Not the worst movie ever made...

...but certainly in the bottom 10%.

I refer of course to "G.I. Joe". I was dragged kicking and screaming by the wife unit in the spirit of family togetherness and whatnot. I would have preferred to spend the day on the bike trail, but it was 100 degrees and 80% humidity in the northwest burbs. Also, My youngest daughter's asthma was acting up and that was the stone that tipped the seesaw. Conditioned air and popcorn for everyone!

So, it sucked, but not as much as I feared and not as much as Transformers 2. At least I didn't feel like I needed a shower after this one. It was certainly the finest movie ever made that featured a member of the Wayans family. After I saw Transformers 2 I wanted to petition the Hague to bring Michael Bay up on charges for crimes against humanity. G.I. Joe was at most a misdemeanor.

It would have been vastly improved with the addition of a scene where Meryl Streep makes a pear tart.

Which brings us to the second film of the weekend. We don't usually see two movies a week, but we did one for the kids and one for mom and dad this week. We managed to sneak away to see "Julie & Julia" on Saturday morning. Not exactly date night but in one respect it was a vast improvement on our usual "dinner and a movie" date. Usually we have to rush to eat so we can make the 7:30PM showing, and if the film is long enough to prevent us from getting home by 10 then the date does NOT progress past the "movie" phase. If I don't get the wife unit tucked in before 10 then I don't get "tucked in".

Am I being too subtle?

Anyway, "Julie and Julia" was not bad but I walked into the theater knowing a bit more about the characters, or at least the people the characters are based on, than I needed or should have known. Sometimes you just have to let art flow over you without knowing where the artist bought his brush or where he dipped it.

I didn’t know much about Julie Powell, the woman that wrote the blog/book that half the movie was adapted from, so I googled her before we went. What I found didn't help, but it did reenforce my belief that fame is bad and should be avoided at all costs. It started with an article in Newsweek about how the blogosphere had turned on her, and how people who had once reverred her were now "hating" on her. The article, which actually was written to defend her, led to google searches for "julie powell divorce", "julie powell infidelity", "julie powell bloodthirsty cleaving maniac".

The truth is, I'm not a curious person when it comes to gossip. I didn’t want to know unsavory details about the real-life woman that inspired the “Julie” part of the movie. I didn’t need to know what she really looks like (Amy Adams is much cuter, but so what? Matt Damon, who will play me in the movie version of my life, is marginally better looking than me). I didn't want to know that sometime before or after she achieved some level of fame from her blog/book she apparently cheated on her husband with some guy. And I REALLY didn't want to know that her next book is about her new favorite hobby: Butchery. By the time I finished the ten minutes of "research" it was virtual certainty that the fictionalized version of her life would be much less repulsive than the real thing (Just like the fictionalized version of my life). Even so, it was hard not to color my opinion of the movie, at least the "julie powell" parts, with the bits of superficial knowledge about the real Julie Powell gleaned from the web.