I feel like Gene Siskel

Or Roger Ebert. Which ever one isn't dead. For the last three days all Aly and I have done is watch movies. At least it seems that way.

Friday Aly bought her wedding dress. It's weird writing that sentence. Aly bought her wedding dress. Five words ... Powerful shit. There's no going back now, not that I'd want to. While she was buying a dress, I bought the Simpsons season four DVD. Easily the best season and I got it for a song at Target. $17.77. Kick ass.

I'm sure there is some sort of deeper meaning in the fact that Aly bought a wedding dress and I bought four DVDs full of cartoons. You find it, there's something about not being able to see the forest for the trees.

Friday night we went to see "Alexander the Great". I was pumped for this movie for a few reasons: I like gladiator/historic pictures, I like Val Kilmer and Oliver Stone, I've always been a fan of ATG and it had a lot of buzz going into it. Three hours later, the buzz was squashed. It wasn't a bad movie per se. It just wasn't that good of a movie.

Even though Oliver Stone couldn't tell us how Alexander died it may have been the hammy over acting. And it wasn't all Colin Farrell's fault, Anthony Hopkins as Ptolemy, Angelina Jolie as Alexander's mother and Jared Leto were all terrible. There was even a narrator telling us everything going on. Shoddy filming, confusing cuts forward and back and corny dialogue torpedoed this flick.

And the symbolism ... oh the symbolism! A hawk was in just about every scene (no doubt representing war), snakes dominated every bedroom scene(shhhh ... they stand for penises) and the whole son of a former world power leader trying to conquer the mideast so his daddy will be proud (hello G.W. Bush!). Oliver Stone just slammed us over the head with this stuff.

The good: the fight scenes, especially in India and the fact that it was about Alexander the Great. I always think that he gets the short end of the stick compared to Julius Caesar. I'm glad he got some pub, though this isn't going to help him in the long run. Out of 19 stars, I'd give it eight.

On Saturday we woke up early and went to South Hampton, NH to pay our respects to Brownie's grandmother. She died about a week earlier and a funeral mass was being celebrated for her. The preacher did a really good job, even though he admitted that he never knew Brownie's grandmother.

I had driven by this church hundreds of times, but have never been in ... it was very bare and basic. Baptists aren't ostentatious like Catholics apparently. Also old, according to a plaque, the church has been there since 1833. A lot of shit has happened since then.

Another interesting thing was that the preacher was a black guy. Not a huge deal in most places, but this is South Hampton, NH. There is about 350 people in their village and I doubt that any of them are African American. I wonder how this guy came up there? Like I said, he did an awesome job and his sermons must be something to hear. I hope that they keep him.

After the funeral we went to my parents' house for another Thanksgiving dinner. We got there early and I began to get stir-crazy, so we walked around Newburyport for a bit. Aly had never been there and she enjoyed walking around the down town checking out all the little shops. We hit Fowles and it was like going into a time machine with their old-fashioned soda fountain.

We had dinner after that and of course Nina's stuffing was the best. And while the stuffing was top-notch, the most enjoyable part of the day was seeing how happy she is. She loves watching Aly and I interact because she knows how crazy we are about each other. She kept saying that we should always act like we are now. I'm taking that advice to heart.

Saturday night we were supposed to go out with Ryan and a bunch of his friends. I cancelled. I was just too beat from the entire day. Aly and I got a movie instead. In retrospect, we should've gone out. "The Missing" was probably one of the most boring movies both of us had ever seen. Aly fell asleep and then I did too. And I never fall asleep at movies.

Basically, Tommy Lee Jones is a drifter who finds his daughter. She's a healer in Arizona or Colorado or New Mexico in the 1880s and she hates her dad. These rogue Apaches who used to work for the government get sick of working for Uncle Sam, so they decide to kidnap a bunch of chicks and sell them off to the Mexicans as sex slaves. Guess who's grand daughter gets kidnapped? TLJ's, that's who. They have to go find them.

Sounds like a pretty good plot, huh? As Homer once said, "More boring than church." Too much talking (TLJ's bitchy daughter), too much brooding (TLJ), too much of TLJ's other, younger grand daughter. And since this is a western made in the last 20 years, it's Uncle Sam's fault that these Apaches are assholes. Why can't people just be dicks without having someone make them this way?

In any event I shut this turkey off before it ended. Hopefully, everyone died. I doubt that happened though. Out of 19 stars, this one got zero.

Sunday morning we woke up early and popped in "Elf" starring Will Farrell, no relation to Colin Farrell. Which is good because his movie was actually pretty interesting. It wasn't the funniest movie I've ever seen, hell, it wasn't even the funniest Will Farrell movie I've seen. But it was cute and had a lot of heart.

And there definitely were some funny scenes. The only problem is that every one has seen this movie about a million times. Elf is looking for his dad and comes to the big city. Dad doesn't want him because he's so weird. Elf does something that wins his dad over. The end. But like I said there was a couple of funny scenes. Out of 19 stars, I'd give it about 12.

After that movie, Aly and I ventured out of the house to the mythic city of Woburn, where we saw "National Treasure" with Nicholas Cage. This was a Disney flick with sort of a hokey premise, there is a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence that was put their by our forefathers in order to hide the treasure of the Knights of Templar. Since the signers were Masons, they were also super smart apparently, so they were good at hiding shit.

Cage's great, great, great, great grandfather was a stable boy of the last signer and was given a clue as to where the treasure was and since then generations of Cages (actually his name was Gates in the movie) have been obsessed with finding this. So Cage gets paired up with a rogue billionaire who screws him over and then it's a race against time between Cage and the billionaire to see who gets the treasure.

Sounds really dumb, right? That's what I thought too, but it wasn't bad at all. Easily, the best movie I've seen in the last 48 hours. Lots of fun, didn't take itself too seriously and was entertaining. That's all I ask out of a movie. Every flick isn't going to change your life some times it's cool just to go in, shut down your life for a few hours and go home. "National Treasure" did that for me. Out of 19 stars, I'd give it 14.

Following that, we went to Charette's, I picked up some new pens, pencils and paper. It's all happening now, man. I also got to meet Drew's girlfriend this weekend, her name is Alicia and she's really cool. I guess she works at Drew's company. Hopefully she'll be around a bit.

Speaking of roommates, looks like I'm not moving out of here on January 1. I'm sticking around until March 1, at least. The way Aly and I worked it out was this: if she gets a job maybe I'll go back to Amesbury. If she doesn't, she's going back to Franklin. We need a place to hang out, and there is no way both of us are going to live at home. That would suck.

Also, Aly is going to Atlanta on Wednesday for a few days. Her brother is in Russia covering a hockey story and her sister-in-law is very pregnant. Aly's going down to help her. So, I'm a free man for three days. The women of Massachusetts must be very happy.