Saturday Day Night at the Movies

Every Saturday night my son and daughter-in-law come over for a visit. They bring along their beautiful Aussie, Teagan, some movies, their appetites and their overnight bags. It's become a ritual we all truly enjoy. We will sit down with the carryout menus to decide where our dinner will come from that night, and once we settle in for the evening we pop in a movie.

I've mentioned before the problem we have with the movie selection process, since we all have different tastes. My son and his wife like all kinds of movies. My husband likes a good detective movie and me....I am the problem. I will only watch movies that are cute, funny and have a fairly happy ending....something along the line of "Pretty Woman" or "Ratatouille". I can watch a tear-jerker like "The Notebook", but I cannot do violence of any kind. I can't sit and watch horrible things that I know really do happen. I just see no point in making myself feel sad and sick.

Last weekend we watched "What Happens In Vegas" with Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz. Sure, you know the ending before the movie even starts...but it is cute and it did make me laugh and it did have that all important happy ending!

The movie is about two down and outs that happen to meet up in Vegas, get very drunk and wind up married. They both freak out when they find out what they've done. There is a funny little twist that I won't go into in case you haven't seen it.

So, they run to divorce court where the judge refuses to grant them a divorce and sends them for counceling. There are a lot of little laughs along the way as they get to know one another and try to figure out married life all at the same time. I found it entertaining and the rest of the group enjoyed it as well.

Next we watched "Blood Diamond" with Leonard DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly and Djimon Hounson. I should say the rest of the family watched it. I got through maybe 15 minutes while trying to cover my eyes and ears, and then couldn't watch anymore.

The movie is about a diamond smuggler and a fisherman trying to recover a rare pink diamond and the fisherman's son. It's set in Sierra Leone during the civil war in 1999. The story line sounded very exciting, but I just couldn't handle the violence that went with it. It was much too graphic for my tastes. My family thought it was a very good movie.

I know that people are "entertained" by a lot of different kinds of movies, and I would never deny anyone the right to watch whatever they want to watch. I just have a difficult time understanding how anyone finds movies that are filled with violence, torture and murder entertaining.

So, with that said...I have no idea what movies are on the agenda for this evening. It is usually a surprise, although he does come armed with quite a variety and we usually watch the whimpy, silly little love story with the happy ending first! Anyone for "Happy Gilmore"?