So Anyway,

Got home Friday and found out that I had made a dreadful error in cognition. It seems that when my wife’s mother had asked that the children spend this week with her and Gramps, it was only intended to be during the daylight hours. No night-spending. And it would begin today, not Friday night. Good thing I like my kids, that’s all I’ve got to say. So, Reba’s desire to clean house, and my desire to, uh…clean house will require some adjustments. ::sigh::

Whatever—so I got home and Miss Reba and I decided to take the kinder to see a movie. You know, everyone has their own benchmark bad movie—for some of you, maybe it’s Battlefield Earth, others of you, Ishtar, some find Santa Claus Conquers the Martians to be unwatchable. My own yardstick of craptacularity is a little fill-um called Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows. A rockin’ little sequel, which for me encapsulates every reason why the late-1960s should be wiped from the history books. It is stupid, annoying, and if I may say so, stupid. And annoying.

Little did I know that people were still able to make such steaming piles of horse manure, until I plunked down close to forty bucks to go see Spy Kids 3D -- Game Over.

Move Review Time—(I would say “spoilers ahead” but this scream-inducing pool of dreck is already far beyond spoiled. I’m going to give everything away, so scroll way down if you really want to go throw you money away on this stinker and don’t want to know how it ends.)

What a bad movie. I came away with actual, visceral, throbbing HATRED for it and for the persons who caused my time to be wasted sitting through this mindless, idiotic drivel. How many ways is it bad?

Well, first off there’s 3D. 3D is what you do when there are no more ideas left. 3D is a crutch for moviemakers who somehow think the audience will forgive you if you make a point of poking your finger at them-WHOA 3-DDDDD!-or throwing things out into the audience-WHOA 3-DDDDDD!-or any of a number of other things that do absolutely nothing except give everyone a headache. And oh, what a headache. The print we had wasn’t quite registered exactly right, so even with the tiny, stupid glasses, everything had fuzzy edges, and even today my eyes hurt. According to Miramax co-chair Bob Weinstein,

"When you get the franchise right and (audiences) have such an enjoyable experience, you build a brand name," Weinstein told Reuters. "The 3-D was something fresh. Parents hadn't seen that in a long time and wanted to turn their kids on to it."

For the love of all that’s holy, why not facilitate parents in turning their kids on to something else they haven’t seen in a while, something that’s better for them—like mescaline.

Aside from the nausea-inducing stereopticon sensation, there was the nausea-inducing story. The Spy Kids franchise has continued to get worse with every movie, and surely this one will be the death of the series. It mostly revolves around Juni, who has the vapid, cloying, highly annoying screen presence of a young Danny Bonaduce. He has left the spy business to scrounge pennies from stupid kids who hire him as a private detective. He has lost all contact with his family, who desperately need him to rescue his sister, whose mind has become trapped inside of a new computer game designed by Rambo. The idea of the game is to trap unwitting children on the Fifth Level. Why? Because this is a moist, curly dog turd of a movie, that’s why.

Anyway, after a call from the President (played by Dr. Doug Ross), Juni goes to the spy place and Salma Hayak convinces Juni to hook himself up to the game to save Carmen, and she convinces him without taking off her clothes. There is a brief bit of what is supposed to pass for double-entendre banter between Hayak and her on-screen husband, which zooms over kid’s heads (which is good, I suppose), and falls like a lead block on the adults (which made me want to punch the screen, which is probably not a good thing, I suppose).

Juni gets into the machine and everyone in the audience puts on their glasses to start the headache-fest. He meets other kids inside who are “Beta Testers” (ooooohhh) who are actually nerds when you get to see them later in the film. They go through various levels of the game (you know, like in Tron, except hard on the eyes). Lots of stupid game play, none of which are anything as good as what kids actually play on video games now. Juni and the Beta Testers (ooohhhh) run into a girl, whom Juni falls in like with, whom he has to clobber a couple of times, but who then takes his place when he has to fight with one of the other guys or get kicked out of the game. The girl is not real, though, she’s just a decoy being played by Rocky to get Juni to the Fifth Level, but Juni doesn’t figure this out until the end of the movie.

Anyway, Juni manages to also get Khan Noonien Singh to come into the game to help him, because a) he needs help, and b) Mr. Roarke wants to confront Judge Dredd because it was HE who paralyzed him and put him in a wheelchair and made him do commercials. So, they all wander around and fling stuff into the audience and poke things out there for us to be amazed by, and finally they find Carmen, who leads them to the Fifth Level and they shut down the game, thus foiling the nefarious schemes of Nick Martinelli.

BUT, it’s not over, because Rambo Returns and somehow manages to build a big robot and starts rampaging through the city, and then since they had only a tiny bit of money left over, all the characters from previous adventures got to show up long enough to stand there and put on 3D glasses while the words “PUT ON GLASSES” flashed in front of them. Ten minutes later, the movie is over and Antonio Banderas is laughing his happy hindquarters to the bank, and I am fuming because Carla Gugino is on screen for about a minute.

The robot Rocky is defeated when Zachary Powers confronts him in the control room and forgives him for being mean. Everyone hugs and the credits roll, and in the outtakes that must now accompany all motion pictures to make the audience laugh (since they didn’t get to during the feature), George Clooney mugged while chewing up his line and after the cut, grinned and quipped that he had probably just managed to wreck his entire career. Yep. Probably so.

Game Over.

Back home, off to bed after a handful of Advil, then up early Saturday.

Off to the sporting goods place to get the youngest two registered for fall soccer and to unload perfectly good cash money for registration. Thankfully, no new uniforms this time, so that saved a little bit. Then back to the house to take stuff to the charity folks—Reba had a backlog of stuff in boxes, which she had put in the back of the truck while I was gone. SO, Franklin got a bit of a workout, and as a reward for his hard work, I stopped and got him some glue to put back on his rearview mirror.

Once they get in the habit of coming off, they keep it up. It just occurred to me that since my readership has risen into the high ones, that some of you may not be familiar with one of the other members of the family. Franklin is my truck. He was named by the kids in honor Franklin the Turtle, because he is green and slow. The name also works well because he’s an F-100, and Benjamin Franklin’s picture is on a $100 bill. So there you go. (Oh, and he has 257,000 miles on him. Which might explain the slow part.)

Anyway, got my glue and got home, to be confronted with several children and a wife who had gotten themselves cleaned up to go to the store. Hmm. “You know Catherine has been wanting to get her ears pierced and I had told her last week she could if she didn’t pee in her pants.” Some inducement, eh? Oh well.

Got us all in the van and away we went to Wally World, where we wandered around for several hours gathering up a treasure trove of valuable prizes, none of which I can really recall at the moment.

The important part of the trip went just fine, though. Catherine sat there all prim and ladylike (a first) after first picking out a pretty little set of earrings with rhinestones. Two pops later and she was even more of a prissy little girl. Not a fidget or a whimper, although she did confess to Mommy that “that ear poker thing hurted some.” We had some lunch at McDonald’s solely to satisfy the kids’ craving for cheap plastic Happy Meals toys and cheap plastic food. The big attraction was that the toys were tie-ins to the garbage we had seen the previous night. ONE MORE STRIKE! The movie and the Happy Meals seemed to have been conceived on two parallel-dimension Planets of the Stupid. The Happy Meal toys had Juni looking like a lobotomized Prince Valiant riding a unicycle. There was also a comic book (in 3D!) that had absolutely no relationship to the movie—different story, different-looking characters (yet, surprisingly, no better than the movie crap—go figure!). To say the kids were disappointed is an understatement.

Finished that mess up and went BACK to the store, this time to the nearly deserted Big K-Mart to look for other junk we could have done without, then back to Wal-Mart AGAIN for the stuff we forgot that we couldn’t find at K-Mart, and then finally back home. Got the kids scrubbed and shampooed and into bed, and then it was time for Reba to visit The Possumblog Style Center.

She had tried to get an appointment to have her hair colored early that morning, but was met with the studied indifference that can only come from a teenager who thinks being a receptionist in a salon is like, the coolest thing. So, she got some goo for me to play with on her hair. Yes, yes—I’ve done this plenty enough, so I know what I’m doing. Most of the time.

This time was a bit different in that the goo she bought had a neat little comb applicator, making it less likely I would leave her with big streaks of uncolored hair. Not that that has ever happened… It worked really well and it looked good enough so that no one at church Sunday asked if she had gotten her hair colored. And saved about 70 bucks. Which is about what we had wasted on stuff at the Wal- and K-Marts.

Sunday, churching up for everyone, and then some. Reba’s mom called at 6:30 wanting to know if we could come eat lunch with them at their church (which is the one where Reba and I grew up). They were having a special Sunday with a guest speaker, who just happened, a couple of years ago, to be the preacher where Reba and I go now. (Confused yet?) We got ready, went to our services, drove across the county to our old home, ate lunch, caught up on the gossip, was berated for not visiting more often, listened to the next sermon at 1, went home, collapsed, went back for our evening service, then went to the GROCERY STORE afterwards, then went home and ate a VERY late supper, then hit the bed like a sack of wet cement, then up bright-eyed this morning so I could come in here!

I wonder why I feel so tired.
posted by Terry at 1:05:00 PM