Tuesday Night at the Movies

(I really should be in bed....but I wanted to blog about my night and the movies I saw first. I might have even more to say about these movies later when I'm not so tired and time-crunched.)

Today was a REALLY good day at the hospital for my grandfather and I checked my bank account only to find that I had more money than I thought, so I decided to take myself out to two movies after I left the hospital today. The local 18-plex is right on the way home as well, so I had lots to choose from.

The first movie I saw was Spiderman 3. I was thoroughly unimpressed. There was some pretty good fight scenes, but I've noticed lately in action movies that the fight scenes seem to me to be going so fast that I can't really take in all that is going on. Maybe I'm getting too old. My biggest problem was that there were way too many storylines all going on at once for me to really get passionate about any of them. Then there is Tobey Macguire's eyes. I'd never noticed how big and kinda buggy they are. It annoyed the crap out of me the whole movie. Topher Grace is 100x cuter and more charismatic, though I thought it was kinda unChristian of his character to pray for God to kill Peter Parker.

*Paragraph contains spoilers***Of course, this movie did bring up some questions that I had never really thought about when watching movies, especially superhero movies. A few years ago, the animated film The Incredibles brought to light the financial havoc that can be result from supervillians and superheroes fighting. Thus, I always wonder now who is going to clean up the messes that these fights leave and what effect these fights have on the everyday people living around the fight area. But this movie made me think of the emotional havoc that happens to these characters. Because these people have superpowers, the actions and reprucussions are magnified. Also, villians and heroes always seem to have some personal connection to each other. When Harry gets his memory back and decides to go after Spiderman again for killing his dad, the original Green Goblin, he breaks into the apartment of Mary Jane, the chick he just kissed and has loved all his life, and throws her into the wall by grabbing her by the neck. Then Black Spiderman and Harry have a knockdown, dragout fight after Parker realizes Harry has been manipulating him. How then can Parker go back to Harry, all buddy buddy, trying to get his help to save Mary Jane? How can they both forget that they almost killed each other? As Harry lays dying, both MJ and Parker act like he's their bestfriend again. Have they forgotten all the assaults??? Maybe this only bothers me.

The second movie I went to see was Waitress. Though it was made as just a small indie, it has gotten a much wider release, I would like to think all on its own merits, but I'm sure it hasn't hurt the movie that there is a tragic story surrounding the murder last November of the writer/director of the movie Adrienne Shelley (who also has a role in the film). No matter why it has gotten this larger release, I'm glad it has. It is an amazing, funny, bittersweet, smart, simple film with superb acting by Keri Russell and Matt Fillion. Andy Griffith was amazing in it as well and reminded me of my grandpa in some ways. Shelley wrote the movie after having her first child, a daughter. She was very afraid that having a child would ruin her artistic abilities, but instead found that having the child broadened and deepened her experience and her art. Obviously, since I'm not all about having children anytime soon and don't know if I'll ever birth any children, I took away a different lesson than the "wonderful baby changes life for the great" message. I really enjoyed the relationship that Jenna had with her doctor. It starts out as an affair. She is drawn to him because he is the opposite of her husband. He is drawn to her because of her beauty and sadness and pies. But then they become really good friends as well as lovers. The movie shows Jenna talking to him on the phone a good deal and she says that it is a long conversation about her life and how it feels to feel so trapped and be poor and be a woman stuck. She says that he is the first bestfriend that she has ever had. Though their relationship can't and doesn't last, it shows the transformative power of having people in your life showing/telling you that you are special while also just allowing you to be yourself, not making you be someone else or hoping you'll be someone else. The ways that the doctor describes Jenna is echoed in the way that Andy Griffith describes her, what he sees in her as a much older man who's lived his full life and sees in her so much more than she sees in herself. Because of my own experiences recently, this resonated the strongest with me. These relationships don't have to last forever to change us and transform how we see ourselves. But I also refuse to believe that I have to have a baby for that transformation to be complete.