Mr. Spontaneity

Today I took my second stab at going to see 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' on the IMAX screen. This time I was successful. Overall I enjoyed it, although there was a potential snag. I got there in plenty of time for the start of the movie. I picked my seat on the back row and was quite happy to not have a lot of people around me. Low and behold about 10 minutes into the movie a family with 2 young kids came in - and these people were movie talkers. I loathe the movie talker. They are right behind the butt flickers on the shit list. So, I got up and moved a few rows forward. I could no longer hear them, so everything was cool from that point on. There was also a bit of poetic justice. The movie talkers' kids were mighty freaked out by this movie. One of them started wigging out when Augustus Gloop got sucked into the pipe, so mom left with child to recover in the lobby. Well, they came back in right before Violet turned into a blueberry, so I knew this was going to be trouble. Sure enough by the end of that scene the whole family got up and left never to return. I'm sorry that their kids were traumatized, but I'm glad they left. I bet Dad was pissed to have dropped $40 for 20 minutes of movie.

Since I was 'in town' I did my coffee run and then my grocery shopping and was planning on having a nice relaxing evening at home. Well, I got an e-mail from my friend who lives (or lived) in New Orleans. He is in town for a few days and he wanted to go see a movie. So, we went and ate dinner and then saw a movie. He is a big fan of the $1.50 movie, so we ended up seeing the god-awful movie 'Stealth'. This is the one about the talking airplane. Usually I wouldn't be caught dead anywhere near this movie. The funny thing is, my friend is actually a filmmaker and he has seen way more movies than I probably will in my entire life. He's actually the person that got me interested in film around 15 years ago. He's worked with the lead actor in 'Stealth' and I think this is one reason why he wanted to see it. Plus I think he's interested in the technical aspects and seeing how other directors do things. So, since he was the guest in town I went along and kind of treated this as an exercise in camp. Make no mistake, this was a bad movie. Metacritic gives it a 35. I did have a few laughs at the movie's expense. I haven't been to the dollar movies in a long time, and I was amazed to see how crowded it was. It was quite the teeming mass. So the quiet evening at home turned into the not-so-quiet evening out. It was good to see my friend though.


p.s. We got no rain whatsoever out this hurricane. Zip. I looked at the radar and the edge of the rain stopped about 30 miles from here. Which really sucks because we need the rain very badly. We did get and are still getting some pretty high wind gusts out the deal.