This weekend, and Vacation!

Aah! Not the Go-Go's! Make it stop!

Anyway...

This past weekend was a good weekend for movies. Only one was an Oscar movie, but it was still impressive that I managed to watch three movies in one weekend. I watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly on Saturday evening. I was originally going to watch it Saturday afternoon when Adam went to work and before I had to leave for church. But I fell asleep. So, yeah, I watched it later. Once again I couldn’t get the subtitles to work (see: Pan’s Labyrinth) (I think this is DVD player problem) but luckily not only was this one in French (which, hey! I majored it so I should be able to understand) but I figured out I could turn the captions on on the TV and it gave me English. Kind of a good thing since there turned out to be some technical stuff that I would have gotten lost on. Overall, a good film. Interesting choices in direction, as a good 75% of the movie is shot from the perspective of a paraplegic who can see out of only his left eye. Anyway, kind of sad, kind of inspiring, that’s about it.

Movie #2 was Made of Honor, seen in the theater. Now, I don’t remember if this opened this weekend or last weekend, but Adam and I were two of six people watching this movie. Granted, it was 10AM on a Sunday morning so perhaps that attributed to the low turnout. Anyway, this movie wasn’t terrible, but it also didn’t have an original plot point in its entirety. Totally ripped off parts of My Best Friend’s Wedding, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Some Kind of Wonderful, and lots of other cliché-y romantic comedies that fail to come to my mind right now. While I suppose some people find Patrick Dempsey to be fetching, the movie begins with a flashback to ten years ago and (according to Patrick’s interview on the "Rachael Ray Show" last week) apparently the actors were reverse-aged with computers and the result was just creepy. Kind of tainted the rest of the movie for me.

Finally, move #3 was Things We Lost in the Fire, rented when we returned movie #1. We had intended to see this movie when it was in the theaters but never got around to it. It definitely starts slow. Well, ok, so David Duchovny’s character dies within the first 2 minutes, but it takes a while for the plot to get into the swing of things. Once it gets going it was ok, but I seriously wanted to just give up until about 25 minutes into it. Halle Berry gets more sobbing and beating up men (see: Monster’s Ball, although she did more than beat guys up in that one. Ahem) and Benicio Del Toro gets more unflattering drug usage (See: Traffic.) *sigh* Really, not a terrible film, but not nearly as good as I was expected. And the kids? It took about an hour before I realized the older one was a girl. Not good.

So, other that waste time watching movies, this weekend was pretty dull. Friday night I made a chicken tortilla lasagna and we went grocery shopping. Saturday morning I took care of the rest of the shopping and got my hair cut. Adam worked a few hours in the afternoon while I napped and then went to play bells at church. Sunday morning we went to the movie and then took care of some errands on the way home. We spent the rest of the day at home doing various things, none of which were very interesting. We grilled out some chicken kabobs for dinner.

The rest of this week will be fun. Bright and early tomorrow morning we head to Chicago for two days. We plan to hit up the aquarium, field museum, and planetarium on Wednesday. We also plan to try and find The Frosted Mug, a drive-in Adam saw on a Food Network show. Thursday we’ll go to IKEA and maybe the Sears Tower. We also plan to stop at the Kohl’s Children’s Museum on the way back home to find some new flavors of Kim and Scott's Pretzels. We also might throw some Marshalls shopping in there since there are a bazillion of them in the Chicago area. We plan to be back home on Thursday night and we both have vacation on Friday as well. We hope to get our season tickets for the PAC’s 2008-2009 lineup at that time. This is my first vacation for the year so I’m looking forward to some time off (without being sick to get it.)