Movies!
So we spent a week and a half at Laura's dad's place, taking care of two cats and two dogs, one of the latter being decidedly unwell. There may be some anecdotes to come about the trip, but what's on my mind is the movies we saw while there.

Ever get the feeling you're watching something that really wasn't meant for you? I got that a few times. Take Wanted, please. Some of the action scenes were entertaining, but it was an unconvincing mess of a movie with not one single believable character I could sympathize with. There are plot holes and handwaving about how the characters do the things they do, but the real handwaving is over the morality of what they do. The main character is recruited by a group of assassins who kill whoever the magic loom tells them to kill, and the protagonist is rightly weirded out by that. Until Angelina Jolie's character says her daddy was killed by someone whose name came up in the loom, but the newbie assassin who got the job couldn't pull the trigger, and if that noob had done his job her daddy would be alive. Well, that makes sense, thinks the protagonist, who then goes on to happily kill whoever the loom's interpreter says should be killed. Not that he cares the least little bit when a lot of innocent civilians get killed when one of his jobs go sour. There are some lame twists and a lot of shit blows up and who cares.

Then there was My Best Friend's Girlfriend. There was a lot of raunchy lowbrow humour in There's Something About Mary, but there was also some heart and sweetness in the mix. Not here. Dane Cook, who's apparently the Andrew Dice Clay of the last fifteen minutes, plays the guy you go to if you want to convince your girlfriend you're the safest bet she has because the dating pool is full of jerks. He takes girls out for dates so awful they decide they won't dump the losers they're with after all. In this case, a friend of his sets him after a girl the friend isn't even actually dating, and of course both guys fall for her, and of course she kind of goes for the bad guy, blah blah blah. Again, no believable characters to sympathize with; the dweeb is half a step up from pathetic stalker territory; Cook's character really is an asshole though he kind of regrets it unconvincingly later on; the girl's just there for them to fight over. There are some undeniably funny (in a very lowbrow way) moments, but this is still about spending an hour and a half with a loser and an asshole.

We wanted to take our nephews out to a movie, and there weren't many options, which is how we saw Paul Blart, Mall Cop. On the surface it's cutesy and nice, you know, racist, sexist, and homophobic, in a nice way. The main character is a middle-aged fat white guy whose wife was a Latin American immigrant who only married him so she could stay in the USA and disappeared afterwards. One of his friends is a massively fat black guy whose reason for being in the movie is to act scared and be funny for being fatter than Blart. Then there's the goofy Asian kid (from India or Pakistan) with the over-the-top accent and obsession with following his girlfriend's movements. And the guy who sees himself as Blart's competition for the female lead of the movie, who -- despite his interest in a woman -- is gradually shown as something of an effeminate gay stereotype. You can tell the gang of criminals who invade the mall are bad because they're young and they have tattoos and skateboards. And all this with a soundtrack of Eddie Money, Survivor, and Bon Jovi. Sorry, I know some of you like that kind of music, but for me it was another way this movie made it clear that I'm not the target audience. People who like shows like King of Queens and According to Jim are probably more the right audience for this.

We did see some reasonably entertaining movies. We finally watched the second and third Bourne movies, and enjoyed them. Body of Lies wasn't bad. The House Bunny was better than we expected (but we really didn't expect much at all). And then there was Changeling. The acting was generally decent, and sometimes very good; the film certainly looked good; but the structure was just plain peculiar. Instead of a story building up to a climax, this one had four or five points where you might think, okay, this is it, this is the end of the movie, and instead we got fifteen minutes of something else leading up to the next apparent resolution. Instead of building to something, it was just and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened, so many times that when the movie ends, you're left thinking, oh, is that it? Was that down to JMS not being used to writing movies, or did it go through a series of rewrites by anonymous contributors? Either way, it was a well-made mess.

More blathering later, no doubt.