Am I old already?

Yesterday was my Official Last Day at IBM. I signed the papers, said my farewells, and turned in my badge.

So to celebrate this momentous occasion we decided to go to see a movie. We picked Man of the Year, that new Robin Williams movie about the comedian who gets elected president. Little did we realize that going to the movies on a Friday night was the worst idea ever. It seems that the local adults have decided to make a rule prohibiting unaccompanied minors in the mall across the street from 6pm Friday until Monday morning. Apparently local mall retailers feel that groups of teenagers are bad for business. So now that there's no real place for teens to hang out and call their own on the weekend, they've taken over our cinema. Which wouldn't be bad. I don't have a problem with teenagers. I do however have a problem with the fact that 80% of the teens there didn't even know what movie they were seeing, who Robin Williams is, or what it was about. You see, they just didn't care, because they just wanted to hang out with their friends someplace where they could act passive and angst-y. It didn't matter to their little universe what was going on around them. So as a consequence they talked loudly through the entire film, acted as though they'd never head a penis joke before, talked on cell phones, and generally disrupted the movie. And I was reduces to being the old lady who "shushes". But only once. And the girl's response "I don't care I'll do whatever I want!" Sensing the futility of the situation I just sat back and wished for subtitles so I could get a sense of what was going on without hearing about who was doing what to whom at Tyngsboro High. And as we were leaving the theater, Paul very loudly said to me, "why would you pay to come see a movie and then talk through it." To which I loudly responded, "because you're underage and no one will let you in anywhere else." At that point the girl in front of us (hanging with the I'll-do-whatever-I-want girl) gasped and exclaimed "They're talking about us!" ... Umm, yeah... We had to sit there and listen to you talk through the whole movie. And we're not talking typical hushed movie interjections, we're talking full on mall-volume conversations but everything and nothing in-particular, sprinkled with whoops every time Robin made an off-color joke. I guess these kids are too young to remember his non-Disney movies.

After that Paul and I vowed that if we ever had children we would impress upon them the importance of not being moronic, regardless of what other drugs, sex, rock and roll, they're into. Being jerks in public is not "cool" or whatever slang word the kids of that generation are using. If you're going to be dark and moody at least do it quietly.

Thank You For Smoking

Paul and I went to see Thank You For Smoking last night. It's brilliant. Clever, funny, and it was ok to hate Katie Holmes! OK, well not really, we must pity her for getting knocked up "by" Tom Cruise. But I did feel like her character would have been cast differently had the movie been produced in the 90s. They introduce her character by going on and on about how great her "tits" are, and quite frankly, I just don't see it. She does have that perpetually young look to her. Plucky young reporter with big doe-eyes who can seem naïve while still exuding the go-getter, altruist, and slightly twisted qualities that they were going for. But I think, had this movie been made in the 90s, they would have cast this character with someone just a bit sleeker, less round (not that round is necessarily a bad thing!), and little edgier. But overall Katie did a great job.

I've never seen any of Aaron Eckhart's other movies so I don't know what he's generally known for (Or if he's not really known for anything) but I think he did a fabulous job as the main character. I think the stars (the celestial ones) were aligned in terms of him being cast, the writer and screenwriter, and the directing to let him pull off such a likeable asshole. The people from House need to take notes.