It was the best of flicks, it was the worst of flicks

The weekend was pretty good. Saturday I took the girls to our friends Taz's and Eli's daughter's 6th birthday party. It was a nice time as I got to meet up with Bismo and his boy and T&E's families. They took the kids bowling and then back to the house for BBQ. While I was there I had a nice discussion with Eli's parents about the events depicted in Foul Ball, the wonderful book I just finished, as they live in Pittsfield, MA, the town where the events of the true story of the book take place. I found it great to get a point of view from people that have lived there all there lives and what they saw and heard from a resident's perspective.

When we got home I guess my teen got her second wind as she wanted to go to the movies. As I wanted to see Collateral, I happily obliged. Collateral was amazing. It's the best movie of the summer (Sorry, Spidey!). It has a wonderful story that keeps you guessing, brisk dialog, and well crafted but subtle action sequences. Tom Cruise gave his best performance since "Interview With a Vampire", but Jamie Foxx was the real deal. He has come a long way from being just another comedian. I cannot wait until his first starring role playing Ray Charles in October.

Sunday was very low key on purpose given that we were expected the remainder of Hurricane Charley. Lucky for us it must have gone off to sea south of us. We wouldn't have gotten the kind of damage Florida got, but it wouldn't have been a good day to be outside.

Since I talked my teen out of Alien vs. Predator the night before, I took her and her boyfriend to see it this afternoon. It wasn't quite as bad as I feared, but given what could have been, it was extremely disappointing. It was basically reduced to a Freddy vs. Jason kinda semi-fright fest with alot of the gore obviously edited out to get a PG-13 rating. The most interesting part of the story, how both races got to be on earth, was made as a backstory shown in flashback taking all but 3-4 minutes on screen. But, what made it truly bad was that it didn't even bother to be consistent with what fans of both franchises knew about the Aliens and Predators. As the title of this entry suggests, this was the worst movie of the summer (that I've seen so far...I hope to be able to avoid Anaconda 2 and Baby Geniuses 2).

Gonna be off early to bed to get some needed shuteye. The Gulag awaits....