Squeezing in a Barcelona movie

I didn't want to include the poster for The Conjuring: Last Rites for my second straight post, so instead, you get to see a picture of Sagrada Familia, the unfinished Catholic church by Antoni Gaudi, which began construction in 1882 and is still going nearly 150 years later. It's such a popular attraction that it was sold out when we tried to go earlier today, and will also be sold out tomorrow, when we leave for Venice. So this is the only view we got of it, but my is it impressive. We did scratch our Gaudi itch with the also incredibly impressive La Pedrera an hour later.

So yes, nothing move-related happened in Paris, other than me looking at posters, though I did watch a screener of a movie to review in Toulouse in the south of France, which did not seem to warrant a mention on this blog.

Instead, I'm telling you about my second theatrical viewing of the trip, which occurred last night, the first having come back on August 31st. If my current pace of about one every two weeks keeps up, I'll watch one more on the trip, though I could squeeze in two (One Battle After Another?) if I get really ambitious. Most likely the next one will come on our final week in Crete, the last week of September, in part because we will really slow down that week, which will making getting to the movies much easier.

As you can see below, The Conjuring: Last Rites is called Expendiente Warren: El Ultimo Rito here in Barcelona. So, basically the opposite of France, where they kept the franchise title but changed the subtitle. "El Ultimo Rite" translates to "The Last Rite," but as far as I can tell, "Expediente Warren" translates to "Office Hours Warren," which is just hilarious.

Without going on and on about how much I love Barcelona, especially the El Born area where we are staying, let me just say that with a 15-year-old and an 11-year-old, we don't have the stamina to stay out and eat dinner at 11:30 with the other Spaniards. Given that our dinner was over by about 8:40, I thought it might be the perfect opportunity to get over to Mooby Aribau, the closest cinema to El Born, for a 9:30 showing.

Now, I should tell you that it wasn't straightforward getting there, but that's because I was trying to exist only on the maps that I'd had when I was in range of a WiFi. I'm trying to keep my phone on airplane mode whenever possible on this trip, to avoid roaming charges. My wife got an e-sim, so she's on a mobile network when we're out and about and need one. We can connect to her hotspot or other available WiFi, but otherwise, my older son and I am offline. (My younger son does noes not yet have a phone, and you can sense that he might complain about that if he weren't so sweet.)

My experience in America has been that if I plug in a destination on my phone map when I'm in range of internet, the map will keep directing me even after I've gone offline. This also generally worked in Singapore last year. It has not worked particularly well in Europe, the latest example being last night.

When I left the tapas bar where we had dinner -- our second sub-par tapas in as many days, unfortunately -- I had about a 25-minute walk to get me there by about 9:15 for the 9:30 show. I got about halfway through the serpentine streets before the map went to "Waiting for location" and never came back out of that mode. I wonder if this is more of a problem when you're walking than driving, though even the walking worked okay in Singapore. 

So I did have to turn on my roaming, and that got me to the theater in plenty of time, by about 9:20. My hope was to get home using only my memory, which was a fairly bold approach. 

But first, the movie.

I ordered my large Coke Zero in Spanish, after buying my ticket through a kiosk. I have no idea how close I got to being actually correct, but the guy had no trouble with what I meant, probably because he is an expert at picking through broken Spanish, and also because there was a natural limit on the things I could be asking him for. (Barcelona is very set up for English. Almost everyone speaks it and I heard English being spoken by tourists constantly, much more so than in Paris.) I said "Por favor, me gusteria uno Coca Cola sin azucar, grande." Anyway, he gave me the right thing. 

There was a small part of me that worried I might have ended up in a dubbed session, even though I'd check to make sure it was "version original," which would mean in English with subtitles. The trailers were also in this form, though the chain made sure to let us know that it carried both original versions and dubbed versions at all its locations, in a promotional video after the trailers. There were a good 40 other people there, I assume mostly Spaniards, but given the prevelance of English in their city, I doubt most of them even needed the subtitles.

Just a side note to say I continue to enjoy watching English language movies with Spanish subtitles, which I've done a half-dozen times before for one reason or another. It does help with remembering some of my Spanish, but I haven't needed it here, and you get the sense that most locals would prefer just to speak to you in English. That is not the case in Paris, where they only speak English if they really have tto. Anyway, after tomorrow I won't need my Spanish at all.

The movie is not good. I have already written a review but will not be posting it until Monday. You can find the link then if you want to read it.

At the end of the movie, I could not find my way back without turning my phone back on to roam for another day. (At least, I assume it's another day because it was after midnight for much of my return walk.) There has been some debate on this trip about whether my sense of direction is good or bad. I think it's good. Everyone else thinks it's bad. Anyway, the majority must be correct, because I ended up in some intersection that was very unfamiliar to me -- not that anything should be very familiar to me after only about 30 hours in the city -- and discovered that I was, indeed, heading away from El Born rather than towards it.

It's been a week between entries on this blog, though I have gotten you something from every country so far, if you don't count Scotland as a separate country from England, and if you lump in my musings about the offerings on Emirates Airlines as part of my Dubai experience. I'll try to keep it going in Italy, where I will be for the next six days, following three days in Venice with three days in Rome. 

A sensible laughs-to-stars ratio

I've gone and done it again. I've gone and liked a movie that everyone else seems to hate. 

I sort of loved it actually. But we'll get to that in a moment.

I don't know if it was just a coincidence that I laughed the hardest I've laughed in years on the first night in Australia after Joe Biden was inaugurated. I didn't consciously feel the sense of relief I imagined I'd feel. Given that his inauguration had recently become a fait accompli, I had an underwhelming actual response to it, even with waking up at 4 a.m. to watch it -- and realizing only then I probably needed to wake up about 15 minutes earlier, as he was already mid-speech.

But Thursday night our time was indeed a cause for celebration. The kids pushed for a special dinner, so we went up to Errol Street and got fish and chips, and beers for the adults. Later when we came home, I told my wife I was going to watch something really silly. I didn't know what, but I wanted a cinematic balm for my celebratory mind.

That thing ended up being Vacation, the fifth movie in the series that started out as a National Lampoon property before shedding that affiliation (at least as far as the titles were concerned) with Vegas Vacation in 1997. I had before now considered it safe to avoid this movie, as Ed Helms already felt like a dud at the movies way back in 2015, and the only previous movies in this series I actually like are the original and the aforementioned Vegas Vacation. That's right, I don't like the Christmas one. 

In fact, if I'd felt for the whole movie like I did in its first 15 minutes, I'd have written a post on The Audient with this title: "I like Ed Helms, I just don't like Ed Helms movies." I was already planning what I'd write about The Clapper when this happened:

I started laughing.

And laughing. And laughing.

And just never stopped laughing throughout the rest of the movie.

That might be a slight exaggeration. But three or four hysterically funny scenes put me in this film's good graces, and I never saw any reason to leave them. And most of the remaining scenes were solid doubles if not actual homers.

It all started with the introduction of the Albanian minivan that the grown Rusty Griswold (Helms) rents for his family to make another ill-fated trip to Wally World. The vehicle is this incredibly odd shade of blue and has kind of a bubble butt at the back, for no good reason. It has multiple gas tanks and multiple charging cables flopping out of it like spaghetti, which have connector prongs that don't go to any outlet you've ever seen, complete with protruding springs and other doohickeys. The remote for the car has about 17 buttons, most of which have completely unclear meanings, including one with a swastika on it. 

Here, have a look:

Anything related to this vehicle had me in stitches, including its GPS and the steady reveal of what the various buttons do, but they weren't the only moments that made me laugh out loud during Vacation. In fact, in one moment involving a highway chase, I was so doubled over with hysterical laughter that my wife had to come check on me to make sure I was okay. (Actually, that did involve the minivan.)

As unpredictable as all this was, it led to something highly predictable: I went to Metacritic and saw that Vacation has a 34 metascore. That's an improvement on its 27 on Rotten Tomatoes. I'd remembered it hadn't been well received, but in those few minutes between when I finished the movie and when I checked on these scores, I convinced myself I'd remembered it wrong. After all, how could I find those scenes so much funnier than anyone else did? But nope. I read the review of the guy who liked it the most on Metacritic -- Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri -- who also admitted to "laughing [his] ass off." But he spent about every other sentence of the review apologizing for his reaction.

Why do we need to apologize for laughing?

It occurred to me after watching Vacation that if something is funny, it's funny. If it's racist or sexist or homophobic and you find it funny, that's a you problem. But Vacation is none of those things (very much) so I don't know why I can't feel pure about the laughter it inspired in me.

And it's not like this movie has no bonafides. We may not have known who they were then, but Vacation was written and directed by Jonathan M. Goldstein and John Francis Daley, who may not be household names, but sure got a lot of kudos when they made Game Night a couple years later. I laughed a lot harder at this than I laughed at Game Night.

If I put myself in my wife's shoes, seeing me on Thursday night -- or rather, hearing my guffaws from the other room and coming in after they'd ended -- would only be comparable to the time she saw me lose my shit at the drive-in while watching Step Brothers for the first time. I was like a crazy person to her with how much I was laughing at that movie. Have I laughed that hard another time since then? Surely, but the fact that Step Brothers was what immediately came to mind as a point of comparison is a good indication how hard I laughed during that one particular scene in Vacation. That's got to be worth something, right?

It's worth four stars, I decided.

Yep. I snubbed that 34 metascore and 27 RT score and logged a four-star (out of five) entry on Letterboxd.

I did feel a little funny about it -- who's going to see that rating on Letterboxd and think less of me for it? -- but not as funny as Vacation was. 

Is this as good as other movies I typically give four stars? Surely not. But I am going to remember that laughter for a long time. Maybe someday I will see another really funny movie and compare it to those times I saw Step Brothers and Vacation.

There's probably no reliable way to translate laughs into stars. And surely, one funny scene in a movie is not going to be enough to push it even into positive three-star territory. I've seen movies that were total duds outside of one brilliantly conceived comedy bit.

But again, that wasn't the only time I emitted guffaws during Vacation. The sheer quantity of laughter forced me to realize that star-ratings are a measure of a subjective experience of watching a movie. Opinions cannot be "right" or "wrong," though of course, the more opinions someone gets "wrong," the less likely you are to believe them when they recommend a movie to you.

Well, I hope you'll still believe me when I tell you that Vacation might bring you the same laughs it brought me.

If we are grading only the laughter, and grading it on a curve, and grading it subjectively, it may have even been worth five stars.

Personal growth

Never let it be said that an old dog can't learn any new tricks.

In past times, my "trick" on a five-night trip to a small country town that had its own movie theater would have been to get to that theater, at least once if not twice. With five nights at your disposal, it's not even a hindrance on any of your fellow travelers. Just this past summer -- winter in Australia -- I went to the local cinema in Lakes Entrance to see both Sonic the Hedgehog, and a repertory screening of Mary Poppins, which I had never seen.

This past week, I made it to the Mansfield Armchair Cinema, pictured above, exactly zero times.

Oh, it had been my intention to go. I had not yet seen any of the films playing there, which at different times during our stay included Wonder Woman 1984, The Croods: A New Age, The Dry and Words on Bathroom Walls. And I got as far as the lobby on our second-to-last full day, when I asked about whether the next day's shows were in danger of selling out. They were, so if we were to buy tickets, we probably ought to do it today. 

But when it didn't work out, I let it go without further comment, and that's the part that encourages me about my own ability to surprise myself.

It wasn't that we didn't have the time, but that we, collectively, did not have the inclination. 

I had expected to take my younger son, who turned seven on January 1st, to The Croods on his birthday. We had known it was going to rain that day. My wife was even planning a concurrent viewing of The Dry for her, her sister and her mother -- an escape to The Dry to get out of the wet, you could say. I guess we figured we'd force my older son along to The Croods.

But then it was revealed that not only did my older son not want to see The Croods -- which we already knew -- but neither did his brother. Forcing one would have been achievable, but not both -- especially if the second one we were forcing was having a birthday. (Incidentally, I sort of blame myself, for making a dismissive comment about this movie sometime in mid-December, when I did not know this scenario would arise.)

Wonder Woman was my next best hope, but my wife was uncertain whether it would be too adult for the seven-year-old. He's watched a handful of Marvel movies, but my wife was not willing to extend that logic to exposing him to this movie. The fact that she wanted to see it on a bigger screen -- we have that option in Australia, at least for now -- also factored into her thinking.

I still could have seen one of the other movies, but this small community theater plays its last show each day by about 6:40. I just couldn't see my way to skipping out on a whole night's dinner just to scratch my itch to visit small theaters in small towns. 

To be sure, my wife would have still helped me work it out. Our trip was long enough that I could have gotten away in one of the afternoons, especially since our kids are accustomed to some afternoon downtime -- meaning time playing video games. 

But instead I just decided to let it go. 

And part of letting it go was never mentioning it again once it was clear it was not going to happen. In the past, had I been thwarted in such an attempt, I might have made solemn, regretful comments which would have let my wife know I had not really let it go. This time, I just decided that what was done was done, and it would never get mentioned again.

Besides, I think we'll be back to Mansfield. If this place is great in the summer, it's even better in the winter, where it serves Mt. Buller, a rare Australian spot with the elevation to support skiing. Which, incidentally, has its own theater, where we saw Aladdin on a visit in 2019. 

And if for some reason we don't get back here, life will go on. 

I can't visit every small theater in every small town, and knowing that is a part of growing up as an evolved human being. 

Cinematic cold feet

I love it when things work out perfectly.

Last Saturday night, my wife, my sister-in-law, my son and I stayed in a hotel in Encinitas, in order to hit Legoland in Carlsbad (about seven miles up the road) the next morning. All three of them had been going to bed pretty early, so I knew Saturday night would be a good opportunity to catch a movie -- a "vacation movie" at that, which is all the better.

Earlier in the day, I'd done some research and discovered that Encinitas boasts a single-screen theater, which was playing The Croods earlier in the day and then The Place Beyond the Pines a single time at 8:15. The Place Beyond the Pines had been one movie I was certain I was going to see in the theater, except it was starting to look like that wasn't going to happen. Then, bam! Along comes this opportunity. And it even started during my preferred window for an evening movie: 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. The 7-8 time slot is often too early, the 9-10 time slot often too late.

However, I still wanted events to play out naturally over the course of the day, rather than broaching the idea of me seeing this movie at 10:30 in the morning. Odds were that my son would be asleep by then and my wife and sister-in-law would be content to part ways with me for the evening, but I didn't want to take that for granted. So imagine how nice it was when we drove by the theater naturally, and they both pointed it out to me before I had the chance to point it out myself. Score.

We wrapped up our Mexican dinner at about 7:45, and I was on my way. I couldn't buy my tickets right away, though. In a perfect sign of small-town quaintness, the box office was empty, with one of those little signs in the window with a clock and adjustable hands, indicating the time the box office would again be occupied by a person. The hands of the clock were set to 8:05.

I returned at about 8:10 and found about five people ahead of me in line -- which is this town's idea of a crowd. I knew I obviously wasn't going to miss anything, but I was excited enough by the opportunity to see this movie under these circumstances that I felt a bit antsy nonetheless.

So it was with some about of impatience and, in fact, incredulity that I listened to the guy ahead of me ask the following question to the woman sitting in the box office:

"Have you seen The Place Beyond the Pines? Is it good?"

You're at the theater, you're in line, you've got your money pulled out ... and now you're not sure you're going to go?

He may have just been making conversation, but come on. You're already here, and now you're going to let someone else's opinion dictate whether you're actually going to plunk down your nine bucks?

First off, this woman is trying to sell you a ticket to see the movie. It's a small-town single-screen theater, so chances are, it loses a ton of money. They need that nine dollars, and they need it bad. So it's not even in her interest to tell the truth.

However, this woman did indeed tell what seemed to be the truth -- that she hadn't seen it, but that her brother had seen it and it was supposed to be great.

The guy bought the ticket.

What I found annoying was that he wasn't only spoiling his own viewing of the movie, but possibly spoiling mine. What happened if this woman had said she didn't really care for it? I'd already decided to buy my ticket, even if he hadn't. I didn't want my own excitement to be tainted by a negative appraisal.

And what if the woman had said she didn't care for it, and he went in anyway? Then he would have proven that this whole exercise was just a waste of everybody's time.

In truth, I did already have some tempered appraisals of the movie under my belt, because I'd already heard the movie discussed on Filmspotting -- meaning I already knew about the movie's unconventional structure. (If you don't know about it, I'll just leave it at that.) However, everyone agrees that at least one part of the movie is incredibly great -- myself included.

One other funny/charming thing about this small theater? The movie started ten minutes late, but then didn't include a single commercial or trailer. Just straight in to the action.

And what action it is: The movie starts with a two- to three-minute unbroken take that ends with what appears to be Ryan Gosling riding a motorcycle inside an enclosed sphere with two other motorcycles, defying death in front of our very eyes.

This shot is reason alone to see The Place Beyond the Pines.

A John Carter length nap

Alas, my attempts to see a movie in the theater on vacation last week were foiled.

It shouldn't have been so hard. The trip included a total of nine nights, seven of which were spent in easy range of numerous movie theaters. I totally could have gone out to a late movie once my family had gone to bed, even if the plan for my wife and me to go to a movie together never transpired.

But it just didn't work out, in part because I had targeted a specific night late in the trip to do it, and that night ended up seeming like the wrong night when it finally arrived. Of course, the theater in Portland where I wanted to see Seeking a Friend for the End of the World didn't make it any easier on us -- it was playing the movie, but only at 3:15 in the afternoon. Only two weeks into its run? Shame. We could have seen it at another theater, but that was the one we had targeted for its cuteness and proximity to Portland's Old Port district, where we hoped to get a drink afterward.

When Wednesday night the 4th clearly wasn't going to work out, I mentally scrambled to see if I could make the next night work out, but the rain on Wednesday night conspired against me, as the city of Portland shifted its fireworks display (which we were supposed to attend) ahead by one day. I ended up glad I had never mentioned it at all, so as not to make my family think I'd been conspiring to see a movie for part of our limited time together. (See here and here for fuller discussions of why I love seeing movies while out of town.)

My last play was for Saturday night, the night before our departure. We were staying in my sister's intimate loft apartment near Boston's Logan Airport, and there was an idea that my sister and I might need to clear out while my wife stayed home and tried to get our son to sleep -- especially important given that we had to get up before 5 to leave for our 7:05 flight. But when we didn't get home from dinner until well after 9, it was clear that this opportunity would also go by the boards.

Well, thank goodness for having to rouse our son so early. As a result, I somehow got to watch an entire 132-minute movie, without interruption, on our flight home.

After our trials on the flight over, I didn't think I'd have a shot at watching even one of those in-flight 30-minute sitcoms. Our son is still under two, so he qualifies as a "lap infant," meaning we don't need to buy a seat for him. Great savings, but it made for a terrible quality of travel. He spent the first three hours of that flight wriggling and kicking and trying to make life miserable for everyone around him. Fortunately, we succeeded to the extent that he only really made it miserable for us. My wife hilariously attempted to watch the in-flight movie, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, despite our son pulling out her earphones every two minutes. (Or "Journey 2: Mystery Island," as the flight attendant had called it.) Me, I can't even wade into a movie if I know that kind of nonsense is awaiting me.

But my son was considerably more docile at the start of this flight home. He still had more sleeping to do. In fact, I began to stress out when he had already gotten himself into a comfortable sleeping position, torso on my wife's lap and legs on mine, but the movie had not yet started. I needed those two things to align perfectly if I wanted any shot at getting through a whole movie.

I figured I had a better shot at The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which I guessed would be about 100 minutes (looking it up now, I see it's actually 123). That was the movie they had announced we'd be seeing. When the Walt Disney logo and an image of Mars were the first two things to appear on screen, I knew we weren't in India anymore.

The first thing that bummed me out about John Carter starting was that I wanted to watch it on a big screen. I knew it wasn't supposed to be good, but I thought our new home TV would be a good place to take in its Martian vistas, which promised to be the best thing about the movie.

The second was that I knew it was about 2 hours and 20 minutes long. And I figured there would be almost no way the little sleeping cherub in our laps would still be either cherubic or sleeping 2 hours and 20 minutes from now.

Well, it couldn't have worked out much better. There were a few twitches and small awakenings, and even a retraction of his legs off my own. But it was only just before the credits were set to roll that my son returned to the waking world, and it was a groggy return uncharacterized by lunges at our headphones.

The movie itself? I liked it fine. Yes, it has all the problems everyone says it has, but I applauded its ambition, and also the visual whimsy Andrew Stanton clearly tried to bring to it. There were some pretty successful attempts at humor, like the scene in which Bryan Cranston is interrogating Taylor Kitsch, and dutifully progresses through the same speech despite being repeatedly interrupted by Kitsch's escape attempts. Each time Kitsch head butts Cranston or dives through a nearby window, the scene picks back up in a new location, with Kitsch newly recaptured, and Cranston picking up where he left off in the speech. That kind of thing really worked -- but the movie needed a lot more of it.

Now that I'm back, I need to get out to the movies big time. It's been nearly a month since my last theatrical screening: Prometheus, way back on June 12th.

However, I may target Beasts of the Southern Wild, and just save Seeking a Friend for DVD -- an unfortunate outcome, since I really wanted to support it by seeing it in the theater.

So my wife and I will probably have that date to see Seeking a Friend, in the end. It'll just be on our couch sometime this October.

Regreso de vacaciones

At least I think that's correct.

Yep, I'm back from six days and five nights in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Thought I should give you something brief on the blog, to end my six-day drought and encapsulate the trip.

So not 15 minutes after we'd gotten to our room in the all-inclusive resort did I start to panic about whether we'd brought enough DVDs. We had two rented from Netflix and had brought three from our own collection. However, only two of the three from our collection would play. My wife has an Australian DVD that's from an incompatible region, a movie we've been meaning to see that was given to her by her family, called Wake in Fright. We thought it was possible that the resort's DVD player was some different region, capable of playing both American DVDs and DVDs from other regions (as all DVD players should be, if there weren't some kind of pernicious DVD industry conspiracy controlling everything). But such was not the case.

So we had four movies for only five nights, one of which was our anniversary night. Somehow this did not seem enough to me. When I arrive places on vacation -- especially these all-inclusive places (this is the second one I've visited) -- I tend to spend the first hour or so completely out of sorts, overwhelmed by how to take it all in. During these times I fixate on ridiculous details, like whether we brought enough movies to carry us through our vacation, when we should be spending our time doing everything imaginable except watching movies. Having a small child along with us would restrict us somewhat, sure, and make movie-watching something we might do more than if my wife and I were alone. But we had babysitting lined up for over half the nights we were there, so my worries were irrational indeed.

And indeed, we watched Dirty Work (which I'd already seen) and the first half of The Switch. These were our two rented movies. Neither of the movies we owned (Lost in Translation or Almost Famous) made it anywhere close to the DVD player.

The reason we rented Dirty Work (which I've seen about three times and once owned on VHS) was because my wife showed me a clip of Norm MacDonald's standup on the internet the other week. I didn't realize she thought MacDonald was funny, and when I learned she hadn't seen the Bob Saget-directed masterpiece Dirty Work, I thought it would make great vacation viewing, when we'd stumble back to our room full of free alcohol. She agreed and it was a done deal.

Well, it didn't hold up as well as I'd hoped. I mean, I found it funny, but I recognized it was something that probably didn't translate that well to most women of above-average intelligence. I will say that she ended up loving the last 20 minutes, and I can't tell if that's just because we broke up our viewing between the end of the night of our arrival (when she was falling asleep) and the next afternoon (when she wasn't), or whether it contains genuinely stronger material. Anyway, I was glad that at least some of it clicked with her.

I was reminded of the fact that MacDonald is one of my favorite comedians in terms of delivering a punchline. It's the way he hits the punchline that kills me. He's not among my top ten favorite funnymen, but some of his individual jokes hit with a force that earns him that consideration. If you don't have MacDonald's particular speech intonations in your head when you read this, some of these lines won't be as funny, but here they are anyway:

"There's two kinds of people in this world: Those who get stomped on and those who do the stomping."
"Where'd you come up with that theory?"
"That famous guy said it. What's his name? Uh... Oh, yeah: Jesus."

It's that perfectly McDonald-ian emphasis he puts on the word "Jesus" that makes it so great.

Then there's this one:

"Note to self: Remember to get ass wart cream for giant wart on my ass."

Maybe by itself it's not a line that reeks of comedic brilliance, but when delivered by MacDonald ... c'est magnifique! This is how it comes out, with emphasis in bold: "Remember to get ass wart cream for giant wart -- on my ass."

They can be simple, too:

"Note to self: Learn to fight."

He enunciates each word clearly: "Learn to fight." That's all you need. (And it helps that he's just been thrown out a glass window, in a terrific looking stunt by the stuntman, which alone is worthy of a good burst of surprised laughter.)

And then the part I always loved when I was younger, when he returns from being anally raped in prison (although it affects him in a purely comic way, not in the traumatic way it would in real life). He looks back in the direction of the off-screen prisoners who supposedly just did the raping, and scolds them in a way as though he were disappointed more than traumatized:

"You fellas have a lot of growing up to do, I'll tell you that. Ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. Can you believe these characters? Way out of line. Way out of line. Have a good mind to go to the warden about this. You know what hurts the most is the ... the lack of respect. You know? That's what hurts the most. Except for the ... except for the other thing. That hurts the most. But the lack of respect hurts the second most. Ridiculous."

Okay, enough quoting Norm MacDonald for today.

What else about our trip? We had a really nice time, though it's certainly hard to juggle a baby and trying to relax in a resort. (Not literally juggling, that would be dangerous.) However, we pulled it off pretty well. I consumed no less than six alcoholic beverages per day, and I swam in no fewer than six pools. (Okay, maybe five.) I also went parasailing, which was a first, and which took my breath away. The food was a mixed bag, but more good than bad, and some of it great. The place failed on a lot of the comical little details (we had to ask several times for things, they were pathologically unwilling to replenish our supply of Splenda in our room) but succeeded on the big ones. And my wife did get some good relaxation in, a bunch of little temporary breaks from the full-time job of motherhood. That was the most important part.

I said at the start that we only watched one-and-a-half movies, but I actually watched pieces of others in an attempt to improve my Spanish. One of the first ways I felt out of sorts is that I'd spent exactly zero time boning up on my Spanish before I left, and though it was barely needed because everyone spoke very good English, speaking no Spanish at all would make me feel like a tourist. So when I was having trouble producing certain easy words, I felt no different from a red-faced chucklehead Republican who flew in from South Carolina for a week to go golfing and call everyone "Jose," regardless of his actual name. That's right, even though I was a tourist, I didn't want to be confused with one -- at least not with an American tourist. (Maybe they thought I was one of the number of different Canandians we ran into.)

So I spent a little time doing what I did before we went on our honeymoon three years ago, which was watching movies in English with Spanish subtitles. There are no end to the choices of American movies available on Mexican TV, and though a number of them were dubbed in Spanish (such as Rocky III, of which I saw about 40 scattered minutes), there were also a fair number in English with Spanish subtitles. These were slightly more helpful, because if you're just hearing the Spanish language spoken, the words can get lost in a steady flow of sounds. It helps to see where the words break from each other, and that's what you get in English with Spanish subtitles -- you hear the words you know, and you see them in the other language. That's the best approach if you ask me. (Rocky III also worked a bit, because I've seen that movie about ten times, and remember much of the dialogue.)

What interested me is the random selection of movies that were playing. Movies I watched at least short chunks of included Daisy von Scherler Mayer's The Guru, Raymond de Felitta's The Thing About My Folks and Bernard Rose's Immortal Beloved. (It's best if you do this with a movie you've already seen, so you don't miss out on the plot while you're concentrating on teaching yourself the words.)

Of course, as with everything on the trip, it was a project I could pursue only in short bursts. There was one valuable word I learned in Spanish, however, while watching The Guru: "pelicula." It's a word I should have known before now, or at least remembered that I already knew.

Yep, "pelicula" means "movie."

Adios y gracias, damas y caballeros. Hasta manana.

Desert hideaway

This is where my wife, son and I spent our Friday and Saturday nights.

Jealous? You should be. It was awesome.

It's a little getaway called Green Acres Ranch in Joshua Tree. This building and one other are the only two on the site, and there ain't nothing else around but the joshua trees and the scorpions. (Of which we saw none, but we knew they were there.)

We were getting away for my wife's birthday, which fell on Saturday this year. We might have been inclined to stay three nights instead of two, only my company doesn't give us President's Day as a paid holiday (or Martin Luther King Day, or the day after Thanksgiving -- I'm getting used to it).

Because this is a movie blog and not a "how I spent my shortened Presidents' Day weekend" blog, I'll talk about how our weekend relates to movies.

Usually in situations like this, we want to watch a movie each night. There's plenty to do in a place like this -- it has an outdoor fire pit, a hammock, a garden fountain with a fish pond, a horseshoe pit, even an outdoor shower, which I tried to use on the assumption that it would eventually warm up. (It did not.) But my wife and I love movies, so we generally want to wind down the evening with a good flick once all the daytime activities had been exhausted. (And it was too windy/rainy to use the outdoor fire pit anyway.)

We might have watched a movie both nights, but after a five-and-a-half hour drive out from Los Angeles on Friday afternoon/evening -- the deadly combination of rain, a Friday night, and a holiday weekend making it especially long and frustrating -- it was all we could do to make ourselves dinner and get our son situated. A week away from six months old, he was finally spending his first night under a different roof, and let's just say he was not particularly happy about it. We did enjoy some cocktails, but the episode of Twin Peaks we thought we might watch -- our compromise when a movie seemed too daunting -- never did get watched.

Saturday night was different. After a day of yummy meals (all of which we made in the kitchen there), a couple short walks away from the cabin, some reading, and various other birthday-related fun, we got our son settled enough to watch Galaxy Quest for the night of my wife's birthday. Even on the small screen of my portable DVD player, we were reminded just what a joy this movie is. Check out our setup: The house has an attached indoor/outdoor space that's about as big as the living area, and has the benefit of being far enough away from our son that we could make noise without him hearing it. We dragged in two chaise lounges from outside, got ourselves all "rugged up" (my wife's Australian term, that I'd never heard, for bundling up in cold weather), and watched most of the movie out there. After several breaks to go comfort him, we eventually had to come inside and finish up in the bed, with her holding him in her arms. At least he slept well after that -- we all did, on both nights, after the initial fussiness. As good a reason as any other to wish we could stay out there.

But I didn't really just want to write about watching Galaxy Quest. Because this cabin was outfitted with just about everything else -- done in a very rustic style, mind you -- it should be no surprise that it also had its own TV and DVD player on the premises. (We just couldn't use them, because it would have kept our son up.) There were a handful of DVDs available as well. Surely they're just things that have accumulated over time, one way or another, but I thought the list of available movies/watching material was rather odd. Check it out:

The Amityville Horror (the original)
The Hurricane
Planet of the Apes (the original)
Thirteen
Training Day
12 Monkeys
Wendy & Lucy
A Showtime Emmy screener pack
A USA Network Emmy screener pack

Sure glad we brought Galaxy Quest from home, because not a single other of these would have been what you would consider "light birthday viewing." The Amityville Horror might have been especially creepy, given that we were out in the middle of the desert with basically no one else around. (Or so we hoped, I guess you would say.) Perhaps that's why it's there as an option.

Now, back at work, but still on a high from our weekend in the high desert. Here's hoping you're reading this from home, even if I'm not writing it from there. (Though I guess that would be pretty weird if I were writing my blog from your home.)

Avatar in Australia

I can't believe I've had this blog for almost a whole year, and I have yet to write an in-depth Avatar post.

Well, this one won't be very in-depth either. Today is my last day in the western hemisphere for two weeks, and I'm tying up a million loose ends before jetting off to Australia tonight. Writing one last blog post before I leave is one of those loose ends.

Yeah, I'm pretty excited for Avatar. Even though my first impression, upon seeing footage, was "Oh, I didn't know this is what Avatar was about." Even though I'm still not a big fan of this poster, with its way-too-earnest blue dude gazing deeply into our eyes. Even though they've done their best to saturate us with footage and remove the thrill from finally getting to see the movie.

So excited, in fact, that I have been -- successfully, it would appear -- campaigning my wife to see the movie while we spend the next three days in Sydney.

Whether we can just walk up and get tickets is another matter, especially on IMAX. I understand many of those shows have been sold out for weeks here in Los Angeles. Australia has a smaller population, but it should hardly matter in the big cities. I do like to think of them as slightly less impressed with big spectacle, in their eagerness to "take the piss" out of blowhards like James Cameron. But they are a film-loving culture that has produced numerous great film icons (as I discussed only a few days ago). Plus, the lead (Sam Worthington) is an Aussie, and I believe some of it was shot (or at least post-produced) in Australia.

So seeing Avatar in Sydney may be a pipe dream. But I really don't want to wait two weeks to get back -- longer than that, actually, since my wife doesn't return until January 5th -- to see the movie. Maybe we'll have a better chance in Hobart, Tasmania, where we will spend the five days after that. Either way, if you read this post, you'll know I'm okay with "wasting" precious travel time on a movie -- in fact, I try to do it once a trip.

I will also try to make at least one Audient post from Australia. After all, won't you want to know which five movies I watched on the 16-hour plane ride?

But if I don't, have a happy holiday season, readers, and I'll see you back here in 2010!

Vacation tease

Away I went on vacation this past weekend, and didn't see the following movies:

1) Away We Go. My mom was the one who actually suggested seeing a movie on Saturday afternoon, and I quickly agreed. She was also interested in the movie I nominated, Sam Mendes' Away We Go. And we had a good five hours before I needed to leave for my dinner plans. However, her boyfriend, a noted outdoorsman, pointed out that the sun was coming out for the first time in weeks, and we should do something outside instead. We ended up walking around Walden Pond -- you know, the place where Henry David Thoreau went and thought deep thoughts. Her boyfriend was "right" in many senses -- doing an outside activity is probably both more social and more memorable for most people. Why, then, did he proceed to try to get me to use that same time to watch Kingdom of Heaven on his iphone? Because a) he's an eccentric old goof, and b) he looooooves his iphone, and demonstrating just how handy it can be. I don't know what would have happened if I'd said "Yes, indeed, let's do that -- let's sit here for 2 hours and 24 minutes squinting at this epic movie on the small screen of your cellular phone." Half of me wishes I'd attempted that particular social experiment.

2) Is Anybody There? The wedding I attended on Friday afternoon broke up earlier than I was expecting, and it was too early to begin the drive across New Hampshire to Portland, where I would be spending that night with my dad and his wife. (I'm sure they would have loved it if I'd arrived early, but what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them, I figured.) On my drive up through New Hampshire on Route 16 the previous night, I'd spotted the Michael Caine movie Is Anybody There? at a one-screen theater somewhere south of North Conway -- though I couldn't remember exactly where. (And I still can't determine that, as a brief internet search came up empty). I love these old single-screen theaters to death, so I made a note of the times on the marquee as I was passing -- just in case. I made a pretty good push for the 5 o'clock show, but when it was about 4:50 and I determined I was not within two or three miles, it was time to give up the quest.

3) Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian/My Sister's Keeper. There was a theater in quaint little downtown North Conway itself, but I passed through about 15 minutes after the twin 4:30 start times of these two movies.

4) The Proposal/Year One/Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen/The Taking of Pelham 123. When I realized I would not make Is Anybody There? on time, I knew I had a fallback option for a late-afternoon movie. It wouldn't be nearly as romantic as the single-screen theater, but it would be something -- the six-screen theater at the Mountain Valley Mall, also in North Conway. In fact, I didn't even know what movies were playing, but I figured there'd be a better-than-average chance of one I hadn't seen starting at 5:15 or 5:20. Nope. All six movies started between 4:10 and 4:40, meaning the lobby was deserted when I got there -- a bad sign to be sure. Even Up and The Hangover, which I refused to see a second time just to fulfill my desire for a vacation movie, wouldn't have been possible contenders for me.

Oh well.

The thing that makes vacation movies so great, in addition to the cineaste's thrill of seeing movies in unfamiliar theaters, is that they are also so unlikely to be possible. If you have only a four-day trip back east, for example, you don't expect that you'll have the time to waste on something so frivolous -- family and friends should come first and foremost.

What was brilliant about this past weekend was that I had a legitimate open window on Friday, as well as a chance to see something as part of my friend/family-visiting on Saturday. But neither worked out.

What a tease.

Theme Night

I recently rediscovered the joys of watching a movie in a themed setting. Except it was quite by accident. Two nights in a row.

Let me explain what I mean by a themed setting. I mean when you watch a movie in a circumstance/environment that enhances its themes/ideas/plot, and ultimately makes the experience more enjoyable. I'm sure you can think of many examples, but one would be a decorated theater. On two very different occasions, for example, I had themed viewings in Disney's El Capitan Theater in downtown Hollywood -- The Princess Diaries, when it was decked out with tween-bait princess furnishings (hey, I went with a guy who was in the movie), and a recent re-release of The Nightmare Before Christmas, when the place was given a ghoulish makeover (and a live organist pounding away on some sort of Tim Burton-ish contraption).

But it doesn't have to be quite as overt as that. There was the time when I saw Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby at the drive-in theater -- a car movie while sitting in a car. Most bizarrely, there was the time I went with some friends to an artists' loft in downtown LA and watched what can only be described as "puppet pornography." As the 1976 schlockfest Let My Puppets Come, directed by Deep Throat helmer Gerard Damiano, unspooled before my eyes, I happened to look over to my right to notice two stuffed muppets watching along with us. That's right, it was none other than Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show -- you know, the grumpy old men who sit in the balcony, naysaying and cracking themselves up. I later found out that those two stuffed dolls sat on that particular ledge for all the screenings that occurred there -- it just so happened I was there when they watched the puppet movie.

Well, on my trip to Bisbee, Arizona last week, I added two more to the collection.

First I think I better tell you why my wife and I chose Bisbee as the destination for our road trip. Several years ago, we'd heard about a vintage trailer park in Bisbee called The Shady Dell, where guests can stay the night in Airstream trailers and other mobile homes from the 1950s. This might not be everyone's idea of an exciting adventure, but it's a testament to our compatibility that we both fell in love with the idea. We finally got the trip on the books last week for my wife's birthday, and started driving east last Wednesday night. By Thursday afternoon we'd passed through Tucson and made our way an hour further south to Bisbee, just minutes from the Mexican border. And not only was the old mining town absolutely adorable, but The Shady Dell was everything we'd hoped for and more.

Wanting to stay a night in each of the 12 trailers on the grounds, but being forced to choose just two, we selected the Spartanette for Thursday night and the Tiki Bus for Friday night. (And just in case you didn't notice the embedded links, I thought I should point them out to you.) As soon as we stepped inside the Spartanette, I began mentally calculating how to fit in all the ways I wanted to appreciate it -- in the sadly finite period of 16 hours, half of which would be spent sleeping.

One of the most charming things about the Spartanette was its antique home electronics. No sooner had we stepped in the door than we were throwing Dean Martin and Harry Belafonte on the record player, and trying to discover if the old TV actually worked. We'd assumed from the shots on the website that it was decorative only, but finding a DVD player connected to it -- hidden discreetly in the closet to preserve period authenticity -- immediately challenged that assumption. Not to mention the dozen classic DVDs that were provided along with the room.

After giddily flipping through all sorts of wonderfully kitschy titles -- like It Came From Outer Space (1953) and The Woman Eater (1957) -- we decided on And Then There Were None, Rene Clair's 1945 adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel. And after a yummy steak birthday dinner and a few glasses of wine, we settled in.

At first, the TV did not seem to work. But we later discovered this was just its inevitable cranky warm-up period, which lasted maybe four minutes. It started with a blank screen whose slight change in hue was the only indication the device was even powered on. This then changed into typical between-station fuzz. When we turned the DVD player on, an image appeared. Of course, it took several more minutes for this image to stabilize -- isn't that what they used to call it, the vertical hold? -- but when it did, there was the title menu for And Then There Were None.

And what followed was an absolutely authentic viewing experience. The sound was terrible, the contrasts were sometimes impossible to make out, and if you stopped the movie for any reason, you had to fight the vertical hold for another couple minutes. (Granted, those first two probably had more to do with the original print of the film than the TV). But I tell you, I wouldn't trade this experience for anything. Sitting in this vintage trailer, watching this old movie, it was easy to imagine that I was actually in the 1950s -- and since this movie would have been ten years old in the mid-50s, it's theoretically something the networks might have actually seen fit to play on a Saturday night. I tickled myself with the unlikely -- though narrowly possible -- notion that someone may have watched And Then There Were None in this very trailer, decades earlier, when "DVD" was just a meaningless acronym.

Just because it would have made for such a jarring anachronism, I had hoped to follow this up with an episode from the Californication DVD I'd brought with me. But we were both too tired.

Fast forward to the next night. We survived a trip into a mine shaft and a day in town, and now we're in the Tiki Bus. This is a giant blue bus that's been tricked out with a kitchen, a breakfast nook, a bathroom, an outside tiki bar, and a double and single bed on either side of the aisle. Plus, it's got a forest of straw hanging down from the ceiling and a couple heads like the kind on Easter Island, to complete the effect of being in Hawaii, or somewhere Polynesian in nature. This lodging also has a record player and a half-dozen vinyl albums, most of them Hawaiian in theme. But no TV.

Never fear. I've brought my portable DVD player with me. In fact, this is only its third usage since I had to replace my old one. It's what I'd been expecting to use the night before if the TV hadn't worked.

But what was really crazy was the movie I'd brought with me, and since I used it as my art with this posting, the title should be no surprise: Forgetting Sarah Marshall. What's crazy about that? Well, for starters, the movie is set in Hawaii.

You planned that, Vance. Actually, I didn't. I've already seen Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and my usual M.O. when at the video store is to find something that neither my wife nor I have seen. You know, always wanting to expand our horizons. In fact, I had a couple such choices in my hand already when I came across Sarah Marshall on the shelves. I saw it last year when she was out of the country, thinking she didn't have much interest in it, which was actually true at the time. But she came around on it and mentioned it recently, so I picked it up as a surprise choice for her birthday trip. See, that's the problem with a movie neither of you has seen -- it might totally suck. I wanted to stack the deck in our favor this time, so I picked it up. There was no consideration to the idea that we might watch it in a giant blue bus wearing a Hawaiian outfit.

But that we did, and so for the second night in a row, I was washed over with a certain surrealism. Yes, it was surreal just to be watching a movie (and sleeping, and making a pasta dinner) in a blue bus with track lights running along the bottom and hula girl bobblehead dolls on the dashboard. But the subject matter made it more so. The image was crisp and clear on my DVD player, and the movie was enjoyed by one and all.

I'd be remiss if I closed this post without singing the praises of the people at The Shady Dell, who were perfectly wonderful in every way you'd want them to be. Jen, Justin and their staff took great care of us, and we wished we could have stayed a week longer. (And kudos to the refurbished Dot's Diner, which just reopened a few weeks ago, a classic diner located just steps from the trailers that was transported from Los Angeles in the mid-1990s). If you are ever traveling through Southern Arizona, you have to put The Shady Dell on your itinerary.

I'd love to hear about any memorable theme movie experiences you had, my dear readers.

It's not a vacation without a movie

Call me crazy, but one of the things I like to do most when I'm out of town is see a movie.

I understand this is not normal. And just to show you how not normal I understand it to be, I'm including the poster of a movie I saw while spending a scant four days in Paris. That's right, I'm in the city of lights, surrounded by culture and history, and all I want to do is hear what Christian Bale sounds like in French. (Actually, we went to see the version original -- pronounce that with a French accent -- which had Bale's words and French subtitles.) My now-wife, then-girlfriend wasn't going to come, but then it started raining. It turned out to be the perfect thing to do, as our feet were totally destroyed from several days of museums and famous cemeteries.

This is the extreme example of a thing I like to do all the time. No, I don't like to sacrifice the meat and potatoes of a trip to see a movie I could see at home just as easily three days later, but I do love to squeeze one in. The circumstances might be similar to those above: it's raining, you're too exhausted to do anything else, or it's too late at night to do anything else anyway.

This last was my reasoning behind seeing Confessions of a Shopaholic in Yuma, Arizona this past weekend. We'd driven five hours that day, Yuma proved to be mostly strip malls rather than the charming Old West town we thought it would be (actually, all we really knew was that trains used to go there), and it was 10:30 on a Saturday night, so hell yeah I signed myself up. My wife passed -- it was all she could do to keep her eyes open through dinner. I kind of felt the same, but that wasn't going to rob me of a golden opportunity for a Vacation Movie. Heck, the theater was right down the street -- I didn't even have to seek it out.

So what's the fascination? The inside of a theater pretty much looks the same wherever you are, doesn't it?

Yes it does, and that actually gets at part of my reasoning. Seeing movies, by necessity, has a certain sameness to it. You usually go to one of a half-dozen theaters that are conveniently located to your house. You also tend to seek out the same kinds of seats, assuming they're available -- some people like it closer, so the screen fills up their whole field of vision, and some people like it farther back. You often even order the same snacks, and most people tend to go to the same kinds of movies. In a way, it's like you're trying to recreate the same experience over and over again.

Why not switch up the geography?

The fact is, I remember a movie a bit better if I see it out of town. You get different ads before the movie. Sometimes, the ads are even in different languages. And the world looks different when you exit. Maybe it's even similar to how Will Smith's character describes his reasons for having sex in Six Degrees of Separation. Paraphrasing: "When you're happy, you try to make it better by having sex." Maybe I try to make the happiness of being on vacation better by something else I love -- going to the movies.

Just to prove to you that seeing a movie on the road is more memorable, here's a selection of movies -- recalled purely from memory -- whose viewings I remember better because I saw them in a circumstance outside the norm:

The Black Hole (1979, Gary Nelson). Yes, this phenomenon stretches a long time back for me. It was Christmas Day, and we were in Bryan, Texas, where my grandmother lived. But we weren't celebrating Christmas, because we'd had it the day before -- my uncle had to fly back early for work. That left moviegoing for Christmas Day. (And may have started a tradition in that sense as well).

Breakin' (1984, Joel Silberg). In Columbia, South America, visiting a friend whose family had returned home to Columbia the year before. If this weren't exotic enough, we actually saw this at the drive-in, my first-ever such experience.

Jewel of the Nile (1985, Lewis Teague). Texas again, but I don't remember the circumstances of our visit this time.

Ghost (1990, Jerry Zucker). Watched this in a small-town theater in upstate New York while on a road trip looking at colleges with my mom.

She's So Lovely (1997, Nick Cassavetes). Saw this in an Atlanta mall while in town for my cousin's wedding.

Saving Private Ryan (1998, Steven Spielberg). On a rare day not totally consumed by driving, saw this with two friends in Park City, Utah, while on a three-and-a-half week baseball road trip that saw us visit 14 major league parks.

William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999, Michael Hoffman). Saw this in New Orleans when in town for the wedding of a college friend. This one I regret a little -- I probably missed out on some good socializing time, and the movie itself wasn't good enough to justify it (even if that isn't really the point).

Pitch Black (2000, David Twohy). Saw this in the Atlanta mall mentioned previously with my dad and sister while visiting my aunt, uncle, cousins and grandmother.

Pay It Forward (2000, Mimi Leder). So as not to pay any more money forward to the casinos, I ducked into the movies to kill two hours on an extra day in Las Vegas. An already-long four-day business trip had been extended because the person who booked our tickets booked them for the wrong day, meaning we missed our red-eye home by 24 hours. I was getting killed at the tables. Found it kind of funny to watch this movie, which is set in Las Vegas, while in Las Vegas.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001, Chris Columbus). Saw this in the same Atlanta mall, yet again, when I arrived for Thanksgiving a day earlier than the rest of my family, and my aunt and uncle were trying to figure out something to do with me.

Robots (2005, Chris Wedge). Another Vegas business trip, this time only 24 hours, and this time much more successful. Met a friend who lived there for an afternoon matinee.

Batman Begins (2005, Christopher Nolan). Paris. As discussed.

War of the Worlds (2005, Steven Spielberg). Business trip to Secaucus, New Jersey, of all places.

Hot Fuzz (2007, Edgar Wright). Saw in a mall in downtown Melbourne, Australia. This was actually an advanced screening, as the movie wasn't due out until a week or two later.

Sunshine (2007, Danny Boyle). Saw immediately afterward in the same mall, when we realized the director (only two years from becoming an Oscar winner) would be present for a Q & A. Not only that, but the movie wouldn't be released for several months. This ended up being extraordinarily memorable for a number of reasons -- not only did actress Rose Byrne (who was in the movie) sit in the row in front of us, but they showed the reels out of order, and eventually had to stop after about five reels when they realized the damage was irreversible in the time they had. So we had the weird experience of a Q & A with Danny Boyle when we did not even see the entire film.

Charlie Wilson's War (2007, Mike Nichols). Actual viewing was in 2008, near West Palm Beach, Florida, on a business trip.

Atonement (2007, Joe Wright). Just a few days after Charlie Wilson's War, but this time in Chicago, with a friend, before the second half of the business trip commenced.

I could go on, but I'd just be wasting yours and my time. I think you get the point.

So if you haven't tried it, why not give it a shot on your next vacation? Don't miss out on the Louvre or the Sistine Chapel or the Grand Canyon or scuba diving. But when you're near that theater, and it's late at night, and a movie you kinda want to see is starting, ask yourself what you'll remember more: those extra two hours of sleep, or the exhilaration of a familiar activity in a foreign land?

As for Confessions of a Shopaholic? Yes, I'll remember it too. It was how I spent part of a Saturday night, exhausted from road-tripping, in Yuma, Arizona. And even though the movie itself wasn't that good, I wouldn't trade the experience.