Movie Review

I saw three movies this past weekend:  We Bought a Zoo, Limitless, and Source Code.  The kids and I went to see We Bought A Zoo together on Friday mostly as an excuse to eat candy.  The movie was a formulaic bawl-fest.  Dead mom, sad kids, grieving husband, financial devastation etc etc.  Matt Damon is in it so that makes up for a lot, and the little girl that plays his daughter is A DOR A BLE; but still.  I don't go to movies to cry.  

Oh yeah, the tiger dies too.

Speaking of bawl-fests, while we were there we saw previews for that Tom Hanks movie that is coming out later this month, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, about the wonderful father who dies in the twin towers on 911 and his family is devastated and traumatized.  FUN!  I cried during the preview.  Why do they make movies like that?   

Sam and I watched Limitless on Saturday night.  

It's about a loser writer who takes a pill and is able to access all of his brain power.  His thoughts and memories are suddenly organized and easy to access and he thinks clearly and he is brilliant.  Wouldn't that be great? I often think that I would be an uber-genius if only I could organize my thoughts better.  I feel like everything I ever learned is somewhere there in my brain but it's like a file cabinet and all the individual nuggets of knowledge are just randomly stuffed into the drawers instead of organized into a neat filing system.  Anyway, problems arise when he discovers that the drug is illicit and in demand from some shady characters, and also that people who go off of it die.  Then the plot kind of spun out and I don't really know what happened (because I was lying on the couch and I might have fallen asleep) until the end when he has reverse engineered the drug and fixed the quirks and was running for senate.  The end seemed a little too neat and happy and all that it taught me was that illicit drugs may cause you some problems in the beginning, but in the long run make your life way better, and that I need to try some.  

Last night Mitch and I watched Source Code. 

That was the best movie of the weekend.  Jake Gyllenhall is an air force pilot on a special mission for a program called Source Code where they are able to put a soldier in the body of a person in the recent past to find clues to a crime.  Very Quantum Leap-y.  In this case, Jake gets put on to a train that will soon blow up from a terrorist attack and his mission is to find the bomb and the bomber.  He can't prevent the bombing, but he can find and identify the bomber who they suspect will do another bombing in downtown Chicago.  He has to relive the eight minutes prior to the train bombing over and over and look for the bomber.  I am not going to tell you what happens because I don't want to spoil it.  But I will tell you this: The train they are on is really cool.  It's big and roomy (double decker) and it has a Dunkin' Donuts shop RIGHT ON THE TRAIN.  I recommend that you see this movie, it was really good.