie for her.
We were wrong.
Halfway through the movie she wouldn’t sit still. She ended up walking up and down the aisle until I relocated with her to the back of the the theater and bear hugged her for the rest of the movie.
Because eight months is a large portion of a toddler’s lifetime, we thought we’d give it another chance this weekend with March of the Penguins.
It didn’t work either. While she didn’t run down the aisles, she wouldn’t sit in any of the chairs in the row, nor on either parent’s lap. She did however slept in the car on the way home.
It was, however, tramatic for Katie, the otherwise avid moviegoer. It hadn’t occurred much to Katie that baby animals don’t always live. While the time lapse photography of a cracked egg freezing didn’t sink in, the shot of an adult penguin poking at his chick’s frozen carcass DID. And the adult penguins leaving their young at the end of winter didn’t go over too well either.
She was bawling when we left the theater.
Star Wars this afternoon, I saw. With co-workers, I went. For all the engineers to go, the company Vice President paid. Private screening, it was. Stilted dialog, did certainly George Lucas write. Continually moped, Natalie Portman character’s did.
Buffalo wings after the movie, we had. To bail early, I did. Pick up Claire at daycare, I must. Claire’s last day of the school year, it was.
Sandbox sand in the backseat of car, will there hopefully no longer be.
Marissa frets when she sees the gray in my hair and beard. She equates that with old age and she equates that with death. While I try to assure her that I’m not planning on going anywhere, she is not always comforted.
Going on vacation helped. Perhaps after seeing me continuously she realized she could do without me. But after vacation, Chris and I looked for a break.
With the girls at grandma’s, my wife and I went on a date. At BD’s Mongolian BBQ, my second bowl of food was shrimp marinated with a single tablespoon of red wine.
At that restaurant, you hand the raw ingredients to a [usually male] college student who cooks it in front of you with croquet mallets. With a whiff of my concoction, the hibachinist turned to me and asked if it contained wine. I fessed up. And for the first time in 15 years, I was carded.
I cannot wait to tell Marissa.
Took the family to see Shrek 2 Saturday. Usually I take the older girls to the movie, but since Chris wanted to see this one too, she insisted that we take the entire family to the drive-in. The movie started at 9:05pm, past the bedtime of all the girls, but it wasn’t a school night.
Knowing it would be crowded, we packed up the girls, blankets, drinks and lunchables and got there at little after 8pm.
Good thing we did because we were able to get a good spot before it got crowded. The SUV in front of us had two dogs in it, which kept Claire entertained before the movie, but the older girls kept asking how long it was before the movie.
Because we had the minivan we were relegated to the back of the parking lot and the screen was the size of a postage stamp. It was either a bad print or the lamp on the projector was shot, because the picture was dark.
We were close to the consession stand so the line for it snaked across the roadway blocking traffic in front of our car. The cars kept coming (and driving in front of us) until an hour into the movie. A truck in front of us was continually swapping places with another jeep during the movie. One of those vehicles arrived late and this was the only way to put two cars in one spot. They would take turns circling the lot during the movie.
Claire, was stir crazy during the movie and would not sit in either of our laps. She ended up constantly going between the front of the minivan and the back turning on the dome lights. (There are seven in the Odyssey.) Claire stepped on a drink pouch and it squirted everywhere.
It was a good movie though. And I tell ya… I cannot wait to see it.
So two weeks after I picked The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for us to see, a movie I loved but Chris hated, she picked up The Statement at Blockbuster. I am vacuous enough to have a subscription to Entertainment Weekly, so it is rare for me not to have heard of a recent movie, but this one from last winter did not ring a bell. It must have been a dud that died quickly in the theaters.
It turned out to be a suspense film without the suspense. Caine played a WWII Nazi collaborator who had been on the lamb for 50 years after killing 7 Jews. They search for him. They find him. No plot twists; no action.
But on the bright side, its now its my turn to pick the next movie.
My wife and I went out for my birthday last week. We have an unwritten rule that whoever arranges for the babysitter gets to pick the movie. She almost always gets to pick out the movie. The one exception is for birthdays so I, for once, got to pick. I get Entertainment Weekly so I had the chance to over-analyze my options. I chose The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind because it got good reviews and I liked some of the screenwriter’s previous works (Adaptation and Being John Malkovich). And because it was a movie that I know my wife would never have picked on herself.
Like Kaufman’s other movies, it was very surreal. More surreal than the one with the two Nicholas Cage’s in it, but not quite as surreal as the one with the dozens of John Malkovich’s in it. I got a kick out of it, but Chris thought it was too bizarre. She was especially annoyed with the fact that I was enjoying it.
It is about a couple who decide to have their memories of each other erased after they break up. It was not your typical romantic comedy. Half the movie takes place within the mind of the lead character while he is REM sleep. The “dream state” special effects were great.
I thought the plot was intriguing, but about every ten minutes Chris would turn to me in the theater and give me a glare that telegraphed “why did you subject me to this movie?”
I would recommend the movie, but Chris was ready to have the last two hours of the her life erased after it was over.
I finally did see Shall We Dance [Dansu]? It was much better than the other mid-90s foreign ballroom dancing romantic comedy film Strictly Ballroom. This time the kutzy amateur dancer was male and the experienced dancer, who learns to appreciate their new partner, was female.
They both had the stepping-on-toes-while-learning-to-dance scene. They both had the meddling matriarch and the oddball dancing couple as supporting characters. They both end with the big dance scene. But bad one was another bad re-hash of the ugly-duckling-into-swan theme. Just like Princess Diaries, She’s All That, Love Potion No. 9, and countless others, all you have to do to make a girl pretty is to get her to take off her glasses. She never needs them anyway!
My daughter tore her new glasses up beyond repair a few weeks ago. Even though mom, dad, and all four grandparents also have glasses, my daughter (a few weeks into Kindergarten) has learned to be resentful of them.