Responsibilities and Fun

Earlier this week I was debating about whether to spend the weekend taking care of grown-up responsibilities in San Jose or having some carefree fun in San Francisco. Scoob is obsessed with trying out a New York-style Jewish deli in San Francisco that he read about. Me, I'm having a hard time believing it can possibly be worth the 2-hour round trip.

Anyhow, since the San Jose task involved getting Roo's oil changed (and not changing the oil in the Forester is the whole reason I had to buy Roo), I decided we'd better stick to grown-up stuff. It seemed like the first oil change came way too quickly; it's only been two months since we brought Roo home. Although I have driven it up to Eureka and back, and I took it up to Oregon over the July 4th weekend to visit mom.

Oh well. But we did manage to have some fun in San Jose—we went to the movies! For the first time in forever!

We've gone to the movies with friends when we visit North Carolina, but when we're in California we never go. So, about a year and a half ago, I bought Scoob a movie giftcard for his birthday. I thought if the movies were already paid for, he would be more likely to go. I put enough on the card to cover 8 movies. We used them for the first time yesterday.

He chose to see Super 8, which was entertaining. I actually thought it was very Goonies-like for the first third of the movie. I think it would have been better if the writers/director hadn't tried to fully develop story lines for a few of the characters. The "love triangle" between the 3 young kids added nothing to the story. And they needed to devote more quality writing to the hatred/forgiveness story line between the fathers if they really wanted it to be part of the story. The latter did help support the "letting go" story arch for the young protagonist, but it still flopped at the end. Just my opinion.

So, after seeing Super 8, Scoob wanted to see another movie! Whoa! I told him it was entirely up to him. I didn't think he meant to sneak into a movie! Oh my god, the guilt! When I asked him if he felt guilty too, he said yes, and then just laughed. I don't believe I've ever snuck into a movie before, but somehow, I pretty sure this wasn't the first time for Scoob.

Anyhow, we saw Transformers 3. Frankly, they should have paid me to sit through that whole thing. I swear they kept changing the girlfriend's name throughout the entire movie, either that, or Shia LaBeouf needs to work on enunciation. I swore he was calling her Laura Lee and someone else kept calling her Carly. I'll admit, I was never a fan of the cartoon when I was a kid, though I did enjoy the first of the Transformers movies. But for crying out loud, it just seemed like this movie would never end.

Leonard Nimoy as Sentinel Prime was a nice touch, and I always enjoy watching John Malkovich (especially when he's playing a prig). I've seen Ken Jeong in a few movies and I usually think he's too over-the-top to truly be funny, but this was the best role I've seen him play. Frances McDormand and John Turturro (and his man servant Alan Tudyk—anyone involved with Firefly and Serenity is almost always a pleasure to watch) were the best parts of the movies though.

Wow, look at that. All that praise and yet I hated the movie. What it really boils down to was that pretty much any scene that didn't involve a transformer or Shia LaBeouf (the main characters) was a good one. And unfortunately, there weren't enough of those scenes.

The level of brutal violence in this movie actually did bother me, because let's face it, this movie is marketed toward kids. It is based on a children's cartoon, after all. With lots of special effects to wow older viewers and try to distract them from what they're really watching.

There was a scene towards the end (or what should have been the end) when the autobots return from exile and kill a deceptacon in Chicago. Even though the deceptacon (bad guy) is dead, the autobots (good guys) mutilate him and rip him limb from limb complete with oil and other machinery fluids standing in for blood and guts. And audience members were voicing their approval. Yet, later in the movie when a deceptacon executed an autobot and smashed the dead body the audience was not pleased.