Sydney or the bush
This entry was posted on 6/23/2009 1:06 PM and is filed under blather, Movies.
It's June in Minnesota. That means it's either raining, cool and clammy or it's broiling hot. On Father's Day, Katie M. and I took our daughters to see The Proposal before we all headed out to Mom and Dads for brats and burgers with the clan. It was about seventy degrees and pouring rain all day. We need the rain; the lakes and the creek are very low. We've had rain in the last few weeks but never enough.
The movie was so-so. I laughed in parts, which is the only reason I don't give it an F. There were a few funny lines but most of it was so pat, so clichéd, so by the numbers that the cringingly embarrassing scenes were a welcome relief. I read a review that said Betty White steals every scene she's in. Believe me, it's not cuz she had great material to work with, or even that she does a particularly good job with it. It's just because she throws herself into the awful material as though it were worth the effort. Which is more than Sandra Bullock does. I kinda like Sandra Bullock and that's the problem; the plot revolves around what a professional Attila the Hun she is, and nothing that actually happens demonstrates that she's even unreasonable. The guy she fires in the beginning was clearly not getting the job done. I guess in Hollywood, any boss who actually expects value from their underlings is a WORKMONGER and therefore to be hated. Of course, I liked Meryl Streep's character in the Devil Wore Prada, too. Bet you can't wait to get a job working for me, can ya?
Anyway, since Sandra can't be bothered to actually be a hateful bitch, we viewers are left to depend on visual cues to understand that she's loosening up, as in; she undoes her pony tail. Now that's as subtle as a gun. The director seems to believe she was making a movie for idiots. Ryan Reynolds seems to think he was in a drama. And apparently Betty White was ten years old when she got married and gave birth to Craig T. Nelson who looks pretty good for 80. (Idiots who can't do math is the director's specific demographic.) Mary Steenburgen is either aging backwards or has had the world's greatest face lift.
It's always sad when a movie with possibility falls back on threadbare cliches. And don't say that rom-coms are so over done that there's nothing left; some people think the world has had enough of silly love songs but it never has and it never will! Besides, the road trip movie has been done to death as well, yet The Hangover is one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. It takes the over used premise of four guys plus a bachelor party in Vegas and makes the idea seem brand new. I imagine the writer(s) laboring over the script saying "What's the worse thing you could run into in the bathroom? No, worse. Worse. Make it worse." And who knew that the line "Here's your car, officers" could be so funny?
You know what's a good romantic comedy? Win a Date With Tad Hamilton. Cuz Josh Duhamel without a shirt is even better than Ryan Reynolds naked. You can quote me on that.
After our rainy, cold Father's Day, the sky cleared and the temperatures soared so naturally our central air failed. We had to swelter through yesterday's 91 degrees before the service plus tech could get here. This morning we got the good news/bad news. The unit was too low on freon to cool and that's an easy fix. The bad news is all the old freon leaked out cuz the unit is a thousand years old and needs to be replaced.
Oh, yay I was wondering what to do with all that stimulus money.
