Life ruiners
We saw “Mean Girls” at the theater last night. I’ve never been much of a teen movie fan, but few are this well written. The screenplay is by Tina Fey from SNL and it sounds like it. The usual exaggerated extremes of high school are involved, but it’s not as important as the story. Imagine that. The movie is briskly paced, with several recurring gags, and I laughed throughout. Off subject, I keep reading comments online about how large Lindsay Lohan’s breasts are. I’ve never paid much attention, but after the first side profile, I poked the girlfriend and demonstrated the universal hand sign for large breasts, and she nodded in agreement.
Last week we caught the midnight premiere of “The Day After Tomorrow”. I try to adjust my expectations (and level of criticism) to the movie I’m going to see. I mean, I don’t expect Michael Jordan to be a genius anymore than I expect Bill Gates to dunk a basketball. And so, I don’t expect Oscar caliber performances or dialog in a disaster flick. If you can manage to adjust in such a way, it’s a really enjoyable movie. I was awed by many of the special effects without actually thinking at the time about how I was awed by the special effects. Now, none of this means that I didn’t laugh when Dennis Quaid said “troposphere”, or that the love story wasn’t completely hokey, but you have to take the good with the bad.
One of the previews attached to the movie was for “The Chronicles of Riddick”. It’s some sort of spooky science fiction movie. It ended with the main character asking someone if they were afraid of the dark and then snuffing out the only candle. After that happened, somebody in the back of the theater let out the most perfectly timed bloodcurdling (sarcastic) scream that I have ever heard. It was too funny to even explain. I couldn’t stop laughing. My brother and his wife had come along, and he was laughing too. Most of the theater was laughing. The girlfriend was not laughing. In fact, she asked me, “Why am I thinking, who is that idiot, and you two are sitting here laughing?”