Movies: Superbad and Stardust

So, one thing Bruce and I love to do is go to the movies. (Short digression here, and just about everyone who reads this at this point will have heard this before, but, do I need to remind you people? It's my blog, which means I can write about whatever I want. WHATEVER I WANT! Ahem. Anyway, when Bruce and I were newly dating, we spent a significant period of time dating long-distance. So for awhile, we made it a point to agree on a movie each week and go see it on a specific weekend day, me in Austin, Texas and Bruce in Los Angeles, and then we would call each other and talk about it. It was almost like seeing the same movie! Cue the sound effects: AWWWW! It all came crashing down when he moved to a different country for a year.)

Anyway, we get to see too few movies now that we have a baby, but when we get a babysitter, we almost always we go to the movies. In this case, Bruce's parents are in town, so we hit them up for an afternoon's worth of taking care of the kid and went to see 2 movies: Superbad and Stardust. (I know, I know. With a post title like this, you were expecting Bourne Ultimatum and The Simpsons Movie. Too bad.) Yes, we will frequently see more than one movie at a time if we can; our max has been 4 in what amounted to an entire day of movie watching, but that was too many. I came out of the theater with my head pounding. But 2 is easily doable. We don't waste that (free!) babysitting!

Superbad: Hilarious. There was, I concede, a joke involving menstruation that had my husband rolling in the aisles, while I was just kind of waiting for it to be over, but otherwise, hysterically funny. Michael Cera is just wonderful as Evan. The movie has some nice moments, too, particularly near the end, about friendships between boys and how they grow and change. It's ridiculously vulgar and may offend those with any sensitivities at all, but it is one funny movie. I have to make fun of this passage in the linked NYTimes review, though:

Long and lanky, Mr. Cera moves like one of those teenagers whose body hasn’t yet fully caught up to his newly reached height. With his wide-open face and smile, he looks absolutely amazed by what he can see from a higher elevation (the world!). But of course he looks surprised: he’s the top half of the exclamation point to the spherical Mr. Hill’s rolling big dot.

Is this not some of the worst imagery and writing you have ever seen? I generally enjoy Manohla Dargis's reviews, but her editor should have stopped this one paragraph shorter than he or she did. Sheesh!

Stardust: Wonderful. Beautifully shot; makes me want to go back to Scotland THIS MINUTE and go live on a loch or something. It's also a lovely story that moves along quickly. The acting is superb; Robert de Niro steals the movie, for my money.The ending is pure AWWWW. It's a movie that we both couldn't wait to watch with our daughter (we estimated about 10 to be an appropriate age for her to see it, as there is some rather graphically suggested violence). I find the comparisons I have been seeing to The Princess Bride to be apt, in the sense that it is a fairy tale with action and humor and romance. Terribly hard to market (indeed,the Stardust trailers are awful), but so worth seeing. I should note that the link is to the NYTimes movie review; I enjoyed it rather more than the reviewer and thought it was quite a bit better put together.

So, that was our afternoon. We got home to a newly-one-year-old Caetlin who had refused her lunch for her grandparents, and it took both me and Bruce to feed her dinner. (I fed her, Bruce entertained her.) She had serious Buddha belly when she was done snarfing down everything that she ended up eating, and then had 5 ounces of formula less than an hour later. She went down hard for bed -after freaking out when I walked by the bathroom carrying her to get her undressed for the bath, and she heard the bathwater running and wanted to be IN the bath already. High tragedy ensued. Is it so wrong that I find my daughter's tantrums, especially when she is tired and likely to be set off by something silly and small, so entertaining?

Great day: little bit of parenting, little bit of couple time, couple of excellent movies.

UPDATE: I'm not sure why it's squooshing the lines together after the block quote above. I've been through the HTML, and there doesn't appear to be any reason that I can see (with my mostly intuitive grasp of what I'm looking at, which is to say, incredibly uninformed) why it's doing that. If it bothers you like it bothers me, sorry. If anyone knows how to fix it, please leave it in the comments or email me. Cripes.