Saving Boys From CG Cats

What do you do when your teenaged son comes home from work in the middle of the day and asks, no begs, you to go to the movies with him?

You drop everything and go, that's what you do. Because when is that ever going to happen again? Come to think of it, when has it ever happened before?

So that's how I came to be sitting in a movie theater yesterday afternoon, shirking my responsibilities, and looking up into Toby Maguire's cute but evil/snotty-little-punk face.

First things first. Some of the previews made it worth the $5.50. I do not refer to the ones where we saw Jessica Alba all but naked, or the ones where people were having sex with anything that moved, or the ones where straight men were marrying each other in order to get benefits. As funny and compelling as those were, I believe I refer more to the movies that star persons like Ioan Gruffudd. And Harry/Hermione/Ron. Those movies. HP5 looks exciting, but I hope it lasts like five hours, because there is a lot to fit in. I doubt it's going to, which will be disappointing, but I'll try to bear up. The thing about Ioan (and of course I'm married to the man of my dreams, and he's already Nemesis' boyfriend, but is it wrong to look and appreciate?) is that he's just so darn good looking, even when he doesn't have the cool accent. And that preview featured way too much of those other semi-Fantastic 3, in my opinion, taking precious preview screen time away from him. I mean, who goes to the movies to look at a rock guy or Jessica Alba? Not me.

Okay, now to the full-length feature we went there to see. I loved seeing Harry all nice again. That was fun. I loved seeing Topher Grace, but couldn't figure out how his teeth got pointy. I also loved seeing Thomas Haden Church all sweet and misunderstood, and plus that sand thing was just cool. And what'shername is beautiful and sweet, too. Only what's with having the damsel in distress hanging above a crowd of a zillion people who can look right up her dress? Multiple times? When I become a superhero's girlfriend/wife, I'm going to wear pants all the time, because who knows when you're going to be suspended above the leering masses by a giant spiderweb?

For my other opinions, I guess you could just see Nem's review, since it pretty much echos what I was thinking, and in a much smarter, funnier way. Or I could write those same things out in a boring, not-funny way so you didn't have to go to the trouble of clicking on the link. But I think I won't. The only thing I have to add is my disappointment with the special effects people during the scenes when they showed the giant Sandman with a crowd of screaming people in the foreground. It was so badly done that each time I suddenly felt I had been thrown into a theater of the seventies and was watching an old Godzilla movie--and that's never good, unless it's associated with MST3K.

In the end, I was glad I went, because I had fun with daltonman, even if he did only ask me so he didn't have to go alone, and even if I did realize halfway through the movie that I had forgotten to wear my wedding ring, and spent the entire omelet scene hoping it didn't look like I was trying to date a man young enough to be my son. (And that ought to give you an idea how slow parts of the movie were. I did not think about my wedding ring, or how other kids were going to get home from school, or even what I was going to make for dinner during the fighting scenes. Those were pretty good.)

I went to the movies alone once when I was nineteen. It was to see The Empire Strikes Back, and I only did it because I was so afraid someone was going to spill the beans and ruin it for me that I didn't mind the humiliation of sitting in a theater alone. But that was before the days of Front Row Joe, when it was safe to sit in a movie theater sans chaperone. Have you seen what happens to Joe when he shows up alone? He ends up in a feline version of a Busby Berkeley extravaganza. It's a little scary, and I'm glad daltonman had the presence of mind to ask me along so that didn't happen to him.