the good, the awful, and the awesome

[llcoolvad]

Lately I've been having trouble defining what "fun" means to me. Brian is all about fun. He has something like seventy-eleven hobbies, and even when not actively participating with some group that he does these hobbies with, he's planning, prepping, or otherwise experiencing some version of hobby-licious fun.

I don't have seventy-eleven hobbies, or really even more than a handful. I like to take pictures. I like to watch television (a more deliberate "watching" than some, I assure you). I like to watch movies. I like to read. Those are my traditional go-to "fun" things. And this week is my vacation/birthday week, so I indulged in almost all.

I finished a couple of books. I saw a bunch of tv on netflix (latest show "Wire in the Blood", a British procedural, pretty good -- plus I'm in the middle of season three of "Dexter", which is just delightful). And I saw three movies in the theater...

"Expendables" was first, and it was exactly what I expected and wanted. Lots of 'splosions, lots of ridiculous scene-chewing (most notably by Mickey Rourke), and tons of silly dialogue. Plus a truly 80s plot -- South American drug dealers taking over a small South American island! Babe in peril! Woo! Can't not love that. Stallone still has it. And now! With added Jason Statham and Jet Li!

On my birthday I like to see really awful movies. It's important to start the movie-watching year on a terrible note, so it has nowhere to go but up. Plus, I love terrible movies. So for my special day I chose a truly special movie: "Piranha 3D". Wow. Passes the Bechdel Test, but I am thinking it is not at all what Alison meant...filled with boobs and gore and a really butch Elizabeth Shue. SPOILER! Ving Rhames gets et. So does almost everyone else. And MAN, so gross! Jerry O'Connell gets his legs chewed down to the bone, and somehow lives long enough to make a wet t-shirt comment. An entire marina full of spring break babes and dudes gets chomped on like last week's chum. People get pulled apart. Faces come off. It's pretty goretastic. [there was a 10 year old kid in the audience, and he totally agreed with me] So yeah, kinda bad. But if you like that kind of thing...you've probably already seen it!

Finally today Brian and I went to see "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" -- and at last, awesome! Truly awesome. Very original story-telling style, lots of great small parts, and just fun fun fun. I had seen a couple of trailers, but thankfully they don't give away the best bits. Just go. It's totally worth a couple hours of your life.

So, fun? Yes! Add to that a couple of dinner parties that doubled as birthday celebrations for me thrown by Patrick, and I've been really getting closer to being able to define fun. I guess I sorta knew all along...

Comments

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

Some fun lines in those movies. Like the one about having to work harder and run farther because he's smaller. And like the one about her leaving him for another guy, probably just because the other guy's better.

[p-j-cleary.livejournal.com]

Yup, re-learning about fun has been pretty swell. I forgot that I like to entertain, and I forgot just how fun it is to do a show. Maybe the second half of 2010 will make it the Year of Fun?