Movie Night: Better Than Sominex + a Bottle of Scotch + Chloroform...

Well. This is what happens when you don't pay attention to your Netflix queue...

Holy crap. Slept all evening, and now I'm going to be up until 4am.

Movie Night: Twofer Edition.

Our first movie this evening was March of the Penguins, the Oscar winning (there's a warning for you) docu-freaking-mentary about the annual trek of the Emperor penguins from their ocean home to their breeding grounds. And back to the Ocean. And back to the breeding grounds... And back to the Ocean. And so on, and so forth.

Look. I've nothing against documentaries. And, as documentaries go, this one was fairly watchable. Well, moderately watchable. It was a tad light on facts: for instance, I was dying to know what that bird was that ate the penguin chick (a Skua, it turns out), and it would've been interesting to learn the overall penguin breeding success rate, figuring in adults who turn into sealbait, the kids who are birdfood, and the eggs that never hatch (turns out only about 60% of couples actually end up having a chick, and it just goes down hill from there).

And having Morgan Freeman as your narrator is a good thing for a documentary. Like James Earl Jones and a couple of other guys, I could listen to this guy read a grocery list and be enthralled. (It's worth noting the original French -of course- version had actors voicing Momma Penguin, Daddy Penguin, and Baby Penguin. But, as we know, the French think Jerry Lewis is a national treasure.)

Now, to be fair, I did give the kids a choice. They could either have watched this, or Return of the Jedi. We've been doing the Star Wars movies, from I to V, over the past couple of weeks with only Jedi left to go. But the kids picked this, and who am I to stand in the way of their learning something.

But the Boy did look at me halfway through the movie and say "Dad, you know, Return of the Jedi would have been more exciting..."

Nothing gets past that one.

As for Sandras©, well, first the mandatory explanation:

The Sandra Bullock Scale© was devised to rate a movie sleepability, due to my inability to stay awake through any Sandra Bullock film since Demolition Man. A perfect score of five out of five represents a movie's a) stupifying boredom combined with b) lack of even token nudity despite hot chickage [see Practical Magic... what a waste of time, Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock and zero nudity... Rated PG-13 for sensuality my fanny...])

Now, Sandraing this one was tough. It was a fairly slow paced movie, but you stayed nearly enthralled... well, interested, in the fate of the scruffy little seabirds. And the kids watched the whole thing. And I think I only zonked out for a couple of minutes...

3 out of 5 Sandras©

Yes, March of the Penguins does not have the raw boredom power to put you out after a long day. For that, we've got Capote

Ah, a near perfect-storm of Sandraness here:

A. Followed March of the Penguins.

B. Stupid frickin' Netflix disc kept skipping, causing me to miss major portion of the middle of the film, severely affecting my ability to give a sh^t about the (alleged) plot.

C. I had already read the book.

Now, as I mentioned, I was not diligently monitoring our Netflix queue, or this would've gotten pushed to the back, as the Wife had laid down a new rule after a regrettable night spent saying "Wha tha fruck?" for 126 minutes during a "watching" of Syriana a couple of weeks ago. Yes, we've banned Oscar winners from the Jones household.

If it's good enough for those pretentious artiste wannabe fvcks in Hollywood, it's not coming here. Look, people. You work in the movie business. Cut the crap. I don't need artsy-fartsy direction with sparse dialog and a piano-clinking score when I want to be entertained. Not to be too much of a pretentious dick myself, I've got a fairly interesting job. I work on issues of importance and lasting consequence. I'm not going to apologize for wanting to watch movies with fart jokes and gratuitous nudity. I gave at the office, okay? I don't want to think, I want to be entertained.

And Capote was not entertaining. If you don't know how to read, by all means, rent this movie. You'll learn something about Truman Capote. What that something is, I have no idea, as I slept through gigantic chunks of this movie, waking only every five or six minutes to skip ahead a chapter because the !@&^*$ disk was so beat up it wouldn't play. If you want to actually learn about Capote and can read, go get the book.

And if you're one of those jerks who likes to sit around and say "hey, they didn't invent cans with pull-tab tops in 1962", then by all means, don't watch this movie. I suspect the continuity coordinator was sent back to making films for the Canadian Broadcasting Company after this abortion of missed detail...

Okay. Time for a Sandra© rating:

(oh, come on, you must see this coming...)

5 of 5 Sandras©! A perfect score!

Thank you. Next week: Caddyshack and Spaceballs... My cup runneth over...